My Last Lament

by James William Brown

After that, I would see him trying to draw himself up, as if holding himself straight would make him taller and more manly. I caught him standing on a box so he could see himself in the mirror as he tried on a hat his father had left behind. It was huge on him; its brim rested on his ears. Holding it just so at an angle, he then turned it the other way. I went over and pulled it all the way down over his ears and then, with my fingers, showed how he could push eyeholes through the cloth.

  “Who asked you?” he said, snatching the hat off his head and tossing it on the floor. He stuck a finger in his mouth, puffed out his cheek and pulled the finger out fast to make a noise like farting. One of his favorite tricks.

  I applauded, raising my eyebrows as if to say how very grown up he was acting.

  “Ha, you’re the one who wet yourself.”

  Then he made more farting noises. Clearly he had a ways to go to manhood. For me, the thought of my becoming an older version of myself was troubling. What would happen to the person I already was? Would it disappear inside the older one? I wanted to grow up, but I didn’t want to let go of what I meant when I thought I or me. I wondered about this late at night, lying there listening to Takis’s breathing. Did Stelios ever think about such things?

  But he seemed mostly interested in the bark, which he sorted through and arranged in piles by size and shape. “I think I’ll do the play Karagiozis the Baker, so this lumpy piece will be good. It looks like a chef’s hat on top.” He chose a wide piece for the fat sultan and two others for villagers. With the knife and scissors Chrysoula gave him, he carved the figures.

  “Stelios has always been artistic,” his mother said.

  “No, I’m not,” he said. “I’m not much good. I mean, I just like it, that’s all. Papa says it’s all homework avoidance anyway. He wants me to be a civil engineer like him, but I don’t know; I just want to read and . . .” Stelios caught himself, glanced at his mother and stopped speaking.

  I didn’t look at her because I knew the mention of her husband would cause the twitch in Sophia’s eyelid. Stelios worked on, still and concentrated. Karagiozis emerged from the bark as a hunched-over man, bald and with a big nose. His body was curved like the bark. Out of paper Stelios cut a long arm for Karagiozis and pinned it to his bark body so the arm could be moved back and forth as the figure gestured while speaking. On the smooth side of the bark, Stelios drew features: heavy eyebrows and a droopy mouth. Karagiozis wore a loose shirt and baggy Turkish trousers. His feet were bare.

  Takis and I wanted to help Stelios, but Chrysoula kept sending us out on errands. If we spent all our time inside, the neighbors might get suspicious. And that year, the winter of ’43 gave way to the summer of ’44 without much of spring. The piercing scents of narcissi and cyclamen had faded fast and already the bloodred anemones were giving up their petals to a breeze. We picked herbs so Chrysoula could make infusions to strengthen Sophia: sage and sweet chamomile for medicinal tea, valerian root for the treatment of nerves and fevers. And some other root, mallow, I think it was, to thin the blood, Chrysoula said, “Because winter makes your blood thick and gooey. It slows the brain.”

  My brain seemed fine. I took in what the shortwave radio told of the victories of the Red Army chasing the Germans back from their failed invasion of Russia, advancing toward the Balkans. If they got to the northern border of Greece, our occupiers would be trapped. Surely they would leave before then. It also looked like Italy next door might surrender to your Land of Big Radios and other Allies before long.

  There were really no set scripts for the plays, Stelios told us. The puppeteers just carried the stories in their heads and made up lines as they went along. Sometimes they wove in events and people of the place and time of the performance. Using an old bedsheet for a screen, he tacked it to the rafters so that it hung from there to the floor. Behind it, he lit candles. The bark figures had been attached to some old bamboo poles he’d found in a corner of the basement. With these, he would make the characters walk or jump or dance. On the other side of the screen, we would see only their shadows.

  When he was ready to present Karagiozis the Baker, Stelios had us all sit in front of the screen. We waited there in the near dark with candles glowing as if we were cavemen gathered around the fire, hoping for a tale.

  “There’s supposed to be a singer or musician,” he called to us from behind the screen. “But we don’t have Yannoula to play the squeeze box. So it will only be me and I can’t carry a tune.”

