Page 239 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

farmers who stayed. Most of them left long ago, though some are coming back

now to live out their retirement on the island.
“Odie is none too pleased,” Thalia says, meaning with the transformation.
She has written me about this too—the older islanders’ suspicion of the
newcomers and the changes they are importing.
“You don’t seem to mind the change,” I say.
“No point in griping about the inevitable,” she says. Then adds, “Odie says,
‘Well, it figures you’d say that, Thalia. You weren’t born here.’” She lets out a
loud, hearty laugh. “You’d think after forty-four years on Tinos I would have
earned the right. But there you have it.”

Thalia has changed too. Even with the winter coat on, I can tell she has
thickened in the hips, become plumper—not soft plump, sturdy plump. There is
a cordial defiance to her now, a slyly teasing way she has of commenting on
things I do that I suspect she finds slightly foolish. The brightness in her eyes,
this new hearty laugh, the perpetual flush of the cheeks—the overall impression
is, a farmer’s wife. A salt-of-the-earth kind of woman whose robust friendliness
hints at a bracing authority and hardness you might be unwise to question.

“How is business?” I ask. “Are you still working?”
“Here and there,” Thalia says. “You know the times.” We both shake our
heads. In Kabul, I had followed news about the rounds of austerity measures. I
had watched on CNN masked young Greeks stoning police outside the
parliament, cops in riot gear firing tear gas, swinging their batons.
Thalia doesn’t run a business in the real sense. Before the digital age, she was
essentially a handywoman. She went to people’s homes and soldered power
transistors in their TVs, replaced signal capacitors in old tube-model radios. She
was called in to fix faulty refrigerator thermostats, seal leaky plumbing. People
paid her what they could. And if they couldn’t afford to pay, she did the work
anyway. I don’t really need the money, she told me. I do it for the game of it.

There’s still a thrill for me in opening things up and seeing how they work
inside. These days, she is like a freelance one-woman IT department. Everything
she knows is self-taught. She charges nominal fees to troubleshoot people’s PCs,
change IP settings, fix their application-file freeze-ups, their slowdowns, their
upgrade and boot-up failures. More than once I have called her from Kabul,
desperate for help with my frozen IBM.
When we arrive at my mother’s house, we stand outside for a moment in the
courtyard beside the old olive tree. I see evidence of Mamá’s recent frenzy of
work—the repainted walls, the half-finished dovecote, a hammer and an open
box of nails resting on a slab of wood.