They both muttered something about being sorry and went on their way. Kyría Koralis knew that by giving few details, few questions could be asked.
‘They can assume what they like,’ she said firmly. ‘I refuse to talk about politics with anyone. Whether Angelos’ father was in the government army or the communist army – what has it got to do with them?’
‘Oh, Yiayiá, I do hope I haven’t brought shame on you,’ said Themis tearfully. ‘I would never have wanted to do that.’
‘You haven’t, my dear. It’s only Thanasis we have to worry about now.’
When they returned to the apartment it was silent except for the ticking of a clock. Thanasis usually left his stick by the front door but it was not there. Nevertheless, Kyría Koralis crept towards his bedroom and listened at the door. She wanted to double-check that he was not still inside sleeping.
‘We’re alone,’ she confirmed, looking round as Angelos began to babble. It would be impossible to suppress the new sounds he was exploring each day.
‘But you mustn’t worry, Themis,’ she continued. ‘Your brother will get used to the new domestic situation!’
Themis took a deep breath.
‘Yiayiá, there is something I need to tell you,’ she said, with trepidation.
‘What is it, agápi mou?’
Kyría Koralis had gone very pale.
‘It’s nothing bad, Yiayiá,’ Themis said quickly. ‘But I think I have to go away again for a while.’
‘But you’ve only just come back! Paidí mou, you can’t leave again!’
‘Yiayiá, I have to,’ she said.
The old lady sank into her armchair. Kyría Koralis, who had experienced such moments of happiness in the past day, did not hold back her tears.
‘Why?’ she asked quietly. ‘Tell me why . . .’
Themis told her about Aliki, about the bond of friendship they had formed on Trikeri and how she had saved Angelos.
‘Angelos wouldn’t have survived without Aliki’s help,’ said Themis.
‘But what does this have to do with you leaving again?’
Themis then explained about Aliki’s son and her execution.
‘Theé mou . . .’ breathed Kyría Koralis. ‘Why did they do that?’
‘Because she drew portraits of us. And they showed the truth. They punished her for it.’
‘So . . .’
‘And I promised to find her son and to bring him up . . .’
Themis did not breathe a word about the man who had fathered both their children. Kyría Koralis would probably assume that Aliki’s child was fatherless, just like hers.
Kyría Koralis had looked pale before. Now she was ashen-faced.
‘But . . .’
‘He’ll be a brother to Angelos,’ Themis said firmly.
She knew that it was a daunting task and had asked herself a hundred questions. Where would she find him? Where would she begin to look? All she had was the name of the woman to whom Aliki had given her child: Anna Kouzelis. There might be a hundred women with such a name in Athens alone.
‘If I can find her, then . . .’
Ever pragmatic, Kyría Koralis cited all the obstacles at once.
‘Agápi mou, are you sure it’s a good idea? She might have got married or gone to live in another country. And the child might not even be with her.’
‘I made a promise, Yiayiá. And I must do my best.’
Kyría Koralis got up to make some coffee. She was thoughtful as she stirred the bríki and Themis could see that her grandmother’s hands were shaking.
‘Let me help you, Yiayiá,’ she said.
Themis poured the boiling liquid into two small cups and carried them to the table.
Her grandmother now sat deep in thought. The sight of Thanasis’ jacket on the back of the door reminded her that one of the epaulettes needed to be stitched but also gave her an idea.
‘You know who might be able to help?’ she said.
‘Who?’ said Themis eagerly.
‘Your brother.’
Themis looked puzzled.
‘But why would he help me?’
‘Because you’re his sister,’ Kyría Koralis replied.
It was well known that the authorities had files with the names and activities of all known or even suspected subversives. Themis knew that hers would be held somewhere with notes on her ‘crimes’. It was unlikely that Anna Kouzelis’ was not there too since the signing of a dílosi did not mean that a name was removed. Imprisonment and exile would never be erased from your personal records.
