The house on the cliff

We shook hands again in farewell, solemnly. In the fading light, I grabbed the familiar handholds on the sloping boulder, and hauled myself towards the path. I thought to myself that if he said “be careful!” he would be like all the rest. He said nothing, and I kept climbing, clumsy as a cockroach, and left him behind the Gate in the dark, alone with the sound of the waves breaking on the rocks below. THE BAND OF BOYS Besides my father and Loxándra, the other protagonists of my life on the island were the kids I played with, the Band of Boys, as Daddy called them. The group had already started forming before the war, but the best years were in the summers immediately after. There weren’t that many of us, and the range of ages and interests was wide. If we had lived spread out in the population of some city, we would have never come together. As things were, our bond was geographic and genealogical. We were all the children of families who had country homes in the area, in Maskouládes or Livádi or thereabouts, and who knew each other socially. There were also some village kids in the gang, most of whose parents worked on one or another of the estates. Because I was the youngest, they wouldn’t always let me tag along, in the early years especially, but as I grew older they grew accustomed to me and I was there to stay. It so happened I was the only girl, but it suited all of us to ignore that, and they treated me as if I too was a boy. They needed me, you see, because with me came my father, whom all the boys loved and admired. He was our teacher, our trainer, and our chief in swimming and sailing, in rowing and fishing. He took us hiking and bouldering, and with him we learned how to climb safely. Even Evgénios, who was the oldest, respected and obeyed him, and tried his best to act like him when he wasn’t around. The other fathers we knew were potbellied and had soft, pale hands. They were away in town all day, at their jobs. In the evenings they wore shirts with short sleeves and sat on their verandas playing cards. Other fathers, such as Evgénios and Grigóris’, were absent. The brothers attended boarding school in Athens and spent their summer holidays with their grandfather on the island. My father had divided us into two teams, the Blues and the Whites, for the colours of the flag, and encouraged competition between us through a complicated awarding of points, which we managed ourselves on an honour system. The scoring carried over from one summer to the next, and we never did find out which team had won. (It didn’t really matter, by the time it came to an end the boys were beyond reach, prisoners of their blossoming hormones, and my father visited much more rarely, ever