CHAPTER 2
Senitsa is a small village that lies across the valley from Margariti in the northern mountains of Epirus, south of the Albanian border. This was where Chevi was born to Anastasia and John Lykas in 1926.
Young Anastasia slid in and out of consciousness as she lay on the damp mat in the corner of the tiny room. The midwife at her side tried to prop her up, to create a more effective birthing position by pushing a rolled woolen blanket to the small of her back.
“Leave that now. It does no good.” Anastasia’s mother-in-law, Vasiliki, spoke to the midwife as she brushed the matted hair from her nifi’s face. “Put your weight behind her.”
The midwife pushed Anastasia’s shoulders, getting her halfway between reclined and sitting, “Up you go, child.” She slid her body behind the girl, and looked at Vasiliki,
“When the next one comes, you push down here.” She pointed to the space between the girl’s breast and the mound of her belly. “The little one needs help.”
Their voices, like the hollow wind pushing into the emptiness of a cave, barely reached young Anastasia through the haze. She stared at the wooden slats of the ceiling and floated upward, toward them, vaguely aware of the flies buzzing somewhere in the small spaces of the room. The ancient beams swallowed her. Slowly. Up. And then she was home. Her mother’s hair. The scent of rosemary and thyme. Sweet melodies from her sister, stirring by the fire—then pain, sharp and cutting, and she was back in the house of her husband—someone was pulling her body apart. She was lost in the stupor of half sleep from the exhaustion that comes from hours of labor.
“Push!”
The older women tried to help the young girl, but she lay staring at the wood above, growing quieter. Her face contorted in intervals of pain, her body rising with each convulsive movement. And just as it was decided that she would be unable to help anymore with the child’s delivery, the infant emerged from between her bloodied thighs—first the head, gently rotating in the hands of Vasiliki, then the shoulders and then she was there. Baby Chevi. She took her first breath in the arms of her yiayia—her grandmother. And Yiayia Vasiliki, wiping the infant with a clean cloth, felt a flood of relief with the baby’s first cry, signaling a living child. John heard that cry and bolted into the room to greet his newborn son, the man’s red hair falling into his eyes as he swung around to get a look.
“A girl,” he sighed. Then he turned and left the room.
Chevi’s young mother never quite regained her strength. She lingered for a few months until she finally found rest in the Senitsa cemetery. Her parents blamed John for their daughter’s death and never came to see the child. Chevi would not know anything of her mother’s family until she was an adult and became acquainted with some of her mother's cousins shortly before her wedding day. And so it was Yiayia Vasiliki who took over as caregiver to her new granddaughter while John went about the task of finding a new wife, preferably one who could give him sons.
Wife number two gave birth to Chevi’s little sister, Ioanna a few years later and was buried along side Anastasia before Chevi’s second birthday, leaving John’s mother with one more little girl to look after. Wife number three came a few years later from behind the far off mountains. Her brothers brought her, traveling all day with her belongings on the back of a donkey, delivering her to her husband’s village, as was customary. She was but a child, leaving behind the faces, smells, customs of her own isolated home, and it was not easy, but she knew what was expected.
Days after the wedding, the new nifi fought the edges of the mountain path to find the village water. The old women at the well, eyed her carefully and whispered of a family curse. They spoke about it in hushed voices—with a pretense of secrecy, something that had no existence in any small village—and they knew she heard.
“Someone’s jealousy has brought the evil eye . . .”
“and now his children are destined to be motherless.”
“Shhh . . .”
The young bride filled her wooden container slowly with the cold water. More whispers and sympathetic looks and with three fingers together, the others touched their foreheads and chests, making the sign of the cross as she passed nearby. And as she walked along the gravel path near the graveyard, afraid to breathe, to move her eyes in its direction, the raised stone markers seemed to grow ever larger as a paralyzing fear gripped her and she realized what she needed to do.
Later, the old crones croaked, “po po po,” shaking their heads under their black scarves. “A married daughter returning to her father’s home! Such a disgrace on the families. She is ruined.”
And so John, accepting his fate: two daughters to raise, and only his tired mother to help, took his usual course of action for solving problems that plagued him. He went to the taverna to discuss it with the other men, over a glass of milky white ouzo and water.
At the same time, Yiayia Vasiliki climbed the path to the church to light a candle, two little girls trailing behind her.
“Virgin Mary, help me,” she whispered between taxing breaths, one hand holding a thick branch like the staff of a shepherd pressing it into the earth, helping her up the incline—each step threatened by rocks jutting from the dusty path.
The grey stones of the church sat with authority beside an overflowing almond tree. From the rocky ridge, it overlooked small walls of stone and tiled roofs—the houses that dotted the mountain side. A small square plateau below, formed from cobblestones that were worn to shiny plates by the feet of many generations, held the village water in a large round well, protected by a wooden cover. And far below that, the naked valley was crisscrossed with shades of brown, waiting patiently for the rain clouds that circled the mountain tops, but seemed to always neglect the valley. The cursed land, some called it.
