When I got back to the house, I asked Stelios to show me the little puppet theater he’d said his father had given him. He took me into his bedroom, where the theater and puppets were set up in a corner. Sports pennants hung on the walls and signed photographs of his favorite soccer players were everywhere. There were shelves of books on the walls too, probably one containing The Count of Monte Cristo. I remembered Stelios telling me something about grief and happiness in that book, but I couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said.
We knelt on the floor and he showed me how the theater worked. Though it was smaller than the one in the Zappeion, it seemed better made, with painted puppets of real leather with movable limbs.
“I have a plan,” I said. “Take your stage and screen outside and put on the plays. You know the stories. I can help. There must be other squares and parks beside the Zappeion.”
“Oh, Aliki, haven’t we had enough of puppets?”
“Wouldn’t it be possible to earn enough to feed ourselves and Yannoula?” We couldn’t just sit there watching our supply of food dwindle. The rice and oil wouldn’t last forever.
“Why don’t you ask your friend Takis to do it with you?” he said, standing up. “Did the little crazy one have anything to say for himself?”
I got to my feet, ignoring the edge in Stelios’s voice, and told him about Takis and the sergeant and the barracks. “I don’t think Takis understands what happened to his mother.”
“And my mother? What about her?” His voice thickened and he couldn’t go on for a few seconds but then added, “He’s probably forgotten about her too.”
“I haven’t.”
“He brought the soldiers that night. We were all in the basement but Takis was outside, angry and jealous. It’s not hard to figure out.”
It wasn’t. But I couldn’t really take in the awfulness of it. I kept thinking of the colonel ruffling Takis’s hair that day in front of Chrysoula’s house. And she’d said he’d done so again only the day before when he’d followed up on an informant’s tale that she was hoarding black market food. And who’d told him that? Would an angry boy have been able to take the colonel by the hand and lead him and his men to the house? Was it possible, especially considering the Germans had been on the verge of leaving the village, leaving Greece, pulling out? Why would they have cared at that point what was happening in Chrysoula’s house, or cared that a boy was angry about something he couldn’t explain?
“Whatever happened,” I said, “it’s been wiped out of Takis’s mind. I really don’t think he knows anymore. Maybe it’s gone someplace deep inside, a place he can’t find.”
“Is that possible?”
“I don’t know.”
We didn’t talk about it any more that day. Or at all over the next few weeks. I wanted to go see Takis, but I didn’t know what to say to him. I kept on talking to Stelios about using the shadow puppets to get a little income. He said that we still had his parents’ artwork to sell, about a half dozen paintings. And then there was the remaining furniture. But so many others in Athens were doing the same thing that dealers were glutted with such merchandise. Still, when food got low, Stelios negotiated what he could. The house grew emptier and our voices echoed in the dining room.
“If not the shadow puppets,” I said, “then what?”
“I don’t know where we’d perform. No one’s heard of us and . . .”
“There are lots of parks and plateias.” The area wasn’t yet as militarized as it would soon become. “I can make some posters and put them up for neighborhood children the day before a performance.”
He ran his hands through his hair and paced around the dining room. “It’s just that when I think of puppets,” he said, “I remember the two of us standing there with one in our hands when the soldiers burst in.”
I thought how Takis had buried his memories and Stelios was haunted by his. I was somewhere in between, fighting to keep myself from sliding in either direction. Trying to push my own bleak feelings to one side, I thought I’d just have to get to them later because someone had to plan ahead, find a way to get us through whatever lay ahead. So I nagged.
“Look how many were in the audience at the Zappeion,” I said.
“The puppet master there is famous,” Stelios said.
“He wasn’t always. He had to start somewhere.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You have a flair for puppetry. We all saw it in the basement of Chrysoula’s house. There were good nights before the bad one, Stelios. You held us together in the dark.”
I suggested that we try to put on Karagiozis the Baker again. I could do the voices of Karagiozis’s wife and some of the villagers. He’d do Karagiozis and the sultan. And why not here in Kolonaki? It looked to me if there was any money to be had, this was the place. All those white marble buildings.
“It’s too close to the Zappeion,” Stelios said. “I can’t compete with the puppet master there.”
He took me to a small park in Pangrati near the end of the trolley line. There were two outdoor cafés nearby. One was closed, but at the other the audience could get refreshments. We stood, looking at an open space where the stage and screen could go.
After a while he said, “We can try it. See if it works out.”
“Yes, just to see.”
“No need to say it in that satisfied way.”
“Who, me?”
“It’s an experiment. We’ll see how it goes.”
“Of course. See how it goes.”
The next day, I made posters advertising the play to be performed in three days’ time and tacked them to trees in the park and to the sides of houses and apartment buildings nearby. At home, we rehearsed. As we did so, Stelios started to lose himself in the work.
