Date Published: 5/29/21
Publisher: Blue Fortune Enterprises, LLC
Three friends, one life-changing summer.
Vana, the math prodigy with a voice that is 85% Sarah Vaughan, 10% Billie Holiday, and 5% Aretha Franklin and an attitude to match. Desperate to leave her chaotic family and become the independent woman of her imagination, she lands a summer job on an aging Greek cruise ship as a member of the house band.
Marko, who failed his university entrance exams, is on the trail of bouzouki god Markos Vamvakaris, in hopes of claiming his own artistic identity.
Stepan, agronomist, accordionist, occasional mystic, has spent the last ten years hopelessly, secretly in love with his only friend.
Stranded in the surreal microcosm of a cruise ship, the three friends stumble across a series of dark and dissolving frontiers: between love and friendship, memory and forgetfulness, sacrifice and redemption. On this voyage to the heart of an ancient world, can the bonds of a friendship forged in childhood survive the tests of tragedy and self-discovery?
Excerpt
“What if we don’t go?” Vana tugged at the life preserver belt in exasperation, trying in vain to tighten it around her waist.
“First of all, you must go because it is a law of the sea; they must have a drill for every person within twenty-four hours of sailing, and they will not see you because you are supposed to be my partner, and I will tell them you are sitting in here, and they will dock your pay.” Cristina surveyed her critically. “Second of all, it would be easier if you put it on correctly. Come here. Pay attention to what I am doing because you will have to do the same for passengers in a minute.” She spun Vana around and began trussing her up with a speedy efficiency. “Yes. That is correct. Now, let’s go.”
Vana’s mood had not improved. She had tried unsuccessfully to assert herself in the cabin’s décor, with a small stack of band photos she had cut out of magazines; asking to borrow some tape, she had been told that the wall space was taken, and that any pictures Vana had could be taped above her bunk, “so I don’t have to look at them. Here you have trees and nature—much healthier than a bunch of men in funny-looking clothes staring at you.”
Bo had asked Cristina to kit her out in an Oceanis staff uniform.
“He said medium? Not with those breasts. Large for you, or maybe extra,” she said primly, snatching the blouse from Vana’s hand and replacing it with another. Vana found the uniform both bland and unflattering, something that was designed for men or slender women with no curves to speak of: no darts, no bias-cut, no shape at all. The stiff blouse was tucked into a tube-like skirt that forced her to walk in tiny, insecure steps. It stung that Cristina wore a gauzy gold charmeuse jumpsuit, nipped at the waist and billowing everywhere else; when Vana challenged her, she replied shortly, “I am about to lead the children’s sing-along hour after this. Therefore, I am working; therefore no uniform.” Trudging along down the corridor behind her, staring daggers into this person with her petite but saucy hips, her cascading curls, oiled and fragrant, Vana had a rare attack of insecurity. She thinks I’m fat and ugly, she thought. I work for an hour every morning to make myself look presentable, and she just gets out of bed like that. She reflected ruefully on the lovely, lacey, and very expensive underthings that spilled out from Cristina’s side of the armoire, that she would rummage through every morning before shutting herself in the microscopic lavatory to dress. I probably couldn’t even fit one leg in some of those panties. She winced at the thought of her own ironclad, prosaic bras—her mother’s hand-me-downs—full of points and bones and sturdy, inhospitable clasps, gone gray from over washing.
My mother made me an orange dress her favorite color and Sofya is walking toward me smiling with two hands full of leaves and bits of dirty grass and twigs and calls out Look what we’ve got here, it’s a great big pumpkin and she releases the leaves and twigs above my head and they cascade down, some of them get caught in my hair and then the other girls are there picking the rest off the ground and stuffing them in my ears, laughing, Look, this pumpkin’s got vines growing out of its ears and I couldn’t do anything but feel the tears on my face taste the snot on my lips, I couldn’t move couldn’t run and with these things you never remember the end because there isn’t one.
