Where the Wandering Ends Read online

  Dedication

  For my mother, Kiki

  And for my children, Christiana and Nico

  Epigraph

  What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.

  —Pericles

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Part Two Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Part Three Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Part Four Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Part Five Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Part Six Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Part Seven Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Part Eight Fifty-Four

  Part Nine Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Yvette Manessis Corporon

  Also by Yvette Manessis Corporon

  Copyright

  Part One

  One

  Corfu

  September 1946

  Somewhere in the distance she could hear Mama’s voice calling her, but Katerina willed her away, if only for a little while longer.

  She was happy here, swinging back and forth under the shade of this beautiful old olive tree. Up and down she swung, soaring higher and higher and then floating back again. She could see the entire island from up here, the ancient gnarled and knotted olive tree groves, the weathered old church, the cemetery overcrowded with stones and loved ones long gone, and even Clotho’s pristine house tucked into the hillside with her lush garden overlooking the sea. And as she soared higher, Katerina gazed beyond the jagged cypress-covered cliffs, across the azure Ionian Sea, to the distant horizon where fishing boats bobbed, silhouetted against the sun, and dolphins swam and jumped in unison.

  The silk ribbons adorning her hair tickled her face each time she lifted back up toward the sky, and her white silk dress filled with air like a balloon each time the swing brought her back down. And then a smile unfurled across her face as she spotted her. The golden woman had come to her again.

  She saw her in the distance, across the hillside, walking toward Katerina’s swing. Her hair flowed free and loose behind her, lifting and lilting up and down like a sail, expertly catching the maestro winds. Katerina squinted her eyes as she leaned in as far as the swing would allow, but still she could not quite make out the woman’s face. Even so, the golden woman’s smile radiated light as pure and bright as the midday sun. Katerina felt so full of love for this woman, yet she did not know who she was or why she came to visit. How could that be?

  Katerina continued to swing higher and higher as she watched the woman walk toward her, closer and closer. Once more her body tilted up toward the sun. She leaned her head back, as far as it would go, and felt the wonder of weightlessness as her hair floated behind her.

  She soared higher, pushing the boundaries between heaven and earth, but she knew the woman would not let anything happen to her. The woman was closer now. Close enough for Katerina to smell her sweet scent, the perfume of the village itself: roses and wisteria and rosemary and basil, fermented on the breeze.

  The woman was almost there; Katerina could almost see her face through the haze of light. Katerina reached out her hand, imploring her to come closer.

  Please, she thought, knowing the woman could read her innermost thoughts, a silent understanding between them. She mouthed the word as she released the swing to go to her. “Please . . .”

  “Katerina.”

  Katerina opened her eyes. Her mother, Maria, was smiling above her. “Were you dreaming? You were smiling. It must have been a good dream.”

  Katerina rubbed her eyes and sat up on the cot, tucked into the corner below the icons of the Virgin Mary and Saint Spyridon that were affixed to the wall with black nails. Crosses made from dried palms were tucked between the icons and the wall, replaced yearly after the Palm Sunday service. The older palms were burned every year after church, as it would be a sin to simply throw them away.

  She changed from her yellowed and threadbare nightshirt to a plain brown wool dress, handed down from her cousin Calliope, that buttoned from her throat to past her knees and itched despite the undershirt and slip she wore beneath. Katerina walked out to the terrace where Mama had breakfast waiting on the table in the shade of the grape arbor that dripped with green orbs. The grapes filled the air with their sweet aroma. A symphony of buzzing bees darted about. Through the morning mist, she could see the shoreline of Albania to the east and the silhouette of the tiny island of Erikousa to the north. Katerina nibbled on the crust of yesterday’s bread drizzled with just a hint of honey and sipped from a cup of goat’s milk, which was still warm. She tried her best to keep her head straight and not wince as Mama brushed and plaited her hair.

  “I have to tell Baba what Calliope said yesterday. She’s so mean, Mama. Why is she so mean?”

  “Children often mimic what they see at home, Katerina. Calliope’s mother is not a kind woman. I hate to speak ill of your father’s sister, but Thea Sofia is a vicious gossip and she puts her nose where it does not belong. It doesn’t make it right, but Calliope is behaving the way she sees her mother behave. Just steer as clear of her as you can,” Mama said.

  “The way you do, Mama?”

  Mama said nothing. She just kept plaiting Katerina’s hair.

