The Devil Takes Half by Leta Serafim Page A

sorry he’d asked.
    Theirs had been an arranged marriage of sorts. He’d wanted to marry Marina Papoulis, but his widowed mother wouldn’t hear of it. With the face of a Raphael Madonna, Marina had been his best friend, and he’d lived for her smile most of his boyhood. A poor girl, she’d had to work as a maid in Athens to complete her education. “She’s nothing,” his mother had said. “A common girl from a common family.” But he had loved her with all his heart and still did, truth be told, his heart quickening whenever he saw her. She’d had a pair of roller skates and used to grab onto the end of his bike, screaming with laughter as he pedaled furiously through the village, her braids flying. The memory still made him smile. Oh Marina, Marina.
    But he’d done as his mother wished and courted and married the girl she had picked out for him, Dimitra Pissou. Calculating, ferret-like Dimitra, Dimitra with the face, not of the Madonna, but of a basset hound.
    His mother had believed she possessed great wealth. A mirage, it turned out, this great wealth , though neither he nor his mother had discovered this until after the wedding, when it was too late. As for her pretenses—the way she looked down on people, her fancy manners and aristocratic way of eating, cutting her meat just so—she was simply imitating the wealthy ship owners she’d seen on Chios. Her ideas she’d gleaned from her more successful relatives, her vision of life from store displays and the gossip of neighbors.
    A stolid, unwavering force of nature, his wife was rooted to the ground in every sense, with legs like tree trunks and no ankles to speak of. A perfect example of one of the older models of Greek womanhood. The kind who never laughed except at someone else and who wore black their entire adult lives. Patronas was willing to concede women like that had their uses. They were good to have around in wartime. For example, a group of them had jumped off a mountain in 1803 to avoid capture by the Turk, Ali Pasha. A victory of sorts, no matter that it killed them. It was just hard to take one on a daily basis.
    He retreated to the bathroom, saying, “Enough, Dimitra. Enough.” But his wife followed him upstairs, continuing their discussion in a loud voice outside the bathroom door.
    â€œ You want to know what that quote means? It means women have to put themselves back together, time and time again, after their men break them like pots.”
    * * *
    Patronas had long thought that the philosopher Socrates, when condemned to death or exile, didn’t drink the hemlock to avoid political exile to Larissa, a cow town north of Athens. No, he was pretty sure Socrates had downed the poison to get away from Xanthippe, his legendary, unspeakable shrew of a wife, someone Patronas fancied was very much like his Dimitra. Socrates simply couldn’t face one more day at her side: Xanthippe turning up in the agora, yelling at him when he was trying to discuss something important—say, caves for instance—with Plato. Xanthippe announcing that her mother was coming for an indefinite stay. Xanthippe complaining he never took her any where .
    Not that the chief officer thought of himself as Socrates. No, he saw himself more as a fellow traveler in the long, not so-happy, but fortunately not completely platonic dialogue that is marriage.
    He thought about it as he lay in bed that night. Where had the years gone? The promise of happiness? He had to admit, he harbored little affection for his wife and none whatsoever for his mother-in-law, a gap-toothed old walrus who had iron clad opinions about everything, which she expressed in a deep, penetrating voice like a man’s. Like Moses with the Ten Commandments, you could almost hear the trumpet blast in everything she said. He’d tried to overlook the gradual thickening of his wife’s waist, the erosion of her face. He’d kept