Marko and Stepan were already on deck when the rehearsal drill began with a five-bell warning. Neither had ever worn white trousers before; both were acutely aware of how distinctly un-nautical they looked doing so. They were discussing the relative degradation of their costumes versus that of the uniforms.
“The uniforms are worse, without a doubt,” Stepan said definitively. “If ever there was a need to make you feel completely unmanned, this is the answer. You can’t hide anything—not even your underwear.”
Bo brushed past. “Hey guys, go down to your assigned floor and start knocking on doors. Make sure that everyone is out and help them with their lifejackets.”
This took some time. Marko and Stepan suspected that many people hid in their rooms until the drill was over. Others flapped about hopelessly in the lifejackets, fussing over one another; a group of older men, perhaps reliving some military aspect of their youth, practically stood at attention, ready to remand the women and children into the lifeboats. A blowsy Englishwoman in her late sixties held a Bloody Mary in one hand and tried to guide Stepan’s hand to her lifejacket tapes with the other. “I jus’ need a little help, sweetie, that’s all!”
One of the military men hustled her away. “Shut up, Marsha, for God’s sake. You’re making a fool of yourself again in front of these foreigners.”
Once back on deck with their herd of passengers, Marko and Stepan had to line them up in front of the appropriate lifeboat and try in vain to hold their attention throughout the endless, multi-lingual PA announcement that described in minute and mild-mannered detail everything that would happen in the event of a catastrophe.
About three-quarters of the way through the announcement, the captain appeared. He was a smallish man and surrounded by a flock of officers; to Marko and Stepan, only the peak of his cap and the flash of a waving hand was visible. He sped by and to the passengers, he called as if by way of apology, “Hello, the less you see of me this cruise, the better! Then you know all is well!”
Two things happened. The captain and his entourage swiftly rounded the prow and disappeared, the announcement droning on although the passengers had all stopped listening (“Why, I didn’t even see what he looked like!” “Where are you from, honey?”), and there was a small thud from the lifeboat group to their left, followed by a commotion.
“Somebody’s collapsed!”
A Filipina lay on the deck, unconscious. “That’s one of the ‘toast girls,’” a grandmotherly American observed to Marko. “They bring breakfast to your cabin and toast and tea when you’re too sick to leave.” She clicked her tongue sympathetically. “The way they run those girls off their feet, I’m not surprised to see them collapsing.”
Marko turned to say something but Stepan was gone.
“Sorry, out of the way please.” Stepan kneeled beside the woman, taking her pulse, brushing back her hair with his palm. “Move back; she needs air.” Her eyes opened slowly, but her soft-featured face was drained of color; her fellow group leader, another “toast girl,” stood with her hand over her mouth, staring at her prostrate friend. “Go get Mr. Taranto, now,” he told her, and she fled inside the ship.
By the time Bo had been found, she was sitting up against the lifeboat hoist, trembling. Stepan, on one knee beside her, rubbed her hands with his and spoke to her gently; one passenger dabbed her face with a wet handkerchief, another offered her broken bits of biscuit.
“What’s going on?”
“I think she’ll be all right. She said she didn’t eat breakfast this morning.”
“Take her to the doctor just to be sure. Not that it’s something catching. I’ll radio her that you’re coming.” He bent down to grab her hand. “Can you walk?”
She looked at him dazedly. “I think so…”
“Good. Stepan here will go with you. Quick thinking, by the way! Where’d you learn all that stuff? Red Cross training?”
Stepan shrugged. “I did my military service with a medical unit. You pick up things.”
The drill had by this time ended, and Vana, eager to leave her partner, came in search of the other two. “What was all that?” she asked Marko as Stepan led the toast girl away, her arm draped around his shoulder.
“Just Stepan playing ‘Young Pioneers First Aid Badge.’”
“Really? That’s odd. I wonder if he would do that for me?”
“Maybe you should faint and find out.”
About the Author
Lori Frey Ranner is a New Orleans native and Oxford-trained Byzantinist. For the past twenty years she has taught history, theology, and Classics in various New Orleans institutions. Married and mother to three children, Sailing to Byzantium is her first novel.
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