The main reason is simple: the need for me to constantly improve my Swedish. I was a writer, I loved my new language, and I exploited both my wife and children in order to become more fluent. On top of this, Gunilla is very rigid about her language, and as she has grown older she has become a real martinet when it comes to both grammar and pronunciation. “It’s not schafför,” she says with distaste, pulling a face in front of the TV.
The children also taught me words like möka (to fart) or fetto (fat) and svullo (greedy guts). We had long discussions about the correct way to conjugate möka. Should it be möka, mök, or möka, mökte, or perhaps möka, mökade?
Who else could teach me those words?
My defense is that simple. I plead guilty, with great pleasure and joy.
We sat on the balcony for a while, listening to the sea and looking at the lights around the inlet. Gunilla smoked her cigarette.
“Did you have a good time?” I asked her.
“I’ve never tasted better figs and grapes.”
“I meant the people.”
She thought for a moment.
“If all Greeks were like them, Greece wouldn’t have any problems,” she answered eventually.
The next day we met up with two friends, Danae and Giannis. They were the only ones I remembered from my childhood; they knew my parents and siblings. To visit them without being offered food is unthinkable. We had a wonderful lunch and talked about the forthcoming performance.
Giannis owned Aeschylus’s collected tragedies, neatly arranged in alphabetical order in his cool, muted study.
For a brief moment I envied them their life. The house was one of the oldest in the village, with large rooms, high ceilings, handmade antique furniture. The terrace was filled with the scent of basil. I remembered Danae as a young woman—she was the great beauty of the village—tending her plants with a silver watering can every afternoon, hovering eighteen inches above the ground.
I also wanted to visit Aunt Argiro, who was the last member of our family still living in the village. So we took our leave of Danae, who naturally gave us a homemade plum-and-raisin cake approximately the size of a small pig.
Giannis went with us to show us the way. My aunt still lives in the house that once belonged to my maternal grandparents. Her husband was my beloved uncle, and he inherited the small property and expanded it. My aunt continued after his death, and eventually it became an extensive three-story building. It turned out that Aunt Argiro was still busy with improvements, in spite of her age and the fact that she could no longer see very well. However, she was as lively as a little girl, quick to smile and laugh. She opened her arms wide when she saw us, her coal-black eyes sparkling with happiness.
“How are you, my child?” she asked Gunilla in dazzling Greek.
“Kala, poli kala,” Gunilla replied. Good, very good.
“You speak Greek well, my daughter!” my aunt rejoiced. She was also very taken with my wife’s appearance and pretended to spit three times to keep away the evil eye.
My reception, however, was significantly more critical.
“You are too thin, my precious,” she said. “You must eat!”
She was eager to prepare a light meal, but we refused with determination and settled for going out onto the terrace to watch the sun setting slowly over the valley. The shadows grew longer and longer until the sun disappeared behind the high mountains in the distance, leaving only a shimmer of pink and blue.
I thought about the battle of Molai between the resistance fighters and the Germans, although I didn’t understand its significance back then. I was just over five years old in December 1943. I saw men edging slowly toward the village, stopping from time to time to fire off a salvo.
That was all I remembered. Everything else had disappeared. I remembered my maternal grandparents, but these sparse memories seemed to belong to someone else. It wasn’t me standing on this terrace, but what was left of me.
My aunt was a lovely old tree, aging as it grew.
The emigration that had begun seventy years ago when I left my village to move to Athens, and continued when I arrived in Sweden, was still going on. This time I was emigrating from myself. I was gradually becoming someone else.
I didn’t count before I left Greece. I was no one, but I was me. The family philosopher, my mother’s son, the local football team’s outside left, the pupil who wrote the best essays. All this was lost in the wind, or on a train heading for somewhere else.
Who or what would restore me to myself?
I looked around over and over again, hoping that something would awaken within me, some aspect of all those things I remembered, but it felt as if I were watching a grainy old film. My memories had lost their strength. That was why it was no longer possible to write. I was empty inside, like an old walnut. It looked whole and healthy, but the flesh within had shriveled until it had no nutritional value.
