“Two weeks ago, on Saturday night, I went to the Attikon Theatre with an acquaintance …” Her hands created a steeple over her head, and Kivelli thought she might begin to belly dance, but instead she sat down and crossed her legs, turning her foot in little circles. “… Elpiniki, the wife of Panayotis’s toumbeleki player.” Her voice dripped with disdain as she pronounced the other woman’s name. “A dull little thing and quite annoying.” She poured herself some more of the pungent wine, and this time it did not make her cough but brought a glow to her cheeks. “How I love the theatre,” she continued. “I can get so lost in the story that I believe its world is more real than mine. But this was an idiocy about a farm girl in love with a goatherd from the next village.” She crossed her arms in frustration and made a sour face. “Elpiniki, of course, was thoroughly amused.”
For a moment, in the darkness behind Kivelli’s eyelids, other scenes from the Attikon stage arose — romance born out of the ashes, a birth that killed the mother. Her ears rang with the heartrending soliloquies that had kept her awake all night in the loge that was her first home in Piraeus: the raspy lament of a shrunken grandmother who’d watched her whole family die and called out a litany of names with a question mark at the end; a peasant woman’s droning recitation of everything she’d owned before her trip to Piraeus — ox, rug beater, wedding ring. She opened her eyes and focused on Marianthi, who flashed a smile as if she believed she’d finally won over her audience of one. The truth was that it was safer for Kivelli to look at her.
“So instead of taking a taxi straight home, I proposed that we take a stroll down by the water. It was a warm and lovely night, and I was still craving a little drama.” Was Marianthi fearless or naive? It had to be the latter to confuse drama with the dangers down on the docks on Saturday night. The few times Kivelli had gone there, she’d been with Sakis, and even then she felt ill at ease. She wasn’t certain whether the Smyrniot’s wife actually had the nerve for such a caper, but it was just a story. What did it matter if it were true as long as it was amusing?
“‘Let’s pretend we’re in a play,’ I said to Elpiniki, ‘and see how it turns out!’” Marianthi clapped her hands as if she’d suggested a clever parlour game. Elpiniki, however, was not so keen to parade past the manghes and sailors who congregated in the shadows of ships to gamble, deal, fight and generally encourage each other’s worst behaviour. But with sweet talk, flattery and a dash of coercion, Marianthi managed to convince her reluctant companion that such a small risk was hardly a risk at all, and that it would be fun to pretend to be someone else, another type of woman not afraid of men or the dark. “‘Don’t you know that they’re terrified of us?’ I said. ‘Why do you think they need to play it so tough?’”
Kivelli kept to herself that the men were trying to scare each other, like dogs with their hackles up, their tails stiff in the air, and that women were just what they fed on when they were hungry. She didn’t want to break the rhythm of the story and whatever surprises lay at the end of it — she certainly hadn’t expected what she’d heard so far. Was Marianthi more than a sheltered little housewife playing it up? Even though she lived in that prim little museum, she was married to the Smyrniot who, in a way, was also a member of the pack because of his trade. But she was behaving as if she’d never come across a mangha except in the newspaper and had decided to fall in love. A twinge of offence sparked in Kivelli’s chest, but she rubbed it away with the heel of her palm as if it were a cramp from eating sardines and black bread in the Attikon Theatre, too fast, out of desperation.
Infused with the thrill of the telling, Marianthi twittered away the rest of the story — the catcalls and propositions that she responded to “like a real manghissa” while Elpiniki blubbered that they should walk faster or run, take off their shoes and run. “You can always tell which ones grew up in the village,” she laughed — frothily, unnaturally, as if she were in a gay comedy.
“Then something interrupted my pleasure with myself and drowned out Elpiniki’s whining.” She paused and joined her hands before her face. “A voice floated out onto the streets and silenced the manghes’ dirt-talking, every coughing motor and the screeching of alley cats in heat. It was the sound …,” she closed her eyes and cocked her ear as if she were trying to hear something in the distance, “… that an angel makes when lying in the arms of the devil.” A shiver ran through her body, and when she looked at Kivelli again, her eyes shone palely. “I could not resist such unearthly cries. I left Elpiniki out on the street and stepped into Barba Yannis’s …”
Kivelli’s heart skipped and her eyebrows arched. Married women did not come to the taverna, not even in the company of their husbands let alone by themselves, unless they were looking to make a scene. “And what was I singing?” she asked with a skepticism Marianthi couldn’t have missed.
