18The day after Yiannis left to join Zervas, everyone in the Triantafyllou household was listless and quiet. Even Afendoula gave little milk that morning and almost none in the afternoon. No enticement by her cousin Sophia to go out and play could distract Zoitsa from lying on the platform with her thumb in her mouth, staring out the window, listening to her music box.
“Don’t regret what has befallen you, think of what hasn’t,” Papa Yiorgos told no one in particular as he sat looking out the same window into the street. It was a maxim he had learned from the old candle lighter, Tatamare. Lately, he had been spending more and more time with the retired shepherd, who now appeared to the priest to have a saintly aura. He had decided Tatamare was a living example of a man who had completely s
