Just as the family sat to enjoy the meal, Tomas stumbled up the pathway calling for all to take the sweet caramellas he pulled from his pocket. Nikos ran to his father and was rewarded with a fuzzy round candy in his palm. He plucked the dust and loose tobacco from it, examined it carefully, then shrugged his shoulders and popped it in his mouth. It wasn’t often that he got to enjoy such a treat; defiled as it was, it was still deliciously sweet.
The men and children took their seats and were served. John cut the vasilopita and passed the chunks of bread around the table. With one bite, Tomas’ teeth hit a one cent coin. Plucking it from his mouth he sputtered, “Good luck for me! This year I will have another son!”
But ten months later when his second daughter arrived, he was not discouraged. He assured Chevi he would keep providing her with the seed for more sons, if she would just do her part; she must lie on her right side next time because that is what the men in the taverna had suggested, “and afterwards eat some zucchini with pepper.”
“If they are so wise,” thought Chevi, “why do they all have daughters?” She rolled her eyes and braced herself. “A fourth child?” She smiled. “Children are a blessing,” she thought, “but they need to eat.” Now with baby Eftihia on her back, little Vaso at her side, scaling the mountain with water several times a day was back-breaking, even with little Nikos trailing behind with a small water container. Cutting and collecting wood was even more challenging. Thankfully, she had Evangelini and Thanasi to help her, poor dears; they still hadn’t had a child.
* * * *
In late March, as Chevi seeded the field with corn, Vaso holding the seed bag, Nikos handing his mother the seeds and Eftihia tethered to a tree in the shade, toddling in the dirt, Tomas discussed some exciting news at the taverna. He had heard something about the government giving away free land. He had his eye on one particular piece, with a house and a farm down near the main road. It was one of the Muslim properties that had been claimed when they had fled. Some people, while living comfortably in a different location, had come and written their names on doors, claiming several different properties. The government had decided to send officials to the countryside to see which buildings were actually inhabited. Those that were not, were confiscated and put in a lottery for those who owned nothing, and since Tomas would not own their family house until John died, Tomas qualified. And since John was still relatively young and quite strong and healthy, Tomas was anxious to get away from him and become the master of his own home. So, he inquired at the Margariti town hall.
Fortunately for Tomas, his buddy Christos, who he often shared a bottle of ouzo with, was the cousin of one of the officials, and brother-in-law of another. When it came time to draw numbers, the number that Tomas drew turned out to be that property he had hoped for. What luck!
Mr. Prasinos in Senitsa, the former owner of that property, was livid. Before it was confiscated from him, he had hoped to build a house for his daughter and her husband from Margariti. She was already twelve years old and had been promised to the son of Mr. Ducas when he finished in the army, but that house had been part of the dowry and was no doubt expected. Mr. Prasinos did not know how he would remedy his situation, but he decided not to tell anyone about the bank loan that existed against the back rooms of that house.
With the news of a new home, Chevi allowed herself to breath in some hope. It had its own private well, it was closer to the main road and there would be much less hauling up the treacherous rocks to her father’s house. Also, her childhood friend, Cochina, had moved to Margariti with her husband and children and they were in the process of building a house right across the street from Tomas’ new one. To have the company of an old friend would be such a relief from the daily struggle.
On the day of the move, Chevi served her father coffee and then began rolling the thin dough for the last pies she would make in his kitchen. Yiayia Vasiliki had gone to live in Uncle Spyros’ house a few years before to help with his three children, but to also be close to that son who she had missed for so many years. But on the day of the move, she was there to help Chevi.
“My son, will you be okay living alone?”
“Yes, of course,” he replied, “I cannot stand to live under the same roof as that drunken fool!” He sneered at Tomas, watching him through the open window as he loaded blankets on the back of the donkey in the courtyard. He turned to Chevi, who was absorbed in thoughts of her new home.
“I will be fine here. Chevi, you are nearby so you will bring me my wood and water. Your grandmother is too busy for that now.”
Chevi and Yiayia Vasiliki exchanged a look. Both thought about the extra work Chevi would have with two houses and wondered about a possible attempt at finding John a new wife—his fourth.
John had been wondering the same thing. Weeks before, his attention had been pulled to his open gate to admire an unsuspecting, Agapi. She was aptly named, he thought, for her name meant love in the Greek language. Her soft yellow curls hung provocatively from her head scarf as she passed his house, her older brother protectively guiding her along the jagged stones. The pair had been passing there every afternoon for years, part of the scenery like the swallows that arched through the air. John only recently noticed her gradual change from a young girl to a woman. But of course, she was out of his reach. The villagers’ idle chatter about his lost wives and the rumors born from it—which continued to multiply over the passing years—meant her father would never allow such a union, but it was her image and those tufts of blond hair that propelled him as he and one of his buddies at the taverna discussed several possibilities of matrimony and with each empty glass of ouzo, their ideas became clearer and seemed more reasonable.
“First, you must find a woman of your taste and then steal her from her home, like Yianni the baker’s son, did,” said Kalofilos. “I have a horse you can use.”
