AT SEA

    

    The Greek was a sailor with the merchant marine and he’d trotted out his limited opening gambits the moment she sat down. But it was easy to discourage him.

    It was easier every day now.

    Why was that?

    For a moment she felt a vague uncertainty. She closed her eyes and three images skittered through her imagination. A full moon. Then dark of the moon, clouds scurrying through the sky. A woman-herself?- in childbirth. She opened them again.

    The sailor sat near her a discrete distance away reading a book.

    Lelia leaned against the rail and watched the sea roll by. The lower deck was crowded, mostly with Greeks bound for Tinos or Siros. They were noisy and dirty. Their children ran around like indians and there were plastic bags dripping bread and cheese and fruit everywhere. Overripe. It’s all so overripe, she thought.

    The only problem with Greece was Greeks.

    And one of them was staring at her.

    A skinny old hag of a woman dressed in black.

    Go to hell, she thought.

    She looked back across the railing and watched the gulls scavenge the sides of the boat.

    When she got bored with that the woman was still staring.

    Her face was expressionless but her gaze was hard and steady. And now two middle-aged women were watching her too. The hag was fingering a blue bead hanging from a chain around her neck.

    The sailor looked up from his book.

    What the fuck is this? A show? Who do you think you’re staring at?

    She stood up.

    Abruptly the woman turned her head and spat.

    Lelia stood rooted there. Surprise and anger boiled in her. Why you dirty old bitch.

    She started forward.

    The woman saw her move and turned her head away again, spread the fingers of her left hand and shoved the hand palm-outward in her direction.

    “Nah!" she barked.

    And suddenly the sailor was on his feet, rattling off some unintelligible Greek to the woman and at the same time stepping toward Lelia, stepping between them to hold her back. The woman answered angrily and then it was a shouting match between them, with everybody on the lower deck watching.

    She didn’t understand a word of it.

    She damn well didn’t like it either.

    The woman was pointing at her, yelling. The sailor shouted back, red-faced, gesticulating wildly.

    Finally the old hag snatched up her plastic bag and repeated the palm-outward shove. “Arpa!” she said.

    She pulled the shawl up over her shoulders and walked stiffly away.

    Lelia and the sailor looked at each other.

    “Do you mind telling me…?”

    The man looked sheepish. Forty-five, she guessed, and acting like a ten-year-old. Greeks.

    “I am very sorry. I apologize for her. Very stupid old woman, very…insulting. I am sorry. She is old, you see, and these old peoples, they have stupid thoughts. She says you have the evil eye. I am sorry.”

    He grinned, embarrassed.

    “She gave you a moondza."

    “Moondza?”

    “A bad word. How you say? A curse. Yes, a curse. A swearing word. That is the spreading of the fingers, you see. ‘Aipa!’ she say. Catch! You catch the moondza. You see? Is old foolishness. I apologize for her.” Lelia sat down. So did the sailor. She could see how uncomfortable he was, how much he wanted to get back to his book.

    Not yet, she thought.

    Something swirled in her. Something wonderful. Just outside her conciousness.

    "And the bead? What was the bead she was fingering? She wore it around her neck.”

    “Ah! To preserve her from the evil eye. You understand, we are new country now but we are old country too and many people still believe in this…this evil eye. So they carry the bead. And you have blue eyes, you see. Very blue.”

    “So-"

    “It is the thought, the belief, that the woman with blue eyes is best to give the evil eye. Is stupid, no?”

    Lelia said nothing.

    “But she will not trouble you now.”

    “She’d better not.”

    “Don’t worry. I have told her.”

    “Thank you.”

    “Is nothing. Is fine.”

    The man went back to his book, his face still flushed with excitement. She wondered if he was really reading.

    Now and then the two middle-aged women would glance nervously in her direction.

    She lit a cigarette.

    “What if it were true?” she said quietly.

    “Eh?”

    “What if I really could cast the evil eye. You’d have been very wrong then, wouldn’t you? To have helped me.”

    The man stared at her, forgetting it was impolite, forgetting himself completely for a moment. He gawked.

    “But you are a tourist,” he said. “Are you not?”

    “Yes.”

    He spread his hands and shrugged.

    “How can tourist have the evil eye?”

    How indeed, thought Lelia.