Chapter fourteen
The Feast
Maria had always believed in the sanctity of first impressions, though after twenty-six years of marriage she ought to have known that the only impression left in Thessaloniki’s Ano Poli was the last, lingering one — usually delivered by a neighbor with a talent for embroidery and slander. It was with this knowledge, and a pair of trembling hands, that she laid the old linen across the dining table — the one embroidered with silver olive branches that had graced every Easter celebration since her marriage, now pressed into service for Nikos's name day, an occasion that demanded the performance of family unity in light of his outburst at church and Dimitris's brazen conduct. She pressed at imaginary wrinkles, then circled the table, surveying for flaws only visible to a conscience already frayed. Silverware came next, the ritual of polish and buff performed with a carefulness that would have made her ancestors proud, were they not already judging her from their picture frames above the sideboard. The knives gleamed menacingly, and as she arranged them she imagined the sharp tongues of her neighbors, already slicing through the scandal of last Sunday’s incident.
Now, as she fussed over the table, the faces returned: lined, lipsticked, mouths poised between a smile and a sneer. The first of them materialized at the iron gate, her heels echoing in the courtyard. A flash of perfume, then the woman was inside, arms open, mouth pinched. “Maria, so lovely, so very — oh, the table, it is beautiful. You must teach my Antigone to care for linen. She treats fabric like a napkin at a souvlaki stand!”
Maria received the compliment as one receives a counterfeit coin: smile, gratitude, but never quite spending it. Not a minute later, another pair of shoes clicked up the stairwell — a cousin, perhaps, or one of the pious aunts, their distinctions unimportant when the entire block had decided to bear witness.
The crowd assembled with their customary lateness, arriving in waves like a receding tide, each guest insisting they were "on Greek time" as though tardiness were a cultural birthright rather than a personal choice. They entered in pairs or threes, peeling off coats, exchanging whispers, their eyes darting to the table and, with almost the same frequency, to the threshold where Eleni lingered. Maria felt a pulse of heat rise in her cheeks each time their eyes met, then quickly looked down, aligning the forks by their reflection alone.
It was then that the most formidable of the old women arrived, Aunt Fotini, flanked by a granddaughter whose sullen gaze betrayed more curiosity than boredom. “Maria mou, I see you’ve survived the week,” the matron said, patting her hand with a grip that lasted just too long. “It is never easy, is it, to raise children in these modern times.”
“No, no, not easy at all,” Maria said, teeth bared in a performance of maternal fortitude. “But we do our best. Family is everything.”
She could sense the steel beneath the sugar, and she wondered, not for the first time, whether her own mother had ever felt such terror on the eve of a gathering. It was as if she stood at the prow of a leaking ship, arranging deck chairs while the passengers eyed the horizon for disaster.
The room grew dense with bodies and perfume, with the spiced aroma of roasting beef leaking from the kitchen and the sharper tang of anticipation. The men arrived last, as was their custom, their voices carrying from the stairwell — loud, jocular, a parody of command. Nikos entered with a flourish, as though his mere presence would absolve the family of all prior transgressions. He shook hands, slapped backs, accepted the obsequious laughter of his friends, and then settled into his chair at the head of the table, surveying his domain with the satisfaction of a conqueror untroubled by rebellion.
Maria counted the place settings one final time. Sixteen. She smoothed each napkin, then picked it up and folded it again, just to feel the motion in her fingers. She took a breath, surveyed the room. The women clustered in little islands, orbiting the kitchen, trading glances and whispered updates. The men arranged themselves by seniority and mutual distrust, eyes already drifting to the ouzo and the platter of pickled octopus that foreshadowed the meal to come. Children darted between the legs of chairs, snatching olives and fleeing the threatened pinches of elderly relatives.
She caught Eleni’s eye from across the room, and the force of that gaze — soft, unwavering — struck her like a dropped plate. For a moment, the tumult receded; she was alone in the kitchen of her girlhood, kneading dough with Eleni beside her, both of them giggling over some forgotten joke, hands sticky with flour and future. But the memory was a paper boat on a stormy sea, and it disintegrated at the sound of someone clearing their throat.
It was the priest’s wife, a large woman whose lipstick had outlasted the morning liturgy. She approached the table with a look of sober inspection, as if expecting to find evidence of sacrilege in the cutlery. “Maria, you are too good. Too generous. We are not worthy!” she exclaimed, then leaned in and whispered, “But perhaps you might keep the children’s voices down during the prayers tonight, yes? We do not want another… episode.” casting a sidelong glance at Nikos, hinting that his behavior had been particularly childish.
Maria laughed, though the sound felt forced, like air escaping a punctured ball. “Of course, Kyria Eleftheria, of course.”
As the room filled and the chorus of whispers reached its inevitable crescendo, Maria retreated to the kitchen. There, she checked the beef in the oven, basting it with trembling hands. The heat from the open door was a relief — a cleansing fire, a place where no one could see the small beads of sweat at her temple, or the way her hands shook as she ladled out the juices. She let herself pause, just for a moment, and then checked her reflection in the aluminum pot lid. She straightened her hair, dabbed her cheeks with a napkin, and re-entered the fray.
