I was Zephyra,
Named for the wind.
But cursed with a mother, a husband and son,
Loving neither my hands nor heart,
Not even the food from my hearth
That they ate without thanks.
I was Zephyra,
Named for the wind.
On and on I’d gone. It made me weep for her sad life. Never mind, the women said, passing me a glass of raki so we could drink to Zephyra’s life. We drank some and then we drank some more. The raki filled our tired bones and pulled us to our feet. With knees creaking and other joints complaining, we took each other’s hands and danced through the house in a line, singing.
In darkest midnight
Comes a knock on my door,
But no one is there.
Who can it be? What does he want of me?
In this life of webs,
Why has he come?
“O-pah!” we called out, turning and twisting until we threw off our grief and trampled our fear that there would be no one to grieve for us as we grieved for Zephyra. Most of us have outlived our families, if we ever had them. After my father was executed, I’d taken Chrysoula and Takis as my family. And after Chrysoula, my next new family began, I suppose, that first morning in Stelios’s house in Athens.
When I came downstairs from the room up under the eaves that the housekeeper, Yannoula, had shown me to the night before, Stelios was waiting for me in the hall. He’d slicked down his hair and put on a dark suit and tie. I was startled to see what a handsome young man he’d turned into overnight.
“Are you yourself?” I asked.
“The very same. Just in my city clothes, that’s all. Yannoula will find some for you.”
The plan for the day was to see if we could find anything to trade for food. Yannoula had been getting by with a small vegetable garden in the courtyard, where she also kept a few chickens for their eggs. She’d also exchanged some of the furniture in the unused bedrooms for pasta, rice and olive oil. But supplies were running low and now there were three of us to feed. At least the neighborhood had been relatively safe because many of the foreign embassies were there.
Stelios asked me to come with him into his parents’ bedroom and I was alarmed at first, remembering what Chrysoula had said about men. “I had to tell Yannoula about Mother last night,” he said, showing me inside. My alarm disappeared as I looked at the enormous blue canopy over the bed. I’d never seen such a thing. Was it in case rain leaked through the ceiling? No, just decoration, he said. I opened the double glass doors and walked onto a balcony overlooking the orange trees in the courtyard. Stelios came after me, saying, “I told Yannoula while she was cleaning my leg wound. Now she’s too upset to leave her room.”
She’d worked for the family for years and was more like a friend of Sophia’s than an employee. She hadn’t said much as she led me up the stairs the night before, except that Stelios had already gone to bed in his room on the second floor. When she’d given me some clean towels and said good night, I saw that although she dressed in black like a village crone, she had a sweet though deeply creased face, probably once pretty. Stelios himself had been further saddened by the telling of his mother’s fate. His eyes were moist as he opened a drawer of the dresser and took out her jewelry box.
“By rights this all belongs to my father now,” he said, opening the box and taking out a gold hat pin in the shape of a tiny tiger with ruby eyes. “But I think he’d understand.” Sophia hadn’t been a flashy woman, but her husband had given her a few good pieces: a necklace of pink amethysts, some gold bracelets and a few rings set with sparkly stones. A cousin of his father’s might be able to help us, Stelios said. Unless the cousin had also been taken away by the Germans.
When we left the house, Stelios was walking better with only a slight limp. We passed groups of police patrolling near embassies. But some blocks away from the neighborhood, in a poorer area, we almost stumbled over the corpse of an old man in pajamas. Stelios said the bodies of those who’d starved to death were put outside for a cart to take them to the municipal mortuary. There were no more coffins and few men to dig graves. This had been true even before he and his mother had fled the city. The man’s jaw had dropped down, giving him a surprised look. I couldn’t bring myself to step over him, but Stelios took my hand and helped me around him.
Most of the shops we passed were closed or burned out. Banks were boarded up and people were sleeping in doorways or public squares. The cheering crowds of the day before were gone and our footsteps sounded loud in the empty streets. In a section full of warehouses and closed antique shops, Stelios told me to wait while he went up to a second-floor office.
