War Games (3 page)

He stationed himself in the tree just outside the front gate, on a branch overhanging the road. Petros gave a great deal of thought to the German army, slow in coming from a place not very far away.

Probably they weren’t coming to Amphissa. It wasn’t an important city like Athens. He had two minds about this: First, the Germans sounded interesting to him. Exciting. Second, Papa was frightened of them. Knowing that Papa was afraid of almost nothing, Petros was now frightened too.

He watched for the Germans every day, because Old Mario said the best way to avoid trouble was to see it coming. Petros had his mission to himself for nearly an hour. He ate a lot of mulberries, and dropped even more of them to Fifi, who stood below the tree.

His friend Elia came out of his house and saw Fifi beneath the tree. He walked across the road. “Are you coming down?”

“Not yet,” Petros replied.

“Ouch!” The tree was easy to climb, but Fifi was quick and got in two bites before Elia was out of reach. “That goat’s a mean dog.”

Petros had owned this goat for less than a day, but already she was making a reputation for herself.

“Why are you here so long?” Elia asked.

“I’m watching for Germans,” he told Elia in a low voice.

Elia said nothing while he rubbed his bites. Then he suggested, “We could go down to the bakery and see if there’s a game.”

Petros dropped a mulberry to Fifi. “Let’s go.”

At the back of the building, a game of marbles was in progress. Five boys, including Stavros, played in an area of hard-packed dirt.

Panayoti saw Petros coming. “Got an ugly dog there,” he called.

Panayoti’s fat dog barked, its neck fur standing up like a brown collar. The other boys shouted to spur it on. Fifi spread her forelegs and put her head down, ready for the fight. The dog trotted off as if it’d had something else in mind all along.

“Don’t hurt Fifi’s feelings,” Petros said, reaching the edge of the game. “She’s likely to hurt yours back.”

Panayoti tried to pet her. She nipped his hand. “Yee-ouch!”

“See what I mean?”

The other boys began to tease, putting out their hands and pulling back. Petros quickly brought out his new marble.

It was an instant sensation.

All the boys wanted to roll the marble between their palms, make a test shot. Left in peace, Fifi trotted over to a weedy
area for a nap. She walked in circles, trampling the grass to make her bed.

Elia peered through the marble as if he were sighting a gun. “A marvelous thing,” he said, and passed the marble to Panayoti.

Panayoti looked at it critically. He didn’t like things new, but if there was to be a new thing, he liked to be the one who brought it. His six-year-old brother, Hero, tugged impatiently at his sleeve.

“It’s not a Greek thing,” Panayoti said, and passed it to Hero.

Panayoti had been born in America and was no more or less a Greek thing than the well-traveled marble, or than Petros himself, but Petros didn’t say so.

Hero looked the marble over, rolled it across his shirt as if to remove any dust that might cling, and popped it into his mouth. There was an immediate outcry. Panayoti whacked Hero on the back, and when the marble shot from Hero’s mouth, he shouted, “What’s the matter with you?”

Panayoti slapped Hero again on general principles. “It’s a miracle you didn’t swallow it.”

Petros wanted to give Hero another whack. He was always swallowing something he shouldn’t or putting things up his nose. He couldn’t play marbles to save his life. But he was Panayoti’s younger brother, and so he was tolerated.

Stavros snatched the marble up from the dirt and rubbed it in a fold of his shirt. He held it out, clean and dry, for all to see. “Let me shoot with it first, Petros,” he said, his eyes sharp with greed.

“You can shoot with it,” Petros said. Stavros could be more trouble than being first was worth. “But you can’t win it from me.”

Stavros, the best player by far, said, “That’s how we play now. We gamble.”

Petros put out his hand. “Give it back and I’ll take it home.”

“Don’t listen to Stavros,” Elia said.

Panayoti closed the argument. “If we all get to shoot with the marble, you don’t have to bet.”

The glass shooter improved everyone’s game. They didn’t stop playing until the marbles all seemed one dark color. “Where’s the shooter?” Petros couldn’t find it.

Elia emptied his pouch to make sure he hadn’t scooped it up.

Petros saw his cousin sneaking off. “Check your pouch, Stavros.”

“Why mine?” Stavros turned around, already angry. “Are you accusing me?”

All the boys stopped checking their pouches, looking on. They’d gone so still, Petros could hear their shallow breathing.

