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My Last Lament

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by James William Brown


  It had all begun with those squash that I mentioned before, secret squash. The fields had been stripped, but there was a gully below one of them, not quite visible unless you knew just where it was. So my father and the others were picking by night and hoarding the secret produce in a root cellar. From time to time we ate one and, oh, I can’t tell you what the taste of squash cooked golden was like in such times. Just that buttery smell. I can’t eat it at all now because the memory is too piercing. Well, anyway, someone had informed the German officer in charge of the area, Colonel Esterhaus. The life of a secret in the village is not long even today, and back then people were willing to debase themselves for the prospect of food.

  Oh, I don’t even cry about it anymore. I’m like an old sponge left out in the sun, dry as cardboard. At the time, I couldn’t cry because I didn’t believe what everyone told me, that the dead, including my father, were truly gone. I stopped arguing with adults about this and closed my mouth. When you don’t respond, people tend to leave you alone. I couldn’t bring myself to speak for months.

  After my father’s burial, I was taken in by Chrysoula, the woman who’d tried to take me away from the execution. There was nowhere else for me. My mother had hated village life, my father told me, and ran off to Athens years earlier. I never knew more than that. He seldom mentioned his runaway wife and I had only faint memories of her. It was one of the mysteries of my childhood. She was my mother, after all—hadn’t she loved me enough to stay? After I lost her and then my father too, Chrysoula and Takis became my second family.

  “Such a good man, your father,” Chrysoula would say, her eyes brimming. “We were all so fond of him.” Before the war Chrysoula had been a shapely woman with lively eyes much admired by the village men. But by the time I moved into her house, she’d become a shadow of herself inside her old dresses, which by then were several sizes too large. Her eyes, though, still held their light. “You’ll be here with Takis and me,” she said, “so it will seem that part of your father is here too.”

  Takis didn’t care that I wouldn’t open my mouth to speak. He talked enough for both of us. The house was small so he and I had to share a room, even a bed. He was ten and both of us were too young to know much about what grown-ups did in bed. We played cards by candlelight at night on the floor or bed, slapping them down noisily. It was Takis who taught me how to cheat by sliding a card into my sleeve or under my bottom. Then he’d call me cheater or gangster. And we’d throw our cards in each other’s faces. It was the best part of the game. Finally, we’d topple over into bed saying good night to the gecko that lived in a crack in the wall.

  Takis had nicknamed his own feet Mr. Shepherd and Mrs. Shepherd. He’d waggle them out of the thin blanket and make up conversations.

  “I’ve lost the flock again, Mrs. Shepherd,” Takis would say in a deep voice, wiggling the toes of his right foot.

  “Oh, dear, Mr. Shepherd,” he’d answer in a falsetto, wagging his left foot in a frenzy. “Was it the wolves this time?”

  “Ate every last one. We’ll have nothing for Easter.”

  “We could eat the baby.”

  “Mrs. Shepherd!”

  Chrysoula would stick her head in the door and tell us that was enough. She’d tuck us in, saying, “Keep each other warm, my little geese.”

  Orion marched across the sky above the house those winter nights as frost etched itself on our window. Lying there with Takis breathing softly beside me, I knew there was this one big thing we shared: the mystery of how our fathers could be there one day and not the next or ever again. I just couldn’t accept death. The old villagers said that souls of the dead hung around after their funerals for about ninety days, reluctant to leave, trying on their old shoes and taking pinches of their favorite meals right out of the pot. Sometimes I heard my father in the wind through the pine trees, in the water splashing in the lion fountain nearby, in the cries of birds passing over the village on their way south to Africa. He’d taken to complaining a lot and he’s done that ever since. Where are my tools? he’d ask. I can’t do anything without tools. I didn’t understand why he needed them.

  I thought about telling Takis this, but no words would come and anyway Takis didn’t like to hear anything about fathers. His own wasn’t around and no one ever mentioned him anymore. But I remembered my father saying that there’d been something wrong in the mind of Takis’s father, that he’d imagined things. He’d thought the whole village was set against him and picked fights for no reason. Then he and Chrysoula had gone away for a while and she came back without him.

  We woke each morning to the sound of Chrysoula’s voice calling out the window to other women around the lion fountain. Houses had no running water then so women came to the fountain to fill their jugs and pails from the stream that poured out of the lion’s marble mouth. Of course they also stood around and gossiped. Chrysoula’s house was closest to the fountain so she presided.

  “Good morning, my beautifully ugly neighbors,” she would call out her kitchen window to the other women. “What’s bothering you today?”

  Of course everyone knew everyone else’s troubles because they were mostly the same: hunger and heartache and isolation, endless worry about how to stay alive and keep out of the way of the Germans. This aged everyone; even young women looked almost as old as crones. But they picked up Chrysoula’s cue.

  “Ugly we may be, but at least we’re clean,” one said. “We so seldom see you taking water into your house.”

  “It’s true,” Chrysoula said. “I only clean with bleach. It’s so much better for washing your husbands’ drool off my front steps after they beg me to open my door to them at night.”

  There were shrieks of laughter, which set off spasmodic coughing because many of the women were ill. One called out, “So that’s where they were!”