What both men failed to realize was that Yianni had been stealing his woman from her father who had objected to their marriage, and that she loved Yianni as much as he loved her, and that she had been waiting for him with her possessions packed when he had come to take her. These facts were of no interest to either of them as they continued to plot. Kalofilos absently picked something from his teeth with the broken end of a matchstick, took a sip of ouzo, scratched his beard and looked off into the empty air, deep in thought with his own fantasy.
“Wait a minute, my friend.” A problem occurred to John. “How will I ride the horse and tie her up at the same time?”
They discussed several scenarios, each better than the one before and finally the men, believing they had ironed out the chinks in the plan, were ready for action—though it would have benefitted them both to ignore their impulses that night, wait a day, or at least until morning and upon sobering up, they might have seen the obvious lunacy of it all. But instead, Kalofilos staggered home, that being about sixty paces from the taverna and he returned with a rope hanging from his shoulder. John, a bottle of ouzo in one hand, grabbed the back of his friend’s neck with his other hand, kissed him on both cheeks and patted him on the back as a reward for his brilliance. Then they set out for Kalofilos' farm to find the horse.
They would have gotten there sooner but the path they took kept bringing them to the wrong farm. Cursing the town grass cutter, for he was the reason the path was awry, they began a long—and sometimes loud—discussion on how to improve the Greek government system, which had allowed such a buffoon to cut the weeds on the path; so inept was he, that they were now being kept from their important task at hand. By then, the moon was high above the mountain peaks, shining a light for them to see a horse tied to a nearby tree, as if Eros, himself, approved of their plan and was leading them to love. John hoisted himself atop the animal. And Kalofilos, tossing him the rope, realized how enormous John was, for his feet were almost touching the ground even though he sat high up on the animal’s back.
John raised one hand to catch the rope, the other hand tightly clutching the ou
zo bottle, but his attempt at catching it, landed him with a thud on the other side of the horse, his back thrown into the dry thistle, his feet stuck up toward the moon and the bottle of ouzo, unhurt, glistening in the night air, held up over his chest by his clenched fist.
“That was some throw, Kalofilos,” he said with admiration, as he struggled to his feet, the rope in disarray around his neck and his arms and over one shoulder, hanging and tripping his feet as he tried to steady his wobbling body. The startled animal let out a loud braying sound and in their drunken stupor, they did not notice that the animal John was climbing back up onto, was not actually a horse.
It has been said that the effect of ouzo on the brain distorts one’s sense of speed and time, so it is not surprising that John and Kalofilos believed themselves to have been transported with great speed by that proud stallion to the balcony of the beautiful and fair Agapi, whereas in reality, when Tomas, in his new house at the foot of the mountain, looked out over the valley that night as he sat on the make-shift toilet he had fashioned with cinder blocks in his indoor bathroom—a small closet-sized room on the second floor with a wide pipe leading to a ditch far below and an aptly-placed window to control unwanted smells—he saw the silhouette of a slow-moving donkey struggling along a moonlit path with two men on top, swaying up and down and occasionally falling to the ground.
“Drunken fools,” he thought as the donkey walked in circles.
John awoke the next afternoon on the floor of his bedroom, near his sleeping mat, with a fuzzy memory of the previous night’s events. Most of the villagers in the main square, however, had a clear rendition of those early morning hours and over the years, they kept it alive as it passed from one mouth to another, always with some embellishments as they had been awoken in the early hours of the morning by a commotion outside their windows. John Lykas was singing, “Agapi mou, Agapi mou,” which to the Greek villagers meant, “my love, my love.” Oh, the poor man missed his daughter they thought. He was extremely intoxicated, riding backwards on a donkey, entangled in a long green vine that wrapped around his neck and his arms and over one shoulder.
“Agapi mou, my love, I am here for you!” John had slid from the donkey, falling to the cobbled road, a new bruise added to his war-torn body that suffered from the night’s adventure. A sympathetic villager had braced his body against his own, helping him to stand. That man, a father himself of a three year old girl, imagined the pain of losing her when she left his house for marriage.
“It cannot be helped, John. You should be grateful she still lives in the same village,” he said gently as he led him through town, passing Kalofilos who was propped up against a tree, eyes closed, a whistling sound coming from his nose and a rooster on his lap, crowing with gusto to alert all in earshot that the sun was on its way. The two continued up the long path to John’s house where his neighbor’s wife, with a confused furrowing of her brow squinted across the narrow ravine that separated them, to see who was entering his gate so early as she started the morning cooking fire.
News reached Chevi as daylight broke over the mountain ridge. Chavana had been gathering wood from a pile near the front wall of her yard as Mihali passed by on his way to the pasture. He told Chavana how his mother had seen John being led, bruised and battered, through his gate just before dawn. Chavana listened intently and then ran off to share the news with Chevi—and anyone else she passed on her way to Chevi’s door.
John had to live with the humiliation of whichever story surfaced. In the clarity of soberness, without the haze of the ouzo—though he would later prefer that haze as life went on—he realized the stupidity of his plan but did not care to discuss it with anyone. Kalofilos seemed to agree.
