“Wife,” his hot breath filled the space between them as his hands, like thorns, felt the warmth of her neck, then slid over her night dress, stopping at her breast.
“No,” she whispered. He pushed her against the mat, the back of her head slid from the top and rested on the stone floor.
He fumbled with her night dress, tangled his hands, lost in the bulkiness of the cloth. Pulling, tugging, twisting, he found an opening at the bottom and slid his hands up her legs, the garment folding upward to her waist like an accordion without air. Instinctively, she pushed him with both hands and slid further off the mat. He grabbed one wrist and held her down. His body pressed her back into the straw. She tasted salt as his mouth pushed against hers. With her free hand she grabbed at his face.
“Stop it!” He hissed. “You are my wife.”
She understood. She obeyed and laid as still as a stone. His breathing became faster with heavy gasps roaring in her ear.
“I’m dying,” she thought as the heaviness of his body pressed the air from her lungs, and a hard bulk moved across her thigh. He pulled her legs apart. Then, there was pain. Her back pressed hard into the straw. He split her in half and filled her with his venom. Then it was over. Tomas’ breathing became shallow and Chevi heard a soft snore escape. In the dim light of the room she stared at the moon's reflection off the far wall. She slid from the bed and went to her washing bowl, dipped the ends of a cloth into it and washed the blood away with the cool water. She turned and watched her husband sleep, his chest rising and falling, peacefully.
“I’m his property, now,” she whispered. And she entertained thoughts of murder.
In the morning, the sun broke through the shutters with stripes of light across the floor. The smoky scent from the cooking fires hung in the air and mixed with the mist. Tomas sat alone on the sleeping mat—his bed.
“I’m a married man,” he pondered. He was amused by the wonder of it. His food would be presented to him. His needs would be met. He would have sons for the hard labor of life in the village. A smile broke across his lips. He got up, dressed, and went to the kitchen.
Chevi had been preparing his coffee. As he entered, she quickly swept away bits of grated root laying in crumbled pieces near the coffee pot. She did not meet his gaze as she handed him his morning coffee, her heart hammering in her ears. She held her breath as he took it and eyed him cautiously from across the room as he sipped it slowly.
Abruptly, he put the cup down on the table, his mouth twisted, his nose crinkled.
“I’m going into town,” he said.
Then, he rose and walked out. The cup was almost full. He’d barely had any. Chevi quickly poured it into the fireplace and watched as the guilty brown liquid seeped into the ashes. In a flood of relief, she realized she was not a murderess. Months later, when Thitsa came to visit, and grated pieces of a familiar root into a cup of tea to relieve her constipation, Chevi realized that, not only was she not a murderess, she also had not listened carefully enough to yiayia over the years when she explained the medicinal properties of their mountainside and the worst she might have caused Tomas that morning, was a bout of diarrhea.
Tomas spent most of that day at the café in town, being cajoled by the other men and complaining to anyone who would listen about the bitter coffee his new wife made.
Chevi spent the day doing the back-breaking work that was expected of her—collecting water from the well and wood from the mountainside and hauling it up the steep incline to the house for cleaning and cooking. On Saturday, she would load the laundry into a barrel, hoist it onto her back and hike to the spring near the church to do the wash. And now, with Tomas, there was an additional person, more work. She kneaded the ache in her thighs and worried about this new torment that had come with marriage. She rested briefly in the shade of a fig tree. There among the weeds rose the tall dry bulbs of the poppies. She eyed one for a moment, contemplating. Then, she bent and collected a handful of its black seeds. Staring at them in her hand, she wondered, “Were these the same as those yiayia had boiled for father when he was overcome by the dark sickness and needed to sleep?”
How many would she need? She let them fall into her apron pocket.
That evening, she brought her father some tea.
“Tea for you also, Tomas.” She spoke to him in his Greek language as best she could and those were the first words she had spoken to him since their awkward dance with the wood, months before, when he had come to talk to John about his daughter.