“What we could do,” he said the day before the performance, “is to have Yannoula sing and play the squeeze box before the play starts.” We were in the living room packing the puppets and screen into a suitcase to carry them to the park. “She was a professional singer when she was young. I mean, music halls and clubs, that kind of thing. And it’s traditional to have music before a performance.”
I couldn’t imagine Yannoula, all in black, singing to an audience of mostly children. But Stelios brought her into the room and explained what we were going to do.
“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” she said. “It’s been years since I sang.” She giggled and covered her yellow teeth with her hand.
“Sing something for Aliki,” Stelios said. “That one you used to sing before my plays.”
“I don’t remember it.”
“Of course you do. I remember some of it.” He sang in a voice much deeper than his speaking one.
Red twine braided fine,
tightly wound around a wheel . . .
“Oh, that,” she said and joined him. Then Stelios went silent and Yannoula went on by herself, clasping her hands in front of her as she sang.
Set the wheel a-spinning, do,
and I’ll spin a tale or two,
for all this happy company.
And may your time pass pleasantly.
Her voice was quavery but there was a sweetness in it. When she finished, I applauded.
“What do you think?” Stelios asked.
“Oh, please do it, Yannoula,” I said. “And play the squeeze box too.”
“No,” she said, eyes cast down. “I don’t want to. It was wonderful those days, singing and dancing in the musical reviews at the old Astir theater in Piraeus. But it’s two husbands later and another time now. And, with just hearing about my poor Sophia, well, I’m not up to it.”
But the next evening, as we were ready to leave the house with the suitcase, she came down the stairs in a long green dress. It was too big, probably made for a better-fed version of herself. And she’d put on some lipstick
—a little red heart shape in the middle of her thin lips.
“A person can change her mind,” she said. She was carrying a case that I guessed contained the squeeze box.
As the sun went down in the park in Pangrati, we lit kerosene lamps behind the screen and set out the puppets. People in the café nearby pointed us out to each other and a few children with their mothers dragged their café chairs nearer. There were only about eight or nine, but they were enough. Yannoula stood in front of the screen and began.
“Red twine braided fine . . .” From behind the screen, we heard more people gathering. Yannoula sang the song through twice and when she finished there was scattered applause. Stelios and I began the play, our first together.
Our audience was quiet at the beginning. At least, I thought, no babies were crying, no one whining to go home. When Karagiozis told the villager that the plucked goose had jumped out of the pan and flown away, the children laughed so much that we had to pause and wait for them to stop. And when he said that the tomatoes and potatoes had run away too, the same thing happened. From then on everything seemed to work. How easy it was to make children laugh in times that were not at all funny. At the end, Stelios had the sultan chase Karagiozis around the stage, hitting him while Karagiozis yelled, “Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch!”
Stelios and I stood up behind the screen to take our bows in the applause and Yannoula kissed us both, leaving little lipsticky heart prints on our cheeks. Our audience began to trail away and Stelios remembered about the collection basket. He dropped some coins in it so people would get the idea and caught up with the departing audience. Carrying the Karagiozis puppet, he called out in his voice, “Who will help a poor starving actor?”
Not many, as it turned out. A few dropped some bills into the basket. But with the devaluation of the drachma when the economy collapsed during the occupation, even a thousand-drachma note was barely enough for a cup of coffee.
“Only that?” Karagiozis shouted. “You shame my mother, my father, the king of Greece and the patriarch of Constantinople!”
Some laughed, but no one gave any more. Stelios came back dejected. He flicked through the thousand-drachma bills and said, “Not even enough for a meal.”
We were repacking the suitcase when the manager of the café came over and thanked us. A twitchy man named Theo with a dirty apron and red face, he said his customers had stayed longer and ordered more drinks and snacks because of our performance. Would we do it again in a few days? A longer play maybe?
“The longer the play, the more orders,” he said. “I can’t pay. But after each performance, you can eat and drink what you like. Within reason.”
Yannoula and I were delighted. A meal every night!
But Stelios said, “What do you mean you can’t pay? Your customers must pay something.”
“Ah, the times, the times,” Theo said, tapping the side of his head and then his nose. “Many of the customers are my relatives, so what can I do? I give them credit.” He and his relatives were from the island of Crete, where, as he said, blood was stronger than money.
“Your café was nearly full tonight. All of them, relatives?”
“Most. Well, about half, but they bring their friends.”
But some must pay, Stelios told him, or it wouldn’t be possible for Theo to stay in business. Theo said they often brought him belongings from home or maybe things they’d stolen, who could say? Some came with suitcases of cash, enough for a few drinks. One had given a valuable ancient coin to settle an old bill; another, a good piece of jewelry.
“We’ll need ten percent of whatever you take in,” Stelios said.
Theo blanched and stepped back. “Do you think I’m a fool?”
He and Stelios went back and forth. There was a lot of hand waving and declarations of poverty on both sides. Finally Theo walked away. Stelios followed him and when he returned a while later, he told us that Theo would give three percent of anything that could be divided up.