“Everyone must look,” Petros said. “But you’re in the greatest hurry to go home.” He made fists. “We should check yours first.”

Stavros shoved Petros, and Petros pushed back.

At first that’s all they did, push and yell insults. Petros had the better insults, or maybe a better memory, and hit a sensitive nerve. Stavros launched himself at Petros, knocking him to the ground. The boys rolled in the dirt, getting in punches when they could.

The other boys shouted advice to both. Panayoti’s dog yapped. Fifi’s voice rose in an alarmed
meh-eh-eh, meh-eh-eh
, and once she reached into the fray to nip. She got Petros.

The string on Stavros’s pouch broke, spilling the marbles between them. They felt like pebbles under Petros’s ribs and shoulders, but he hardly knew it. He gave back as many blows as he’d gotten. Hitting fast and furiously, he bloodied Stavros’s nose. Stavros returned the favor.

Petros hardly noticed when the shouts died away and the dog barked more ravenously than before.

A stranger snatched him up by the neck and grabbed Stavros as well, separating them roughly. “Stop it,” he told them. “We’re at war already! Don’t fight among yourselves.”

Petros stopped fighting right away, not because the stranger scolded but because he stank. His matted hair and beard clung to his head like a scarf of sheep’s wool. His face and body were dirty and sunburned, his nose and shoulders blistered and scabbed over. He wore only the ragged remains of his trousers.

His feet were wrapped in rags. Bloody rags.

After one long look at him, Petros and Stravros both struggled to escape. “Quit!” the stranger shouted, so hard his voice failed and the rest of what he said came out in a whisper. “Stavros, Petros, stop it.”

Petros was frightened into struggling even harder. The stranger stood firm, holding Petros in place with only a grip on his shirt collar.

Stavros froze, still gripped about the neck. “Lambros? Is that you?”

“Of course it’s me.” The stranger let go of them. “Don’t you recognize your own brother?”

Petros stared. Could this filthy, wrecked creature be the same Lambros whose daring assaults on the Italian army were so dramatic that word of his courage reached the village? Whose adventures were told and retold on the verandas? Only nineteen and already he was a hero.

“Lambros.” Petros was sickened to see the cuts on his hands, the torn nails. How could this happen to him?

Stavros said, “Your feet, Lambros. Where are your boots?”

“Gone.” Lambros didn’t wait but limped forward a few steps. “It’s enough to know for now. Let’s go home.”

Stavros moved to put his arm about Lambros’s waist, to be his crutch. Lambros stopped him, saying, “Don’t come so close. I’m covered with lice. Walk with me, but keep your distance.”

The boys followed Lambros.

Petros snatched up the spilled marbles. His glass marble
was now among them. As for the rest, there remained just enough evening light to tell them apart.

He stuffed his own marbles into his pouch, glad for the moment to himself. The vision that was Lambros had shaken him. He dropped Stavros’s marbles into his pocket and hurried to catch up.

Elia pointed to Lambros’s swollen hands and asked, “What happened to you?”

“Little enough,” Lambros said as Petros joined them, “considering all that might have happened.”

“Where’s the rest of your company?” Panayoti asked.

“On their way home, the lucky ones. Has no one else returned from the north?”

“No one yet,” Panayoti replied.

“Then you must all go home now and give warning,” Lambros said, his voice rising like an alarm. “Tell your families the Germans are near.”

“They’ve been coming for nearly a month,” Petros said. “Even the Italians aren’t expecting them.”

“Go tell your father now,” Lambros yelled, in a voice sharp with the pain of his feet and hands.

Petros ran, but not because news of the Germans was frightening or even important. His legs had wanted to carry him away since he’d laid eyes on Lambros. Only the fact that the other boys had not run made him stay.

Petros ran, his own heartbeat loud in his ears. With Elia, he raced through the gathering darkness, Fifi close behind them.

Petros and Elia ran recklessly, tripping over rocks, with only the pale moonlight to guide them. By the time they pelted alongside the rock wall of Petros’s home, both had scraped knees and palms.

When Elia veered off, Petros headed straight for his own gate, a little farther along the road. Panting, he hurried first to the veranda. His father could ordinarily be found there at this hour, smoking a cigarette and playing cards. Perhaps doing card tricks.

