Twenty-seven years after the end of the first book The House on the Rocks, Anthi arrives in Corfu with the aim of selling the now-abandoned house. Three days filled with meetings and memories culminate in the realization that she has returned to where she belongs.
In this book, the year that takes center stage is 1976, the year she learns a lot through new stories about Giakos, Aunt Helen, her father, Uncle Victor, Loxandra, and meets new faces from the past. But mainly, it is the year she realizes many things about herself.
The second book of the trilogy A STORY ONLY. We do not note all those things our parents tell us, because we believe they will always be there to repeat them if needed, the representatives and chroniclers of the past […].
But what about the rest, those things we do not note in our minds, the keys to the entrances to the past? Those that we rediscover? It is jarring to think that once they were offered to us repeatedly, on silver platters, willingly and without apparent charge, and then they were lost forever.
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Return – On the Verge
From a distance, as I approached in the taxi, I looked at the slope with the olive grove that ended at the house, and it seemed unchanged at all. Upon arrival, the illusion was shattered. The private road hardly stood out from the underbrush and certainly was not passable. I remembered it as a well-maintained cobblestone path, and I had difficulty believing it when the driver told me there was no access to the house and he would drop me off at the public road. He would come back to pick me up in two hours. The gate at the entrance of the building was rusty and ajar. I waited for the taxi to leave before approaching. I stood on the threshold of this bygone life, still believing that it depended on me to move forward or to leave.
The towering olive trees that lived in my memories were proud and well-kept, their gray trunks, twisted and perforated, stretched upward forming dense silver canopies. The constant micro-movement created sparks of light and a muffled rustling. At this time of year, the soil beneath them would be bare and trampled, ready to receive the ripe fruit from above. Occasionally, tufts of bright green shoots would appear in the gaps.
But now, the familiar had been battered by neglect. I saw crippled trees, randomly mutilated by nature and weather, with broken limbs, some hanging dry, others tangled around my feet – I gathered small bundles for kindling, nothing went to waste. Now, no soil was visible. The green shoots struggled to rise among generations of dried ones. The oaks, tangled with brambles, and the wild boars formed thorny walls. Here and there, mastic trees, myrtles, and spartas, all unnaturally tall, vainly seeking the sun, with stripped trunks and minimal vegetation at the top. The cobblestone path, in the darkness of the shadow, was covered by the moss (that's what we called the moss) and the dry olive leaves, hiding the harmony of the composition of the cobblestone. The silver canopy was hidden behind a dense curtain of dried branches