  With her straight, sharp nose, fair hair, and green eyes, Mama looked nothing like the other dark and sturdy mothers in the village. Mama had come to Corfu twelve years earlier as an anxious young bride after meeting Baba at a cousin’s wedding on her family’s island of Tinos. After a few bottles of wine and an intense negotiation by their fathers over the restaurant’s finest ouzo, it was decided by the end of that first night that Mama and Baba would be married. Mama, just sixteen, and Baba, twenty, had never met before that day. The wedding took place in a small village church with only a handful of family members in attendance. Mama’s wedding day had been the last time she had seen her own family or stepped foot on Tinos.

  With no dowry to speak of and no mother to send her off with words of comfort or advice, all the young bride brought with her to Corfu were her memories and a few trinkets: faded photos, yellowed linens, and her parents’ wedding crowns all kept locked away in her mother’s old keepsake chest.

  Katerina loved to sit with Mama and look through all of the treasures in that ch
est. Each time they did, Mama would place the crowns on Katerina’s head and smile, her eyes misting over as she promised to take Katerina to her beloved island of Tinos to visit the magnificent church of the Virgin Mary, the Panagia of Tinos.

  “We’ll go to Tinos together one day,” Mama always promised. “And Panagia will bless you, Katerina. She will bless and protect you like she does all of the virtuous girls who pray to her.”

  Katerina couldn’t wait for the day that she could go and pray to Panagia in Tinos. She knew exactly what she would pray for and hoped the Virgin would be kind enough to make her beautiful, too, just like her mother.

  Katerina especially loved when Mama told her the story of how the church came to be. Katerina sat in awe each time Mama explained how Panagia herself visited an old, pious nun in her dream. Panagia spoke to the nun, telling her where the villagers should dig to find her buried icon. Not long after that, the wooden icon was found in that very spot. Katerina hoped that one day she, too, might be visited by Panagia and told where to find buried treasure. She would like that very much.

  As much as she loved hearing stories about her mother’s island, Katerina often wondered why they had never been back to visit and why none of their relatives came to visit on Corfu. She wondered, too, if her mother was lonely with no one to keep her company all day but the kittens, the chickens, and the family’s stubborn skinny goat. Mama never joined the other mothers who met sometimes to clean the cemetery, mill their olives together, or pick chamomile and oregano from the mountainside. Katerina had asked a handful of times if her mother had a best friend, if she might come visit, and if she had a daughter for Katerina to play with. But each time, Mama always found another chore for Katerina, insisting she urgently needed water from the fresh spring or the floor needed to be swept or kindling gathered. So Katerina had simply stopped asking. She never lost hope, though, that the day would come when she would learn at last all of the secrets her mother kept guarded and locked away as tightly as the items in the keepsake chest.

  Each night Katerina prayed before bed, down on her knees, back straight with hands clasped, just the way Mama had taught her. Each night she asked the Virgin Panagia to help her grow as big as her obnoxious cousin Calliope, who called Katerina a baby and declared herself practically a full-blown woman. Katerina also prayed for their chickens to lay more eggs, for her father to catch more fish, and for their tired old goat to produce more milk. She prayed that soon they would make the trip across the sea to Tinos.

  Her prayers had yet to be answered, but Katerina had learned to be patient. With so much suffering all around them, she knew God was probably busy answering the prayers of other, perhaps needier children. Night after night, as her knees bled on the floor, scabs cracking open like eggshells, she promised herself that she would be patient with God as she awaited her turn. But deep down Katerina hoped he would hurry up already. She was growing quite tired of being small and hungry with ugly, scabbed knees.

  “What will you study today?” Mama asked Katerina as she finished the plait, fastening the end with a piece of black yarn.

  “Mr. Andonis said we’ll continue along with Odysseus and his travels. I’m so excited. I love the part when he comes home and no one knows it’s him. Only the dog,” she said, using her sleeve to wipe the milk from her lip.

  “As you should be, my love. Pay close attention,” Mama said. “Remember, you are the first girl in our family to be taught to read and write. Each day you leave this house, you take me with you. Through your eyes, it is as if I am learning too, as if I am sitting beside you in your classroom.”

  Like all of the other daughters, wives, and mothers before her, Mama was never sent to school. Educations, like opinions, were thought unnecessary for those born to serve others. But Mr. Andonis, the new schoolteacher, had changed all that. When he arrived in their tiny village just five years earlier, he brought with him a passion for the classics and an intolerance for ignorance, as well as the fervent belief that even provincial girls deserved an education.

  “Yes, I promise to pay close attention,” Katerina replied as she devoured the bread and finished the last sip of milk. “Where is Baba? He promised to walk me to school today.”

  Mama did not answer.

  Katerina watched as Mama walked over to the washbasin where Baba’s work clothes were soaking. Silently, Mama bent over the basin, scrubbing and pounding his shirt into the soapy water.

