CASSETTE 3 Side 1
We buried Zephyra the day before yesterday, may the earth rest lightly on her. The men carried her coffin on their shoulders through the cemetery gates while we women stood on either side making bird noises to ward off bad spirits.
Once inside, I nodded to the graves of those I’ve loved. I’ll lie next to them one of these days, but who will be left to lament for the lamenter? Not the other women, who lack the—What should I call it?—the inner eye and ear to take in what has not been seen or spoken. Still, they were kind enough to give me a nice shoulder of lamb for my services at the wake, though I would have lamented for nothing. I stewed the lamb with chopped spring onions, romaine and dill and planned to finish it off with an egg-lemon sauce made from the broth, all in Zephyra’s honor. As I was stirring it, I thought of her the last time I saw her, that sound she made as she pawed the bedclothes. I turned the flame down to a simmer and put a lid on the pot. Then I set out for the next village to see Aphrodite, our wisewoman, who was the last to be with Zephyra.
Aphrodite’s house—if it could be called that—was outside the village, standing by itself in a meadow. It was just a stone hut of the kind shepherds use for temporary shelter in bad weather. The door was ajar and inside I could see a small fire burning in a grate in a corner, though the day was warm. As my eyes adjusted to the dark inside, I made out bunches of herbs hung so thickly from the ceiling that I had to stoop to enter. The walls were covered in icons. I called out her name. A pile of rugs in another corner stirred. Aphrodite sat up and blinked.
“Is someone there?” she asked. The light was behind me so I told her who I was. She got to her feet and came closer, peering into my face. “Ah, that one,” she said. “Am I dead yet? Did you come for a pair of my shoes?”
“I’m not here to lament,” I said.
“Oh? They say that when you arrive, death is at hand.”
“They say the same of you.”
She giggled and threw her hands in the air. “What can we do? We are like sisters. We prepare the way.”
We were not exactly competitors, but we’ve always stayed out of each other’s paths. Aphrodite deals with healing, charms and curses, telling the future by throwing smooth stones on the floor and reading their patterns. Or acting as a go-between when villagers need the favors of saints. I’m not saying these things were nonsense, but they weren’t of much use to me. And to fewer and fewer villagers as the years turned, but of course that was true of lamenting too. Aphrodite served the living and I the dying or their relatives. But sometimes her services and mine overlapped near that space between life and death. So it had been with Zephyra.
Aphrodite took my arm and pulled me farther inside. On the dirt floor were clumps of white feathers here and there, as if a chicken had recently been plucked. She motioned me to a low stool on one side of a table and she sat down opposite. From the nearness of her, I understood that there must be no place in the hut for her to wash. Or maybe there was little inclination? Her hair was matted and her skin looked gray. She opened her mouth to say something but started coughing so hard she couldn’t speak. When she got control, she wiped her mouth with the corner of the rug draped around her shoulders and stared at me as if she’d only just noticed I was there.
“It’s about Zephyra, isn’t it?” she asked.
“How do you know?”
“How do I know anything? How do you?”
I couldn’t answer that so I started to tell her how Zephyra had acted the last time I saw her, but Aphrodite cut me off.
“Yes, yes, I know. She was the same with me.”
“What did it mean?”
“What did what mean?”
“The noises.”
“Is that all that’s bothering you? I can tell you about it, but little else. I keep the secrets of the dying, you know.”
During the time of the Germans, Aphrodite said, Zephyra’s mother made a goatskin disguise for her daughter. Zephyra wasn’t much bigger than a young kid herself so her mother fitted the skin over her and tied the leg bits to Zephyra’s own legs and arms with twine.
“Like a costume for Carnival,” Aphrodite said.
“But no one celebrated Carnival in those years.”
“That’s right, you were there in that same village then, weren’t you?” She paused and scratched herself roughly around the waist. “The charcoal maker’s daughter, taken in by Chrysoula. We heard of you all even over here. You and your secret guests.”
