Colonel Esterhaus grinned and saluted back, then reached down and grabbed Takis under the arms, swinging him up onto the saddle in front of him. He shook the reins and this time the donkey obeyed, trotting across the field toward the flag. Takis continued to salute all the way and the other soldiers cheered and applauded.
We didn’t cheer. Chrysoula marched after them and when she caught up with the donkey, she reached up and demanded of the colonel, “Give me my child!”
“No!” Takis said, clinging to the colonel.
“Give him to me!”
The colonel looked at her. Possibly he remembered that this was the woman they’d interrogated, the woman who’d been in the wrong house at the wrong time on the day it had been requisitioned. But whatever he was thinking, he gently pried Takis away from himself and lifted him down to Chrysoula.
“No!” Takis screamed, and he tried to pull away from his mother, grabbing hold of the colonel’s leg. This startled the donkey and it jerked its head around and brayed at length. It was a great barrage of noise, as if the rusted hinge of a massive door were being worked back and forth until it gave way at last. Takis let go, giving himself over to his mother. Then the colonel dismounted and led the donkey away.
And that was the end of it. Or so we thought. Once home, I heard Chrysoula giving Takis a lecture punctuated by swats to his bottom with her big wooden spoon.
“The bomb!” he shrieked. “You’ll make it explode.”
Takis was no different the next day, insisting that Stelios teach him the puppets or he’d be bombed. Stelios ignored him, telling both of us, “Make up whatever lines you want, but in each scene something must happen that moves the tale forward.” He showed us how that was true for Karagiozis the Baker. Over the next month or so we learned the plots for Karagiozis the Senator, Karagiozis the Prophet, Karagiozis and the Ghost and Karagiozis the Doctor. Stelios also taught us how to make sound effects and manipulate the puppets in their turns and leaps and attacks.
Takis carved a lumpy little puppet which he named after himself, and he made up his own play called Karagiozis and Takis, starring Takis. He rehearsed it in a low voice in a corner, telling us over his shoulder that it was “probably the best play ever and you’ll hate me because you’ll wish you’d thought it up instead of me.” But when he performed it for us, there wasn’t much more than the Takis and Karagiozis puppets hitting and yelling at each other. It concluded with a song called “Takis, the King of the Puppets.”
Takis is right,
Takis is bright.
No one tells him to stuff it,
’Cause he’s the King of the Puppets.
“I don’t think Karagiozis would agree,” Stelios said afterward.
Takis flared up. “In my play, Karagiozis agrees.”
“If there’s a king of the puppets, it’s Karagiozis himself. Your play was a good start. But it turned into all anger and hitting. It’s important to tell a story.”
“You know what? You’re just stupid is what.”
“Takis, don’t be so aggressive,” Chrysoula said. “You sound like a German again.”
“Yes, yes!” he said, goose-stepping around the room and carrying an invisible rifle. He pointed it at Stelios, saying, “Pow, you’re dead!”
“And enough of that too,” Chrysoula said. “Up to your room.”
Takis started to cry. He went over to the wall and hit it with his fists. “I have a bomb inside me,” he said. “A big, red bomb.”
“I’ll make something else red if you don’t stop that,” Chrysoula said, taking him by the arm and pulling him after her up the ladder. Poor Takis. I could see that he was behaving this way out of jealousy of Stelios, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I felt disloyal in paying more attention to Stelios than Takis, but there wasn’t much I could do about that either.
While she was upstairs, I noticed how pale Stelios and his mother were becoming. Staying in the dark basement all day and night with no sun or fresh air had not been good for them. Sophia had developed a bad cough and Stelios had lost weight. Although Chrysoula kept feeding Sophia her herbal infusions, they didn’t seem to be helping.
I wanted to get Stelios out of the house for a walk in the hills with me. Convincing myself that this would do him good, I was also longing to show him my special places, the trails and animal tracks and the big rock that looked like a giant tortoise. Would Stelios like the kinds of things I liked? What if he didn’t? The thought worried me, but I wasn’t sure it mattered. The important thing was for us to be alone for once, to breathe free together, away from the supervision of Chrysoula and Sophia.
But did I dare? Although the Germans would never see us up there, we had to get there first. They’d been in the village so long that our faces were all familiar to them so Stelios would really stand out if he were so much as glimpsed. There was also the problem of his city clothes, which would make him stand out from other village men. So that afternoon while everyone else was napping, I borrowed some things from an old trunk that must have belonged to Takis’s father. Baggy pants, a faded shirt and a cap like the ones old men wear to pass the time talking and fingering their strings of beads. I wrote Stelios a note asking him to put these things on and pull the cap down over his forehead because we were going out. When I went downstairs to give him the note and clothes, he was working on some new puppets for a new play he’d told us about. Sophia was napping on a cot in the corner.
When he’d read my note, Stelios looked at me, alarmed. He didn’t seem to understand. I wrote out where I wanted to take him and what I wanted to show him. I hoped he could read it in spite of my awful spelling and badly shaped letters.
