Tales of the City 06 - Sure of You

the sun. Anna cooed a greeting. “You’re home.”
    “I am,” said Mona, and smiled at her, one seasoned traveler to another.

    “It was truly elemental.”
    They were on the terrace now, under big hats. The waning sun had turned the sea to blue Mylar, and there was a breeze. The wisteria on the terrace had lost its thick coat of dust in what Anna said had been a torrential rainstorm.
    “No shit?” remarked Mona. “It barely drizzled in Skala.”
    “Indeed?”
    “How long did it last?”
    “All night. We were giddy on the ozone. We flung open the shutters and let it just tear through the house.” Anna smiled winsomely. “I was quite the madwoman.”
    “Did it knock out the electricity?”
    “No. Why?”
    “There are candles all over the place.”
    “Oh. Those were for”—Anna dropped her eyes—“atmosphere.”
    “Atmosphere?”
    “Yes.”
    Mona didn’t pursue this, but the image that leapt to mind was of Anna buck naked in a thunderstorm, head wreathed in laurel, arms aloft, like some transcendental Evita. “Did you enjoy the house?”
    Anna nodded.
    “You didn’t throw him out, just because I was…”
    “No, dear. We both wanted a little distance for a while.”
    “A breather,” said Mona.
    Her parent glowered.
    “He seems nice.”
    “He is. Very.”
    “How was the birthplace of Dukakis’s father?”
    “Lovely.”
    Mona tilted her hat and gave Anna a friendly smirk. “You never even went, did you?”
    “We most certainly did.”
    “For how long?” She wasn’t letting her off the hook this easily.
    Anna hesitated, then said: “Most of a day, at least.”
    “You could’ve just asked me to leave, you know. I wouldn’t have minded.”
    “Dear, I assure you…”
    Mona laughed.
    “How was Sappho’s birthplace?”
    “Fine.”
    “Did you meet any nice people?”
    “Several,” said Mona, and let it go at that.

    When Mona woke to the three o’clock church bells, the air was much cooler, and there were fat, bruised clouds lolling outside her window. This had been her last siesta; tomorrow she’d be back in Athens, sitting on her luggage, waiting for her flight to Gatwick. Wilfred had insisted on meeting her plane, so she felt compelled to be strict about her schedule.
    “What haven’t you done?” Anna asked her over tea.
    Mona rolled her eyes. “Don’t ask.”
    “I mean here,” said Anna, smiling. “Have you seen the kastro? ”
    “They have gay boys here?”
    “The castle, you philistine.”
    “I know.”
    “It’s extraordinary, if you haven’t seen it. Fourteenth century.”
    “Fine. Let’s do it.”
    “It’s a bit of a walk.”
    “Something told me,” said Mona.

    Higher and higher they trekked through the cobbled labyrinth, until the houses fell away and the castle gate loomed above them. Two black-sweatered old ladies with apple-doll faces were on their way down, so Anna chirped a cheery “ Kalispera ” before taking Mona’s arm and pointing to the squiggly writing above the gate. “The Turks ruled this place for over four hundred years. They didn’t leave until 1923.”
    Mona imagined Stratos on the same spot, telling Anna the same thing. And the goofy look in Anna’s eyes when he said it.
    “The kastro itself is Genoese, built by a titled Italian family.”
    Mona grunted and followed her through the gate and up a scrubby incline to another entrance, more mammoth than the first. Thirty feet above their heads, a gnarled fig tree grew from the very stone itself. The ground was sticky from a recent bombardment of fruit.
    The door to the keep was ironclad on the outside, but its wooden inside had proved vulnerable to tourist graffiti. It was Greek, for the most part, and the quaint fraternity lettering of the ancients somehow reduced its offensiveness. The only English word she recognized was AIDS, emblazoned in red against the medieval wood.
    She averted her gaze and kept walking, her temples pounding as she strode into the open air of the inner fortifications.
    Her parent seemed unaffected. “They use this part for a stage,” she explained. “Stratos says they did a production of The Trojan Women several summers ago.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    Anna forged ahead, ignoring the lackluster response, climbing until the castle began to resemble an opera set—all turrets and fragments and stony niches framing the sea. There were Wagnerian clouds to match, and the wind had picked up considerably, invading Anna’s hair to create a sort of Medusa