His tone was hard. He moved from one pennant to another, pulling out tacks until the floor was littered with the sporting colors of the past. Then he turned to me and said, “If he’s going to stay, he’ll have to be confined to the house. We can’t trust him outside.”
“I’ll look after him.”
“Are you really up to that?” His tone softened. “You’ve just gone through some kind of, I don’t know, collapse.”
“Yannoula will help.”
“Look, I can’t ever forget what happened in the village, you know that. I’ll try to push it to one side for now since we all have to live in the same house. But I don’t guarantee it’ll stay there.”
“I know, Stelios. It’s not as if I’ve forgotten either.”
I went to him and held him, laying my head on his shoulder.
When we went downstairs, we saw that Yannoula had cut a slice of cake for Takis. No doubt she’d intentionally cut the part with the lucky New Year’s coin. He held it up just as the lights came back on.
“Look! Yannoula says I’ll have a lucky year.”
We didn’t say anything.
Yannoula gave Takis a room down the hall from mine on the top floor. The next day she found some of Stelios’s boyhood clothes for him and dressed him to look like a proper schoolboy. I explained to her why we needed to keep him inside unless one of us was with him.
“He did that?” she said. “With no clothes on? A little discipline, that’s what he needs. Then he’ll remember how to behave.”
What Takis would and would not remember was more complicated than she knew. But he seemed to take to Yannoula, holding her hand or even crawling into her lap so she could tell him a story. For a while he seemed to have turned back into the little boy he’d been when I’d moved into his mother’s house. But when I thought of how crazily he’d acted at the British base, I was uneasy about this new change.
Late the next night he slipped into my room. “I can’t sleep,” he said, hopping on top of the bedcovers and sticking out his feet. He wiggled his right foot and said in Mr. Shepherd’s voice, “What’s for dinner?”
“Takis, we’re too old for this,” I said.
“Oh, my dear Mr. Shepherd,” he said in Mrs. Shepherd’s voice, “there’s nothing at all. We’ll have to eat the furniture. I’ll have the floor lamp. Will you have an armchair?”
“Oh, stop it, Takis. I need to talk to you.”
He fingered the edge of the blanket, crumpling it up then smoothing it out. He couldn’t go outside without one of us along, I told him.
“Why?”
“You know. You can’t take your clothes off the way you did near the base.”
“I don’t remember much about that,” he said, crumpling up the blanket again.
“Sometimes you scare me.”
“I’m sorry, Aliki. I don’t know why I do what I do. Words fly out of my mouth and I don’t know where they come from. I scare myself.”
He climbed out of bed and went to the window where the leaves of a tall eucalyptus were beating against the glass in the wind.
“Why do you talk to trees?”
“I don’t talk to them,” he said. “They talk to me.”
“Isn’t it like calling your feet Mr. and Mrs. Shepherd? It’s silly fun, but they’re still only feet.”
“No, no, trees do talk to me.”
“Saying what, exactly?”
“They told me to take off my clothes.”
“Why would they want you to do that?”
“How would I know? I remember being cold in someone’s garden and I couldn’t find my way out. I got scratched all over. Stupid, that’s what it was, stupid.”
“What other things do they tell you to do?”
“I don’t always remember afterward.”
He climbed back onto the bed and waggled his feet again.
“Stop that,” I said. “We’re having a serious conversation.”
“You’re no fun anymore. When did you get so serious?”
“I think you know. It happened in the village.”
His reaction was immediate, expression darkening as he jumped off the bed and went out the door. I called after him, but there was only the sound of his footsteps hurrying down the hall and the bang of his door.
When I came downstairs the next morning, Stelios was in the library, a room at the side of the staircase with floor-to-ceiling shelves of books. He was pulling books off the shelves and stacking them on the floor. “I hate to see these go,” he said. “But we don’t have much left to sell. Would you like any of these? Yannoula said something about my helping you read.”
Was there a dictionary I could use to look up words from the Athens guidebook he’d given me? He pulled one off a low shelf, but it was so heavy I could barely hold it. I flipped through its pages and thought of the millions of words that I mostly didn’t know. Where should I start?
“See what you think of this,” Stelios said. He pulled a volume off the shelf, blew off the dust and handed it to me: The Iliad.
“What’s it about?”
“Greeks at war.”
“We can see that by looking out the window, can’t we?”
“This is different. Or maybe not. It’s about the Trojan War, you know, the Mycenian Greeks attacking Troy to avenge the abduction of Helen.”
I’d never heard of this Helen or the Mycenians and wondered if this was something that had just happened and they’d already got it into a book. He saw that I was puzzled and explained that Paris, a Trojan prince, had kidnapped the wife of the king of Sparta, Menelaus, with whom he’d been staying as guest, and had taken her off to Troy. The Greeks fought the Trojans for ten years to get her back. The Iliad told all about it.
