'Lazarus Needs A Wife' by Michelle Christophorou

Lazarus always carries a stick. He takes it with him when he tends his goats, and brings it back through the lemon groves. If you try to take it off him, he’ll fight you. Sometimes it’s a gun, other times a snake, and sometimes he just leans on it.

Lazarus pulls faces at things that aren’t there. Mum says he’s like that because his dad hit him over the head. All the kids in the village make fun of him. I don’t, because he’s my cousin. But I don’t defend him either.

I’m glad my dad never beat us.

They want to find Lazarus a wife. There’ll be a meeting at my uncle’s house, a proxenia.  The girl’s called Eleni. Mum says her family’s so poor they don’t even have a tree to hang themselves from.

Mum sends me to fetch Dad home. So there’ll at least be money left for flour in the morning. When we come back, she’ll nag him with her sing-song voice, and he’ll ignore her, but his eyes will smile.

On the way to the kafeneon, I see them arrive at Lazarus’ house, so I watch beneath the plane tree. The mum is nudging her daughter along by the shoulder. She looks a couple of years older than me. She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.

The next day, as Mum ladles bean soup, Dad says they’ve agreed on the match. In the autumn, when Eleni turns 16. She brings no dowry. Poor girl, Mum says, but they’ll have milk. And meat.

No school on Tuesday because of the Coronation (like that has anything to do with us Cypriots) so I help Mum pick watermelons. I push their still-warmth into my stomach as I carry them to the truck. My cousin Maria tells us the girl’s brothers grabbed Lazarus on his way home yesterday. One took his stick, and the others pinned him down and removed his vraka and underwear: to check all is present and correct. And they think Lazarus is the idiot, says my mum.

I won’t marry until I’m at least 21. But when I do, my wife will be beautiful, like Eleni. And wise, like my mother.