There were few still alive in the village who even remembered those events. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about it before, but of course Aphrodite, who looked older than God, was probably around my age. But I was startled to know that news of Sophia and Stelios had traveled even to this village.
“Did everybody know?” I asked.
“Some did. Some didn’t.”
Before I could ask who knew exactly, she began coughing again, just a little at first, then a spasm overwhelmed her in terrible heaves. I reached across to hold her shoulders until it passed.
“What are you doing about this cough?” I asked.
“I am in his care.” She pointed at one of the icons on the wall. “St. Athanassios. Don’t worry about me.” She adjusted her shoulder rug and said, “What everyone knew about your village was Zephyra and the goats. Nothing like that happened here.”
Aphrodite paused and picked a chicken feather off the rug around her shoulders. She studied it carefully as if she’d never seen one before. She showed no interest in continuing to speak. I took some coins from my pocket and slid them across the table, saying as I did so that here was something for a few candles to light in front of the icon of St. Athanassios. Aphrodite glanced at the coins, then covered them with her hand.
“Everyone was starving,” she said. “Well, you remember how it was. But the Germans had some goats in a pen. They’d taken them from Manos, the goatherd. Was that his name? No, Christos? Anyhow, Zephyra’s mother would send her among the goats late at night in her disguise and on all fours. The goats could smell one of their own on her so they weren’t startled or noisy. You know how goats are. Skittish.”
She wrinkled her face and sniffed about as if she were a goat testing the air. For a second she reminded me of Zephyra as I’d last seen her.
“Well, Zephyra would slide a rope around the neck of one and lead it to her house, where her mother would slit its throat and skin it. They had plenty to eat when others had none.”
Except for us, I thought. Sophia’s gold sovereigns and the black market food they bought had kept us alive. But it hadn’t taken the Germans long to realize the goats were disappearing faster than they could eat them, Aphrodite said. They could count, after all. So a guard was posted and that stopped Zephyra’s stealing. Soon she and her mother were back to eating snails and grass like the rest of the village.
I tried to imagine little Zephyra in a goatskin coaxing an actual goat along the street. It must have been terrifying for her; the Germans were brutal to anyone caught stealing, even children. In a village in the next valley over, they’d beaten a boy to death with the butts of their rifles for stealing potatoes off one of their trucks although the year’s crop had been seized from the villagers there in the first place. And what could be said of Zephyra’s mother that she risked her daughter’s life that way? Poor Zephyra must have carried the experience all the way to her deathbed. In the cloudiness of her last days, the sound of goats intruded on her own dying. I’ve seen before how a mind near death fixes on an event known only to it.
Aphrodite pulled the coins toward her and said nothing more.
At home, beating the egg-lemon sauce for my lamb, I reflected on how village secrets always come out in time. But here was this velvety piece of lamb in its tart sauce to remind me of the comfort of food and the degrading acts people could be brought to by the lack of it.
In
Athens, food hadn’t suddenly appeared just because the war was over. That winter—what was the year, ’44, I think—was to be one of the worst. But we did get some good news when Stelios received a hand-delivered message from the owner of a café along the waterfront in the Piraeus harbor to the south of Athens. He’d somehow heard about our performances in Pangrati and sent a message offering ten percent of each evening’s take plus ticket sales—no more passing a basket—if we would perform The Hero Katsondonis at his café. The long play was one of “the heroics,” usually performed over three successive evenings. Stelios had seen it several times and believed he could work out the story in two parts and teach it to me. Of course Piraeus was a long way, through dangerous neighborhoods, but the café owner had offered to send a car for us. That he could afford this meant that he ran a much more profitable café than Theo’s in Pangrati.
The message had come while I’d been off seeing Takis. When I came in, Stelios and Yannoula were in the dining room talking about making the new puppets we’d need for the performance.
“Katsondonis has a big mustache like this,” Stelios was saying, sketching on a pad. “And he wears the warrior’s fustanella.” He roughed in the white pleated skirt that had been part of the military uniform of revolutionary officers.
