The Goodtime Girl

by Tess Fragoulis

  Guests were welcomed on board by the Berengeria’s captain: a dignified, white-haired man who stood as tall and straight as a statue. He shook Papa’s hand and offered Kivelli a red rose, which she accepted graciously, her gaiety instantly restored. Everywhere she went on the ship, men offered her flowers until her slender arms were full, and her head was light from their perfume. She consigned her bouquet to the waves as a tribute to all the handsome drowned sailors whose souls were reborn in the bodies of gulls. A few clever birds plucked the blooms midair, then dropped them upon the heads of young ladies dancing on the upper deck.

  There was hardly a moment for a bite of food or a sip of wine as one swell after another requested the pleasure of Kivelli’s company on the dance floor. They twirled her under a canopy of stars, and whispered that she was the most beautiful girl on the ship, in Smyrna, in the world. Kivelli smiled coquettishly and told them she was from the moon, then looked with affection and longing towards the white orb hanging full above the ship. She danced with no man twice — not even a local dandy who offered a ride on his red-sailed schooner — and gave equivocal replies to those who insisted they would die if they didn’t see her again. All were set adrift, neither encouraged nor dejected.

  Papa divided his attention between Kivelli’s dance floor liaisons and the business associates who had gathered at his table. Amidst all this music and splendour, these stuffy old men could think of nothing more pleasant to discuss than politics. Artemiadis the gold merchant was worried about some movement unfriendly to Greeks. He blamed the trouble on foreign interests. “Remember the Armenians,” added Papathanos the fur importer, a sober expression on his face. “The British are with us,” Papa stated with confidence. He waved when Kivelli floated by in her green taffeta gown, her gold bracelets jingling like angel’s bells when she waved back.

  Kivelli was sure Papa was right: she had no enemies in Smyrna, only admirers. Doors opened for her wherever she went, and people were always kind and helpful and courteous. They were all Smyrneans, whether Greek or Turkish, Armenian or Jewish, Levantine or European. Looking towards the city’s flickering lights in the distance, Kivelli was surprised by a slight cramp of homesickness in her breast, as if this foreign ship anchored firmly in the harbour were taking her away forever.

  A thunderflash over the water startled her and brought dozens of other guests to the railing. Together they watched a display of red, purple and silver blossoms lighting up the sky. Kivelli followed a group of revellers into a small boat that sailed to a point midway between ship and shore. There she was bathed in a shower of colours, catching embers like fallen stars in her hair, skirts and outstretched palms. A boy in her boat launched a series of Bengal lights that burned brilliant blue eyes into the black velvet firmament, and she laughed as seagulls flew panicked and screaming through the explosions before diving into the water as if escaping war.

  The fireworks were her favourite part of the evening, more marvellous than the music, the dancing, the feast. They erased the delays, the proposals, the homesickness and the glum old bores at the table, speaking of tiresome men’s subjects while the sky was ablaze. Upon her return to the ship, she was glad to see Papa by the railing, applauding the spectacle. He remarked that she’d been kissed by stardust, which had left a smudge on her cheek, and asked if she’d made a wish. “I wished for a thousand nights exactly like this one,” she sighed, and he squeezed her hand and promised she’d have them. Kivelli believed him with all her heart, the fireworks still dancing before her eyes, above her city.

  Before she went to sleep that night, she wrote a letter to Amalia:

  My pretty cousin,

  The sky over Smyrna caught fire tonight. How magnificent it was as it burned. I watched in awe, my eyes bright with tears. Is it possible to love something, to be totally devoted without even realizing it until, all at once, for no particular reason, you fear its loss? For me that moment came when I watched Smyrna from the water while strains of violins and jaunty horns accompanied the explosions. If only you had been here to witness it, Amalia, to burn along with me and my beloved city …

  42

  To pass the time until departure, Kyra Xanthi offered to tell Kivelli a story, one which neither Marianthi nor she had ever bothered to ask about. “I don’t tell too many people these old tales, but since you won’t be around here anymore …”

  “You must know by now that I’m against memory, Kyra Xanthi, so you can tell me what you want and I’ll do my best to forget it.”