We didn’t stay long with Aunt Argiro and she didn’t get the opportunity to feed us, but she made sure she seized the chance to remind me once again that I was too thin. To be on the safe side, she also told my wife that she must make sure that I ate a little more.
We returned to the hotel at about six o’clock. Gunilla felt the need to go down to the sea and wanted to swim. We walked along the shore, and I watched as she entered the water at a leisurely pace and began to swim, without dipping her head beneath the waves. I have never seen her emerge from the water with wet hair. I went in to keep her company, but I dipped my head over and over again in the hope of waking from my lethargy.
It didn’t work.
It was September 26, the night of the supermoon, if you remember that. The performance was due to begin in the village’s small amphitheater at eight thirty. It was already busy when we got there, and more people were arriving all the time.
I felt as if I were witnessing a requiem mass dedicated to me. The moon up in the sky kept on growing.
The mayor gave a speech, as did the cultural representative for the area. Finally our hostess spoke—the director of the performance and the school principal, Olympia Lampoussi.
I saw them, I heard them, they were wonderful people, but what was it they were talking about? Was it me? Was I dreaming while still awake?
Then the lights went out, except on the stage and in the sky. A drum in the background provided the rhythm for the teenagers who appeared dressed in the silvery darkness of the star-studded night, their costumes glowing faintly and making them look both ceremonial and ethereal.
This was the chorus. I got goose bumps as soon as they uttered the opening words.
While o’er the fields of Greece the embattled troops
Of Persia march with delegated sway,
We o’er their rich and gold-abounding seats
Hold faithful our firm guard…
So Aeschylus began, speaking directly to us. We were not an audience; we were a part of the play.
The young actors knew what they were talking about. I have seen famous people playing classical tragedy and failing to connect with either the words or the audience. But these young voices could do it. I gave myself up to them, to the words of Aeschylus, and my heart almost burst with pride.
Was there anywhere else in the world where high school students performed Aeschylus? Was there?
The moon was now so huge and so close that it looked as if it were holding on to the sky with its teeth. Then all of a sudden there was a power outage.
Who switched off the moon? This absurd question came into my mind.
There was a brief pause, the power came back on, the play continued. That’s exactly what used to happen in my childhood. The power came and went all night long. Life paused, then continued after a few minutes.
That was how it felt on this occasion too, as if life were starting again from the beginning. Aeschylus’s word
s fell like cooling rain on parched earth.
This language was my language.
I was perspiring heavily, with large beads of sweat shining on my forehead, and Gunilla whispered in my ear, “Take off your jacket.”
“There’s no need. It’s cool in Greek.”
The performance was a triumph. The audience applauded loudly and for a long time, particularly because it was made up of the parents and relatives of those involved. I don’t say this with the intention of devaluing their enthusiasm; the performance was quite simply very, very good.
I had to make a short speech of thanks, but I was so moved, my legs were shaking. I stumbled and was in danger of making a rather more spectacular entrance than I would have wished, but one of the teachers took me by the arm, and eventually I was standing on the stage in front of everyone like a shipwrecked sailor, finding it difficult to breathe. I knew that Gunilla was on her feet like the rest of the audience, I looked for her but couldn’t find her, the young actors surrounded me with glowing, bottomless eyes that I will never forget, they had brought copies of my books for me to sign, I exchanged a few words with each one of them.
The evening was further enhanced by the dinner that took place beneath the open sky, with the usual cascade of small dishes.
I was seated a short distance away from Gunilla, and I glanced at her from time to time to see if she was enjoying herself. It was better than that. She was having the time of her life. The young fair-haired English teacher who had visited our hotel room was there to help once more, which reassured me.
We sat there until long after midnight. A very kind married couple who were both physicians drove us back to our hotel. The husband had the same problem as me, with the same result. He was trying to give up smoking. Without success.
The following morning I was up early and was surprised by a storm. The wind was blowing, the sea was rough. Dark clouds in the sky. Then came a downpour, almost passionate in its intensity.
The weather wasn’t going to affect my plans. I went down to the hotel restaurant where guests could make themselves a cup of instant coffee. I sat down at a table. My pulse rate must have been somewhere in the region of one eighty, my heart was pounding like a jackhammer.