“It’s too dangerous,” he whispered so as not to wake his mother. He reminded me that he hadn’t been outside since the day he and his mother had moved in months before. He was right, but once I’ve made a plan, it’s hard for me to let go of it, even if I can guess possible consequences. It’s always been one of my failings, I suppose. I put the cap on his head and pulled it down so he could barely see. Then I held up a mirror. We both laughed. When he’d put on the rest of the clothes, he could have been any village man if you didn’t look too closely. I wrote that the villagers were all inside at this time for their afternoon naps and there were never any soldiers around.
We crept upstairs and I peeked out the door. After making sure there was no one around, I signaled for Stelios to follow me. I ran and he ran after me. We were soon in the pine grove where the charcoal had been made. It was a warm, almost hot day. I felt the sun spreading through my body as we climbed out of the pine grove and made our way along a rocky ridge overlooking the village and valley. From there we could see the hillsides below green with thyme and oregano, the olive trees that rippled in the breeze as the undersides of their leaves flashed silver in the sun. Above us, a pair of hawks glided in intersecting loops beneath a spine of clouds. I led Stelios farther along the ridge to show him the leafy crevice where I’d once found some poor baby hares abandoned and dead. Their little skeletons were still there, the delicate seashells of their skulls, the spray of tiny rib bones against tufts of fur the mother hare would have pulled from herself for the nest.
While we were kneeling beside each other I found myself overwhelmed with a little burst of joy, the exhilaration of our freedom from the house, the sparkling day and our place in it. Without thinking, I turned quickly and put my lips on his. His eyes widened with surprise, but he kissed me back, gently at first, then harder. It was as if we were drawing in each other’s breath, our tongues touching, our teeth knocking together, heartbeats speeding. We drew apart, dazed, and looked at each other as though seeing ourselves for the first time. Color had risen in his cheeks.
“Well . . .” he said and laughed a little.
My face had grown so hot that I felt like the flame of a candle. I opened my mouth to speak but had no words. As always w
hen I came close to speaking, a wave of sadness washed through me and I saw my father again, his cap flying off, the popping of the guns. But for the first time since then, I felt almost as if I’d begun to return to something I’d lost. The feeling was strong, as if I’d been drifting since his death. My eyes filled and brimmed over.
“What is it, Aliki? Tell me. Please.”
But I couldn’t. The time for speaking was coming, though I didn’t know it, but it wasn’t there yet. Stelios brushed the tears off my cheeks and took my hand. We stood up and started our walk back to the village.
“Don’t worry,” he said, taking my hand. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’ll be friends forever now.”
He didn’t say anything else all the way back. He walked along running his hands through the heads of tall grasses that brushed our legs. I wondered what he was thinking; I was having trouble keeping track of my own thoughts. There was something in me that suspected I’d planned the whole outing with the kiss in mind. Well, not in mind, exactly, but sort of lurking around the edges. Another part of me said it had just been a matter of the moment. That seemed equally true. But a third part said, well, really, who cares? The important thing was that I felt different and I supposed he did too. But what was the difference and what did it mean?
We’d spent more time away than I’d been aware of and, lost in thought, I hadn’t remembered that the village would be coming alive again as afternoon shaded into evening. When we were nearly down the path that brought us back, we could see old Theodoros with his donkey cart half-full of hay near the plateia and our priest hurrying out of the church in his vestments, a sign that someone was probably dying. If those two were up and about, soldiers would be too. The village was waking up.
We stopped and pressed ourselves against the wall of a roadside shed and, when no one was around, darted from house to house. We ducked under grape arbors at the sides of houses and then hid ourselves in a huge, red-flowering bougainvillea that grew over the house next to Chrysoula’s. We were just about to dash to her door when it opened and the colonel came out, followed by the officer who’d been with him that day in my father’s house, and Petros. Stelios and I froze and glanced at each other, our eyes wide. Petros said something we couldn’t make out over his shoulder to Chrysoula, who was standing in the doorway. We stood quite still, willing the bees in the bougainvillea away from our faces, but one did land on my cheek. I almost screamed, but Stelios flicked it away with his finger. When the three men had turned the corner of the house, we counted slowly to ten, then ran to the door.
Chrysoula let out a shriek as we flew inside. She quickly clapped a hand over her mouth and slammed the door shut behind us. “Theo mou!” she said. “Where did you two come from? If you’d jumped in here before they left, just minutes ago . . .” She trailed off as she pulled the hem of her apron up to wipe her eyes. It took her a minute to get control. When she did, she looked at us as if she couldn’t decide whether to embrace us or kill us. Stelios started to ask about the colonel at the same time that Chrysoula demanded to know why Stelios had been outside the house.
“Whose idea was it?” she asked, looking at me. She’d never been angry with me before and had never talked to me in such a tone. The heat rushed into my face and she rightly took it as a sign of guilt. “So it was your idea? I thought so. And you,” she said to Stelios, “you’re older than Aliki and should have better judgment. You nearly gave your mother a heart attack when she realized you weren’t in the house.” She looked him up and down, saying, “And where exactly did you come by those clothes?”
“I’ll explain. But first, please tell us why the colonel . . . ?”