  “Of course you can,” his mother said. And then to us, “I don’t know why he’s being so modest.”

  There was the sound of two pans being slammed together like muted cymbals and the shadow of our hero, Karagiozis the baker, was there on the screen, leaping and chanting.

  Trin, trin, trin,

  What a mess I’m in.

  They call me a baker

  But I’m really a faker.

  Trin, trin, trin,

  What a mess I’m in.

  When Stelios ran out of words, he hummed or just sang thrum thrum thrum, over and over again while Karagiozis bounced across the screen. Takis was delighted, shouting, “Mr. Karagiozis, I’m here. I’m Takis.”

  Chrysoula hushed him, but Sophia said that it was all right for the audience to talk to the characters or make comments. It happened all the time at the shows at the Zappeion.

  “Ah, Mr. Takis,” Karagiozis said, bowing deeply, “you’re looking very clever this evening so I know you’ll understand my problem. I’ve talked myself into the job of a baker. But what do I know of baking? Cakes, bread, they might as well be rocks.”

  There was another clash of pans. A fat villager appeared stage right and told Karagiozis that he’d killed a fine goose to offer to guests at his house. Like most villagers, he had no oven at home so would Karagiozis bake it in the bakery oven? He must be careful not to burn it.

  “Bah!” Karagiozis said. “I do not burn what I bake. Give me the goose.” When the man had gone, Karagiozis said to the audience, “Burn it I will not, but eat it—that my three poor sons and wife will do!”

  Then another customer brought Karagiozis a casserole of potatoes and tomatoes flavored with garlic and rosemary. Karagiozis said again, “Burn it I will not!” But when the customer had gone, he turned to the audience. “How perfectly it will go with the goose!”

  Enter the sultan. He’d smelled everything cooking and commanded Karagiozis to send it all to the palace when it was ready. “But what will I tell my customers?” Karagiozis asked. “They’ll complain to you that I’m a thief and you’ll have me hanged.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Karagiozis,” the sultan said. “Tell them anything you want. If you don’t bring me the goose, then I will have you hanged.”

  “You want everything, even the stewed potatoes and tomatoes?”

  “No, you eat them; I’ll just take the goose. When your customers come to me, I’ll shut them up fast enough.”

  After he’d gone, Karagiozis turned to the audience. “I lie, but he lies even bigger!” Taking the goose and the stew from the oven, he carried them to his own hut on the other side of the screen. “Oh, Karagiozis,” we heard Stelios say in a high-pitched voice as the wife, “so delicious this is!”

  When the first customer returned for his goose, Karagiozis told him, “Such a miracle we’ve had! The goose left the baking pan and flapped out of the oven. I tried to catch her but she flew out the door.”

  “The plucked and stuffed goose?”

  “The very one.”

  “It flew away?”

  “Just like that!”

  The customer began to beat Karagiozis, calling out, “Liar! Thief!” Before he had finished, the second customer came for his potato and tomato stew.

  “Such a miracle,” Karagiozis said. “The potatoes didn’t get along with the tomatoes and they got into a brawl. They leaped out of the pan and chased ea
ch other out the door.”

  “They ran out the door? Potatoes? Tomatoes?”

  “Just like that.”

  Then the second customer began to beat Karagiozis too. The sultan arrived, asking, “What’s all this?” Karagiozis had tricked them, the customers claimed, repeating what Karagiozis had told them about the goose and the stew. But the sultan said they were wrong. “The miracle was foretold by prophets: A roast goose will come to life and fly away. Potatoes and tomatoes will argue and chase each other.” When the customers cried out that this wasn’t possible, the sultan claimed they doubted the word of holy prophets and ordered the guards to take them away and beat them.

  “Now,” he said to Karagiozis when they had gone, “where’s the goose?”

  “Goose? What goose?”

  “The one we lied about in front of your customer.”

  “A lie? You mean it was a lie? It wasn’t a miracle? It wasn’t prophesied?”

  “Bring me the goose!”