Standing on the sidewalk, I realized that we were just below the hill I’d seen the day before as we entered the city. Partway up the rocky slope, immense fortification walls surrounded the top. I couldn’t see the Parthenon or anything else from there but I wondered how anyone had ever built walls so huge and high. And for what purpose? Below it, on almost the same level as the city streets, was an area of ruined marble buildings, broken columns rising above the weeds. I was going to ask Stelios, but when he returned after a while, his face was gray.
“He took it all,” he said, “all of Mother’s things.” He was carrying two burlap bags, one full of rice, the other containing a ten-liter tin of olive oil.
“Is that all they were worth?”
“This is what I got. What something’s worth these days is whatever you can get for it.”
He handed me the sack of rice, the lighter of the two, and we started home. A pair of jeeps driven by British soldiers roared past and I told Stelios that I didn’t understand why the British were here. Were they going to run the country now?
“Do I know?” he asked, more sharply than I would have expected. Then he said he’d learned something else from his father’s cousin. It was the fact of the labor camps where Greek Jews had been sent in Poland and Germany. Tens of thousands had been taken from Greece—the actual numbers wouldn’t be known until much later. But at that time, the International Red Cross in Geneva had no record of them, including almost the entire Jewish population of Thessaloniki in the north, more than forty thousand people.
“They’ve disappeared off the earth. Papa and Uncle Nikos with them.” I was lagging behind him and he looked back at me, his face still gray. I asked about the cousin he’d just been with and Stelios said some friends here in the city had hidden him and his family in their house. So he hadn’t gone to the synagogue to register with the others.
I still didn’t understand why anyone had been taken in the first place. I was about to ask Stelios, when I heard rapid footsteps behind me and someone grabbed hold of the sack of rice and tried to pull it away. A man in rags with a pinched face and wild eyes. I pulled back, but he shouted at me to give it to him.
“For my children,” he said. “Three of them without food.”
Stelios turned and swung the bag with the heavy tin of olive oil, hitting him in the face. Blood spurted from his nose and splattered onto me.
“Please, just a little,” the man begged. “Only a little.”
“Run!” Stelios shouted. And we did run as best we could with the heavy sacks. I didn’t think my legs would hold me up, but somehow they did. The man dropped farther behind. When I looked over my shoulder, he was standing beside a wall, weeping, his face covered in blood.
“Can’t we give him some?” I asked.
“No. Hold the sack close to your body, like this,” Stelios said, demonstrating with his own. “So no one can grab it.”
“I’m going to give him some.”
Without stopping, I reached into the bag and scooped up a handful of rice, then threw it over my shoulder. And one more. Glancing back, I saw the man on his knees trying to brush the rice into little piles he could scoop up.
“Stop it!” Stelios said. “Others may see you. They’ll be all over us.”
But we made it back to the house without more trouble. Old Yannoula opened the door, her eyes swollen from weeping. She looked at us without speaking and then turned away. That evening Stelios and I sat at either end of the table in the yellow dining room over the rice and boiled greens that Yannoula had made. On the walls were paintings I didn’t understand: human beings or flowers made out of cubes and triangles. Stelios seemed bowed down by the weight of his thoughts. It was hard for me to imagine the boy who walked out with me in the hills beyond the village. I felt cut off from him so, trying to find something to say, I asked Stelios about the huge walls I’d seen, and the ruins.
“Oh, that’s right,” he said softly, “you don’t know much about Athens.”
He left the room and returned with a guidebook. He said he was sorry, but he didn’t feel much like talking and was going to bed. I took the book with me to my room. But there were too many hard words for me. In the center of the book were a lot of photographs of places in the area I recognized but also some of the National Gardens, much as Sophia had described them.
