The Secret Sister Read Online Free Page B

You took the yellowed Frosso in your fingers, you stood looking at her for a long time, and the whole time Grandma was speaking, you held her paper dead sister in your hands. Why didn’t we think it strange, Amalia? Why didn’t we say: “Why haven’t you told us of your sister all this time? Why now?”
    â€œ
It was so beautiful, Jonathan, the photo!
”
    Did we already know? How many things do children know without knowing? Grandma began talking to us slowly and steadily at first and then without pausing, in a haste that would not let up, in a single breath.
    â€œShe was five years old and I was seven, I held her by the hand, September of ’22, 3 frantic, we were running along the quay at Smyrna, in one minute we had to leave, we had to abandon our identity, in one minute what we were had ceased to exist, tightly, as tightly as possible, I held her by the hand so as not to lose her, my little sister, everything was getting lost then, there was nothing easier than to get lost, I don’t remember anything else, only the cries, the weeping of the women who were losing their children, babies screaming because their mothers had left them to save themselves, dark instincts transform you at such times, I saw a mother tearing her son from her arms and setting him on the ground, so she would be lighter and able to save herself, and another cutting her finger, so as to be the same as her injured child which was screeching as if it were being slaughtered by a thousand swords, and she was howling in the same way as her child, they say that you can’t die another’s death, but I saw mothers dying their children’s deaths, I saw the Turks, the charging horses, the dust, the dogs barking fiercely, a roar, dead bodies strewn about like they were nothing, people running like a river to the sea, we were carried off by the raging torrent of the crowd, from Talas, 4 that’s all I know, one name, Talas, and the caves, the Fairy Caves they called them, pyramids sculpted out of the rocks, near Goreme, that’s where we would play, my sister, who had the voice of an angel, and I, that’s what I remember, butterflies, the sound of an oud, a hill covered in orange trees, and a mother, a father, relatives next to us, cattle, horses, dogs, donkeys, us running to the sea, they pushed us onto a rowboat, they were all lost, my mother, Amalia, I never saw her again, nor anyone else, I remember her voice, when foreign hands grabbed her, ‘my Little Frosso, the apple of my eye, keep an eye out for her,’ and then my eyes grew dark, somebody pushed us onto a rowboat, I shut my eyes, but I was holding onto her tightly, I wasn’t going to let her go, not for anything. They could have given me the sky and the earth below, and I would not have let go. With the ribbon I pulled off my plaits, I tied her hand tightly to mine. My Little Frosso, it’s the two of us now, no more Fairy Caves, no more
hatırı
and
ciǧer
, no more
hediye
, no more
canım
. 5 Gone is your voice that enchanted one and all. Little Frosso has the voice of an angel, she’s a tiny little thing but you can be proud of her, and whoever picked up an oud and touched its chords, you’d start to sing: ‘
What do you care / Where I’m from / Whether from Karadassi / Or from Kordelio
. . . ’ From the rowboat to a ship and from there from port to port until we arrived at a foreign harbor, Piraeus. We didn’t say a word, we kept our mouths obstinately shut, as if someone wanted to force feed us something unbearable, we didn’t make a sound, we just held each other tightly by the hand, I don’t know for how many days . . . and then we ended up there. In this new land. ‘It’ll be like a homeland here,’ they told us. The word ‘like’ made all the difference. But we grew up, we went to school, in New Ionia, 6 in Podarades. We built a small life. A brother of