Themis took Angelos to sleep and lay down next to him on the bed. They were both still exhausted after the gruelling journey they had taken from Trikeri and neither of them woke until the early hours of the following day.
In the evening, Kyría Koralis broached the subject of police files with Thanasis. She was the only person who could have a calm conversation with him on any subject, specially one as sensitive as this.
‘Themis wants to find one of her friends,’ she said simply. ‘One of the women she met while she was on Trike—’
‘Don’t say that word!’ he interrupted her. ‘Please never mention that place again. Not when I am here.’
‘Sorry, agápi mou,’ Kyría Koralis muttered.
‘And not in front of anyone else, for that matter! I can do without the stigma of this . . . this . . . this red sister.’
‘Shh,’ coaxed Kyría Koralis. ‘They’re sleeping next door.’
Thanasis continued, undeterred, ‘It will stick to us! Stigma always sticks! Like shit on a shoe!’
‘Don’t worry, Thanasis. Stay calm, my dear. I promise I won’t say anything. Not to anyone.’
She could see Thanasis shaking and poured a little tsípouro into a glass to calm him down. He knocked it back in one gulp and banged his glass down on the table, empty. It was his way of asking for more.
Kyría Koralis obliged.
‘So she wants to find out what happened to her friend?’
He sat for a moment, sipping the second measure.
‘And suppose she meets up with this friend again? Wouldn’t it be better if those women were kept separate?’
‘I think she just wants to know where she ended up . . . She is curious, that’s all.’
‘I suppose it’s harmless enough,’ said Thanasis, grumpily.
In his mind there was something else too. Perhaps he could also find Themis’ records. If there was any chance of modifying them to minimise the chance of anyone connecting him with a communist then he would do so.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said, finally. ‘But I’m not promising anything.’
Kyría Koralis smiled. It was so rare for Thanasis to be obliging, even in a small way.
The next day, Themis wrote the woman’s name on a piece of paper and gave it to her grandmother, who found the right moment to pass it to Thanasis.
Themis noticed him slip it into his top pocket before leaving for work. If she had believed that prayer would work then she would have gone to church, but instead she lit a small candle and put it on the window ledge.
Chapter Nineteen
FOR SEVERAL WEEKS, the subject of Anna Kouzelis was not mentioned by Thanasis, although Themis asked her grandmother almost every day: ‘Any news?’
Kyría Koralis knew she would get an angry reaction if she raised it with her grandson.
‘We have to wait until he has some information,’ she told Themis. ‘We mustn’t irritate him.’
Themis could scarcely contain her impatience. With each day she pictured the unknown child growing up, moving further away and becoming harder to find.
All the possibilities circled in her mind.
Aliki had wanted her child brought up as a communist so Anna might have made sure that he had been taken to one of the communist children’s camps beyond Greece. She knew that many had gone not just to Albania, but also to Yugoslavia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria.
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‘He might even have ended up in Tashkent,’ she said to her grandmother.
‘Agápi mou, until Thanasis has some news for us, you must try not to fret. And if he is there then you must accept it. Do you even know where such places are? How far away Tash . . . or whatever it’s called, is?’
‘No. I couldn’t even put a finger on the map. But they say that some of the children live in terrible conditions there in abandoned hotels or like gypsies on the street . . .’
‘That’s certainly what your brother would say,’ said her grandmother. ‘But you mustn’t believe everything. You know, they even had a day of national mourning for the children when you were . . . away.’
Kyría Koralis never referred directly to Themis’ period of imprisonment.
‘What do you mean? Mourning?’
‘Queen Frederika made a speech about how we should rescue the twenty-eight thousand children—’
The mention of the Queen’s name as usual provoked a reaction in Themis. The woman’s face still regularly smiled out from the front page of the newspaper that Thanasis would leave on the kitchen table, a broadsheet that happily displayed its triumphalist right-wing politics.