“Well,” thought Tomas, “she’s finally warming up to me” and he congratulated himself on his skillful lovemaking which could be the only reason for her sudden thaw. No doubt, the evening chill reminded her of what marvels he had to offer her in the secrecy of the dark.
Chevi put the tray of tea on the table in front of the men. “This is yours, husband.” She handed him a cup. She moved to the back of the room slowly, watching. The two men conversed about the days events. Chevi observed Tomas closely. He yawned. His eyelids drooped a bit. He smoothed his mustache and passed gas.
Crash!
Her father’s cup fell to the floor as he slumped forward in his chair, snoring loudly.
“My goodness, that old man falls asleep fast,” thought Tomas.
“Oh no,” Chevi exhaled.
“It’s okay; I’ll put him in his bed.” Tomas heaped the limp body over his shoulder and walked to the bedroom.
In a panic, Chevi rushed to her bedroom, put on several protective layers of bed clothing and laid on the mat. She closed her eyes and feigned sleep, wondering how many hours it would be until her father awoke.
Tomas entered the room. He tilted his chin, scratched his head and looked quizzically at the motionless lump in the bed. Perplexed at the speed at which this family seemed to fall asleep, he went outside to smoke a cigarette in the moonlight.
Chevi had not thought her plan through very well. She had only hoped for her second married night to be a peaceful one. Now she lay in bed far earlier than she had expected to be there, damp with sweat from the layers on her. She needed to relieve herself of her evening tea, and her nervousness did not help matters. She heard Tomas humming to himself, as he entered the house again. She would not be able to sneak by him. Through the wall, she heard the even tremors of her father’s deep slumber. Her worry deepened with every passing minute. She thought about wetting the bed. Surely, that would take care of all her worries. Tomas would be appalled and stay away from her and she would have the relief that she was growing desperate for. In the end, she thought better of it. She could not predict how he would react and she might end up more uncomfortable than ever.
She got out of the bed, her hair matted with sweat. She lifted a night shirt over her head, then another, and another. The shuffle of footsteps on the floor startled her and as she turned, pulling her head from the cloth, she stood face to face with Tomas, a wide grin on his lips. He said something about his tool. She did not understand.
“Perhaps he was going to build a tool shed as father had suggested during dinner,” she thought. He certainly seemed pleased with the idea.
“I’m going to pee,” Chevi said and swept past him, disappearing behind the bathroom door.
Tomas went to the sleeping mat and waited. He heard the splash of water as it was poured from the bucket, flushing over the waste hole, but the door remained closed.
Chevi, turned the empty bucket over and sat on it. The cool air bit through the thin cloth and she thought about the warm layers she had just shed. She waited. Perhaps he would fall asleep. When she felt a reasonable amount of time had elapsed, she opened the bathroom door. Except for the soft snores from the two bedrooms, it was quiet. She tiptoed to the sitting area near the fire and lay down near the dying flame, pulling the discarded night clothes from the floor and wrapping them around her like a bed sheet. Then she tried to sleep, Tomas breathing softly on the sleeping mat beside her. He had waited for Chevi. It was obvious to him that she was excited a
bout having him a second time, which was not surprising at all, as he knew he was a great masculine specimen. But she had taken so long and the bed was so soft . . . and warm.
As it turned out, Chevi did not have to endure his body on hers every night as she had mistakenly believed. If she added some wine to dinner and some ouzo afterwards, she could usually have a peaceful slumber with only the occasional snorts and gargles of his snoring to interrupt her dreams. On the nights that he insisted on his husband entitlements, she found, quite by accident, that if she concentrated on something intently, like planning her day at the market or arranging the vegetables on the farm, she barely knew he was there.
One night, he had come to her stinking of a familiar odor. It filled the bedroom. He rolled on top of her and began his usual pawing and pushing.
Chevi thought, “what is that smell?” and with furrowed eyebrows, biting her bottom lip, she closed her eyes and tried with intensity to identify it.
“Chives?” she thought.