By now, the family was assembled, and the guests had formed a perimeter around the table, their eyes devouring the spectacle of the meal even as they weighed the taste of gossip on their tongues. Maria made her rounds, pouring wine, accepting compliments, flinching only slightly at the more pointed remarks about her daughter’s “spiritedness.” She noticed that each time she placed a dish, a pair of eyes would drift toward Eleni, then back to her, searching for the invisible thread that joined them.
With each circuit of the table, Maria grew bolder, greeting the late arrivals with the smile of a hostess possessed. She straightened napkins even as they were being unfurled, adjusted the salt cellars, ran her finger along the edge of every plate as though searching for a flaw that might, if unchecked, undo them all.
As the last guest arrived — a minor cousin from Kalamaria, freshly shaven and smelling of new cologne — the table was complete. Sixteen souls, all seated, all waiting, the air crackling with expectation.
Maria stood at the foot of the table, hands clasped, breath shallow. She looked once to Nikos, who nodded at her with the solemnity of a man accepting a military commission. Then she glanced at Eleni, whose lips curled in the barest encouragement.
She lifted the carafe of wine and began to pour, her wrist steady now, her smile no longer forced but ferocious in its resolve. The chorus of whispers had faded; in its place, a hush of anticipation, as though the whole neighborhood were leaning in, waiting to see whether the Anagnostous would triumph or collapse under the weight of their own absurdities.
She finished the pour, set the carafe down, and, for the briefest moment, allowed herself to believe that everything might turn out all right.
Nikos had already claimed the head of the table as his ancestral right, his chair elevated by the careful stacking of seat cushions. His eyes, sharp as the knives he wielded, swept the assembly with the authority of a judge presiding over a trial. He saw everything: the way his son’s knee edged closer to the neighbor boy’s; the tremor in Maria’s wrist as she poured the wine; the subtle distance Katerina maintained from her plate, as if the food might rise up and betray her. He saw and remembered, cataloging each infraction for later adjudication.
He carved the butcher’s sausage with a flourish, then distributed the pieces with the solemnity of a priest handing out sacrament. The meat bled onto the platter, a thin pink stain spreading across the porcelain. Nikos caught himself imagining the butcher’s thick hands, the forearms corded with muscle, the way he leaned in close when offering a cut. It was a flash of memory, so brief it might have been a stray thought, but it unsettled him. He drank deeply from his glass and resolved to pay it no mind.
Across from him, Dimitris hovered at the edge of rebellion. His hair had been slicked into submission by his mother, but the rest of him was a live wire — every gesture impatient, every smile edged with private joke. He nudged Stavros under the table, and the two of them exchanged a glance that was, by the standards of this household, a declaration of war.
Katerina, by contrast, occupied her chair as though she had been exiled to it. She held her wine glass delicately, rotating it so that the candlelight refracted through the ruby liquid and danced across her face. She was not here, not really. Instead, she floated somewhere above the conversation, adrift in the memory of the previous week: the café where she had met her professor. It was Despina's perfume, she remembered, that had lingered after she left — bright citrus mingled with salt air, like peeled oranges on a beach towel, so vivid she could almost feel sand between her toes. Now it haunted the air above the beef and potatoes, a ghostly counterpoint to the grease and garlic.
The rejection, if it was a rejection, had left Katerina unmoored. She had spent the days since oscillating between shame and defiant hope, her mind a latticework of imagined dialogues and counterfactuals. If only she had phrased it differently. If only she had waited until the project was done. If only, if only. She resolved to dedicate herself to her project, not out of a desire to win Despina's admiration, but because it felt like a necessary act of self-preservation and healing, if only she survived the horrors of this wretched dinner.
Yet as the meal progressed, Aunt Sophia's "lovely potatoes, Maria" hung in the air for seventeen seconds — Katerina counted — before Uncle Yannis cleared his throat to ask about the weather. Forks clinked against plates. Wine glasses were refilled twice before anyone touched their food. "And how are your studies, Stavros?" Nikos finally asked, leaning forward with narrowed eyes. The boy's neck flushed first, then his cheeks, until even his ears glowed crimson against his dark hair. He opened his mouth, closed it, then reached for his water glass with trembling fingers. Three aunts exchanged glances, eyebrows raised, as the priest's wife pressed her lips into a thin, white line.
Maria watched it all from the far end, orchestrating the courses: she replenished bread, topped up glasses, swept away crumbs before they could accumulate. Her own plate went largely untouched; she survived on adrenaline and the sour bite of retsina. The knowledge of her failure — that she had failed to keep her family’s secrets, failed to stifle the rumors — pressed on her chest with every round of laughter that sounded just a shade too loud.
But it was the children, the youngest cousins, who broke the stalemate. They had been plotting all evening, trading conspiratorial whispers under the table, and at the appointed moment they unleashed their prank: a chorus of animal noises, perfectly timed to coincide with the priest’s wife raising her glass for a toast. The effect was instant — first shock, then laughter, then a frantic attempt to restore order.
Nikos attempted to seize control, rapping his glass with a knife. “In this house,” he intoned, “we honor our guests. We show respect.”
But the spell was broken; the room belonged to chaos now. The aunts tittered, the men argued over the best cut of beef, and the children returned to their games, emboldened. Katerina seized the opportunity to slip away, her chair scraping softly against the tile.