  Kyra Xanthi had spent so much time listening to others that once she started speaking she was unstoppable; it would have been hard to get a word in edgewise even if Kivelli had wanted to. “It is true I’ve lived a long time,” she began, “so long I’ve almost forgotten what it felt like to be young, to see an unlined face in the mirror, to have strong and beautiful legs.” Kivelli nodded, although she didn’t feel young despite her smooth face, which hid the corrosion in her heart. Sometimes it felt like it was ready to give up, run out of beats like Kosmas and his toumbeleki at the end of a long night. Reading her mind, Kyra Xanthi continued:

  “I think I was always an old lady at heart because I feel more myself with each passing year, as if my body was telling all manner of lies when it sauntered down the street from my mother’s kitchen to the market or to church. In my day, those were the only places a girl was allowed to go on her own — as long as she kept her eyes glued to the ground.” How different was it now? Kivelli wondered. Aspasia was watched over by her vulture of a mother, who would just as soon eat her as let her venture out on her own. She’d been caught sneaking out recently, with painted lips and smelling of lavender. Kivelli had been a bad influence.

  “My limited route didn’t bother me that much. My head wasn’t filled with the same types of dreams as other girls my age. I didn’t want a husband. While I listened to the men chanting the liturgy in church, I prayed for an escape from the match my father had made without my consent. He’d traded me off to Vangelis, the son of a vegetable seller, who had spotted me running errands for my mother.” She gave a cunning smile and leaned in closer. “Today they call him the Cucumber, you know, but back then he was just a skinny kid, no more or less impressive than the usual lot. A good enough boy, though I hear other things about him now from girls who come here with broken hearts.”

  Xanthi stopped speaking for a few minutes, waiting for Kivelli to absorb this information. She then tore an old photograph from the wall and presented it as proof. It might have been the Cucumber if thirty kilos were trimmed away, but could have just as easily been someone else. The young man wore baggy trousers and a white shirt with suspenders, but his enormous ears were his most distinctive feature. It could be those ears were hidden under the Cucumber’s hat — Kivelli had never seen him without it — but she wasn’t convinced, so she laughed to hide her hesitation.

  “You don’t have to believe me. But what reason would I have to lie to you now? In a few hours you’ll be gone forever, and my secret will be yours to do with as you wish. I thought it would tickle you to imagine me as the Cucumber’s girl.” She primped for a moment, readjusting the sparkly barrette on her kerchief, and as Kivelli watched her, the old woman metamorphosed into a small and pretty thing, too mischievous for her own good. Squinting at the photograph again, Kivelli almost recognized the Cucumber.

  “I’d never noticed him in the market, but my mother claimed he’d asked for me himself, even though my dowry was piteous. Then, one evening, he came to my house with his father to make the formal arrangements. He was too shy to look me in the eye when I stepped into the room with drinks! What kind of husband would this trembling goat make, I asked myself, and I knew that I could never let it happen.” The joy, the levity left her voice. “I would throw myself off a cliff into the sea before I was traded like a cow for cucumbers and a head of lettuce. But Mama was adamant.” Kyra Xanthi made the sign of the cross and breathed a few agitated breaths, as if she were reliving the episode and Kivelli w
as her mother to whom she was pleading for mercy.

  “I begged Mama to find some reason to call off the engagement. I refused to eat. I threatened to kill myself. She told me I might as well because we’d given our word. Then she pulled my hair and warned me that I would not shame the family nor deprive it of fresh vegetables for dinner every night.”

  Her mother stood firm for weeks and didn’t seem likely to give up until Xanthi was wreathed and bound. Her younger sister, Leonora, was also eager to see her married off to Vangelis because there was going to be no chance for her until the older one was gone. Things seemed impossible, hopeless, until Xanthi was visited by divine inspiration.

  “One day Mama sent me to Vangelis’s vegetable stand to pick up our daily allotment of goodwill between in-laws. He still hadn’t looked me in the eye or smiled, and I began to think he had as little to do with our engagement as I did. This made me like him a little more, though not enough to marry him. My betrothed wrapped the zucchini in an old newspaper, and I took the bundle without a word and made my way home. On the outside page was a photograph of a nunnery in the north, an unreal place between heaven and earth. I’d never seen anything like it before.”

