“Confession,” said Fanis.
“You haven’t confessed for as long as I’ve been a cleric.”
“Then it’s about time, isn’t it?”
The bishop removed his tie and jacket, donned his vestments and pectoral cross, and said a prayer. Then he sat down across from Fanis, in one of the armchairs in front of the desk. “Behold, my child,” he said. “Christ stands here and hears your confession.”
“I have been licentious my whole life,” said Fanis. “I was unfaithful to my wife countless times . . .”
“Why don’t you tell me something I don’t already know?”
Fanis took the photo of Kalypso from his breast pocket, kissed it, and handed it to the bishop. “It was the name day of my fiancée’s grandmother,” he began. “I was supposed to close the shop at six and go to dinner at her grandmother’s house in the Old City. Instead, when the troubles started, I saw to the shop and my mother. My fiancée’s father went to protect the family business. My fiancée, her mother, grandmother, and siblings were left alone.”
“There is no sin in looking after one’s mother,” said the bishop, quietly passing the photo back to Fanis.
“Perhaps there isn’t, but while I was looking after my mother, my fiancée was . . . raped on the steps of her grandmother’s house. People saw. When those things occur behind closed doors or in secret places, the girls can attempt to face the world as if nothing has happened, as if the shame doesn’t hover between them and their family, friends, and neighborhood. They aren’t forever known as one of the girls dishonored on the night of the pogrom. But Kalypso—”
“Still, it wasn’t your fault.”
“It’s not just that, Elder. My real sin—the weight I have been carrying all these years—is that I didn’t go to visit her immediately afterwards. I thought there was time. I didn’t want to cause her any more distress. My mother said it was better to let a couple days pass, let her womenfolk attend to her, and I was so angry at those men I didn’t know . . . I wasn’t sure if I could control myself, or if I could listen to details if she chose to tell me—”
“Fanis, caring for a loved one who has survived trauma is difficult, to say the least. You need to be a bit gentler with yourself. You didn’t know what to do. That’s all.”
“But, Elder, that has to be why she killed herself.”
“How do you know?”
“I feel it. She thought I’d abandoned her.”
The bishop sighed. “The secrecy of the mystery of penance is indisputable,” he said, staring up at the yellow watermarks on the ceiling. “But”—he lowered his gaze—“when the penitent has already passed to the other side, and when one of those in this life can be helped, perhaps a disclosure is in order . . .”
“Elder?”
“The girl’s father came to me before the family’s sudden departure for Canada. He, too, blamed himself for the suicide. Apparently, despite what happened, the girl didn’t want to leave the City. Whether it was for you or because she didn’t want to leave her home, or both, I don’t know, but Petridis insisted on taking her away from here, shouted in his frustration even. A few hours later, after the others had gone to bed, she did what she did, God rest her soul.”
“It wasn’t that she knew I knew? That I didn’t tell her it was all right, that it didn’t matter, that it made no difference to me? It wasn’t any of that?”
“Fanis, what happened was terrible, but it certainly wasn’t your fault. Or her father’s. You were both traumatized. Secondary survivors.”
“What does that mean?” said Fanis, annoyed that the bishop would choose a time like this to show off his English.
“My niece—the smart one who did her PhD in Boston—taught me the term. It’s what American psychologists call the family of trauma victims. In a way, you, too, are—indirectly, of course—a rape survivor. And survivors must never blame themselves.”
Secondary survivor? Fanis had never thought of himself in that way. If he had called himself secondary anything, it would have been secondary criminal. Or secondary murderer. Certainly not secondary survivor. Tears came to his eyes.
The bishop ran his fingers along the edge of the embroidered stole. “What brought you here today, Fanis? After all these years?”
Fanis glanced down at the sunburned girl sitting on the church wall. “I need to say goodbye to her, Elder. I . . . even if what you say is true . . . I feel I need to erase the old notebook, as they say. I don’t want to live with ghosts anymore. And . . . I never visited her grave. I just couldn’t. I guess I thought that maybe, if I didn’t see her grave, then it didn’t exist. So, you see, I abandoned her in death as well.”
The bishop cleared his throat. “Listen, Fanis. It’s true that, as Orthodox Christians, we have no past and no dead. Our past is always present, and the dead are always with us while we are in church. Still, the dead should not be a part of our daily life. Put your hand to the plow. Stop looking back. And take a good look around you: now is quite different from then.”
“Yes, Elder.” Fanis crossed his arms over his chest and bowed at the waist.
The bishop covered Fanis’s head with his stole and gave the absolution: “Whatever you have said to my humble person, and whatever you have failed to say, whether through ignorance or forgetfulness, whatever it may be, may God forgive you in this world and the next.”
The bishop whistled—the same piercing whistle with which he had frightened girls when he was a teenager. “Get the car ready,” he called to Samuel, his assistant. Then,