“But actually it’s about everything,” he said. “Listen, listen to this. Wait, just let me find it.” He flipped through clumps of pages until he found what he wanted and read out this:
As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground but the live timber
burgeons with leaves again in the season of Spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another dies.
“Do you like it?” Stelios asked.
“Yes, yes. I’ve never heard anything like that. Read some more.”
“Let me find something.” As he turned the pages this time, things slipped out and fell to the floor. I bent to pick them up: dried leaves, a photograph of a soccer team, yellowed newspaper clippings.
“Don’t, don’t,” he said. “I’ll get them.”
By then we were both on our knees, bumping heads, laughing. “I save things,” he said, “just things I like, and keep them in the pages. They’re really nothing.” He gathered them up and inserted them back in the pages, looking embarrassed.
“Will you show them to me one day?”
“Oh, they’re just foolish mostly.”
We got to our feet and he put The Iliad back on the shelf without reading anything else.
“What about that book you told me about in the village?” I asked.
He found a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, but it was almost as big as the dictionary. I said I remembered him telling me how someone in the book said that happiness and misery are really the same. But it couldn’t be true, could it?
“Look at all we’ve been through,” I said, “some of each, and they weren’t the same at all.”
“I think it’s more that they’re relative, Aliki. What we call happiness or misery might be something else to other people.”
I could understand that, but as I thought about it, I was bothered. “If that’s so, how would we know what’s true about anything? It would just be one person’s idea against another’s, wouldn’t it?”
“Ah, you’r
e a philosopher. That’s a good question and a lot of people have thought about it, starting with someone called Socrates.”
He took from a shelf a copy of Plato’s Republic. I put down The Count of Monte Cristo and took the Republic from him. It wasn’t as thick as The Count, but the print inside was tiny.
“Aren’t there any pictures?” I asked.
Stelios sighed.
“The guidebook has lots of pictures and that helps me figure out some of the meaning. If you could help me with the hard words, Stelios . . .”
“All right. Why don’t I read to you while you follow along word by word? Just a little each day. Then you can try to read it back to me and I’ll explain whatever you want. How would that be?”
I’d left the guidebook upstairs, but he found one about the history of Athens with lots of pictures, some even in color. We sat down on the floor side by side and held the book between us as he read slowly out loud, but then he paused and said, “Oh.” I looked up and saw Takis standing in the doorway.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Learning to read better,” I said.
There was an uncomfortable moment as the three of us stared at each other without speaking. Takis’s eyes flashed briefly, but then he looked down and scraped his shoe along the floor. “You look funny, the two of you on the floor there like that.”
“And you look much better,” I said to break the tension. Yannoula had cut his hair and dressed him in a sailor outfit from Stelios’s childhood.
“I look like a monkey,” he said.
“No, you don’t. Monkeys are more handsome.”
“Ha-ha.” He looked at the staircase curving up to the next two floors. “This is some house. What do you do here all day?” We told him about our Karagiozis performances, but he winced and turned away at the mention of them.
“Because of Karagiozis, we eat,” Stelios said. “We should do more performances now that the shooting has stopped.” Takis said nothing. “Look, Takis, would you like to read with us?”
“I can’t.”
“You could learn along with Aliki.”
“Isn’t there anything else to do?”
“There’s a backgammon set around here someplace. And a deck of cards.”
Takis made a face and left. Stelios sighed again. We went on with our reading.
Through the next weeks, we read a few pages every day and I filled a notebook with new words. Stelios was patient with me, adding his own details about the city, which was slowly coming to life around us: where the blind violinist played so sweetly in a park, which lottery ticket seller was the luckiest, how to find the kafeneion where the old men still smoked hookahs—a kind of water pipe—in the evening. We went for walks now that it was safe, past buildings pockmarked with bullet holes or in streets that had been reduced to rubble by British tanks. Police and British troops seemed to be everywhere, telling pedestrians where they could and could not go. We were grateful for the end of local fighting, but as Stelios put it, the British troops were “acting as if they owned the place.” Along with the royalist government, they were determined to retake parts of the country in communist hands. Athens was an island of relative calm and the actual islands, in their isolation, were not so bad.
On our walks, Stelios stopped at cafés to ask if they would like to have shadow puppet performances there, and though many said yes, few were willing to pay anything. One proprietor even wanted us to pay him for the use of his café.
Sometimes we took Takis with us, trying never to let him out of our sight, but even so, he trailed behind and sometimes disappeared. We had to circle back to find him.
“Here, you walk in front,” Stelios told him.
But if we stopped to talk to a café owner or look at a bookstall, he was off again, forcing us to search. I had to do my balancing act, trying to make Takis feel part of our lives without exasperating Stelios.
Most days Takis stayed home with Yannoula. He helped her shop, cook and clean while she told him stories from her life. At least, I supposed that was what they were doing.