  “And we thought they were doing their business in the outhouse,” yelled another.

  “It’s almost the same thing, isn’t it?” a third one asked.

  More shrieks and hoots of laughter.

  “Too bad your own husband can’t satisfy you, Chrysoula,” someone called out. “You couldn’t even keep him at home, could you? No wonder you try to lure our men.”

  Chrysoula always sidestepped any reference to her husband. “No one needs to lure your husbands, my dears. One look at any of you is enough.”

  “Oh, we curse our fates not to be born beautiful like Princess Chrysoula,” someone said. In fact, Chrysoula was as scrawny and worn looking as any of them, as all could clearly see.

  But they began calling out, “Health to the beautiful Princess Chrysoula!”

  “Health and life to the great beauty!”

  “If only we looked like her, we could keep our husbands in our beds.”

  They could go for an hour or more like this, some of the women finally sitting or lying on the ground, exhausted from laughing and insulting each other. After a while, a pair of German soldiers would arrive to investigate the noise and break up the crowd, pushing the women to their feet with the butts of their rifles. The Germans didn’t know Greek, of course, so the women would talk about them.

  “That one has the forehead of a monkey!”

  “And look at the other’s low-slung bottom. As pretty as any girl’s.”

  “He thinks so too. Look how he walks as if he’s just longing for a pat or a pinch.”

  “Or something more.”

  Their wheezy laughter would trail off into the village lanes. Well, you can see where I got my early training as a crone. But most of the soldiers were just boys, really. They should have been behind school desks, not out here being hated by everyone. Sometimes they chose teams and played soccer matches, ordering us to come and watch. We’d stand in silence as they whooped around a field, scrambling after a ball. Once they requisitioned a couple of our donkeys and raced the beasts across a field so they could plac
e bets on them. Anything to pass the time in what must have seemed to them a dull place.

  I didn’t understand war at all—it meant that foreigners took over your country, stole your food, watched you starve and shot you for the sake of a few squash. But why? It didn’t make any sense. What we didn’t understand at the time was that the real prize for the Germans was our island of Crete with its strategic airfields and harbors sitting right there in the middle of the Mediterranean offering easy access to North Africa and the Middle East. But for us here in the village cut off from the world, finding a moldy potato to eat meant another day’s survival, maybe even a chance to squeeze a grain or two of pleasure out of whatever we could so as not to shrivel up inside. We’re all like that here; we know how to get around anything with a laugh, a wisecrack, a little foolishness. It’s our ancient gift, even when trapped. Of course the soldiers were as trapped as we were. They lacked our gift, but on the other hand, they had the guns. Boys with guns—the old story of war.

  Takis liked the way the soldiers marched. He pretended to carry a rifle as he imitated their goose step.

  “Stop that!” his mother would say. “I won’t have a German in my house, even a small one.”

  Most mornings he was either impossible to wake at all or else he hopped up full of questions that had perched in his sleeping mind like owls. Shaking me awake, he’d ask, “Why don’t the stars fall on our heads?” Or, “When I jump up, why don’t I come down in some other village?”

  I had no answers for him; I still couldn’t bring myself to speak.

  But there were other days when he sulked around, kicking the furniture and scowling at everyone. I took him to see the charcoal pits where my father had worked, just outside the village. He liked it there because, as he said, the pine trees talked to him.

  “They want to teach me to fly so I can drop bombs on the Germans.” He cocked his head near the trunk of a pine and said, “I’m sorry, Aliki, but they don’t want to teach you.”

  I shrugged and walked away. Takis lost interest in the pines and followed. There were no piles of dried logs anymore as the Germans had taken those for firewood. But there was a lot of bark on the ground. I pointed to where my father and the other men had stacked logs in conical piles with an airhole down the center. Acting it all out for Takis, I showed how they covered the wood with dirt and then dropped hot coals into the airhole.

  “Why the dirt?” he asked. “Weren’t they trying to burn the wood?”

  That was just what they didn’t want to happen. But I didn’t know how to make that clear without language. My father always said that if fire broke out, everything was ruined because the wood would burn down to ash. But if it only smoldered, over time it would reduce to charcoal. Sometimes the pile of wood started to catch fire and he’d have to jump on it, throwing on more dirt to put it out. I’d seen him do that once, a kind of crazy dance on top of the pile in all that smoke, flinging fistfuls of dirt at places where little flames were licking out.

  I danced around for Takis and threw dirt every which way until he flopped onto the ground and rolled around laughing. When he laughed, there seemed to be nothing in the world except his enjoyment. Here was this half-starved, skinny boy—what did he have to laugh about? For that matter, what did any of us? The women at the fountain, Chrysoula, even the Germans didn’t look too happy to be stuck here while they were losing the war everywhere else—or at least that was what we heard on the shortwave radio late at night.

  It was illegal to have an unregistered radio and the punishment for owning one was death. But Chrysoula managed to conceal this one somehow. I don’t think there were many shortwave radios in Greece then. It had been sent to Chrysoula by a cousin who’d emigrated to your America years before the war. We knew so little about that place then—there were no movies, no newsreels in our area and we seldom saw newspapers. What we did know was that your Mr. Roosevelt had sent all those Yanks to help us out in Europe and the radio told us the Yanks and other Allies were winning the war. And of course the radio itself—big and shiny with the word ZENITH on it—came from there. So I imagined America as a place of such radios, one for every man, woman and child. The Land of Big Radios.