  “I’d heard you were a nun. From Marianthi.” As Kivelli spoke her name, her heart cramped. Would she find her again? Would she be forgiven?

  “I had to tell her because she thought I was a witch. Same thing if you ask me. But no one’s heard the full story before except for Alekos.”

  In the middle of the night Xanthi began moaning as if she were trapped in a troubling dream and couldn’t find her way out. “Which in a way was true,” she added. Her mother rushed to her room and found her in a trancelike state, staring at the ceiling, eyes wide open and still whining and whimpering. It took a few minutes to shake her awake.

  “I told Mama that the Virgin Mary had come to me while I slept, and had laid her blessed hand on my forehead.” She’d placed a trembling, clammy hand upon her mother’s; now she put a dry warm one on Kivelli’s. “Then the Mother of God blew her rose breath into my ear.” Young Xanthi’s words wafted out slowly, quietly, though they didn’t smell of roses but of the zucchini and onion pie her mother had made for dinner. “I am to remain a virgin and dedicate my life to the Holy Spirit,” she whispered. Her mother slapped her face and called her a liar and a blasphemer. But the next moment she fell to her knees, weeping at Xanthi’s feet. “Mama was a true believer, so she couldn’t take any chances. She woke my father up immediately and told him that marriage to Vangelis was out of the question. Then in her own moment of divine inspiration told him to offer Leonora.” Kivelli looked incredulous. “Believe what you want. But I have kept at least one of my vows to the Virgin.”

  Leonora was a good girl, but had little imagination or ambition other than to wed. Though she hadn’t been consulted, she did not object to the new arrangement. They combined both girls’ dowries to sweeten the deal, and Vangelis and his father didn’t object either. She died shortly after giving birth to their first child, a boy who Kyra Xanthi had never seen. “So much,” she concluded, “for ordinary ambitions.”

  Free of her arranged marriage, she went to live with fifty other nuns in the middle of the sky. Agia Anastasia was perched atop a slate grey crag that looked like the raised thumb of a giant’s hand. The only way up or down was in a basket attached to thick ropes and a pulley, so most of the nuns stayed up — closer to God — tending a herd of goats named after saints and making sweet wine in the cellar. It was in that intermediate place that Xanthi began to understand the hearts of women, what made them race or break.

  “I learned how the most abrupt and isolated girls could be the softest and kindest on the inside, while the ones with the biggest smiles often had the darkest thoughts and habits. I learned not to believe what I heard from others, but to look for the truth deep in the eyes.” Approaching the other nuns with true curiosity provided her with all she needed to know — their fears and strengths, their disappointments and dreams. “It’s like choosing a melon,” she added. “You need to know where to tap on its body and what to listen for inside.”

  It was also at Agia Anastasia that she developed her talents for prediction. It was easy to guess which girl would never return from the town below where she’d been sent on an errand, or which one would jump off the cliff in despair. Once in a while, Xanthi was able to prevent such a tragedy. She would look at the girl’s palm and tell her something hopeful because she could already see the shadow of death eclipsing her face, turning it grey.

  And sometimes a little colour would return to her cheeks. “A lot of things can change a girl’s mind in a day, in a week. So even if what I’d predicted did not come to pass, something else would happen. There are many small miracles transpiring every day, but it helps if you’re looking for them.”

  One morning, three years after she’d arrived, she woke up knowing her time at Agia Anastasia had come to an end. She did not disappear into the town below, nor did she dive off the cliff. After morning prayers, she went straight to the Mother Superior to inform her she was leaving and to tell her why. “‘I don’t think it’s right,’ I said, ‘that the monks from the nearby monasteries bring us their soiled underclothes to bang against the rocks. Or that the priest who comes to administer communion preaches that this is one more way we can serve God. Let God send me his underpants then!’ Most of my sisters saw nothing wrong with this arrangement, but if I’d wanted to wash a man’s dirty socks, I would have married the Cucumber.” The Mother Superior accepted Xanthi’s decision without fuss, and made no effort to dissuade her lest her blasphemies and disobedience infect the other nuns, give them ideas. But her blessing during Xanthi’s swinging descent in the basket rang with pity and good riddance.