  “It flew away. You said so yourself, and it was prophesied. You have said this in front of everyone.”

  The sultan roared, “Aye, you’ve tricked me again. You’re a liar and a swindler. And one day you will go too far and I will trap you.” He turned to us in the audience. “One day, Takis over there will not find you so funny, right, Takis?”

  Takis clapped and then we all clapped.

  “Such days will come for us all,” Karagiozis said. “And that is the end of tonight’s play.” Both characters bowed as we applauded.

  Stelios peeked around the screen. “Thank you, thank you. Now, would anyone like my autograph?”

  “He’s such a ham,” his mother said. “Not so modest now.”

  Actually, the play seemed kind of like village life though without the boring parts. But what struck me then was Stelios himself, how cleverly he’d put this all together and out of nothing—bark and a bedsheet and his own talents.

  Will you teach me? I wrote on my pad.

  “Teach you to . . . ?”

  Do the voices and control the puppets and learn the plays.

  “Me too!” Takis said, hopping from one foot to the other. Jumping in front of me, he grabbed my notepad and threw it to the floor. “Teach me, not her!”

  “Hey, Takis. That’s not nice,” Stelios said, bending to pick up the pad. “But I’ll teach you both.” He took the pencil from me and drew a little grinning Karagiozis face on the pad, then handed it back to me.

  And so it began. I didn’t really understand it then, but in some way I sensed that Stelios was a path I might take. I had no idea where it might lead or if there would be any possibility of return. And though I didn’t know it then, the yearning to return to someone, or somewhere, was to shadow my life.

  CASSETTE 2 Side 1

  Well, I’ll need to gather myself up for Zephyra’s wake tonight. It was her death that the neighbors came to tell me; you probably heard them pounding on the door before I turned the machine off. Too much trouble to find my place on that cassette so I’m just starting a new one here.

  Poor Zephyra, may the earth rest lightly on her. She died shortly after Aphrodite had finished her chants and bustled off in her rugs. She must have brought Zephyra some final relief, allowing her soul to fly into the wind she was named for.

  There aren’t any relatives nearby as Zephyra’s husband, Kostas, died years ago. And good riddance to him, that man who let it be known that he was marrying her in spite of her enormous nose. She suffered from this all her life. The village women predicted in Zephyra’s childhood that she’d never marry because of “a nose bigger than her dowry.” And when, years later, the men of her family persuaded old Kostas to marry her after he’d had his way with her, she took revenge by telling the women that his cucumber was far smaller than her nose. Ah, life—the indignities it forces on us without a scrap of pity.

  There was a son but he left for the Land of Big Radios after his father’s death. Your country is so big that he just seemed to get swallowed up. We have no idea where he is. So it was up to the other village women to wash and perfume the body before dressing it in its grave clothes. Now, that’s not something I like to do, as such intimate knowledge of the dead may interfere with my ability to create a lament, though I’ve never understood why. I’ll need a pair of her shoes, I reminded the others, if I’m to mourn for her. I don’t know the why of this either, but putting on the shoes of the dead seems to stir up some sense of who they’ve been. When I’m in their shoes, the dead seem to rise up through my legs all the way into my head and behind my eyelids. Then, with no effort at all, the words come out of my mouth. Of course Zephyra’s shoes won’t fit. That’s often the way. It’s not my fault I have such big feet. But I’ll only have to squeeze them into her shoes for a few minutes at the wake.

  Before I get ready for that, there’s just enough time to tell you more about Stelios teaching us shadow puppetry in the downstairs of Chrysoula’s house. That was around the time when the Allies were taking Italy. From what we heard on the Zenith, Yanks from the Land of Big Radios had been all over Italy for months, using it as a point from which to bomb the Greek military base occupied by Germans at Tatoi, north of Athens. What had happened to Mussolini? It wouldn’t be until after the liberation of Greece that we’d see the newsreels of Il Duce and his mistress hanging by their heels in a public square filled with laughing Italians. The camera caught one grinning man leaning over the edge of the roof where the bodies were hanging, just touching the dictator’s shoe and looking so proud of himself. Ah, what we won’t do for a bit of notoriety. It would not be the last opportunity for such dismal fame in that grim decade.