His dark looks at dinnertime worried me. I wasn’t sure if he was glaring at Stelios or at me or at both of us. Our walks together were among the happiest times Stelios and I had ever had, just looking at everything and talking about it all, sitting in a park. Yannoula seemed to trust us together in a way Chrysoula never would have done and I felt so safe with Stelios, as if I’d returned home. We probably glowed when we came home and Takis clearly noticed. The closer Stelios and I became, the more sullen and brooding Takis was, answering questions with a grunt or a shrug. Was he sinking again? Was some gravitational pull drawing him down into a shadow world?
Yannoula would try to cheer him up, asking him about life in the village. What was it really like? She was just a city girl, she said, and had no idea about village life.
“I hated it there,” he said.
“Oh, Takis, you did not,” I said. “Remember the good times we had—me showing you how my father made charcoal and how much you laughed at me and . . .”
“I hated it.”
Then one day he ran off. He’d been sitting with Yannoula in the library. Stelios and I had gone for one of our walks. When we returned, she met us at the door.
“I don’t know what made me ask him,” she said. “I just wanted to know what happened to Sophia and his mother, what really happened, you know, from his point of view. I asked him why it was that the Germans came to his mother’s house when they did. He got up and walked out of the room without a word. I went after him but he’d gone. That was hours ago.”
He was not back by nightfall. I searched the neighborhood but found no trace. Stelios tried the National Gardens because I thought Takis might be where there were trees. But he wasn’t. Stelios went as far as Theo’s café in Pangrati and stopped there to see if it had reopened. But neighbors said Theo had moved his family back to Crete during the worst of the street fighting in Athens. He’d opened a café there in Heraklion, the capital of the island. When Stelios came back, he said he was going to write Theo that day to ask if he had work for us. No local cafés had shown interest and there was still too much street fighting around Piraeus for us to consider performing there again. We’d sold most of the items of value in the house and were running out of money again. We had to have a new plan.
“That’s all you can think of,” Yannoula said, “with our Takis still missing?” Her eyes were red. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have been so nosy.”
I tried to tell her again that something was wrong with Takis, something we couldn’t understand, and he couldn’t talk about anything that happened that night. She must never ask him again.
“All he needs is a mother,” she said. “He’s just young and confused. We were all that way once.”
Stelios rolled his eyes at me. “I’ll look for him again tomorrow,” he said. “I don’t know what else to do.”
There was nowhere to report a missing child then, but two days later a woman named Nurse Papadakis phoned from a clinic in the suburb of Kifissia to say that Takis was there and he’d given her this number. He’d been found naked and half-drowned in a fishpond in the back garden of a villa near the clinic.
When Stelios and I got to the clinic, we saw that it was itself an old villa of fading and crumbling pink plaster. There was a spray of bullet holes across the archway above the front door. All the windows were shuttered. We pounded on the door for some time before it was opened by a stout woman in a smudged apron who said she was Nurse Papadakis. She motioned us into the foyer. We had to shout who we were because in another room a woman was singing the national anthem at the top of her voice and someone else was shrieking about her mother-in-law, whom she called, “that whore.” A pair of old men in their underwear marched into the foyer, saluted us and marched out again.
I’d never been to any sort of
clinic and wasn’t even sure what it was for. I asked Nurse Papadakis.
“It’s for those who’ve lost their minds,” she said. “Or never had them to begin with.”
As we were to discover, there was almost no treatment for mental problems at that time. People who were thought to be crazy were locked up and that was that. Nurse Papadakis led us through what had once been the parlor of the house. It was now filled with single beds in rows. Standing on one of them was the singer of the anthem, who was still in full voice. Other patients were sleeping, talking to themselves or playing cards. Perhaps some of these were staff, but it was difficult to tell them from patients. Nurse Papadakis said that most of the patients were hopeless, beyond anyone’s reach.
“But your friend Takis, he’s young so he may grow out of it.”
“Out of what?” Stelios asked.
“Whatever it is that’s wrong with him.”
“And that is . . . ?”
“We know so little of the mind,” Nurse Papadakis said. “But young people do often get better. Of course they need to be purged regularly.” Stelios and I exchanged glances. “All of these people . . .” she said, waving at those sleeping on cots as we passed through the dining room, “they have regular purges. They can’t expect to get better without them.”
“That’s the only treatment?” Stelios asked, astonished.
“There’s laudanum, of course, so calming. Sleeping elixirs, aspirin . . .” Nothing else had been available since the end of the war. She wasn’t prepared to give extensive treatment at the clinic in any case; most people were only there temporarily until they were claimed by families. If that didn’t happen, they were sent to a place for long-term patients in the town of Dafni, southwest of Athens. I didn’t like to think what that might be like.
“Most of these patients, they’ll be gone by this time next month,” she said. “But there’ll be new arrivals. It’s the times, you know, they make people lose their minds.”
My Last Lament Page 14