  “Not knowing where else to go, I came back to Piraeus. During my absence, both my parents had died in an accident when a trolley went off its rails, my only sister was already dead, and strangers had moved into our house. I felt like a refugee from the mountains, with nothing but a satchel and the clothes on my back.”

  Kivelli looked at her distressed leather suitcase, at the web of string that held it together. She had come here with nothing; she was leaving with not much more. And there was no cousin Alekos in America to help her find a house, to tell her everything would work out as God willed it. Hopefully, there would be a Marianthi. “I’ve been in this house ever since, more than fifty years I think, though I’ve stopped counting. It’s small but it suits me, and I like having all my things around me, keeping me company.” She swept her arm out like a queen showing off a vast estate. “We must all find where we best belong, my Kivelli. Then happiness and everything else we need will know where to find us. Sometimes a person is born in the wrong place, and sometimes she is exactly where she is supposed to be, like I was. When you find it, you’ll know it. Don’t think twice about it, Kivelli. Piraeus was never going to be that place.”

  Since she’d traded in her ticket to Egypt, she’d agonized over her decision, going back and forth a hundred times, weighing the good against the bad until there was no doubt left that it was time to leave Greece. But what about Smyrna? If something was taken away from you, did it mean it had never really been yours? There was no point asking questions with no definite answers, none that would satisfy or relieve her heavy heart.

  Done with her tale, Kyra Xanthi left the table and began rummaging in her china cabinet again, moving things around, talking to herself, or to the objects, or to Elenitsa. In any case, Kivelli could not hear what she was mumbling. When she turned around again, she was holding a pair of bright red satin shoes. “A going away gift, so you’ll remember me even if you forget my story. And you never know, some handsome American might ask you to dance on the ship.” She winked and dropped the shoes in Kivelli’s lap. “I tried them on myself once. Danced around the room with Alekos like we were young and carefree, but they hurt my old feet.”

  At first Kivelli refused to take them, protesting that her bag was al
ready full, though in truth it was more than half empty. The fancy dresses from the club were in a trunk on their way to Egypt without her, and what she had packed amounted to the bare necessities for a much shorter voyage: underwear, a few blouses and skirts, her sailor’s dress, her white dress and a few other things she’d owned before her ascendancy to the Bella Vista. Stripped of all her frills and feathers, she was no longer the celebrated Smyrnean chanteuse, but simply Kivelli Fotiathi. The old woman looked so eager to give her the shoes, however, that she untied the strings and dropped them in amongst her slips and stockings.

  Their goodbye was quick and without tears, as casual as if she’d be back the next day. Kivelli gave Kyra Xanthi a short hug and a kiss on her plump cheek, searched her eyes one last time for a clue to what the future held or to Marianthi’s whereabouts. But all she saw was her own reflection swimming in the iridescent blue of the fortune-teller’s irises. Kivelli put on her hat, parted the beaded curtain and stepped out onto the front stoop, closing the door behind her.

  During her interlude at Kyra Xanthi’s, the skies had cleared and the sea was mirror-smooth. The Smyrniot’s ship must have already gone, and soon hers would be launching her in the opposite direction, to the America of her youthful desires. Did she still long for a life filled with excitement and novelty? No. Those dreams had been reduced to ashes like everything else, blown out the window and onto the heads of alleycats and stray dogs and pumpkin-seed sellers. But now she had something she’d never had before: a reason to go, and none to come back.

  43

  PIRAEUS, 1922

  The quay where the SS Excelsior was moored was swarming with people. They were divided into large groups by towering columns of suitcases, steamer trunks and wooden boxes, and parted occasionally by porters with two-wheeled carts looking for customers not willing or able to carry their own luggage. Peddlers pushed their way through, hawking ring-shaped bread rolls, flaky tiropites, Greek flags and balls of yarn in white and blue, while competing laterna players cranked patriotic songs out of their flower-bedecked barrel-organs. They were all doing a brisk business as the soon-to-be voyagers emptied their pockets and purses of their last Greek coins.