“You should think about it,” Mamá said.
“I already have,” Thalia said hesitantly. Then, even more hesitant, as she raised her eyes to meet Mamá’s, “But I don’t want to assume.”
Mamá put down the knife. I heard a faint expulsion of breath. Had she been holding it? If so, her stoic face betrayed no sign of relief. “The answer is yes. Of course it’s yes.”
Thalia reached across the table and touched Mamá’s wrist. “Thank you, Aunt Odie.”
“I’ll only say this once,” I said. “I think this is a mistake. You’re both making a mistake.”
They turned to look at me.
“Do you want me to go, Markos?” Thalia said.
“Yes,” I said. “I’d miss you, a lot, and you know that. But you can’t pass up a private school education. You’d go to university afterward. You could become a researcher, a scientist, a professor, an inventor. Isn’t that what you want? You’re the smartest person I know. You could be anything you want.”
I broke off.
“No, Markos,” Thalia said heavily. “No I couldn’t.”
She said this with a thudding finality that sealed off all channels of rebuttal.
Many years later, when I began training as a plastic surgeon, I understood something that I had not that day in the kitchen arguing for Thalia to leave Tinos for the boarding school. I learned that the world didn’t see the inside of you, that it didn’t care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that. My patients knew this. They saw that much of what they were, would be, or could be hinged on the symmetry of their bone structure, the space between their eyes, their chin length, the tip projection of their nose, whether they had an ideal nasofrontal angle or not.
Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.
And so I chose my specialty to even out the odds for people like Thalia, to rectify, with each slice of my scalpel, an arbitrary injustice, to make a small stand against a world order I found disgraceful, one in which a dog bite could rob a little girl of her future, make her an outcast, an object of scorn.
At least this is what I tell myself. I suppose there were other reasons I chose plastic surgery. Money, for instance, prestige, social standing. To say I chose it solely because of Thalia is too simple—lovely as the idea may be—a bit too orderly and balanced. If I’ve learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries. But I find comfort in it, in the idea of a pattern, of a narrative of my life taking shape, like a photograph in a darkroom, a story that slowly emerges and affirms the good I have always wanted to see in myself. It sustains me, this story.
I spent half of my practice in Athens, erasing wrinkles, lifting eyebrows, stretching jowls, reshaping misbegotten noses. I spent the other half doing what I really wanted to, which was to fly around the world—to Central America, to sub-Saharan Africa, to South Asia, and to the Far East—and work on children, repairing cleft lips and palates, removing facial tumors, repairing injuries to their faces. The work in Athens was not nearly as gratifying, but the pay was good, and it afforded me the luxury of taking weeks and months off at a time for my volunteer work.
Then, early in 2002, I took a phone call in my office from a woman I knew. Her name was Amra Ademovic. She was a nurse from Bosnia. She and I had met at a conference in London a few years back and had had a pleasant, weekend-long thing that we’d mutually kept inconsequential, though we had remained in touch and seen each other socially on occasion. She said she was working for a nonprofit in Kabul now and that they were searching for a plastic surgeon to work on children—cleft lips, facial injuries inflicted by shrapnel and bullets, that sort of thing. I agreed on the spot. I intended to stay for three months. I went late in the spring of 2002. I never came back.
Thalia picks me up from the ferry port. She has on a green wool scarf and a thick dull-rose-colored coat over a cardigan sweater and jeans. She wears her hair long these days, loose over the shoulders and parted in the center. Her hair is white, and it is this feature—not the mutilated lower face—that jars me and takes me aback when I see her. Not that it surprises me; Thalia started going gray in her mid-thirties and had cotton-white hair by the end of the following decade. I know I have changed too, the stubbornly growing paunch, the just-as-determined retreat of the hairline, but the decline of one’s own body is incremental, as nearly imperceptible as it is insidious. Seeing Thalia white-haired presents jolting evidence of her steady, inevitable march toward old age—and, by association, my own.
“You’re going to be cold,” she says, tightening the scarf around her neck. It’s January, late morning, the sky overcast and gray. A cool breeze makes the shriveled-up leaves clatter in the trees.
“You want cold, come to Kabul,” I say. I pick up my suitcase.
“Suit yourself, Doctor. Bus or walk? Your choice.”
“Let’s walk,” I say.
We head north. We pass through Tinos town. The sailboats and yachts moored in the inner harbor. The kiosks selling postcards and T-shirts. People sipping coffee at little round tables outside cafés, reading newspapers, playing chess. Waiters setting out silverware for lunch. Another hour or two and the smell of cooking fish will waft from kitchens.
Thalia launches energetically into a story about a new set of whitewashed bungalows that developers are building south of Tinos town, with views of Mykonos and the Aegean. Primarily, they will be filled by either tourists or the wealthy summer residents who have been coming to Tinos since the 1990s. She says the bungalows will have an outdoor pool and a fitness center.
She has been e-mailing me for years, chronicling for me these changes that are reshaping Tinos. The beachside hotels with the satellite dishes and dial-up access, the nightclubs and bars and taverns, the restaurants and shops that cater to tourists, the cabs, the buses, the crowds, the foreign women who lie topless at the beaches. The farmers ride pickup trucks now instead of donkeys—at least the farmers who stayed. Most of them left long ago, though some are coming back now to live out their retirement on the island.
“Odie is none too pleased,” Thalia says, meaning with the transformation. She has written me about this too—the older islanders’ suspicion of the newcomers and the changes they are importing.