The Goodtime Girl

by Tess Fragoulis

  “Get in before someone sees me,” he whispered urgently. “Where is everyone?” Kivelli asked, looking around for Rovertakis, who was nowhere in sight. He made the best coffee in the square, and she suddenly craved a cup as if she’d never have one again.

  “There’s been a crackdown,” Sakis replied, flicking his worry beads at a pace that set her nerves on edge and didn’t seem to soothe his.

  Kivelli looked out at the barren square again. A scrawny dog was peeing up against the tree Barba Yannis claimed had been planted on the day he was born. He had a fit whenever a dog sniffed around it, and anything more incited him to violence. Most of the neighbourhood mongrels had learned to stay away, but now a pack of dogs was circling the tree, each leaving its mark. “Is Barba Yannis still in jail?” she asked. Sakis nodded gravely.

  “Barba Yannis, Sklavis, Marinos the Moustache, Crazy Manos — whoever they managed to round up at the raid last night at Barba Yannis’s and down by the docks after. The bastards even climbed up to the caves in Keratsini — broke everything and threw it into the sea.” He kicked a chair, which fell over, dead. “So the Cucumber said we should clear out for a little while, until things settle down.” He looked like he was about to cry, but not over Kivelli. Their arrangement had always been casual, without plans or promises. Someone would have eventually told her that he’d taken off, and by the time he came back it probably wouldn’t matter anymore.

  “Where to?” she asked, more out of politeness than concern.

  “Thessaloniki,” he replied. “The Cucumber says the cops are friendly there and hashish grows on trees.” Kivelli had sung that song many times and wondered if Sakis was that naive. The Cucumber had smarter men he could count on for complicated problems, but Sakis was the most loyal by far. He jumped and danced when he was told to, and would cut his own throat if it were required. That morning he had been ordered to wait in the kafenion, and he’d stay there until the Cucumber came or sent other instructions. The whole time he spoke, Sakis clutched the handle of a small, black leather suitcase, as finely buffed as his shoe tips, ready to run.

  Kivelli did not ask when and if he would return, and he did not offer up any assurances. It was as if everything between them had suddenly evaporated, and the only thing left was a vague and distant affection. So she wished him safe travels and kissed him goodbye. Her bigger concern at that moment was that she was indeed out of a job. With the scarcity of manghes, it probably wouldn’t be easy to find another one.

  After she’d crossed the square, she looked back towards Rovertakis’s and saw Sakis scramble into a car. It wasn’t the Cucumber’s shiny sedan, but something small and dirty and beat up. She couldn’t make out who was inside, but she assumed it was the big man or Sakis would not have budged from his post. The car drove off just as two policemen entered the square on foot. They gave a cursory look at the empty shops, the abandoned tables, the dogs sleeping under Barba Yannis’s tree, and laughed. They then walked back in the direction they’d come from, satisfied that they’d finally managed to clean Piraeus of its scum.

  14

  After all her months at Barba Yannis’s, Kivelli felt strange having nowhere to go once the sun went down and she really began to wake up. Aspasia sat with her for a while, smearing rouge on her cheeks and complaining about her mother. “Mama’s so ugly that she once broke a mirror just looking into it. It cracked right in half across the middle and smashed on the floor. She blamed it on an earthquake, but I didn’t feel nothing.” The girl’s snorting laugher alerted Margarita, who howled like a punishing wind for Aspasia to come to the kitchen. From the window Kivelli observed the usual goings on down on the street — boys playing with balls and spinning tops, their mothers yelling for them to come inside, fishermen and stevedores coming home stooped and demanding — until darkness erased even that minor diversion.

  The later it got, the more the room seemed to shrink until Kivelli felt as if she were suffocating. Not knowing where else to go, she scurried across the still-empty square and knocked on Kyria Effie’s door. Since she’d paid off her debt, she occasionally stopped by to visit Narella or to share a drink with the old madam, though Kivelli still didn’t trust her, and Effie still bemoaned the loss of the Anatolian Pearl. Kivelli let her complain until she got bored, then reminded her that she’d been paid five times over thanks to Barba Yannis. But to the madam it remained a matter of reputation.