With a brief glance at his wife’s face, Tomas was secure in his role as master. Bump, bump, thud, the straw mat hit the wall.
“Dill?” she wondered.
Groans from Tomas.
“Garlic?”
Grunt, grunt.
“White onions?”
Gasp, heavy sigh.
“Cabbage!” she thought confidently. “Yes, that’s it.”
Tomas rolled off of his wife, farted loudly, and was asleep in seconds.
“Cabbage,” thought Chevi as she drifted to sleep, “that reminds me . . . I want to give some cabbage to cousin Evangelini for her goats.”
* * * *
The cool air of January signaled the season for picking the olives. Chevi, with a swollen belly, awaited the birth of her first child. Tomas had some urgent business at the village café so she and her father, taking some bread and goat cheese wrapped in a cloth, walked through the valley to their olive grove to unfold the black nets under the olive trees. They hit the branches with sticks, encouraging the little black spheres to fall to the nets. After the olives were collected, John would take some to Dimi at the mill to be turned into oil—the ingredient that was poured thick into all recipes like broth in soup. It was the mother’s milk of the mountain that kept them alive when the fields yielded little. Yiayia Vasiliki and Chevi would store some olives in vinegar and water with sliced lemons to be eaten later and some would be sold at the market with eggs from the chickens and the snails collected after the rains.
On market day, Chevi would go to the seaside village of Parga to sell her wares with the hope of selling enough to return with some needed household items and a few extra drachmas. She went with her cousin, Evangelini. During those cool months, Chevi wrapped herself tightly with her black shawl as she rose before dawn to load the donkey with the goods. Then she and her cousin walked behind the animal, crossing the valley, through Senitsa and over the mountain to Parga. The women arrived in the marketplace before noon and greeted the other women as they set out their wares. They passed their time gossiping with the others from Senitsa.
“Mitsos’ dog bit the man who sells cloth. That dog should be brought to the farm and tied up. It is too vicious to be inside the village.”
“Yes! That nasty animal scares the devil out of anyone who passes by. He should bring it to the mountain where his goats are.”
“He should shoot the ugly mutt.”
“That cloth man has a dark heart so the dog bit him; dogs know. It’s their nature.”
“Yes.” said Chevi, thinking about some vicious dogs that had determined her worth once and she said, “Let me tell you about some sheep dogs.”
The other women waited. They knew that Chevi was always good for a story and it helped pass the time.
Chevi continued, “Before I was to marry Tomas, he took me to his village, to meet his family. We went by foot and first it took one full day to get to Kanali—you know, that town near the river?”
Chevi did not wait for answers, “I have a cousin there. We stayed there that night and the next morning we started out again for his village. We walked and walked and I asked him, ‘Tomas where is your village?’ and he said ‘it’s just over that mountain.’ So we walked more. We stopped for water and we ate some bread and cheese that my cousin had given us and we started out again and I said, ‘Tomas where is your village?’ and again he said, ‘it’s just over that mountain.’ Oh my I had no idea. He was not a person to tell me things straight. We walked for a full day more over so many mountains, and finally we got there and I was so nervous. It was so high up and the houses were on steep paths so one house looked like it was on top of another. The neighbor woman saw me and she told me ‘you’re marrying into the worst family. Your father-in-law is a nice man but his wife is bad.’ And she told me not to say anything because my mother-in-law would throw rocks down on her and try to kill her, so of course I did not say anything. And as soon as my mother-in-law saw me she told me to go get water from the well and collect some wood, so I did but I was so tired and then we sat and everyone talked and I knew that I had to be the last to go to sleep because I am the nifi—and one by one they went to sleep but my mother-in-law kept talking and I was so tired. My eyes kept trying to close but I would not let them. But I didn’t know—she had this problem that she always fell asleep for a few seconds and then woke up. It happened so fast and it happened many times over the hours that I sat with her but I didn’t see her do it. It kept her awake and she never felt tired and finally I couldn’t take it and I fell asleep. I couldn’t help it!”