The next day, I asked Stelios if he’d take me there. We waited until evening when the shadow theater would be operating—if it still existed. The gardens were not far from the house so we walked over to the entrance near the Parliament building. But as Stelios said, everything had changed. Trees and bushes had been stripped bare by hungry Athenians, some of whom were living there in flimsy shelters made of cardboard or tin roofing material. Paths still rambled among the streams and pools. But the ducks and goldfish were long gone.
“Mother wouldn’t recognize it,” Stelios said. “I’m glad she can’t see it. This was one of her favorite places.”
I remembered Sophia saying how much her husband liked the cabarets nearby. And I wondered again why he and the others had been taken by the Germans. I asked Stelios.
He sighed and said, “It’s an old racial hatred.” He stared straight ahead as we walked. His father had told him that Jews in Greece were Sephardic, which meant that they’d come originally from Spain hundreds of years earlier, escaping persecution there. People like Jews, people without a homeland, were often not accepted elsewhere. “But here in Greece there’s been no problem. If you’re Greek, that’s all that matters. I was born here and my parents before me. No one has ever taken us for anything but Greek.”
His father’s cousin had told him it wasn’t only Jews the Germans took but Gypsies, Muslims, mentally or physically sick people, communists, socialists, people with police records. If any had children, they were taken too.
“I mean, really anyone they didn’t like.”
A breeze whirled circles of dust on the path up ahead. Across it ran a gang of ragged boys chasing a scrawny cat. I didn’t want to think what they would do when they caught it. We walked along in silence until we heard laughter and applause in the distance, a few chords of accordion music. I took his hand and we walked in that direction.
“The Germans are gone,” I said. “They can’t hurt anyone now, can they?”
“But the people they took, where are they? And not just the ones they took to the camps but the laborers they also abducted?”
The Greek puppet government set up by the Germans had formed Security Battalions, local men willing to do anything for food and uniforms. They carried out what came to be called bloccos. Along with the Germans, the Security Battalions would move into a poor section of Athens and, with megaphones, command all the men of the area into the central square. Wearing black bags with eyeholes over their heads to hide their identity, the men of Security Battalions moved among the men, pointing out any suspected of being communists or anyone else likely to be dissenters of any kind. Most of these were shot immediately. But many others were rounded up to be sent to Germany as laborers in the war factories of the Reich.
“They can’t all just be permanently gone,” Stelios said. “How can thousands of people just disappear?”
I had no idea; it was incomprehensible. But nearly everything had been so since the awfulness of the failed Italian invasion followed by the German one. There was no way to take it all in or make sense of it. Sense had left the world, it seemed, and taken these thousands of lost people with it. But Germany had been defeated. So surely some of the missing people would be able to make their way home again. That was what we had to believe, I thought, just as we rounded a corner at the edge of the gardens. I recognized the Zappeion Exhibition Hall with its great semicircle of columns from the guidebook photos. In front there was another group of ragged children and adults looking at a screen stretched between two of the columns. I was surprised that the colors and features of Karagiozis and the sultan showed through the screen, which must have been of thinner cloth than the old bedsheet we’d used in the village.
“You’re a villain!” the sultan said.
“And you’re a sultan,” Karagiozis replied. “Sultan and villain—they have the same meaning.”
The shadows on the screen were huge compared to the little ones we’d had in the village. Stelios and I stopped and looked at each other, both of us remembering the last night of the puppets in the village. But that memory hurt too much so I reminded him that he’d promised to take me here one day after the war.
“Yes,” he said. “You and Takis.”
As if saying his name somehow conjured him up, there Takis was, sitting on the shoulders of a soldier in a British uniform near the back of the little audience. I was shocked to see him there behaving like any ordinary little boy after all that had happened. He was concentrating on the play and hadn’t seen us. I pointed him out to Stelios.
“My God, the little monster himself,” he said. Takis had on a British uniform way too big for him, with rolled-up pants and shirtsleeves. He rocked back and forth clapping and laughing as the soldier reached up with both hands to steady him.