  With so many manghes on the lam, Kyria Effie’s was peaceful as a church, so she was glad to have a visitor. “Papa Zacharias is up there,” she confided as she let Kivelli in. “With two girls.” She made a circle with her finger and thumb, then jabbed the centre with her right middle finger. “God bless him, he always pays double to relieve his guilt. So when he comes down the stairs, make sure to cross yourself with the wrong hand.”

  “I’ll run up now and kiss his ring,” Kivelli replied. Kyria Effie’s laughter filled the quiet house, the gold locket hanging around her neck bouncing up and down on her massive, quaking breasts. Her mood changed abruptly when she heard about Barba Yannis’s arrest and Old Nontas’s demise. Sadness drew down her overrouged cheeks and stilled her chest. She patted the locket and poured herself a drink out of a decanter stained brown with the memory of many long-gone spirits, then raised her glass in a silent toast and drank until it was empty.

  “Did you know Nontas?” Kivelli asked, surprised by her reaction.

  “Who haven’t I known in Piraeus?” Kyria Effie replied, a sudden languor slowing her speech and movements. She offered her guest some of the thick orange liqueur that tasted like corrupted peaches, and emptied a second glass by the time Kivelli had taken three sips. “They’ve all passed through here — the big, the small, the young and old. They’re all the same to me. Some of them just have more money,” she said dolefully, and touched the locket again.

  “Who’s in here, Kyria Effie?” Kivelli asked, reaching out and putting a finger on the dull gold oval. “Nontas? Barba Yannis?”

  She swatted Kivelli’s hand away, her sadness quickly replaced by indignation. “Don’t be ridiculous. No one you know.” After another swig of peach liqueur, she wound the locket chain around her finger and searched the younger woman’s eyes for an ulterior motive for her presence, her questions.

  “Don’t look at me like that. I’m just making conversation. Whether you tell me or not makes no difference whatsoever.” She was already sorry she’d asked.

  A door opened upstairs, and the women heard the swish of long skirts, then light footsteps on the staircase. Kyria Effie tried to keep a straight face, but sputtered in her hand as a young priest, who seemed torn between elation and contrition, floated past the parlour and out the front door without looking in their direction. Kyria Effie stood up and drew the moss-coloured curtain.

  “Kivelli,” she began, her forehead rippling and creasing with hesitation. “I’m going to tell you a few things my other girls don’t know. Because I feel like it.” She splashed more liqueur into both their glasses. Kivelli, already feeling woozy from the alcohol, wondered if she’d be able to bear the burden of Kyria Effie’s revelations.

  “But all of this must remain between you and me. I don’t need no one’s pity or the girls making fun of me behind my back. Do you understand?” Kivelli nodded her assent, and this seemed to satisfy the old woman. Kyria Effie took off her locket, pushed it across the table. The etchings on its surface had been rubbed off over the years, between her fingers, against her skin. “Open it,” she commanded, and Kivelli obeyed, running her fingernail between the locket’s oval halves. Curled inside was a strand of golden hair tied up in a hundred tiny knots. Smoothed out against the table, it was the length of a child’s bracelet. The portrait hidden within was not of a man at all, but of a young girl with blond curls and very serious dark eyes. The girl’s gaze disconcerted Kivelli, and she dropped the locket on the table.

  “Don’t you recognize me?” Kyria Effie asked, sounding slightly offended. There was little resemblance
between the girl in the photo and the grotesque harridan who sat across from Kivelli. Besides being old and fat, her hair colour was as muddy and uncertain as the glass decanter’s stain. “I know I’m no spring blossom anymore, but look at our eyes.” She widened hers and leaned across the table. Upon closer inspection, Kivelli saw a slight similarity in the shape; there was also a comparable sadness in them.

  “I wasn’t always an old shoe, you know. Before misfortune found me, I was fresh and full of sweet dreams. But she had her own plans for me and my godforsaken mother.” She looked out the window at the lemon tree, then pulled the locket across the table by its chain. For a while she seemed to be talking to the girl in the photo as if Kivelli wasn’t in the room.