I wanted to tell Stelios where I’d been, but I knew he wouldn’t like it. If I told him how Takis had behaved, that would put an end to the possibility of his joining us, if it existed at all. But how could we let Takis go with people who’d never understand what was going on inside him? Not that I had any idea about that, but I knew he had a place full of sickness inside. If we could all stay together, maybe it would go away as he grew up, or we could find someone who knew about these things. But how much time did we have? Sergeant Whitfield hadn’t said when the removal of the orphans would begin.
When Stelios was working on a play, he almost seemed to forget himself; almost seemed happy. When he told me about the message from Piraeus, he talked about Captain Katsondonis, who’d been a folk hero of the War of Independence that ended the Turkish occupation of Greece in the nineteenth century. Originally a shepherd, Katsondonis led an uprising. But a Greek priest betrayed him for a single gold sovereign.
“The Turks executed him with sledgehammers,” Stelios said, raising his arms in the air as if he were holding one of the hammers. “They broke all his bones on an anvil!” He slammed his arms down in front of him with a shout: “Sperm of the devil!”
I jumped and what was left of my intent to talk to him about Takis evaporated. Sometimes Stelios was so forceful that he startled me. In the last scene of the play, the spirit of Greece, in the form of a winged young man crowned with laurel, descended and claimed Katsondonis for History.
Over the next few days, Yannoula practiced the melancholy songs from the play.
“Are they sad enough?” she asked. “I think I need to sound more tearful.”
The play was indeed sad, full of Turks (always dastardly) and Greeks (always brave). I had several vocal roles, primarily that of Angeliki, Greek wife of the hero—“They have boiled my father-in-law in oil, the villains!” And that of the Turkish ruler, Ali Pasha—“I will smash your ankles and scatter them on the road!” I loved learning all this patriotic history. We’d had some of it in school before the war, but it was never as exciting as Stelios made it. I was looking forward to our first performance but even more to riding to Piraeus in a big car.
But the car was actually small, heavily dented and so covered with dust and dirt that you could barely make out its liverish color. The driver was a burly man in a stained undershirt who introduced himself as Michaelis. When he heard that I’d never been to Piraeus and Stelios and Yannoula hadn’t seen it for years, he talked all the way.
“This whole area,” he said, waving his arm out the window as we passed through a run-down neighborhood, “it’s controlled by guerrillas from the so-called National Liberation Front. Communists. Liberate us from what? Stupidity and poverty?” Farther on, in a better area, he said, “There’s Republican League around here—you can smell them.”
“So who’s worse, left or right?” Stelios asked.
“From what I hear, whoever is in charge in any area—they’re tyrants then and there. But it all changes and the next one is worse than the last. What a joke!”
“Maybe you should run the government yourself.”
“Maybe we all should. That’s what’s wrong with this place—we all think we’re the government. You’ve got the police, the British and the royalists on one side trying to get the king back and splintered communist and socialist groups on the other. And they all think they’re the government. Bah, a curse on them all!”
He was getting out, he told us, emigrating to Canada. He had a cousin who ran a restaurant there, Spyros, his name was, who was going to make him a partner.
“But it’s cold there, isn’t it?” Yannoula said.
“Yes, yes, I know, and I hate the cold. I was in the army up on the Albanian front, trying to hold back the macaroni-eaters. Now that was cold. Hands had to be amputated. Feet. Outside the medical tent there was a big pile of hands and feet. And for what? I ask you. The Nazis came to the aid of the Italians and drove us back anyway. You know the rest.”
There was silence in the car until Michaelis dropped us at the café in a central plateia that was crowded with people who’d come for our performance. Among them were several armed guerrillas with machine gun belts across their chests. They looked like the ones who’d stopped me on the way back from seeing Takis, but we were far from there. In the play, when Katsondonis and his warriors took their oath to free their homeland from the Turks or “. . . filled with honor’s bullets, together upon the earth we’ll fall!” the armed men stood up and sang the national anthem.
