We were almost at Agia Sophia. Her shoulder brushed my sleeve, her hair tickled my nose. She smelled like a garden.
— Want to go in? I suggested.
— Are we allowed?
— This late at night, everything’s allowed.
I hopped over the low wall around the churchyard and held out my hand.
— I bet what we’re doing is against the law, she said gleefully.
I didn’t tell her I jump this wall every day, to look at the sky from inside the churchyard. From in there the stars are dizzying. The way they leap out at you all at once, you can almost hear it, like a wave crashing. If you close your eyes, you can even pretend that the coastline of Halkidiki has beamed itself into the city center. Of course you’re brought back to reality by the honking of cars and the stink of exhaust. But even car exhaust smells different, better, around Agia Sophia. If you’ve grown up with that smell in your lungs, the countryside throws you for a loop. Grandma might be right when she says Agia Sophia is the heart of the city. If you drew a circle around the city with a compass, this is definitely where you’d plant the foot.
Evelina spread her bag out on the grass and sat down.
— I wouldn’t recommend that, I warned. Stray dogs shit there.
— How much of a jerk are you?
— Why? Because I’m trying to keep your pants clean?
— Now the thing I’m going to remember about being here is dog shit. What are you doing?
— Bringing you to someplace better.
I put my jacket on a fragment of marble, the one with the rosettes and the piece of gum stuck to the bottom.
— Is this part of a column? An ancient one?
— Probably. Move over so I can sit, too.
Spotlights flooded the place.
— It’s like moonlight, Evelina said. All that’s missing is Byron and the moon-drenched maid.
She leaned her head on my shoulder and launched into the folk song Dokou had started the concert with. She doesn’t have a great voice, and she knows it. Which means she usually doesn’t sing. But she’s got soul. She’s got a fire inside, you can tell. She squeezed her eyes shut and turned up the volume. She was living it. Her forehead glistened. What I was smelling wasn’t her perfume, it was her skin. It made me dizzy.
I bent down and kissed her. Don’t ask why, I don’t know. She turned toward me and stuck in her tongue. Hot saliva and a sweet taste of Evelina and bubble gum.
Somewhere dogs were barking.
— Turns out you’re brand-name, she said.
I didn’t have a ready response, so I just shut up.
I had no choice in the matter. One French kiss and she had me on standby.
Grandpa Dinopoulos, born in 1922, was twenty-six years old during Gris’s trial and is eighty-nine now. He lives in a penthouse apartment on Ermou. From his veranda he can see Agia Sophia if he twists his head. The apartment was bought with his wife’s inheritance. She was younger than him and everyone assumed she would outlive him, but she set off before him along the eternal road, as Grandma Evthalia says.
Statistics suggest that most widowers wither away, but Grandpa Dinopoulos, a widower for the past twenty years, is living proof to the contrary. He wakes up at six every morning, drinks a Greek coffee with lots of sugar, dunks his koulouri in the froth, and sets out on his walk through the apartment. His doctor has forbidden him to walk outside, since he’s unsteady on his feet and sometimes has dizzy spells.
He wears a vest and pocket watch over his pajamas. He does the rounds of the entire apartment three times. Kitchen, living room, dining room, office, bedroom. When he’s done, he goes out onto the balcony to get some sun and feel the breeze on his face.
Now that his wife is dead, Elena, from Georgia, takes care of him. Her legs support the old man and the apartment, too. She’s his nurse, his cleaning lady, his cook. All his relatives worship the ground she walks on.
Grandpa Dinopoulos doesn’t eat much. He spends his mornings reading in his office and pores over the newspaper with a magnifying glass every evening, seated in his favorite armchair. He has opinions about everything and likes to share them with others, though these days he rarely has the opportunity. He’s a walking library and a living museum. He knows everything we read about in books, only he knows it first hand. He has the equanimity of a person who’s lived through a world war, a civil war, and plenty of political changeovers. Nothing phases him. He believes people can withstand pretty much anything.
He hasn’t practiced law in years, but continues to advise his son, who inherited his law practice, along with a Rolodex full of clients. In the beginning his son wasn’t bothered by the father’s interventions, he was glad for the help. But Jesus Christ, he was nearing retirement age himself. It didn’t look good for him to still be accepting advice from his father.
Evelina and her grandfather aren’t on the best of terms. No matter how much her mother sang her praises, it took the old man ten years to reconcile himself to the fact that his law practice would eventually fall into a woman’s hands. Only last year did Grandpa Dinopoulos finally write a card to his granddaughter in a trembling hand congratulating her on coming first in her class, and expressing his wishes that she continue to thrive and prosper and accomplish good works — even if he personally doubted how much a woman could achieve.
Evelina explained all that to me, more or less, when I asked if she would take me to see her grandfather. At first she didn’t want to, he talked too much and it bored her. Besides, there was the principle of the thing, since she thought it irresponsible of Soukiouroglou to assign me a research project so close to the date of the exams that would determine our future.
— What’s his deal, she said, wasting your time on something so pointless?
Evelina is as stubborn as Mom. She thinks her opinion is superior, tries to push her ideas on others, doesn’t listen to anyone. It took me seven text messages and half an hour of close tracking on Facebook to bring her around, and she almost drove me crazy with her LOLs and OMGs in the meantime.
Evelina is like a lion. The lion is king of the desert, and can pretty much do whatever it wants. That’s Evelina. She absolutely never backs down until she gets her way. If you try to stop her she’ll tear you to shreds. I can say under oath: if there’s ever a nuclear disaster and only one human being survives, it’ll be her. Handling her takes skill and subtlety, not brute force. We’re talking hours of conversation and negotiation.
In the end, though, she did arrange a meeting, and even came with me. Elena opened the door. We’d come during the old man’s afternoon walk, and we watched as he dragged his feet through the rooms, braking at every turn, then gathering speed and racing down the hall.
— Advanced Parkinson’s, Evelina whispered in my ear. It takes a while for the engine to warm up. But when he gets going, there’s no catching him. If he stops, he’ll fall, so he always touches the walls to steady himself, even though it embarrasses him.
The old man was approaching the living room. Elena ran over, wedged her body under his, and eased him into his armchair.
— What a wreck of a human I’ve become, the old man commented.
He had on striped pajamas, mustard and red, like the ones people wear in movies. His big bald head had a strip of hair around the edge, and the veins on his hands bulged. But what I noticed most were his eyes. A person’s eyes don’t age. Mom learned that from one of her documentaries, that the eyes are the only part of the human body that doesn’t age. I checked with Grandma’s, too.
— Well? he said, obviously thrilled at suddenly having an audience.