“Oh, I don’t remember.” She waved her hand to dismiss such an irrelevant question. “‘The cops have broken our narghiles, and my woman is sly as a cat and just as mean, so I’m drowning my sorrows in hashish.’ You know, one of those songs the manghes like so much because they’re stoned.”
For the first time since Marianthi entered her room, Kivelli’s smile was genuine. She knew a hundred versions of that song by now, and had almost forgotten that there was anything else to sing about. Marianthi returned the smile, drew courage from it.
“In any case, it wasn’t the song that pulled me in, but the voice that transformed it into a spell.” Her eyes glistened with tears as she tried to describe the experience. “I felt a sensation in my body: warm, uplifting, powerful.” Marianthi finished off her wine, then rested her head in her hands for so long that Kivelli thought she might have fainted from the emotion, held like breath and finally released.
Kivelli felt a rush of warmth in her chest, and any previous feelings of apprehension or offence dissipated. But she wasn’t sure what to say to the woman quivering in the corner of her room. It was as difficult for her to understand how her voice affected those who heard it, as it was to explain what it felt like to sing. The flush on Marianthi’s face, the vulnerability in her worshipful eyes, suggested that what she had shared was as private and tender as a declaration of love. It seemed inappropriate to fill the silence that followed with words that might be convenient but empty. Kivelli walked over and placed her hand on the other woman’s nape. “Thank you,” she whispered, and Marianthi looked up and smiled through her tears, then told the rest of her curious story.
Once inside the taverna, she gravitated towards the tables in the corner where the working girls sat waiting for their men. “After they determined that I wasn’t someone’s vengeful wife, they made room for me at their table and began to squawk like parrots, offering me advice. ‘You’ll never catch a mangha dressed like a spinster,’ said a blonde with a painted mole on her lip who claimed she was a dressmaker.”
It was surely Kiki, though her past as a seamstress was news to Kivelli. Then again, everyone had been something else before landing in Piraeus. Even Marianthi.
“I might have been insulted, but they were so nice to me and I was only half-listening. Your voice was entering me through every orifice, through the pores of my skin, and especially here …” Marianthi put Kivelli’s hand on her belly, and the singer finally understood why the Smyrniot’s wife was in her room.
When the set was over, Marianthi regained her senses and, all at once, it became imperative for her to escape Barba Yannis’s, a matter of life and death. Kivelli wondered when that instinct had left her completely.
“I was almost out the door when an old mangha grabbed my arm. ‘Where are you flying off to, my butterfly?’ he croaked.” “That’s probably old Themis,” Kivelli offered. “Always the same line. Harmless really, except for maybe a pinch.”
“I ran as if my shoes were on fire,” she admitted, looking slightly embarrassed. “The old guy ran after me, but couldn’t keep up.” She put her hand on her heart as if it were still pounding. “I lost him, I outra
n him.” Kivelli burst out laughing and Marianthi laughed too, each one setting the other off until they were both spent.
“You should go now,” Kivelli said after she’d finally caught her breath. “Make your way home before it gets dark and old Themis comes looking for you.” At the door, she gave her directions back to the bridge.
“But when will we meet again? I’m not finished, I’ve barely even begun …” She looked so worried that Kivelli took her hand, which was soft and plush, with short polished nails.
“Let’s not give everything away all at once, my friend. I’ll come by tomorrow, I promise. But on one condition.”
Marianthi blinked rapidly and brought her other hand to her throat. “Anything, just ask for it and it’s yours.”
“I’m not interested in talking about what happened in Smyrna, in raising ghosts by the light of day. Talking does not change anything or bring back the dead. Do I have your word?”
“It’s not Smyrna I want to talk about.” She wound the gold chain with its tiny cross around her finger until Kivelli was afraid she might choke. “It’s the Smyrniot.”