Chevi let out a laugh.
“What about the dogs?” someone asked.
She continued, “Well, the next day, I went further up into the mountains with Tomas’ sisters to help with the sheep. My father-in-law said to me, ‘The sheep dogs will be there. If you are good, you can marry my son, but if you are bad, the dogs will know and they will eat you.’ Well, imagine that? I was terrified. I could hear those dogs barking when we were far from the pasture, long before we got to the sheep. They sounded like terrible beasts, much worse than Mitsos’ dog!”
She shook her head from side to side with the memory of it.
“As we got to the place with the sheep, they ran toward me with such angry growling faces. I was frozen to the ground. My legs were shaking and my teeth were going like this.”
She chattered her teeth together to demonstrate and then continued.
“I almost wet my pants. I was so scared. The dogs growled and barked and surrounded me, showing their teeth and they were pointy and slobbery and I was shaking so hard I could barely stand. But they didn’t bite me.”
Someone made a joke, “too bad Chevi—you had to marry Tomas!” and the women laughed.
“Chevi, of course, the dogs saw that you were a good woman.”
Chevi smiled.
And so the first few hours in the marketplace passed with the chatter of gossip and old stories. And with the morning sun peeking over the mountains, reflecting blue on the returning fishermen in the harbor, Chevi was loading the donkey with empty baskets, her goods all having been sold at a fair price. She returned to her space to help her cousin. And with Chevi’s help, Evangelini was next in loading her empty baskets, readying to leave. Her friends from Senitsa, kissing Chevi on both cheeks, wished her well, their next meeting always uncertain. But they, with the other women from the neighboring villages would stay a few more hours, watching the sun grow higher in the sky and when the shadows crept up the post office wall, their products also having been sold, they would be done. It always seemed to be that way.
“Chevi, how is it that you are always first to sell your goods, yet we all have the same?”
Chevi attributed it to the candle she lit every time she passed the church in Agia Kiriaki on her way to market. She did not realize, but the other women guessed, that the soft eyes beneath her black head scarf mesmerized the hearts of the buyers and they were drawn to her like lost children—buying her
eggs and snails before they noticed the faces of the other women.
* * * *
In March, little Nikolaos came into the world with a gentle wind whirling within the stone walls of the yard, brushing against the house and causing the empty branches of the pear tree to scratch at the roof tiles of the cooking room in the courtyard below. It had been a particularly rainy month, but on that evening, the moonlight washed over the mountainside
Tomas’s young sister, Vaia, had been visiting when the pains began. Yiayia Vasiliki was entertaining the two young women with stories of the village. Tomas had just returned from the village square and had fallen asleep near the fire. Chevi, feeling a rush of warm water soak the seat of her chair and a sudden crush against her pelvis, cried out with a wail that was barely recognizable as human. Panicked, she sank to the floor. This was the thing that killed young women; it had killed her mother and her sister’s mother. Yiayia Vasilliki could not stop the fear that spread across her granddaughter’s face, but she tried to soothe her.
“Turn onto your back, my child. It’s going to be okay.” She helped Vaia push the sleeping mat under Chevi.
“Brother! Wake up!” yelled Vaia
She could hardly believe Tomas continued to snore through such commotion. But Tomas only shifted his weight, turning to the side, the breathing of his deep slumber hissing from the corner of his mouth.
“Brother!” Vaia grabbed the poker from the fire.
Tomas was awakened from a splitting pain on the side of his head, his sister’s voice breaking through the haze. She stood above him, an iron rod in her hand.
“Go get the midwives!”
Chevi’s body convulsed with each cry that pulsed down the mountainside as Tomas took in the scene and ran from the room. Vaia returned to her nifi’s side with soothing words of encouragement.
After several hours, Chevi lay damp and exhausted. A screaming baby was brought to her breast. He was beautiful. Raw with pain, she brushed her face lightly in his wisps of white hair. For this, she decided, her marriage was bearable.
The Nifi Page 4