‘But they’re not dead!’ exclaimed Themis. ‘And I am sure some of them are being well looked after.’
‘I’m sure they are, agápi mou. It’s so hard to know who to believe, isn’t it? But look at this. It’s in the newspaper today.’
She passed it across to Themis. It was a letter supposedly written by a child in an Albanian children’s institution.
‘Read it, agápi mou.’
‘Dear Aunt, Months go by and life gets better every day. It’s paradise here.’
She looked down at Angelos, who was sitting playing on the floor.
‘It doesn’t ring true, does it?’ she said, concurring with her grandmother. ‘I’m so lucky to have my child here with me, Yiayiá,’ she said. ‘Whatever his future, at least we are together.’
For almost every report on the communist children’s camps stating that the children there were underfed and uneducated, there was one on the paidopóleis, the Queen’s homes. In Thanasis’ newspaper, these stories were always illustrated with photographs of smiling children, boys with uniformly trimmed hair and girls with neat plaits happily congregated outside white concrete buildings. Themis always scrutinised the faces of the boys doing keep fit, tilling a field or even being instructed in basket weaving. Might one of them be Nikos? One day there was a photo of a small boy on a swing, and she convinced herself that he was Aliki’s son.
Every lunchtime, when she heard a key in the door, Themis hoped that this would be the day that news came. Six months passed and her disappointment grew.
The only positive development was that Thanasis had begun to talk with more warmth to his nephew.
‘Yia sou, Ángelé mou,’ he would say almost cheerily when he came in from work. ‘Hello, Angelos. How’s the little man today?’
Sometimes he would even play a game of peek-a-boo with him, picking up one of the embroidered cloths that lay on the table and hiding his face.
Angelos chuckled with laughter, almost making Thanasis’ lopsided face break into a smile. The child was no longer afraid of his uncle and, in a way that was mysterious to both mother and great-grandmother, the pair formed a bond.
Thanasis and Themis barely spoke to each other. Thanasis harboured a great anger against his sister, even more so since he had been obliged to pay the local priest a hefty bribe not to read Themis’ dílosi. That autumn the trial of Nikos Belogiannis was exciting international protest. For Thanasis, the communist leader was a traitor, accused of sending information to Moscow. For Themis, he was a true patriot who had exposed that many Nazi collaborators had been rewarded, rather than punished. It was an explosive subject and they had to avoid discussing it.
Almost at the end of the year, when the trees in the square were bare and the days were short, they were eating lunch. It was a Tuesday. Themis would always remember that her grandmother had made spinach rice that day and Thanasis was bent over his plate as usual, shovelling food hungrily into his mouth. His plate was almost empty and suddenly he looked up.
‘By the way,’ he said, his mouth still full, ‘that friend of yours was rearrested and sent to jail.’
Themis dropped her fork.
‘So you found her! Where is she?’
She managed to stop herself asking about the boy, but before she could get in another word, Thanasis answered.
‘Anna Kouzelis is dead,’ he said bluntly. ‘And so is her child.’
Kyría Koralis saw her granddaughter’s crestfallen face and immediately reached out a hand to comfort her.
Thanasis continued, ‘But her papers say that there was another child.’
‘Oh!’ said Themis, eagerly leaning forward. ‘What else did they say? Was there anything else? Tell me, Thanasis. Did they say anything about him?’
Themis had risen from her seat, unable to hide her agitation.
‘Please tell me, Thanasis! Please!’
‘Why is it so important to you?’ he asked, very deliberately tantalising her.
‘Just because . . . it is,’ she cried out in frustration.
‘Please, Thanasis. Please don’t tease your sister!’ interceded their grandmother.
‘It didn’t say anything specific. All I can tell you is that the children of these prisoners usually get taken away and looked after in a paidópoli. Queen Frederika—’
‘Yes, Thanasis, I know about her children’s homes,’ snapped Themis with impatience.
