And the Mountains Echoed

when we were little,” Mamá said. Right off, she said, they had become inseparable friends. They had held hands under their desks in class, or at recess, at church, or strolling past the barley fields. They had sworn to remain sisters for life. They promised they would live close to each other, even after they’d married. They would live as neighbors, and if one or the other’s husband insisted on moving away, then they would demand a divorce. I remember that Mamá grinned a little when she told me all this self-mockingly, as if to distance herself from this youthful exuberance and foolishness, all those headlong, breathless vows. But I saw on her face a tinge of unspoken hurt as well, a shade of disappointment that Mamá was far too proud to admit to.
    Madaline was married now to a wealthy and much older man, a Mr. Andreas Gianakos, who years before had produced her second and, as it turned out, last film. He was in the construction business now and owned a big firm in Athens. They had had a falling-outrecently, a row, Madaline and Mr. Gianakos. Mamá didn’t tell me any of this information; I knew it from a clandestine, hasty, partial read of the letter Madaline had sent Mamá informing her of her intent to visit.
    It grows so tiresome, I tell you, to be around Andreas and his right-wing friends and their martial music. I keep tight-lipped all the time. I say nothing when they exalt these military thugs who have made a mockery of our democracy. Should I utter so much as a word of dissent, I am confident they would label me a communist anarchist, and then even Andreas’s influence would not save me from the dungeons. Perhaps he would not bother exerting it, meaning his influence. Sometimes I believe it is precisely his intent to provoke me into impugning myself. Ah, how I miss you, my dear Odie. How I miss your company
…
    The day our guests were due to arrive, Mamá awoke early to tidy up. We lived in a small house built into a hillside. Like many houses on Tinos, it was made of whitewashed stone, and the roof was flat, with diamond-shaped red tiles. The small upstairs bedroom Mamá and I shared didn’t have a door—the narrow stairwell led right into it—but it did have a fanlight window and a narrow terrace with a waist-high wrought-iron balustrade from which you could look out on the roofs of other houses, on the olive trees and the goats and winding stone alleys and arches below, and, of course, the Aegean, blue and calm in the summer morning, white-capped in the afternoon when the
meltemi
winds blew in from the north.
    When she was done cleaning up, Mamá put on what passed for her one fancy outfit, the one she wore every August fifteenth, the Feast of the Dormition at the Panagia Evangelistria Church, when pilgrims descended on Tinos from everywhere in the Mediterranean to pray before the church’s famed icon. There is a photo of my mother in that outfit—the long, drab rusty gold dress with a rounded neckline, the shrunken white sweater, the stockings, theclunky black shoes. Mamá looking every bit the forbidding widow, with her severe face, her tufted eyebrows, and her snub nose, standing stiffly, looking sullenly pious, like she’s a pilgrim herself. I’m in the picture too, standing rigidly at my mother’s hip. I am wearing a white shirt, white shorts, and white kneesocks rolled up. You can tell by my scowl that I’ve been ordered to stand straight, to not smile, that my face has been scrubbed and my hair combed down with water, against my will and with a great deal of fuss. You can sense a current of dissatisfaction between us. You see it in how rigidly we stand, how our bodies barely make contact.
    Or maybe you can’t. But I do every time I see that picture, the last time being two years ago. I can’t help but see the wariness, the effort, the impatience. I can’t help but see two people together out of a sense of genetic duty, doomed already to bewilder and disappoint each other, each honor-bound to defy the other.
    From the bedroom window upstairs, I watched Mamá leave for the ferry port in the town of Tinos. A scarf tied under the chin, Mamá rammed into the sunny blue day headfirst. She was a slight, small-boned woman with the body of a child, but when you saw her coming you did well to let her pass. I remember her walking me to school every morning—my mother is retired now, but she was a