“Takis!” I called out, but he didn’t hear me over the laughter of the audience. “I’m going over to talk to him.”
“Why?”
I didn’t know how to explain, but I said maybe it was something to do with all those nights matching my breathing to Takis’s before kicking off into the darkness. We had breathed as one as if we shared the same breath. He was of my village, of my second family. “And we still don’t know exactly what happened,” I said.
“Are you sure about that?” Stelios asked, letting go of my hand and walking away.
The soldier supporting Takis seemed to notice me making my way through the crowd toward them before Takis did. A tall blond man with green eyes, he smiled down at me. I didn’t know any English so I spoke directly to Takis.
“How are you, Takis?” When he looked down at me, all the laughter went out of his face. “Where’ve you been?”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Oh, Takis, stop it. What’s happened to you? I was worried.”
“I don’t know you.”
His face was blank, a mask of indifference. He turned back to the action on the stage, ignoring me. The soldier smiled at me again, uncertainly. He could have been the one who’d taken Takis into the jeep in Halandri, but I wasn’t sure. Lifting Takis off his shoulders, he set him on the ground in front of me.
“Oh, Aliki, it’s you,” Takis said, pretending surprise. “I didn’t recognize you.”
“I’ll bet. Where’ve you been?” I heard my voice go up and realized how angry I’d been that he’d just run off. Chrysoula would have wanted me to look after him. The times were still dangerous; a boy on his own wasn’t safe.
“I’ve been with him.” He nodded at the soldier behind him. “Sergeant Whitfield. He’s teaching me English. They all are.”
“They . . . ?”
“At the barracks.”
I wasn’t sure what that was exactly, but it didn’t seem a good place for
a small boy on his own. His arms and legs stuck out of the uniform like sticks. “Are you getting enough to eat? Do you have a clean place to sleep?”
He laughed. “Do you?” He stuck out his tongue.
Onstage the sultan was beating Karagiozis with a club, shouting, “You have swindled me again.” There was a ripple of laughter from the children that swelled into shrieks as the beating went on. Takis said something else, but I didn’t catch it. Then the sergeant knelt down beside Takis and me and spoke in painfully simple Greek.
“Many children we have. They are orphans we think. What we can to do? Family? You are in his family?”
“No. Yes. Well, sort of. We’re from the same village.” I could see he hadn’t really understood. I asked Takis where the British barracks were and he pulled a small notebook from the sergeant’s shirt pocket and drew a simple diagram of the area called Kaisariani.
“I’ll come find you,” I told him.
“What for?” he asked.
“Someone has to look out for you now that your mother is . . .” I hadn’t meant to stop there but I did. His eyes narrowed. I said, “Now that she’s not around.”
“What happened? Something happened, didn’t it?”
“But you were there, Takis. Don’t you remember how the German colonel . . . ?” Another burst of laughter interrupted me.
“I can’t remember,” Takis shouted over it. “I don’t know.”
“The colonel and his soldiers came to the house . . .”
“It’s bad, isn’t it? What happened? Don’t tell me.” He clapped his hands over his ears.
“Takis, just let me . . .”
“Don’t tell,” he said again. “Don’t ever tell.” Then he said something in English to the sergeant, who lifted him back onto his shoulders. Takis stared at the shadows on the screen as if I were no longer there.
“You come see us,” the sergeant said to me. “Is strange boy. Good him to have friend.”
I wondered what Takis had done, for the sergeant to call him a strange boy. Whatever it was, he seemed to me what he’d always been, confused and a little lost. I wanted to protect him. On the screen, the sultan was chasing Karagiozis, followed by a pair of villagers who were trying to beat the sultan while he was beating Karagiozis. The children in the audience were wild with laughter as the shadows chased each other off the screen. The puppet master came from behind the screen for a bow, then passed among the parents with a basket. Some put a few coins in it. One left a half loaf of bread. Takis and Sergeant Whitfield had gone.
My Last Lament Page 9