Page 108 of Dagger in the Sea

“What are you thinking?”

I let out a breath. “How I love listening to your stories.”

And I did. That elegant, exotic voice, the way all her features—eyes, mouth, hands would engage in the telling. Was it Adri’s way? Was it a Greek thing? From what I’d experienced so far, they were a dramatic people, very expressive. But it was obvious how connected she felt to the stories. They were important to her.

“I love that you enjoy them,” she said quietly.

I leaned into her. “Tell me another.”

“I’ll tell you my favorite.”

“Shame we don’t have wine.”

“But then how would we ever climb down?” A soft giggle escaped her lips. Those lips. I wanted to drink wine from those lips.

My mouth touched hers. A brief, soft kiss. Salt and sweet air and humid earth.

Her hand wrapped around my arm. “We’ll have a lot of wine this evening, I promise.”

“Good. Now, tell me your favorite story.”

She turned back to the sea again. “My great-great-grandfather, Stefanos, had fallen in love with a girl here in town. She came from a fine family in the silk worm trade. Natalia was her name. She had Venetian blood in her family and was quite wealthy. Stefanos’s family had several small merchant boats, but they weren’t as wealthy or as cosmopolitan. Natalia’s family worked with the Ottomans, so they enjoyed many privileges. Stefanos’s family did not. Furthermore, Stefanos was a bastard son. But none of that stopped him from asking for her hand in marriage.

“Her father refused him, so the two lovers met in secret. The night before he left on his ship she gave him a special gift to use in battle and to remember her by because he might get killed, might never come back.”

“What was the gift?”

“A dagger.”

“A dagger?”

“A two hundred year old family heirloom from Venice. A simple thing, it’s been said. No jewels or fancy sheath, only an engraved silver handle on a sharp blade. Stefanos took it and wore it in his great wide belt along with his pistols and sword.”

“And he took the dagger with him to war?”

“Yes, and the naval battle was a success—out here in the straights between Andros and Tinos. He survived that battle and many more with that dagger. But in the meantime, Natalia had been married off to another man. A much older man who was a very wealthy silk worm farmer and exporter like her father. When Stefanos finally came home, Natalia had just given birth to her second child and was dying. He wasn’t allowed to see her, of course, but he did anyway. The legend goes that he climbed up into her room and she died in his arms.

“They loved each other, and yet they hadn’t been allowed to be together, and now death separated them forever.” She heaved a sigh. “Eventually, after the war, Stefanos went on and married another girl, but Natalia’s family realized the dagger was missing. They accused him of stealing it. He denied it and kept it hidden. It was his precious treasure, his connection to his great love. But they threatened him, his life, his business, his new family.

“The day his wife gave birth to their first child, a son, he came here to this cliff with the dagger. It didn’t belong to anyone but him and Natalia, and he wasn’t going to give it back, wasn’t going to give in. That dagger had symbolized all his hopes and dreams for a future in a free, united Greece with the woman he loved. So he came here to that spot—” she pointed to the edge of the cliff down below. “— and threw that dagger in the sea.”

Her voice caught. Her words, the vivid images she’d painted drifted into the wind, to the wild blue water below us, beyond. I squeezed her hand in mine and she squeezed back.

Adri said, “For me, throwing that dagger in the sea was his declaration of love for her, but also for life itself. He was a realist. He marked an end to that past and also marked a new beginning. When I was little, I always imagined that he must have wanted to keep it, to hang on to that part of himself that was Natalia, even though he would never have her. But he knew he needed to let go of that broken dream, that lost future, and move forward.”

“Jesus said, ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’”

“Yes, you must carry on, and not dwell on that which is no more,” she said. “At funerals, Greeks say to each other‘Zoí se mas’—‘To us, Life’. We’re reminding each other that our grief becomes remembrance as we carry on. Life doesn’t stop for the living, and the dead are beyond us, elsewhere. Stefanos knew that clinging to the past was useless. He was alive, and he had to live that life.

“The dagger had brought him victories but now it also symbolized his greatest tragedy. To return it to her family would have been a form of defeat and would have exposed them both and potentially harmed Natalia’s children. No good would have come of it. Now he had a new wife and his own child he needed to honour. He had a future to build.”

“He let the dagger go on his terms,” I said.

“You understand, don’t you?” Her eyes softened.

“I do.”

“I like to think Stefanos was a terribly soulful romantic, and this was his way of keeping her close. I always imagined him coming out here late at night or at sunrise, and standing just down there at the edge, pleased that his beloved Aegean was preserving their dagger, keeping it safe, right here, by his home. That was comforting, satisfying. That was enough.”

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