  Two

  Corfu

  September 1946

  Laki stood at the water’s edge and looked out across the bay to the horizon. No stars were visible in the sky, the first light of the new day just now beginning to cut through the darkness. Only the silver moon could be seen against the black.

  Laki looked down on the stiff body of the man and exhaled before flipping the corpse and rummaging through his pockets. From the wet billfold he pulled out a few drachmas. He whispered a word of thanks, grateful for the light of the moon and for the glassy sea, which reflected shimmering moonlight across the beach. He glanced up and down the shoreline again, squinting into the darkness to make sure he was indeed alone. Certain no one was watching, he stuffed the wet bills into his own pocket before shifting the man to his other side to search for more.

  He knew what he held in his fingers even before he pulled the wet paper from the man’s pocket. He had done this many times and could predict what he would find with one glance at a dead man’s face. This was a young man, clean-shaven with a square jaw, jet-black hair, and a thin band of gold on his finger. He had been handsome and strong and loved. But that was before his boat had been blown out of the brilliant blue waters between Albania and Corfu.

  Laki thought for a moment of the woman’s face that would soon greet him on this waterlogged photograph. He thought of the face that would soon be streaked with tears and of the body that would be shrouded in black upon hearing of her young husband’s death. He said a silent prayer, asking God to give this woman strength, allowing her a few final moments of anonymity, of blissful ignorance before he glanced upon her face and branded her a widow.

  Laki slipped the photo out of the man’s pocket and held it up to his face. He sucked in his breath and let out a soft moan. Shaking his head, he said another prayer, this one for the beautiful little girl who sat on her mother’s knee in the photo. She was no more than ten, just like his precious Katerina. The girl smiling back at him from the photo had shiny black hair like her father and the piercing black eyes and bee-stung lips of her mother. He looked closer at the photo and noticed the serene smile on the woman’s face and then her hands, one wrapped around her daughter’s tiny waist and the other resting on her own swollen belly. He was not a man who cried easily, or ever. But his eyes filled with tears as he looked down at this man and the family he had left behind.

  “Senseless,” he said out loud as if there were anyone to hear him. “Senseless.” Louder this time. “Barbarians.”

  Greek killing Greek. Cousin killing cousin. Brother killing brother. After so many years of war, oppression, and Italian and then German occupation, Laki never would have imagined that his own people would turn against each other the way they had. The newspapers called it an impending civil war, but he called it something else: cannibalism.

  He bent down once again and returned the photo to the man’s pocket. When he heard that a boat belonging to the Communist Greek People’s Liberation Navy had been blown out of the water by government firepower, he knew what would happen next. He knew the fish would be scared away once again, making it even more difficult for the villagers to feed their families. He also knew the tide would bring the dead men’s bodies to rest here, in this pristine cove, just as it had the Italian soldiers years before when their ship was destroyed by German grenades in these very waters.

  He shook his head as he thought of those men massacred by the Nazis. The Italians had been good to Laki and all of the villagers throughout the occupation, even trading squares of chocolate for octopuses and
lobsters. He smiled thinking of the times he presented Katerina with the sweet treats. How she would squeal and sigh as the dark squares dissolved on her tongue. Those young Italian boys had boarded boats after the long occupation thinking they were finally homebound, waving to the villagers as they sailed away. In reality, the Italians were deceived and murdered, their boats bombarded with gunfire and grenades from the very soldiers who had assured them safe passage. Instead of returning to the arms of their loved ones, their lifeless bodies came to rest here on this beach, with Laki rummaging through their pockets hoping to find some way to feed his family.

  Now, as he stood over the body of this young man, he realized he could not continue, even though he knew more bodies had washed up and there were more pockets to rummage farther down the beach. He knew it was time to leave this cove and head home before the sunrise could reveal his secret. He was a poor man with nothing to his name but his old family home, a torn and tangled fishing net, and a small garden plot. It was barely enough for them to survive on. But unlike the dead man at his feet, he had the luxury of walking through the door where Maria would have a meal waiting for him and kissing the cheek of beautiful Katerina, whose giggles echoed on the breeze like an angelic chorus. He knew in his heart that as difficult as things were, at least for now, they were the lucky ones.

  Thousands were dying from famine all across Greece, but living in their tiny seaside village meant that at least there would always be fish to eat. Fishing might be difficult for a while after the mines planted just off the coast of Albania were detonated, or when the government managed to identify and destroy a Communist navy boat, but Laki knew that eventually, as always, the fish would be back. No, it wasn’t the famine that worried him most. It was the increasing violence and waves of terror that had started in the remote northern villages and now had begun to spread south, closer to Corfu and even to Athens.