Mirrored on the opposite mountain, across the brown expanse, sat Senitsa’s sister—Margariti—the stately village with a town hall, a school, a medical center, a police station and a main road passing by, taking with it the young men in search of work to sustain the lives of their loved ones, who waited with impatience for evidence of their success.
For little Chevi, looking out across that sun-burnt valley, Margariti was a village that could be visited instantly with her eyes but as she would later learn, forty minutes by foot and twenty, when she found the short-cuts. And, this was the valley—her valley—in the arms of these two villages, that formed the broken cocoon where she would live out her life, never to grow wings, never to fly.
Yiayia Vasiliki taught her girls all she knew about the mountain plants—the fruit that looked like small apples but were poisonous and could kill you with one bite, the leaf that could be pulverized to stop an itch. She knew what could be boiled for headaches, for monthly cramps, and the black seeds of the poppy that could be put into tea to make a person sleep for three days.
And she showed them—as soon as their tiny fingers could grip the wooden dowel—the smooth rotating movements for pressing the dough into thin paper for the pies.
“Sprinkle a little more flour; don’t let it rip.”
And collecting the olives, “We’ll press them into oil and use the old oil to make soap.”
“And never leave any behind. Pick every olive, every bean, every onion, every fig”. . . as insurance against the hungry times. Then she showed them how to preserve: to tie the onions and garlic in a braid and hang them from the ceiling with the figs and pomegranates, olives in salt water, corn pulled from the husk and stored in sacks with wheat and beans in the cellar—the room dug into the earth in the back of the house.
She showed the girls how to tie a bundle of wood, to sling it onto their backs and to walk stooped over, making their backs flat, like a cart, and with time their spines would grow accustomed to it and straightening to stand would be with effort.
School was not necessary. The girls’ labor was needed elsewhere, but Father Lou, pestered the villagers to enroll their children, even the girls. John met the subject with indifference. As lon
g as he felt neither hunger nor thirst, and his clothes seemed to be clean, his winter nights alit with the warmth of the collected wood in the fire, he did not look past the top of his ouzo glass. But Yiayia Vasiliki was different. She was quietly aggressive in her efforts with Chevi and school—and one might assume that this old woman, having endured an arduous life, illiterate, uneducated, controlled in every aspect by the men around her, would be first in line to register her granddaughters with the hope of their breaking free of the village yoke, but such an assumption would only be made by a person who had never lived in that time or place, as she used every bit of her intelligence and cunning to avoid the priest for quite some time and then to articulate long and unlikely scenarios—that one might call lies—as to why her son had not come to register Chevi yet.
“Oh, John is tending to the sheep, on the mountain,” she’d say, knowing he never had nor ever would have animals, or “Chevi is visiting my sister in Paramithia,” when Chevi was not far behind her on the path and Yiayia had no living sister. But the priest was accustomed to being put off this way. Apparently, it was proper village etiquette to make an excuse that was obviously false, in order to achieve a goal, but to also—at all cost—avoid the unacceptable behavior of hurting one’s feelings because, after all, in a small village, the occupants would be living close together for a long time. Better to be talked about for a flimsy excuse than for cruel behavior. So, for example: if one were to have an unwanted guest whose stay appeared to be for an undefined amount of time, the more appropriate response to such a situation would be to say something like, “I’m sorry you’ll have to stay in the goat shed (knowing this would create the hoped-for result) because the priest needs his brother to stay here for a while,” rather than saying, “your digestive habits are making me sick and you’ve been here a month already; take a hike.” And mind you, there is a chance that the visitor would actually move to the goat shed and see that no guest arrives, but the house would be rid of him and he would not mention it. Goal achieved—village etiquette intact.
So Yiayia Vasiliki did her best to keep Chevi free from the shackles of this façade called school. She was of the opinion that having Chevi sit in a two room school house wasting time with fifty other children of all ages, would only give the appearance of being educated because she suspected very little learning actually occurred there, which in turn would limit her granddaughter’s ability to find a husband. And, besides that, in all likelihood Chevi—because of her old age of ten—would be used to assist the teacher with the unruly smaller children, most of whom had never sat quietly in a chair with a writing tablet or a pencil. But eventually, Father Lou got most of the signatures that he needed by buying a round of drinks at the taverna and Chevi found herself sitting uncomfortably among the first graders in a corner of the school house.
“Chevi Lykas, read this page before the wolves come down from the mountains and eat you.”
The teacher was a man, who in her aged memory was as tall as the ceiling, with a voice that boomed like thunder, and with small black weasel-like eyes embedded in a head as hairless as a turtle’s shell. He was a man who found it easy and comfortable to use her for creating light moments of fun in the classroom. And the other children laughed as she stared at the lines that were supposed to be words. But it was Greek and she only knew Albanetika, the village dialect—but not its writing.
She endured one full year like this until Uncle Spyros came to rescue her.