“How did you manage that?” I asked.
“I told him we were going to perform at that other café over there. Then we’d see how many customers he had.” I looked over at the boarded-up café.
“But it’s closed,” I said.
“I told him the owner had offered to reopen if we would perform there.”
We were to stage another show two days later, but we had to come up with a longer play. Stelios thought we might try Karagiozis the Senator and began to explain it to me scene by scene. I was quietly pleased that my plan was working.
This time, the audience was bigger. We repeated the play the next night and then in the following week did another new one. Over the next few weeks, we were able to break away from our old diet of rice and olive oil. News of the once well-known Yannoula had apparently spread and she developed a small following of elderly gentlemen who waited for her after the show.
“I have no time for them,” she said. “I have to think about my new career. And you too,” she told me. “It’s time to do something about your clothes,” Yannoula said. “You’ve grown too tall for that little-girl dress.”
She took me into her room at the back of the house, which had an old-lady smell of dried flowers and stale cologne. There she opened a battered trunk of costumes from her theater days. It also contained street clothes from another time, before Yannoula had been widowed, she said. I’d never seen anything like them. In front of a full-length mirror, she held up one dress after another, but most were either too large or too fancy and all were dated. They looked silly on me, plain little thing that I was, somewhere on the far side of pretty but not completely homely. Yannoula saw the expression on my face.
“Never mind,” she said, “everything can be fixed. You have expressive eyes, but your hair—oh, yes, we must do something about that.”
In the theater, she told me, audiences expected to see entertainers who looked better than themselves. It was especially true in times like these, “when everyone looks and feels so drab,” she said. “People want a little sparkle.”
“But I’m behind the screen.”
“They see you at the end when you stand up. And anyway, in the theater one should always be ready to be seen.”
She scissored much of my long hair and, using a sticky liquid, set the rest so that when dried, it became a mop of jiggly curls. Then she cobbled together a few outfits: a long one of shiny red material, then a pale blue, drapey thing with puffed sleeves. And a couple of other, plainer ones. When I looked in the mirror, my reflection reminded me of that cartoon character I’d seen on movie posters downtown, Betty Boop. One thing was certain, though: I didn’t look like a skinny village girl anymore.
Stelios was stunned when I came downstairs. For the first time since those earliest days, he spoke with a stammer. “Aliki, you don’t—don’t—don’t . . . look like yourself. More like, I mean, someone out of a movie.”
“Betty Boop?”
“Who? Uh, well, not ex-exactly. But I wouldn’t have recognized you.”
I felt the color rise in my cheeks. So this was the effect of a new look? Not that our next audience noticed. Before we could begin the performance, an argument started inside the café. It sounded like two men insulting each other’s politics at first, but soon others joined in. Tables were pushed over and bottles smashed. Someone drew a pistol and there were shots. We threw our things into the suitcase and fled home. The next day Stelios went to see what had happened, but the café was closed and the area cordoned off. Theo was not around.
Such things and worse were happening all over Athens. No one group seemed to take control after the liberation. We’d heard that the prewar prime minister and some of his old government had returned from their exile in Cairo. They’d been escorted by the British and supported by the royalist faction—the Republican League—though the king himself hadn’t returned. But the communist-based National Lib
eration Front and its military wing were in control of large parts of the country, including some sections of Athens, and considered themselves the rightful government. We felt fairly safe in our embassy neighborhood, protected by British forces and Greek police. But we heard that People’s Committees had been set up by the communist groups to try anyone suspected of collaborating with the Germans, especially members of the Security Battalions who’d taken part in the bloccos. In the morning, even in Kolonaki, there were sometimes bodies in the street and not just of people who’d starved to death. Down the block from us, a man was found hanged from a plane tree.
With few functioning newspapers and not much on local radio, we had to rely on word of mouth to find out which groups had taken control of which neighborhoods outside our own. I missed Chrysoula’s big Zenith, partly for the news but also because without it, I no longer heard my father’s voice. Was he still fretting over his misplaced ax and hammer or saw? Would I ever hear from him again? I hoped so, but I needn’t have worried.
And was it safe for us to continue performing anywhere else in the city? We couldn’t find out for certain. Yannoula was especially put out by this.
“Just when I’ve returned to the stage,” she said. “All right, the small stage. All right, the very small stage.”
We gave one last Athens performance nearby in Kolonaki Square. But partway through the play, a pair of Greek policemen along with a British soldier showed up and started to interrogate audience members, looking for any parents who might belong to People’s Committees. The performance had to stop while individuals in the audience were questioned. It seemed unlikely that People’s Committee members would attend a puppet show or, even if they did, admit their affiliation. But one or two people were led away. Then I realized that the British soldier was the one who’d been with Takis at the Zappeion, Sergeant Whitfield. I’d told him that I would come see Takis, but with all the work for the performances, I hadn’t done it. I still worried about him every day and felt bad about not going to see him.
My Last Lament Page 10