  But when I listened to the radio, sometimes I thought I could hear my father speaking just behind the voice of the news announcer, still asking me questions. They were so specific: Had he left the lid off the tin of kerosene in the basement? Had I found the eggs from the hen that had wandered into the woods? Where were the saw and ax he’d used on the pine logs?

  The dead leave the earth, old villagers said, but can’t get rid of the dailiness of their lives on it. They worry about dripping taps or debts unpaid or crops left standing in the fields. They’re not interested in the big things like war or poverty or happiness or the loss of it. But if the roof in the stable has a leak, they’ll worry it to death and beyond. If I asked my father something that I thought the dead would know, like what his life had been all about anyway, he always said that my question was too simple and the answer too complicated.

  Oh, wait, there’s someone at the door. How do I turn this thing off?

  Back again. It was just a neighbor talking about old Zephyra down the road. Remember I said she was dying? Well, she may die at any moment from the many things that ail her and there’s nothing to be done, sadly. We used to walk to school together back before the Germans came, but even then Zephyra was such a beaten-down little thing, bossed around by her busybody mother who was always sniffing out everyone’s secrets. Little Zephyra was as plain and quiet as a turnip. She asked me one day if she could come live with my father and me. “I can clean and cook,” she said. “Oh, please, Aliki, can I?” It was an odd thing for someone my own age to suggest, but I think she was afraid of her mother. Zephyra always looked so sad when the schoolday ended and she had to go home.

  After I moved into Chrysoula’s house, Zephyra stopped speaking to me, as if she thought I’d chosen Takis as my friend instead of her. Takis noticed this, asking me about that girl who crossed to the other side of the road when she saw us coming. And to think that Zephyra’s name comes from the ancient god of the west wind, Zephyrus, but there wasn’t even a trace of a breeze in her spirit. And of course she never lived down that business of the goat stealing, but I’m not going to get started on that. Nothing like the nearness of death to dig up the not-quite-buried past.

  I’m getting off track here. Better replay a little of this. Oh, I see, all right, my father on the radio, yes, I heard him, or at least I thought I did. It comforted me to know he wasn’t completely gone. He was around somewhere. I’d go over to our old house, perched on the side of the hill at the edge of the village. It had been empty since I’d moved in with Takis and his mother. But I could feel my father’s presence in the house. Once I thought I saw his shirttail disappearing around the corner, but when I went into the next room, there was no one there. Climbing down the ladder beneath the trapdoor in the kitchen floor, I would come into what once had been a stable on the lower level, what we called the basement. There was the kerosene tin just as my father had said, without its lid. And I found the missing saw and ax. But I never found the hen in the woods or her eggs.

  Chrysoula said there used to be wild chickens around the area, hens and roosters that escaped and set up housekeeping in the lower branches of the pines. They left their eggs all over the place and they were much better tasting than the usual kind. Over time, the chickens taught themselves to fly and you could see flocks of them in the morning sky. They stopped clucking and developed their own song—“You know what I mean,” Chrysoula said. “Loo, loo, loo, loo, loo, loo.”

  Takis and I had never heard anything like that. But Chrysoula would say whatever crossed her mind when asked a question, and she didn’t seem to care if anyone believed her. She had a reputation in the village for giving curious advice to those who came to her with problems. Back before the war, a neighbor woman told
her that she’d been unable to decide whether or not to sell her house and move to the nearby town after her husband’s death. Chrysoula had advised, “The carpet slipper of life doesn’t accept or deny what is written on the last hats of the old blood.”

  The neighbor pondered this for several days and decided not to sell her house.

  But Chrysoula had no comment on the matter of the partisans in our area who were sabotaging Germans, blowing up their tanks, mowing them down in lonely mountain passes, slitting the throats of their sentries at night. There were several groups of partisans and we’d heard some of their names, all important sounding. National Liberation Front, People’s Liberation Party, National Social Liberation, National Republican League. But they broke down mostly into two kinds, communists and royalists. I wasn’t sure what exactly communists were, but I knew that the royalists were supporters of our king in exile in Cairo. The communists and royalists had their own little war going with each other while they were snatching territory back from the Germans. And like the Germans, they demanded food from us.

  In a place on the other side of the mountains, villagers had given supplies to one of the partisan groups. What else could they have done? If they hadn’t helped, they would have been accused of collaborating with the Germans and shot as traitors. In this case, a village informer told the Germans. As punishment, German soldiers lined up all the village men in the plateia and shot them. Then they herded the women and children into the village church and set it on fire. When they tried to escape the flames, they too were shot.

  But we’d heard that in areas the partisans controlled, they were as ruthless as the Germans they’d driven out. All this made us feel helpless, like flies trapped in a bottle. To fight that sense of helplessness—which can kill you—we had to come up with our own solutions. Chrysoula had decided on one without telling Takis or me.

 

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