She calls my name from downstairs.
I get up quietly. As I leave the room, something catches my eye. Something framed, mounted on the wall beneath the clock. I can’t quite make it out in the dark. I open my cell phone and take a look in its silver glow. It’s an AP story about the nonprofit I work with in Kabul. I remember the interview. The journalist was a pleasant Korean-American fellow with a mild stutter. We had shared a plate of qabuli—Afghan pilaf, with brown rice, raisins, lamb. There is in the center of the story a group photo. Me, some of the children, Nabi in the back, standing rigidly, hands behind his back, looking simultaneously foreboding, shy, and dignified, as Afghans often manage to in pictures. Amra is there too with her adopted daughter, Roshi. All the children are smiling.
“Markos.”
I flip the mobile closed and make my way downstairs.
Thalia puts before me a glass of milk and a steaming plate of eggs on a bed of tomatoes. “Don’t worry, I already sugared the milk.”
“You remember.”
She takes a seat, not bothering to remove the apron. She rests her elbows on the table and watches me eat, dabbing now and then at her left cheek with a handkerchief.
I remember all the times I tried to convince her to let me work on her face. I told her that surgical techniques had come a long way since the 1960s, and that I was certain I could, if not fix, then at least significantly improve her disfigurement. Thalia refused, to enormous bewilderment on my part. This is who I am, she said to me. An insipid, unsatisfactory answer, I thought at the time. What did that even mean? I didn’t understand it. I had uncharitable thoughts of prison inmates, lifers, afraid to get out, terrified of being paroled, terrified of change, terrified of facing a new life outside barbed wire and guard towers.
My offer to Thalia still stands to this day. I know she won’t take it. But I understand now. Because she was right—this is who she is. I cannot pretend to know what it must have been like to gaze at that face in the mirror each day, to take stock of its ghastly ruin, and to summon the will to accept it. The mountainous strain of it, the effort, the patience. Her acceptance taking shape slowly, over years, like rocks of a beachside cliff sculpted by the pounding tides. It took the dog minutes to give Thalia her face, and a lifetime for her to mold it into an identity. She would not let me undo it all with my scalpel. It would be like inflicting a fresh wound over the old one.
I dig into the eggs, knowing it will please her, even though I am not really hungry. “This is good, Thalia.”
“So, are you excited?”
“What do you mean?”
She reaches behind her and pulls open a kitchen-counter drawer. She retrieves a pair of sunglasses with rectangular lenses. It takes me a moment. Then I remember. The eclipse.
“Ah, of course.”
“At first,” she says, “I thought we’d just watch it through a pinhole. But then Odie said you were coming. And I said, ‘Well, then, let’s do it in style.’ ”
We talk a bit about the eclipse that is supposed to happen the next day. Thalia says it will start in the morning and be complete by noon or so. She has been checking the weather updates and is relieved that the island is not due for a cloudy day. She asks if I want more eggs and I say yes, and she tells me about a new Internet café that has gone up where Mr. Roussos’s old pawnshop used to sit.
“I saw the pictures,” I say. “Upstairs. The article too.”
She wipes my bread crumbs off the table with her palm, tosses them over her shoulder into the kitchen sink without looking. “Ah, that was easy. Well, scanning and uploading them was. The hard part was organizing them into countries. I had to sit and figure it out because you never sent notes, just the pictures. She was very specific about that, the having it organized into countries. She had to have it that way. She insisted on it.”
“Who?”
She issues a sigh. “ ‘Who?’ he says. Odie. Who else?”
“That was her idea?”
“The article too. She was the one who found it on the web.”
“Mamá looked me up?” I say.
“I should have never taught her. Now she won’t stop.” She gives a chuckle. “She checks on you every day. It’s true. You have yourself a cyberspace stalker, Markos Varvaris.”
…
Mamá comes downstairs early in the afternoon. She is wearing a dark blue bathrobe and the fuzzy slippers that I have already come to loathe. It looks like she has brushed her hair. I am relieved to see that she appears to be moving normally as she walks down the steps, as she opens her arms to me, smiling sleepily.
We sit at the table for coffee.
“Where is Thalia?” she asks, blowing into her cup.
“Out to get some treats. For tomorrow. Is that yours, Mamá?” I point to a cane leaning against the wall behind the new armchair. I hadn’t noticed it when I had first come in.
“Oh, I hardly use it. Just on bad days. And for long walks. Even then, mostly for peace of mind,” she says too dismissively, which is how I know she relies on it far more than she lets on. “It’s you I worry for. The news from that awful country. Thalia doesn’t want me listening to it. She says it will agitate me.”
“We do have our incidents,” I say, “but mostly it’s just people going about their lives. And I’m always careful, Mamá.” Of course I neglect to tell her about the shooting at the guesthouse across the street or the recent surge in attacks on foreign-aid workers, or that by careful I mean I have taken to carrying a 9mm when I am out driving around the city, which I probably shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
Mamá takes a sip of coffee, winces a bit. She doesn’t push me. I am not sure whether this is a good thing. Not sure whether she has drifted off, descended into herself as old people do, or whether it is a tactic to not corner me into lying or disclosing things that would only upset her.
“We missed you at Christmas,” she says.
“I couldn’t get away, Mamá.”
She nods. “You’re here now. That’s what matters.”
I take a sip of my coffee. I remember when I was little Mamá and me eating breakfast at this table every morning, quietly, almost solemnly, before we walked to school together. We said so little to each other.
“You know, Mamá, I worry for you too.”
“No need to. I take care of myself all right.” A flash of the old defiant pride, like a dim glint in the fog.