Page 205 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

Varvaris! Well, I am Madaline Gianakos, and, may I say, I am delighted.”

She took off a cream-colored, elbow-length satin glove, the kind I’d seen
worn only in magazines by elegant ladies out at a soiree, smoking on the wide
steps of the opera house or being helped out of a shiny black car, their faces lit
up by popping flashbulbs. She had to yank on each fingertip a bunch of times
before the glove came off, and then she stooped slightly at the waist and offered
me her hand.
“Charmed,” she said. Her hand was soft and cool, despite the glove. “And this
is my daughter, Thalia. Darling, say hello to Markos Varvaris.”
She stood at the entrance of the room beside my mother, looking at me

blankly, a lanky, pale-skinned girl with limp curls. Other than that, I can’t tell
you a single thing. I can’t tell you the color of the dress she wore that day—that
is, if she wore a dress—or the style of her shoes, or whether she had socks on, or
whether she wore a watch, or a necklace, or a ring, or a pair of earrings. I can’t
tell you because if you were at a restaurant and someone suddenly stripped,
hopped atop a table, and started juggling dessert spoons, you would not only
look, it would be the only thing you could look at. The mask draped over the
lower half of the girl’s face was like that. It obliterated the possibility of any
other observation.
“Thalia, say hello, darling. Don’t be rude.”

I thought I saw a faint nod of the head.
“Hello,” I replied with a sandpaper tongue. There was a ripple in the air. A
current. I felt charged with something that was half thrill, half dread, something
that burst upward inside of me and coiled itself up. I was staring and I knew it
and I couldn’t stop, couldn’t peel my gaze away from the sky blue cloth of the
mask, the two sets of bands tying it to the back of her head, the narrow
horizontal slit over the mouth. I knew right then that I couldn’t bear to see it,
whatever the mask was hiding. And that I couldn’t wait to see it. Nothing in my
life could resume its natural course and rhythm and order until I saw for myself
what was so terrible, so dreadful, that I and others had to be protected from it.

The alternate possibility, that the mask was perhaps designed to shield Thalia
from us, eluded me. At least it did in the dizzying throes of that first meeting.
Madaline and Thalia stayed upstairs to unpack while Mamá battered up cuts
of sole for supper in the kitchen. She asked me to make Madaline a cup of
ellinikós kafés, which I did, and she asked me to take it up to her, which I did as
well, on a tray, with a little plate of pastelli.

All these decades later and shame still washes over me like some warm,
sticky liquid at the memory of what happened next. To this day I can picture the