‘And in this case, it’s almost certainly what happened,’ continued Thanasis, ignoring his sister’s interruption. ‘The prisoner died. So what else would they have done?’
With a twinge of guilt, Themis felt a sense of relief. The continuing rumours about what happened to the children taken out of Greece had filled her with trepidation and, deep down, she had known that to go on a search outside her own country would have presented insurmountable challenges.
‘At least if your friend’s brat is in a Queen’s home, he won’t have trouble remembering he’s Greek.’
Themis told herself to remain calm.
‘And he’ll know the real heroes of his country. He won’t be brainwashed!’
A recent newspaper article had reported that Greek children growing up in the communist bloc were being taught a new version of history: that the true hero of Greece was not Kapodistrias, the leader of the revolution against the Turks, but Zachariadis, the infamous leader of the communist army.
Thanasis had not quite reached the end of his tirade.
‘Because we won’t do that to our little man, will we?’ he said, plucking Angelos’ cheek. ‘We’ll know our history, won’t we, moró mou?’
He turned his attention fully to Angelos now. He was not going to tell his sister that the reason it had taken so long to bring news of Anna Kouzelis was that he had been looking for her records too. In this pursuit he had been unsuccessful. He continued to play with his nephew.
Themis did not rise to her brother’s provocation.
Once Angelos was old enough to understand everything that was said, Themis would have to protect him from Thanasis’ views, but for now the child gurgled and smiled, oblivious to the meaning of his uncle’s words.
Themis was in turmoil. It was a relief to have information that might lead her to Nikos, but she did not know its implications. To occupy herself, she got up to wash the dishes. At least with her back turned to Thanasis, she could think.
Aliki was dead. Anna was dead. These women had wanted the best for their country but their lives had been cut short. Themis was almost overwhelmed by a sense of her own good fortune. She was alive and healthy with her beloved son close by.
As she carefully set the dishes to drain, she ruminated on what Thanasis had said. It was more than likely that Aliki’s son was in one of the homes set up by the Queen. For the first time, she felt grateful for th
eir existence. At least there was a possibility of finding him. At one time there had been eighteen thousand children accommodated in fifty or more paidopóleis scattered throughout Greece, from Kavala to Crete. In the past few years, only a few thousand children remained in a dozen or so homes, the majority having been returned to their families. It was a very different situation for the children who had left Greece. Tens of thousands were unaccounted for and almost impossible to trace.
Thanasis went for his afternoon sleep. Themis and her grandmother talked of what must be done. Even now, they could not tell her brother of the plan.
‘It’s always the same with Thanasis,’ Kyría Koralis said. ‘I don’t give him something to worry about before it happens.’
‘You talk about him as though he is a child,’ protested Themis. ‘Why do you protect him all the time?’
‘You know why, agápi mou. I know he seems so tough. But underneath . . .’
Even Themis knew now that there was a gentler side to her brother, one that her son seemed to have drawn out.
Themis spent the night tossing and turning in bed and the following day, as soon as Thanasis went out for his shift, she began to compose the letter that she would send to each and every paidópoli.
It was a long time since she had held a pen in her hand and she needed to practise her handwriting before beginning the painstaking process of copying the letter a dozen times. She enjoyed the sensation of watching the pen move across the page and tried to overcome her tendency to scrawl. Even now she recalled the enviable neatness of Fotini’s writing.
Once she was happy with the draft she began. The letters were written to the principal of each home, enquiring whether they had any children with the surname Kouzelis.
In these letters, Themis adopted the same name. She believed it was the only way to get her request taken seriously and would have a story ready if this was challenged.
I understand that a member of my family, Anna Kouzelis, has died and that her son has been placed in your care. I wish for him to be reunited with his grandmother and other close members of family including myself, his aunt, etc., etc.
Yours faithfully . . .
It was a shameless lie but she would do anything to be allowed to take Nikos into their family. At the end of the second day she meticulously addressed each envelope, went to the post office and posted them all off.
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