  “My father was Armenian, killed by the Turks. They also took my brothers, into their army, to their deaths.” Tears pooled in the deep wrinkles beneath her eyes, but her voice did not waver. “You’re from Smyrna, so you know these things,” she added, and Kivelli understood why she’d been chosen as her confidante. She’d heard all of it before — not from Kyria Effie’s mouth, but from a hundred others who insisted on sharing their tragedies with her, as if her own were not enough. Happy voices seeped in through the curtain, and Kivelli wished she was in the next room with the girls, chatting about silly things, gossiping and laughing.

  “They violated my mother and threw us out of our house. Mama never recovered from the shock of that day. She always said she wished they’d killed her too because her life became a punishment from God.” The tears had stopped, but the words kept marching out obediently, like prisoners of war in the hinterlands heading to their doom.

  “A fisherman brought us here, though we knew no one and had nothing. We begged at doors for work and table scraps, but the good citizens of Piraeus were more heartless than the girls say I am now.” Kivelli did not contradict her, nor did Kyria Effie pause long enough to allow it. “They spat on us and called us gypsies, dogs, filth. And Mama would just stand there weeping until I took her by the hand and led her away.” She brought the locket to her bosom and sighed. “That’s how we spent our days, and for what? A few crusts of bread and more heartache than five lifetimes and all the hashish in Bursa could cure.” Kyria Effie fell silent for what seemed a long time, though it was probably Kivelli’s own sorrows, tweaked by the madam’s, that were stretching the minutes.

  When she began to speak again, her voice was wet, as if tears were roiling in her throat. “Don’t look so down in the dumps, my girl. The funny part is upon us.” Kyria Effie’s tone belied her words.

  That Kivelli was wasting sympathy on the madam would have annoyed Narella to no end, but she could not help it.

  “One rainy night after even the hope for a mouldy elbow of bread had faded, my mother knocked on one last door, red and cracked from the salty air. Oh, I’m not going to get sentimental and claim that a whore became our saviour, though Kyria Vasso rescued us from the cold and miserable streets. She took us in, gave us a meal, and the rest, the rest is just details …” She sighed and looked out at the tree again.

  Narella had implied more than once that Kyria Effie’s mother had hanged herself from the lemon tree in the garden, but Kivelli wasn’t going to ask. She’d heard more than she’d bargained for already, and Kyria Effie looked spent, deflated, as if only the story circling through her body all this time had kept her alive.

  “My girls think I don’t understand their pain,” she slurred. “I understand. I just don’t feel anything about it. Haven’t since I was fourteen and Mama …” Kivelli stood up before the madam unwound another long thread of mournful reminiscences that would set off her own.

  “I’ll come again some other night, Kyria Effie.” She considered patting the madam’s hand or kissing her wrinkled cheek but couldn’t bring herself to enter the cloud of lemon water, peach liqueur and sweat that surrounded her.

  “I’ve tired you, I know, but before you go, I have a proposition for you.” Kivelli knew what was coming, but no matter how desperate she became, she would never come back to the house to work. If worst came to worst, she could follow Sakis and the Cucumber to Thessaloniki. They were sure to have connections there.

  “Why not come back here …”

  “I don’t think so, Kyria Effie,” she said in one breath.

  “Let me finish, Miss Kivelli. Why not come here on weekends to sing? I’ll pay you something, and you can also collect tips from the men. And if you want to go to bed with any of them, that’s your business, though if you do it here, he’ll have to pay for the room.”

  “What about the police?”

  “If those crooks didn’t like blow jobs so much, I’d be breaking rocks with Barba Yannis. A little bit of singing on the weekend won’t change nothing here. And it’ll solve both our problems until the manghes come home. What do you say to me now?”

  Kivelli was impressed. Kyria Effie was drunk, deflated, depressed, but still a businesswoman. It wasn’t a terrible idea. “And the music?” she asked, still looking for a bug that would turn the whole thing rotten.

  “Old Batis can bring his laterna, and who knows who else will show up with baglamas made of gourds and wire. Stop looking for reasons to say no, Kivelli. What else are you going do this Saturday night?”

