“Doing things that are to his advantage”

“Doing things that are to his advantage” is the principle Sofia Papastergiadis assigns to her father, Christos Papastergiadis, and a question about that principle follows her from a family conversation in Athens to a later exchange with Rose Papastergiadis. Its significance lies in this change of direction: first it makes self-interest seem like the rule governing her family; eventually Sofia turns the same language toward her mother’s independence, and toward her own.

The phrase as a family rule

In Athens, Alexandra asks Sofia whether her mother still loves her father. Sofia answers that her father only acts in ways that benefit him. Alexandra stares at her as if the answer is absurd, then laughs and asks why he would do anything else. Her response does not refute Sofia’s assessment. Instead, it treats the assumption beneath it as obvious: people act for their own advantage. The exchange leaves Sofia with a question that is less an argument than an unsettling echo.

The question returns in Sofia’s thoughts while she sits with Alexandra on a soft blue sofa. A squirrel peers through the locked window, briefly making the family gathering seem like a scene viewed from outside. Sofia stretches out in the Yellow silk top with misread embroidery that Ingrid Bauer gave her; Alexandra tries to read the word Beloved stitched above Sofia’s breast, silently spelling it and frowning without asking what it means. The garment’s declaration of love sits beside the conversation’s colder account of self-interest, while Alexandra’s uncertainty over the word makes intimacy present but not fully spoken.

Sofia measures her life against Alexandra’s. Alexandra has a career, a devoted husband, a child, financial security, and religious faith; Sofia sees herself living a temporary, vague existence on the village’s edge and wonders what has kept her from building a more settled life. The comparison gives Alexandra’s question a personal force. It is no longer only about Christos: it presses Sofia to ask whether she, too, acts in her own interest, and what such a question means when she feels she has not built a life of her own.

Advantage, care, and belief

The family scene complicates any simple opposition between selfishness and care. Alexandra is nursing Evangeline, whose feeding has left her nipple split. When the baby cries after being separated from the breast, Alexandra lets her cry while making herself more comfortable. Sofia recognizes this small act of self-preservation as evidence that her sister does not always put another person first. She concludes that Alexandra, like Christos, can act to her own disadvantage’s opposite—to protect her own needs—and sees the two as a good match. Their shared faith, in Sofia’s account, helps make their world feel more certain than hers.

Sofia recalls the medieval Christian mystic Julian of Norwich, who believed God to be both mother and father. The idea interests her, but she adds that she can barely manage her own parents. This reflection places the question of advantage within a larger uncertainty about belief and kinship: Alexandra’s household appears coherent to Sofia, while her own relationship to both parents remains difficult to understand. She repeats Alexandra’s question aloud and cannot settle into either agreement or refusal, nodding and shaking her head in succession. The phrase has become a genuine grey area, not a maxim she can comfortably accept or dismiss.

Alexandra then lowers her voice and moves closer on the sofa, explaining that being with an older man is not easy and that there is a forty-year age gap between them. The disclosure gives the earlier talk about advantage a context of unequal partnership, without resolving it into a judgment about Alexandra’s marriage. Sofia’s thought that Alexandra and Christos are a perfect match sits beside her sister’s admission of difficulty. The phrase exposes how little a general rule can explain about the specific costs people accept in family life.

From accusation to release

In Athens, Sofia encounters the rule again through a concrete exchange with Christos. The night before she is due to leave, he offers her spending money, something he has not done since she was fourteen. He searches his worn wallet, remembers that he has not been to the bank, and eventually finds a single ten-euro note. He smooths it on the table and hands it to her with a flourish. The smallness of the sum and the care with which he presents it leave Sofia touched, even though the gesture is belated and oddly childish to her.

When a woman begging comes to Sofia’s table, Sofia puts the ten-euro note into her plastic cup. The woman speaks Greek, limps nearer, and kisses Sofia’s hand. Sofia recognizes this as the first affection anyone has shown her in Athens. Against that unexpected tenderness, she confronts the painful possibility that the first man in her life would disadvantage her whenever doing so served his own advantage. Yet this recognition does not leave her only with grievance: Sofia describes it as a revelation that somehow sets her free. The encounter makes the expression more than a diagnosis of Christos. It marks a moment when seeing the pattern clearly loosens its hold on her.

Turning the language toward agency

Later, Sofia repeats the logic of advantage to Rose, but now uses it as encouragement rather than accusation. Rose warns her against driving without a licence at night, with her lights off, and says she cannot imagine Sofia as a driver. Sofia replies that Rose is a driver and the head of her household, and urges her to start doing things to her own advantage. Rose agrees to try. She then says that, in the meantime, she can imagine Sofia finishing her doctorate in America.

The exchange reverses the phrase’s earlier direction. Sofia had used self-interest to explain her father’s conduct; now she treats a mother’s interests and capacities as worth asserting. Rose’s promise is tentative, not a report that her circumstances have already changed, while her vision of Sofia’s doctorate offers a reciprocal expression of confidence. Across these scenes, the repeated question about why anyone would act against their own advantage shifts from an apparently settled family rule into an opening for reconsidering who is allowed to benefit from their choices.