“I’m afraid something awful has happened. One of those old village hens has done some squawking—and I think I know which one it was. Before I’m done with her she’ll be laying eggs!”
The woman had evidently told the colonel that there’d been more food in this house than elsewhere and he wanted to know if it was true and where we were getting it. Luckily there wasn’t much at hand at the moment; there hadn’t been a fisherman’s caïque come through for a while—who knows why?—so the black market faucet was turned off. There was nothing for him to see aside from the greens and bulbs we’d gathered.
“But he had a good look around my kitchen, pointing out that hoarding food was punishable by death. As if I hadn’t noticed what they did to your father, Aliki.”
Chrysoula had leaned against the kitchen table, trying to appear calm while the other officer searched the rest of the rooms, tapping on the walls to find hollow spaces. Takis had goose-stepped around the colonel, saluting him, trying hard to impress. The colonel let him try on his hat.
“What a creature that man is. He would have shot me without a thought if he’d turned up so much as a tin of beans. But Takis just makes him melt.” She took a deep breath, shaking her head, but then said to Stelios, “I was waiting to make sure they were really gone before going down to explain to your mother, the poor woman. First you disappear and then she hears all this going on above her head.” Stelios went to the kitchen, where we could hear him pushing aside the rug to climb downstairs.
“Now, Aliki, let’s sit down. I’m exhausted.” We went into the front room and sat on chairs beside the old wood-burning stove, cold at that time of year. Chrysoula looked distracted then seemed to notice the stove for the first time. “I need to replace this when the war is over,” she said, patting it. “The vent pipe is rusted and won’t get us through another winter.”
She fell silent for a long minute. Then she looked at me and sighed. “You have no mother to look after you, Aliki, so you’re my responsibility. But I haven’t done much of a job of it if you thought it was a good idea to persuade Stelios to leave the house. If he’d been noticed, it could have been the end of all of us. Didn’t you understand that?” She glanced out the window and added, “And that’s not even to mention that it also isn’t right for you to be out alone with any boy.”
My throat constricted as she said I’d become a little headstrong lately and she’d been meaning to speak to me about that and about my spending so much time with Stelios. But there was much to worry about these dangerous days, especially with Takis always being so difficult, that she hadn’t been careful enough.
“That’s my fault,” she said. “I blame myself completely. Your dear father, may the earth rest lightly on him, wouldn’t be happy with me.”
She wanted to know everything that had happened—what had come over me and everything Stelios had done. I couldn’t remember where I’d left my pad and pencil so I tried to point in the direction we’d gone and show her that all we’d done was walk and talk.
“You’re not allowed out of the house at all anymore,” she said. “I’m not sure I can trust you again. And don’t you know that a village girl is nothing without her good reputation? She must always guard it against the clucking tongues of the village.”
She talked about the war winding down and how Stelios and his mother would probably return to Athens around the time our village boys who’d been prisoners of war returned here. I’d become a young lady of property—it was unusual for someone my age already to have a house of her own as dowry. More importantly, I had my good character and reputation, much more valuable than any piece of property. I’d be able to make a good marriage but only if I was careful.
She reached out to touch my hair. “You’re a bit young still, but it’s not too early to take precautions about your good name. I need to ask you something: have you noticed any bleeding between your legs?”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. I drew a question mark in the air.
“Well, when it happens the first time, you’re not to worry about it. Come tell me and I’ll show you how to manage. It just means your body is old enough to have babies.” She saw my confusion and said, “Oh, my dear, it’s hard to be young when most everything is still
a mystery, isn’t it? I’d almost forgotten what it was like until you came into my life. And you know, I don’t think I’ve ever told you, but I’m so glad you did.” She took my hands in hers. “You’re very dear to me, Aliki. It’s as if you were my own daughter. Just the same. And we’re going to have lots of long talks from now on.”
Was this what having a mother meant? It made me feel cared for in a way I’d only felt with my father. Though he was a loving man, no one would have called him motherly in the way Chrysoula now seemed to me. She took her hands away and asked me if I knew how babies were made. I shook my head. Of course, living as we did near fields with animals, I’d seen the way they behaved. But silly fool that I was, it hadn’t seemed possible that people would act that way too. When she explained, I was aghast. I went to find my writing pad and when I had it, I wrote that what she’d told me sounded disgusting and that Stelios would never do anything like that.
“What men will and will not do is a very big subject, I’m afraid. We’ll need to talk more about that. But for now, I’ve probably said enough. You just think about it and when you have questions, ask me. Meanwhile, I’m going to set up a bed for you in my room. You’re too old to be sharing with Takis.”
But marriage? I scribbled down. How do you know when? And who? How do you ever know that?
“Oh, you’ll know. But all I can tell you now is what my mother told me long ago. You may not be able to marry the one you love. So learn to love the one you marry. It’ll work out better in the end.”
I wasn’t quite able to take that in. I drew a question mark on my pad.
“Yes, I know, Aliki. It probably sounds as strange to you now as it did to me then. But don’t worry about it. Sometimes ideas that seem so odd at first go away for a while. Then one day they walk back into your head and sit down just as comfortably as if they’ve been there all along. You’ll see.”
My Last Lament Page 6