Marianthi tiptoed down the stairs and out the front door as if she were one of Kivelli’s lovers, then scuttled up the street like a tiny pretty crab fleeing a flock of hungry seagulls.
17
In her Piraeus afterlife, Kivelli’s self-imposed task was to rid herself of every lingering trace of Smyrna: who she’d been, what she’d had and what she’d seen in the city’s terrible final days. Whenever a memory arose, she imagined wrapping it in butcher paper, tying it up with string and tossing it into the street to be run over by a tram or ripped apart and devoured by a starving cat. It seemed to be working. She’d forgotten the sing-songy enticements of the vegetable hawker who pushed his cart down her street every morning. His call was always the same, and as familiar to her as the voice of their housemaid Vasso summoning her to breakfast. But now, even when she tried, she could not remember his words. They were in a language she no longer spoke, entirely dependent on the wind of the streets, the midnight and morning customs, the way laundry was hung and the general attitude towards sunshine, rain and love.
She’d also forgotten the smell of Smyrna’s roses, brought in from the countryside and sold by the basketful on street corners for a few coins. They saturated the whole city with a perfume as potent as the clouds of hashish smoke at Barba Yannis’s. At the taverna, fancy-pants manghes had occasionally tossed roses at her feet, but the smell was so different it might have been another flower altogether. Now those rose-filled breezes no longer existed inside her, and she probably would not recognize the scent if it swept into the neighbourhood on a meltemi. This in no way absolved the roses of Piraeus, which smelled like soap.
When Kivelli called on Marianthi the next afternoon, she brought her white lilies, a tray of baklava from the bakery in the square and a white lace doily made by Aspasia. The Smyrniot’s wife looked both pleased and genuinely surprised that Kivelli had kept her word, yet she still seemed as nervous as the first time they’d met. As they walked down the marble-tiled hallway, she told her guest that the Smyrniot wasn’t home, as if he was still the reason Kivelli had come. They passed through the dining room and into the kitchen, where Marianthi latched the swinging door. “So we won’t be interrupted,” she whispered, out of habit. She then busied herself with putting the lilies in a crystal vase, the baklava on a platter, and brewing coffee in a shiny copper briki. In contrast to the cramped luxury of the rest of the house, the kitchen was simple, almost bare, with a plain wooden table and matching, high-backed chairs. Marianthi looked at ease, even though her blue, empire-waisted silk dress seemed a little fancy for the occasion. Kivelli told her so and Marianthi smiled.
“My father used to build and sell chairs and tables just like these in Aivali,” she explained. “He was a practical man and never paid any mind to comfort — made people lazy, he said.” She picked up a piece of baklava and bit into it, then licked the honey off her fingers. “Not that there was any time to sit around and eat sweets back then. There were too many of us, and I had to help my mother clean, prepare meals and scold the younger children. I could hardly keep track of when it was time to put down the winter rugs or begin sewing costumes for Carnival.” She laid out a few photographs on the table like gypsy cards from which her fortune could be read. Kivelli picked each one up and studied it, then returned it to its original place.
The first was of Marianthi as a girl standing in a fishing boat, surrounded by her brothers and sisters. Another showed her in her wedding dress, looking not as happy as she should have been but pretty nonetheless. In the last one she was stretched out on a deck chair on the ship that had brought her to Piraeus. Kivelli placed the wedding picture before her, and Marianthi immediately launched into the story of how she’d met her famous husband.
“It was June, and he’d come to play at a festival of the Holy Spirit in my village. On stage he looked tall and handsome as a prince. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and I prayed he’d notice me. When he finally did, I decided to marry him.” She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Music always makes me so stupid.” The bravest act she’d ever committed, other than stepping into Barba Yannis’s, was eloping with the Smyrniot, even though her father had already agreed to the marriage. She thought climbing down a ladder in the middle of the night would make the whole thing seem more desperately romantic.