I opened the computer, changed the language from Swedish to Greek, and waited for the first word. The waves were getting higher and higher, and the rain was rattling against the windowpane. I waited. Nothing happened. I tried to think in Greek, but that didn’t help. Swedish was the language in which I had written all my books.
I switched back to Swedish, but nothing was going on in my brain. I had gathered so many impressions during this trip, made so many notes, but everything felt lifeless, stone dead.
I sat there for almost an hour without writing a single word. I was caught between my two languages like Buridan’s famous donkey, who died of both hunger and thirst because it couldn’t decide whether to eat or drink.
I hadn’t said anything to Gunilla. She was unaware of my plans to write in Greek. I didn’t want to tell anyone. I feared the self-evident objections. How could I possibly write in a language I hadn’t used in a literary context since the age of twenty?
I had heard all this when I started writing in Swedish. How could I possibly write in a language that wasn’t mine? But I did.
I went back to Greek and waited. Gunilla came down a while later, we had breakfast together. The weather had dampened her spirits a little, but she took a practical view of the rain.
“I’m sure it’s needed,” she said, and wanted to know what I was doing on the computer at such an early hour.
“I was playing chess.”
She knew I was lying but said nothing. Instead she took out a pile of the postcards she’d bought and started writing, as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
For heaven’s sake, I’m going to do the same thing! I thought. I opened the computer once more, thought about a dear friend in Sweden, and set to work.
It was a difficult time. After the very first word I was aware of an incomprehensible sweetness in my mouth, as if I had eaten honey. Sweetness and relief.
I wasn’t writing. I was speaking. One word joined the next like small siblings. I wasn’t afraid of making mistakes, even though I knew I would. This was my language. It didn’t impose itself upon me, it wasn’t necessary to change my tone of voice.
In Swedish, which I loved and will always love, I had never reached this immediacy, this sense of restfulness. I probably never would. The language was a crown of thorns upon my head, not a heartbeat. The result was neither better nor worse, it was simply different. Would it be possible to marry my two languages together?
I rewrote the first sentence in Swedish, trying to be completely faithful to the original Greek.
It couldn’t be done. In order to be anywhere near good in Swedish, it had to be changed. Not completely and not too much, but the world of one language was different from the other. So was the rhythm. And the idea of time, the sense of timing. But mainly the rhythm. Swedish flowed along one inlet, Greek along another.
The conclusion is simple. Each language is unique. You can’t write the same book in two different languages. You write a book that resembles the one you’ve already written.
That’s all.
You can say what is to be said in every language in the world.
You can also say nothing about it.
Or talk about something else.
The latter is best done in your mother tongue.
The following day we went home to Sweden, but this time I was not an immigrant. I thought about the migrating bird flying all alone across the Gotland sky; it had lost its flock but not the direction in which it had to travel. The reverse was true of me. I hadn’t lost my flock, but I had lost the direction.
It was restored to me by the words of Aeschylus, by those boys and girls and their teacher, Olympia Lampoussi.
This short book—the first I have written in Greek in more than fifty years—is my belated thanks to them for taking me back to my language, the only homeland I had, and one that would never let me down.
Not only did they show me an almost unbearable appreciation, which became my salvation, they also saved that which could be saved.
So what did it matter where in the world I would spend my life?
Huddinge, February 28, 2016
Theodor Kallifatides
THEODOR KALLIFATIDES has published more than forty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that have been translated around the world. Born in Greece in 1938, Kallifatides immigrated in 1964 to Sweden, where he began his literary career. As a translator, he has brought August Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman to Greek readers, and Giannis Ritsos and Mikis Theodorakis to Swedish ones. He has received numerous awards for his work in both Greece and Sweden. He lives in Sweden.
MARLAINE DELARGY is best known for her translations of the work of Henning Mankell, John Ajvide Lindqvist, and Kristina Ohlsson. She is also the translator of Therese Bohman’s Eventide, The Other Woman, and Drowned (Other Press). She serves on the editorial board of the Swedish Book Review. She lives in Shropshire, England.
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Another Life Page 9