04.03.08
Orphanage
The sleepy Aegean waves licked up the white beach, warm and low. Up the shore, a cottage clung to the low shoulder of the island and howled. It howled and it screamed, and it ejected something out its flank, which began a slow ragged rotation and fell flat and motionless upon the ground.
The young man turned to the midwife, averting his eyes from the bed, and flinching under the violence of his love’s screams. The midwife handed him another bloodied rag, which fell to his feet. He picked it up and lobbed it through the doorway.
He looked out, and stepped out for some air, as the world began to sway and whiten. He spiraled downward.
He heard the frail, alien crying of infants. He heard his love humming a broken lullaby, and he woke with a jolt. He found his face to the floor. He pushed away the floor, righted himself, and turned round until he found her. She hummed euphorically, but weakly and laboriously. He held her hand. She smiled, blinked, and closed her eyes. Her neck eased as she fell into sleep. Two infants laid against her breast, braced by pillows.
The midwife sent him out for the doctor. He completed the chore, but not quickly enough.
“And Nymphodorus, in his Voyage round Asia, says that there are nowhere more beautiful women than those in Tenedos, an Island close to Troy.” —Athenaeus
Cynthia and her brother were taken into the care of different families. The couple that took Cynthia soon moved off the Island to find employment in the city, and left the boy as the last remaining Greek child of Tenedos, which was perhaps why he was named Apollo, for the Island had been known by Homer as a sanctuary of Apollo.
It had once been a Dionysian isle of vineyards, beaches, and—surely—beautiful women. Since Greece ceded the Isle to Turkey in 1923, it has been systematically cleansed of Greeks. Though technically a treaty violation, the cleansing was in strict accordance with the times. Turkey expelled Greeks. Greece expelled Turks. All in the name of national unity.
The decades following the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, and those particularly after the Istanbul Pogrom in 1955, were times of Greek diaspora from ancestral lands they had inhabited since before the Turkish invasions. Soon after Cynthia learned to walk, her guardians vanished suddenly and she was given over to the care of the Church. As she was learning to speak smatterings of Greek and Turkish, she changed hands once more. She found herself on an airliner with a strange man and woman. During the long journey, she woke several times, each time having to readjust to the strange surroundings, which would sometimes change utterly. She would find herself in a small seating space, in a corridor, in a large space of loud, echoing voices. She woke as she was being carried through the night. The adults spoke to her in affectionate voices, but often spoke anxiously and hurriedly. They took her to a house unlike any she had ever seen, where there was another adult, a boy, and an orange dog. The boy was bigger than her, but not much. He showed her a toy train, several cars, and then brought her a stuffed bunny. One of the adults approached and said something to her, but she could not understand anything that was said.
@ 2008 Dan J. Jensen