CHAPTER 3
On that first visit, I had expected Margariti to be a quiet place because I’d heard it said—though I’m not sure where—that the countryside is peaceful. But this is completely untrue. The cacophony of insect songs intermingled with random outbursts from farm animals like chickens, roosters, donkeys, horses, sheep, and goats, which were kept in yards like family pets. And those animals competed with the clacking sounds of the storks’ beaks and the varying pitches of different birds that sailed through the air while a variety of other wildlife screeched and cawed. Eventually they would all become an unnoticed buzz in my daily routine, as familiarity weaved its veil, but in those first days, they mixing together to produce one unending noise at a volume only a newcomer would notice.
As it turns out, roosters will often announce the onset of morning long before light peaks into the valley. And though I had naively believed owls to produce a short melodic “hoot – hoot,” Margariti’s owls were actually more like a woman’s blood-curdling scream. That screech would pull me from my sleep—heart pounding and eyes wide.
“No one is being murdered . . . go back to sleep,” Nick would say after being roused by an elbow in the side.
The sheep were different. They sounded like an old man’s deep and throaty well-articulated “baa. . . baa”—so much so, that I had to see their mouth movements synchronized with that sound, before I would believe that some older man was not outside the window making sheep noises.
“That’s how they sound,” Nick chuckled and shook his head—watching me as I stood with my hands on my hips, eyes squinted, looking out the window, studying a dozen sheep in the fading summer light.
“She never had animals when we were growing up.” He joined me at the window.
We were looking at Chevi’s sheep. Every morning she walked them to the farm, stayed with them while they grazed, milked them, and then returned them in the evening to the yard next to the house. She turned their milk into fresh cheese and yogurt. In later years, she would trade them for goats that she would keep in a goat shed on the farm, but still in her eighties, she would continue the routine. None of her children would end up living in the village—an unusual circumstance in that culture—so she would tend to her animals, and they, with their never-ending needs, would provide her with a sense of purpose and freedom.
But that year, her eldest son and her American nifi, not yet having become parents, still children, ourselves, did not understand this need. So, the sheep with the constant barrage of flies that accompanied them, resided outside our bedroom window and in the morning, quite early, as the storks in their precariously placed nests, loudly clacked their beaks in greeting, we would groan as Chevi called her sheep together and led them away to the farm.
With the mountains picked clean of any buffering trees, the sound waves traveled unobstructed for miles, and any happenings within the valley, sounded like they were occurring in the next room. But, those obstacles to a good night’s sleep always disappeared during the midday siesta, when even the birds did not stir in the heat. So, on non-beach days—usually the weekends—as the afternoon breeze rolled off the mountains and anesthetized the village, I found myself nodding off to sleep, a quiet respite from the village-time-anxiety I seemed powerless to free myself from.
On the weekends, guests arrived all day and all evening. Some stopped by for coffee. Others came for a meal which would be cooked in one of the two fournos. The word fourno means oven, but these ovens were unlike any that I had ever seen. They were large hollow domes of cement with a small opening in the front that was loaded with wood. The wood would burn until it produced the coals for heat and then the food would be roasted or baked. There was one fourno on a small roofless platform upstairs, outside the only room left undamaged from the past fire. The other fourno was behind the house, sheltered by a dilapidated shack. Neither fourno, however, would be used to cook the sheep. Yes, Chevi loved her lambs, but as she would say, "food is food!" So, one of their skinless torsos would be affixed to a spit and hand-turned over hot coals in the yard by volunteers, the blaze of the burning wood, hours before, adding to the intense heat of the day.
There was a mix of friends and family, most of whom I would recognize in later years in the old photos of those gatherings, but at that time, I really wasn’t sure who was who. It seemed like Nick had hundreds of relatives. I remember the familiar faces of Nick’s sisters, including Vaso with her husband, Christos from Igoumenitsa. And I clearly remember Aunt Evangelini. She was one of Chevi’s cousins who
came with her husband, Thanasi, to every gathering. She and Chevi seemed to be the best of friends, always laughing and talking in the local dialect. She was a sweet older woman, dressed in the customary black garb: dress, stockings, apron, head scarf. I wondered how they survived in the heat. Her sunbaked face, so innocent, and yet whenever she could, she questioned me about my lack of children when I had already been married one full year. The absence of a mutual language between us did not discourage her, for she seemed to know two English words.
“No baby?” She pointed at me and then Nick and then clasped her hands into a praying position and laid her cheek on them and feigned sleep. My face burned red as I understood what she was asking, but even in English, I had no words. She misread my questioning eyes and continued to pantomime, gyrating forward and back with her hips, saying “Niko. . . Niko,” and pointing at me. The other women, though overcome with laughter, seemed to be reprimanding her but Evangelini, a woman barely four feet in height and with an angelic cherub-face, just smiled as she continued her line of questioning.
There was also an older man with no legs, being pushed in a wheelchair. Nick’s explanation was vague as to what disease had taken them. But the others wheeled him around on the rocky dirt. It was a terrain that might have discouraged many full bodied seniors, though it did not seem to deter him. Always smiling, he seemed to enjoy the company around him tremendously. It wasn’t until years later, looking back on those photos, that I realized it was Uncle Spyros and then, knowing his story, I understood his lust for that day, being attended to by the family he had longed for in his youth.
CHAPTER 4
The Nifi Page 2