In the second act, Stelios did the voice of Katsondonis’s son, who says to his mother (me), when they hear distant shooting, “Listen, Mother, listen, they’re fighting.”
Then I responded, “Yes, my child, but who is fighting?”
The guerrillas in the audience cried out, “We are!” and everyone applauded, drowning out the next lines. The audience was entering the play. It was going to be a long performance. After it finished, the owner showed us to rooms above the café as it was too far to get back to Kolonaki and return for the concluding performance the next night. Yannoula and I shared a room and Stelios was down the hall. Yannoula had brought a large beaker of wine back to the room and was getting through it, sitting on the bed opposite mine. She said she’d be sleeping in her clothes and told me to do the same.
“Bedbugs,” she said. “These ports, they’re always full of them. The foreign sailors, they’re the ones that bring them. I used to sing in reviews at the Astir music hall just over there,” she said, pointing out the window, “and sailors came to the shows. They always left their crawly little friends behind.”
The reviews had featured many acts: comedians, trained animals, magicians, ventriloquists. They had changed regularly, but Yannoula had been a permanent feature. “I was famous, you know. Not really famous, but enough for it to be fun. And not only for my voice!”
She winked. She told me the prime minister had once come to the theater wearing dark glasses so as not to be recognized. And after the performance, she’d received a huge spray of expensive orchids from an anonymous gentleman.
“Oh, I had so many beautiful gowns, you can’t imagine. The red ones always suited me best, you know, with my high coloring.” She turned her head just so as if to show me, but without makeup, her skin had the papery whiteness of someone long out of the sun. While she talked, we could hear intermittent gunfire from another part of the port.
“Listen to them out there,” she said. “Now that we don’t have the Germans to kill us, we have to do it ourselves. That Michaelis is right, of course, but we don’t all have relatives in Canada. And anyhow, someday this will all be o
ver and we’ll be glad we’re not freezing in Toronto.”
When things calmed down Stelios would likely be called to do his national service, she said; he’d been too young to fight in the north where Michaelis had been, thanks to God. But we weren’t going to let Stelios go, were we? “We’ll hide him. Or, wait, we could dress him up as a girl. Like Achilles.” She said that Achilles’s mother had disguised him as a girl and hidden him on the island of Skyros to evade the Trojan War. “Brave Achilles, just imagine, in skirts. But Odysseus found him out and tricked him into joining the forces. Did you know that?”
I didn’t know anything, I said, and told her about the village school closing.
“Get Stelios to teach you. He told me that about Achilles. Smart boy, our Stelios.” She’d noticed the way he’d been looking at me, she said, especially that night she’d opened the courtyard door and he’d rushed inside. I felt myself blushing. “Oh, I’m embarrassing you,” she said. “I’m as blunt as a battleship sometimes.”
She handed me a glass of the wine and told me to go ahead and try it; it wasn’t going to hurt me. “You have to learn to drink sometime.” The wine tasted strongly of resin, but I got it down and the glass was quickly refilled. After a bit I didn’t notice the taste so much. Yannoula was telling me how naughty she’d been in her theater days.
“Here’s a little secret: I dyed my hair. Not that on my head, which was as black as midnight. No, I mean down there, on my what-do-you-call-it. With the help of a little peroxide and a toothbrush, I was blond below and black on top. Let me tell you, it drove the men wild!”
Seeing me blushing again, she apologized. “I keep forgetting how young you are, Aliki. You act so much older. Well, everyone’s an adult these days. Some are just shorter than others.”
What she really wanted to know, she said, was who was this boy who’d bitten Stelios back in the village? And what had really happened there? What Stelios had told her hadn’t quite made sense; he’d been so angry he could barely get it all out. Her Sophia, really her dearest friend even though her employer, was dead; that was all she’d understood.
My Last Lament Page 12