“Back then he was as happy playing in the village square as at a grand ball. He was the best of the best and even played for King Constantine when he visited. At the end of the night the king rose from his seat to shake Panayotis’s hand.” The radiance in her eyes suggested she was still impressed by this, proud of him and for herself. Kivelli remembered the King’s last visit — the cheering crowds lining the streets, the girls dressed in white waving Greek flags as his black limousine rolled down the Quai. But she made no comment, afraid it would lead her directly to Smyrna, where she would once again be trapped by fire. Coming back to Marianthi’s house had been difficult enough.
Many things had changed for the Smyrniot in Piraeus, and not necessarily for the better, despite what it looked like from the outside. “Something happened to his spirit. It was as if he’d lost something he knew he’d never find again. His freedom, or maybe Smyrna …” Kivelli’s face tensed and Marianthi apologized then quickly changed the subject. “Panayotis has too many responsibilities now. He spends his mornings recording, his afternoons at the offices of Columbia, and all night at the Bella Vista.”
Kivelli had never been to the club in Athens where the Smyrniot’s orchestra played. Not only was it too far from Drapetsona and too expensive, but from what she was told it was the kind of place that liked to pretend nothing had changed, which was more painful to her than admitting she had. Marianthi was still talking, listing off the Smyrniot’s tribulations as if they were her own.
“And there are people after him all the time, wanting this, wanting that, trying to convince him they know something. One mangha even threatened to cut out his tongue if he didn’t record some awful song.” Kivelli nodded but felt no pity. She knew those men, and there were worst problems in life. It was no excuse for the Smyrniot’s rudeness.
Marianthi picked up a second piece of baklava, then put it back down on the platter. She looked at Kivelli and blinked hard a few times, as if trying to decide whether the woman sitting across her was real or an invention of her overactive imagination. She reached for Kivelli’s hand and pressed it with an urgency that said she had no intention of letting go.
“I have a confession, and don’t ask me why, but I knew I could trust you the moment I heard you sing.”
Kivelli’s mind went back to old Themis and to the prostitutes who had befriended her at the taverna, who had given her advice on how to catch a man. Perhaps something more had happened that night; some of the more scabrous manghes had a charm that would turn the head of a saint. Since one of the satisfactions of a clandestine affair was
sharing the details with a trusted confidante, Kivelli assumed she was about to be invited into the forbidden folds. Marianthi swore her to secrecy, and though she capitulated, the oath left a bitter taste in her mouth, as if she were instantly unworthy of it.
Marianthi spat it out quickly, like a bite of food that was too hot.
“I wrote that song you sang. The words, I mean — I write all of the Smyrniot’s songs. It wasn’t like that before we came here, but that’s our arrangement now.” She grinned like a cat who’d swallowed a goldfinch.
Not sure whether to believe her, Kivelli said nothing. An afternoon tussle with a handsome mangha was one thing, but if what she claimed was true, the Smyrniot’s wife had made a cuckold of every man in Athens and Piraeus. Prepared for her disbelief, Marianthi removed a folded stack of pale pink paper from a kitchen drawer, then smoothed the creases before placing the sheets before her guest. The handwriting was small, feminine and neat. Some of the sheets had lines crossed out, while others were pristine, as if the words had fallen from the heavens and onto the paper in the order they now appeared. There were dozens of songs, a few that Kivelli recognized as the Smyrniot’s recent hits, others that seemed oddly familiar, but whose melody escaped her. When she came across “The Goodtime Girl,” she began to sing it and Marianthi jumped out of her seat and danced around the plain wooden table, twirling Aspasia’s lace doily like a victory flag for the king.
Marianthi’s foray into Barba Yannis’s now made more sense. Her “arrangement” granted her an unusual power over her husband, which was why he could do nothing but shrug off her little adventure. He’d even acted as her procurer, bringing Kivelli into their lives because he had no choice. “I’d been longing for the perfect voice,” she said shyly and blushed, “so I sent him after you.” Marianthi wrote every single one of his songs: the ones about jail, the ones about drugs, and the ones that belonged in a woman’s mouth — in Kivelli’s. It was so unlikely, no one would suspect it; but if it got out, the Smyrniot would be ruined.
The Goodtime Girl Page 11