The Secret Sister by Fotini Tsalikoglou, Mary Kritoeff Page B

bulimic climbing vine, the unrevealed secrets embrace the family’s flesh a little tighter each day, until in the end they become one with it. You can’t tell the vine from the flesh. A couple joined for all time, and if you try to pry it apart, you destroy it. Dust, damp, lichen and bugs erode the leafy, green body. In the summer, when the smell of something rotting won’t let you be, you pray to God for a breath of fresh air.
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    An oppressive heat is coming out of the air conditioning—“Please, Miss, could you fix the ventilator?” The revolving nozzle above my head is adjusted and the temperature drops at once. I can’t wait for takeoff. A couple of rows in front of me an elderly woman makes the sign of the cross. The moment just before becoming airborne is ideal for entreaties. Up there in the sky, in a few moments, our fate will lie in God’s hands. If you grow up without a father, you dream of those hands—sometimes gently healing your wounds, and other times mean and merciless, choking the life out of you.
    â€œHeavens above, Frosso, one doesn’t play with God!”
    Our mother played with him. She borrowed his omnipotence and his arbitrariness. She answered to no one. To give birth to her son in her bedroom, to cut the umbilical cord herself, to wash off the blood, to spend the day with the newborn in her arms, defying the rules of physical and mental health—she would do all these things and more. To reveal to no one who her son’s father was. And, two years later, to be pregnant with a daughter, whose father was unknown once again. To give her children names like Jonathan and Amalia for her own indecipherable reasons. I assume she liked the sound of “Jonathan”—there’s an extended musicality to it, at “Jo-” the tongue goes up as if it’s singing, and then at “-nathan” it settles down again, a little sadly. As for “Amalia,” maybe it was the first syllable, “Am-,” that sounds like the French for soul. I’ll never know.
    You have to be pretty unhappy to always want to do things your way. Grandma, Grandpa, Anthoula, Stamatis, our Greek friends, Grandpa’s colleagues, Peter, Matthew, John—none of them dared contradict her. Were they frightened of her misery? And when she started drinking like a fish, and there’d be no trace of her for hours, even days, again no one said anything. And when her belly began to grow, again no one asked about the whys and the wherefores. What else did they fear besides her misery? God punishes those who stand in the way of the insane desires of insanely miserable people. Who doesn’t want God’s grace? And if you’re guilty, you might want it even more . . .
    Were all of them guilty? Why? How long did we live in ignorance? And could it be that when the secret is revealed, when the darkness is lifted, then you find yourself in another delusion?
    You lean over and whisper something in my ear, the roar of the plane’s engine grows louder, I try to make out your words.
    â€œ
Jonathan
,” you say, “
what you will never know will always be stronger, don’t kid yourself, do you want me to tell you what you accomplish every time you think you understand?
”
    Yes, tell me.
    â€œ
A meatless bone of truth is what you’re holding in your hand, and you’re licking it and saying ‘this tastes good’.
”
    Don’t stop talking to me, Amalia.
    The voice is lost, all I catch is the word “crumbs” and the phrase “the bones of truth.” The noise drowns out the rest.
    The engines sound like something just before an explosion. The elderly woman is still praying. What would she think if I suddenly went up to her and said: “It’s no use, my dear lady, however many signs of the cross you make, nothing will change. The sky is self-sufficient; a cloudless flight does