Tonight, no one sat outside. Not Papa. Not Zola. Not Old Mario.

Poking his face into the front room, Petros blinked against the lamplight. His sister and Elia’s sister, Maria, sat at the card table, putting the puzzle together. “Sophie, where’s Papa?”

Neither of them looked up. “Down the well.”

“Why?”

“One of the tributaries has gone dry,” Sophie said briskly. “Get that goat out of here.”

Petros heard Mama talking to her friends as they worked
on their knitting in the kitchen. To take his sister’s mind off Fifi as he cut through, he said, “Lambros has come home.”

Sophie gave him a sharp glance. “Has he been injured?”

“His feet are bleeding,” he said.

“Mama,” Sophie cried. She leaped off the divan and followed him to the kitchen, wailing, “Mama, Lambros is dying!”

Clattering over the marble floor, Fifi stayed right behind Petros as he dashed past Mama and Elia’s mother and grandmother—all of them suddenly talking at once. Petros let the kitchen door slam against the house as he burst through.

Petros slowed, letting his eyes get used to the darkness again. He saw the white of Zola’s dog turn at the sound of Fifi’s hooves on the gravel. He didn’t bark. He didn’t care to fight a goat.

Old Mario and Zola stood looking down the well. Zola was very much the taller of the two. Petros crossed to Old Mario’s side, and they stood shoulder to shoulder. Only recently he’d noticed he was for the first time as tall as someone who wasn’t a child. He still liked the novelty of it.

A great deal of cold air rose from the well. This was welcome in the heat of daylight, but now it chilled Petros as he leaped up to cling to the thick rock wall, letting his feet hang and his weight rest on his forearms.

The mouth of the well was as big across as Mama’s kitchen, to accommodate the copper buckets, barrel-shaped, but larger. Petros looked down, but there was only the cold and greater darkness. He asked, “Papa climbed down?”

Zola said, “He wants to see if a tunnel has collapsed.” This was delivered in the tone of superior logic that Zola had adopted at the old age of fifteen.

Petros could rarely hear this tone without arguing with it. “There’s still plenty of water.” There were several tunnels bringing water to the well.

He’d been down below to stand hunched over in one of these only once, carrying a tool to Papa when he was making a repair. It wouldn’t trouble him if he never had to go below again. It had been dark, except for Papa’s lamp, and cold. Too cold.

“You made a lucky escape,” Zola said.

When Petros looked the question at him, Zola said, “Papa’s thinking about bigger things than trading goats.”

At a shout from deep within, Zola hurried to the pump house and threw the switch. The motor started with a
putt-putt-putt
, and the belt whined as it turned. The tarnished green buckets jerked, then began to move, the chain creaking as it stretched over the axle.

When the buckets reached the top, water spilled into the reservoir and trickled along tiled gutters to the garden. The empty buckets shifted lower, then lower still, working up to a steady pace. Curious, Fifi put her front hooves up against the well.

“How do we fix a tunnel?” Petros asked Old Mario. The old man made a rolling motion with one hand that suggested a great deal of trouble.

Papa emerged from the darkness, ghostly. He stood on the
edge of one of the buckets, holding on to the chain, coming up and up, until he could step onto the rock wall circling the well. His wet shirt hung nearly to his knees. He jumped to the ground, shivering like a wet dog.

Petros began, “Papa—”

“Bring me a dry shirt. Two dry shirts.” Papa shook himself, spraying icy water over everyone. “Go.”

Petros ran through the kitchen with Fifi at his heels. When the women called to him, he shouted, “Elia saw him too,” over his shoulder. In the bedroom, he rummaged through his father’s drawers for shirts.

Fifi looked as if she knew what Petros needed to do. He liked this about her. She was at least as good as the dog. Better, because the dog only followed Zola, when he followed at all.

Mama and Grandmother Lemos reached for Petros as he ran past again. Elia’s mother spoke into the phone. Petros ducked out the back door.

Papa wore the dry pants he’d taken off before going into the well. He shivered so hard he steadied himself with a hand on Zola’s shoulder to pull on his socks.

“This goat follows you like a dog,” he said as the first dry shirt went over his head. “Are you sure she’s a goat?”

“She bites like a goat,” Petros said, reminded that he was about to be in big trouble. “But then, so does Zola’s dog.”