So it was the matchmaker, who eventually found John his fourth wife. With a few drachmas and a brief description, a single man looking for a wife or a desperate family unable to find a husband for their not-so-desirable bride could usually close a deal. The matchmaker was a married man, himself with two sons and a daughter. One might wonder how such a successful businessman as he, could have failed so miserably with his own daughter some years later when she went off to Athens—a woman alone, unthinkable—and then returned to the village an entrepreneur in a business similar to that of her father’s in which she satisfied the needs of her customers, mostly random husbands of the village or an occasional traveler.
Before his thoughts brought him to Antonio, John laid low for a while, embarrassed by his escapade with Kalofilos, and he slowly accepting his limitations as a prospective husband. Then, when the whisper of the lefkes trees started to sound like a woman’s voice and when he mistook the singing of a bird for someone calling him to his gate, he decided to visit the matchmaker who then presented John with a possibility. Her name was Vaso, an older person like himself, from behind the mountain, in a village whose name is believed to have been derived from the Greek word for fairy tale: Paramithia. It was the place where forty-nine priests and teachers had been executed during the second Great War, the place that always got the rain while the Margaritans watched with thirst as the black clouds emptied into the distance, the place where, four decades later, desperate pleas to European Union officials, paired with a heated competition between officials from neighboring villages, would win its inhabitants the lucrative exit ramp from the Egnatia Highway, built with money from the EU, and lined with Paramithia’s gas stations and cafes. But for John, it was a place of real fairy tales because it was the place that brought him his fourth wife, the one he fell in love with: Vaso.
How old was Vaso? It could not definitively be determined, which was not an unusual circumstance, as many of the villagers of that time estimated their ages. Parents often delayed registering their newborns with the town hall for varying reasons. Some bore the child in the fields during harvest and preferred not to interrupt their reaping, others were on the mountains shepherding the sheep, and still others had just forgotten; it was not a priority. The child was alive and appeared healthy. Nothing more was needed. A visit to the registrar could be done on any subsequent trip into town. For many of the older people, most documents would have been destroyed in one of the several wars they endured, so birth dates were often an estimate. Celebrating an added year to one’s life was done on the saints’ days, so Vaso, short for Vasiliki, the female form of Vasilli, meaning Basil, was celebrated on the first of January every year, Saint Basil’s Day. And people estimated that Vaso had celebrated close to the same number as had John, so there it was agreed upon by those in the negotiations of the deal, that the two were close in age. But John had no pretenses. He estimated himself to be a man of about fifty eight and his only hope was for someone to soften the deafening silence of the house.
On the day of the wedding, there was an unremarkable ceremony where Father Lou blessed the union. John could not have imagined, and the villagers never guessed, the joy he would have with those next years of marriage. Chevi, her children at her side, came to the church to witness the union and to greet her new mother, the new nifi in town, her children’s new grandmother.
John’s bride, shrouded in the traditional black dress and black head scarf that was customary of the older women of that time, promised to love, honor and obey and then went home with her new husband to her new home, which had slowly descended into disarray the winter before. John, after having first contemplated collecting wood himself and then having dismissed the idea at the thought of the shame when others might see him doing women’s work, had removed the giant wooden gate and disassembled the wooden shed in the yard to keep himself warm when his wood pile had not been replenished quickly enough by Chevi.
Vaso removed her head scarf, her face softened by its removal, revealing a woman who appeared much younger than John had expected. He did not question his luck in getting this younger, attractive woman, nor did he wonder about her apparent commitment to him, her passionate lovemaking, the joy she brought to the home nor the love he felt for her as time pleasantly slipped by. So when t
he first outbreak of her disfiguring skin disease occurred, he was so thoroughly in love with her, he barely heard the whispers of the villagers around him or noticed how they had stopped inviting them to their houses or knew how, when they left the relatives’ homes, their plates and forks were thrown in the garbage and their seats were scrubbed with bleach.
It is hard to be different in a small village, and Margariti was no exception. Vaso’s skin ailment was not something that could be hidden. It was there on her face, intermittently under her black shawl, ready to appear without warning or coping mechanisms, by some unfair genetic coding. And so, the villagers turned cool to the new nifi as she became more and more isolated from them and more deeply dedicated to her husband.
Vaso, a woman in her forties, had come from a small village and knew the cruelties that her misunderstood disease brought with it. She was but an innocent child when it first showed itself and it was believed by many to have been a curse put upon someone in the history of the family. Much of its cruelty was in its randomness as her sister and brother would live out normal lives while she was sentenced to a lifetime of misery.
But that was before her union with John. She savored and relished his presence, something no one ever suspected. They saw her only with pity, living as she was in a broken house with an old man who drank too much and offered very little in the way of income. But with John, she had the love and warmth of a man—one whose eyes showed the joy of her presence in a room, who tenderly caressed her blemished body without regard for the purple marks at which others cringed, and above all one who gave her what she longed for, but had resigned herself to a life without. Children.
Chevi welcomed this new mother who was but a decade older than she. They collected wood together and visited the vrisi and Vaso was grateful for that. The nifi’s brother from Athens visited John’s home occasionally bringing money and gifts. And the shock was felt equally in both families when Vaso’s belly began to swell and it was realized that John would become a father again—in his sixties.
The Nifi Page 6