  Though she tried to come up with an answer, a lie, as quickly as Kyria Effie produced the laterna, all she could think of was how the small sum she’d managed to save was not likely to last long. Especially when she had nothing to keep her from wiling away long nights in beer gardens, tedious afternoons in the empty square. “Fine, I’ll drop by this Saturday and we’ll see how it goes.”

  Kyria waved a finger and shook her head no. “You have to agree to at least two Saturdays. One to start the rumour, and a second to reap its rewards. Then we’ll see if it’s worth it or not. Agreed?”

  After she left, she regretted not setting a price. Kyria Effie was a much better dealer than Kivelli, who had neither the inclination nor the experience. Since her arrival in Piraeus, she’d left such matters to others, taking what they offered and making no demands. It hadn’t worked out too badly. But despite Kyria Effie’s confidences and tears, she did not kid herself that the old madam was looking after anyone’s interests but her own. Narella would say the sob story was nothing but a ploy to soften her up, though Kivelli was not yet that cynical. When she went back on Saturday, she would let Effie pay her whatever she wanted and then state her conditions for a repeat performance.

  A few tables in the square were occupied by old men — cobblers, fishermen and peddlers — as well as a few cops talking and laughing loudly, like conquerors in a foreign land. One of them made a rude remark when she walked by, but Kivelli did not bat an eyelash.

  The moon shone through her window, covering her narrow bed with a sheet of silver light. She lay beneath it and serenaded it with the Smyrniot’s song until her eyes became heavy with sleep. Neither the sombre little man nor the melancholy madam visited her dreams that night. Instead, Marianthi appeared in her flowered dress and fed Kivelli pastries as she would a handsome suitor, a saviour who might steal her away from her unpleasant husband and set her free.

  15

  From dusk to dawn I get high on ouzo and wine

  Despite all my troubles, I have a good time

  ’Cause I know how to live and I know how to play

  And I don’t give a damn what anyone says

  Four days after the raid at Barba Yannis’s, whatever had not been carried away by the cops or looted by packs of beggars and thieves was thrown out into the square and burned. It was just a stack of spindly chairs and rough-hewn tables, but it signalled the end in a way only a fire can. Neighbourhood children hopped around the blaze, thrilled by the explosions of sparks, the dancing flames lighting up their little faces. Fishwives watched from a distance, arms crossed in smug satisfaction as their husbands mourned the loss of their neighbourhood refuge where they’d retreated in hashish and song from the troubles of life. Kivelli’s eyes smarte
d from the smoke, and she held a handkerchief to her nostrils as she skirted the square, trying to avoid notice. Who knew what they’d throw in next in their frenzy? She had seen how quickly fire could spread, from building to building, from soul to soul. As she rushed towards Kyria Effie’s for her debut, she hoped that singing would rid her of her agitation and fill her purse with coins.

  When she arrived, however, things did not look promising. Her audience was made up entirely of Kyria Effie’s girls, who had nothing better to do for the same reasons the bars and tavernas in the neighbourhood were empty. Even if they offered, she wouldn’t accept any money from them. The fact that they were sitting around waiting to be entertained instead of entertaining in their rooms meant that their debt was rising threefold in Kyria Effie’s ledger. Nonetheless, their spirits were good, and they were impatient for the festivities to begin.

  “Thank God you’re here, little sister. We were dying of boredom,” whined Narella before collapsing dramatically in an armchair and playing dead.

  “We were about to start practising French tricks on each other,” explained Sophia the Cappadocian, “and Effie was going to charge us for that too.” She was wearing her belly dancing outfit, complete with bells around her waist and ankles, and zils on her fingers, which she clapped as she spoke whenever she wanted to make a point.

  Kyria Effie was nowhere in sight. Narella said that she’d gone out “to trawl the streets” for customers, but the next moment she walked through the door looking murderous. Using the same finger she might have drawn across her throat, she summoned Kivelli, who reluctantly left the giddy harem to hear what its keeper had to say. “I can’t pay you anything tonight, so if you want, you can go home,” she said, blunt as always.