he said softly and moved a little closer. The air smelled of honey and as he talked his olive-black eyes were smiling at her again.
‘I will,’ she said and thought of nothing that she would like to do more.
While he spoke, he reached and placed his palm on the trunk of the old tree; his hand lingered there for a moment and then patted the gnarled wood with such tenderness that Calli fancied it was a person he was touching so lovingly. She found this simple gesture of his so moving that a lump rose to her throat. She looked at Michalis’s kind face and was seized by an almost overwhelming urge to talk to him, to unburden herself of the revelations she had learned over the last few days, and even to tell him about her own life, about the sadness of her own recent experience. But it was clear that what she had been told by her aunt was a private matter, a secret, which for whatever reason had been guarded for decades. Even if she was brimming with her new knowledge, ready to burst with the need to divulge it to a sympathetic ear, she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
‘Thirsty?’ he asked suddenly, breaking into her thoughts and reaching for her hand. She gave it willingly and followed him out of the grove towards the car. ‘I know of a nice little kafenio in the village up the hill,’ he said, putting the car into gear. ‘It’s not far, an old relative of my mother’s lives there.’
As always in those parts the narrow road snaked tortuously up the hill, and with every hairpin bend the car teetered alarmingly close to the edge, giving Calli a clear view of gullies, ravines, gorges and hollowed-out rocks below. She was familiar with these mountainous landscapes which had never made her nervous, yet for the first time they seemed to her to take on a sinister character.
‘The terrain looks so menacing down there.’ She turned to Michalis.
‘They say that thieves and bandits would often take refuge in those caves, and during wartime it was a place to hide from the enemy . . .’
As she peered down through the open window a sense of dread engulfed her, and she fancied that any one of those caves she now saw could have been the doomed lovers’ hiding place. ‘These caves had many uses in the past,’ Michalis continued without taking his eyes off the road. ‘Not so long ago, when lovers eloped, it was down in those caves that they ran to hide,’ he added, causing her to catch her breath.
As he parked in the village square, again, just as earlier in the car, Calli was filled with a sense of foreboding. This place reminded her too much of that other village that figured in her aunt’s story, the one they called the upper village. She had heard so much about it; now apparently here it was, complete with bus stop and schoolhouse. Although seventy-odd years had passed she thought she recognized it from Froso’s descriptions. How could she be sure that she was not mistaken? Her suspicion could have easily been the result of her over-active imagination and the effect the drive had had on her. Yet as they walked down the street and approached the kafenio, Calli felt a gloom descending.
‘Do you mind if we don’t stay here?’ she asked Michalis, feeling foolish for asking the question.
‘Of course not . . .’ he said, his surprise evident in his voice, ‘not if you don’t like it.’
‘It’s not that . . .’ she tried to explain. ‘I don’t know . . . it’s something about the aura of the place that makes me feel uneasy,’ she said, at the same time incredulous to hear the words coming out of her mouth: she sounded more like Maya than herself.
7
In the time that followed, despite the urge to confide in him and despite having plenty of opportunities, Calli decided she couldn’t talk to Michalis about her aunt’s secret; she had to honour her privacy. At the same time, Froso too had made a decision to refrain from continuing further with her story; the prospect of having to re-live the upsetting history she had buried once her sister arrived was sending her into a state of high anxiety.
‘I now realize I should have waited for your mother to come before starting to talk to you,’ Froso told a disappointed Calli. ‘Bringing back the