  Sometimes at night we thought we could hear the muffled shudder of distant bombing. With all the talk about it, we didn’t at first think it was unusual when Takis announced he had a bomb inside him. “Shh, shh,” he’d say, a warning finger on his lips, “don’t make it explode.” It seemed most likely to do so whenever he couldn’t get his own way. Pushing Stelios to teach him the craft of shadow puppetry, he’d say, “. . . or else my bomb might blow up.”

  Stelios, who was going to teach both of us anyway, said, “Ooh, I’m afraid.”

  “If you go on talking like that,” Chrysoula told Takis, “you’re the one who’ll get bombed, and by me.”

  If the Germans in our village had heard about the Allied bombing, they didn’t show it. But there did seem to be a general loosening up, as if they were trying to enjoy themselves before going home to defeat. There was to be another donkey race, we were told, another way for the soldiers to make money off each other, there being nothing left to take from us. The same two donkeys used in the previous race were requisitioned again and Petros came house to house to tell us that we were all commanded to be the audience. Such a joke, we said to each other, as we trudged off to the field. Why did they need us standing there stone-faced, with rifles aimed at us by guards? Did they think they were doing us a favor maybe, giving us a bit of entertainment after they’d taken most of our food? It was impossible for us to understand them. But Chrysoula and I agreed that at least we’d have a story to tell Stelios and Sophia when we came home. So, along with Takis and the other villagers, we lined up under the olive trees at the edge of the field.

  “Look,” Takis said, pointing at Zephyra and her mother not far from us. “There’s that girl who doesn’t like us. The one with the big nose.” He thumbed his nose at her and Zephyra turned red before ducking behind her mother, who glared in our direction.

  “Stop that,” Chrysoula said. “Just stand here quietly until the race starts.”

  “I want to race too!” Takis said. “Can I? Can I?” He ran around his mother in circles until she grabbed him by the shoulders and held him still in front of her. Pointing to Colonel Esterhaus on the other side of the field, Takis said, “I’ll ask him. He’ll let me.”

  “No, you won’t. Stand still,
” Chrysoula said.

  Hot weather was upon us already and the Germans who were going to race had taken off their shirts. With their sunburned faces and white, muscular chests, they seemed a different species from our scrawny selves. Near the colonel, a soldier was collecting money from others.

  As usual, the first pair of soldiers had trouble adjusting to the hard wooden saddles we use here. They were made for fieldwork, not for the thrust and grind of racing. The soldiers got on them, then off to make fidgety adjustments, then on again.

  “Their bottoms will be as red as their faces,” someone said.

  “There’ll be no buggering in the barracks tonight!” another called out.

  The donkeys themselves looked puzzled. They’re amiable and intelligent creatures when treated well, but no one expects them to move fast. When the colonel shot a pistol in the air, the two soldiers flapped their legs against the flanks of their donkeys. One went in a circle while the other walked straight ahead, then came to a stop halfway across the field. The first soldier managed to maneuver his donkey out of the circle and it trotted in a leisurely way up to the other donkey before stopping. Then both animals lowered their heads and munched some weeds.

  Their riders flapped legs and reins while shouting, but the donkeys took no notice. On the other side of the field, the soldiers who’d wagered money were also shouting. Suddenly the first donkey ambled forward and trotted to the edge of the field, passing the swastika flag that meant it had won.

  Takis was squirming to get away from his mother. “Me next!” he cried out. “Me now.”

  In the second race, the colonel himself was on one of the donkeys. But it kept twisting its head around in an attempt to bite him. He jerked the reins to turn the donkey’s head, but this made the donkey go in circles while continuing to snap at its rider.

  Takis shrieked with laughter and we all laughed too at the whirligig of animal and man. The faster the donkey danced in circles, the more we laughed.

  Suddenly it stopped its dance, shook its head and trotted in our direction, still with the colonel trying to control it. We quit laughing. He managed to bring it to a stop just in front of our little group, where Takis drew himself up and saluted.