My Last Lament

by James William Brown

  Some of the villagers had shaved the heads of the accused, tied them backward on donkeys and led them through the streets while others pelted them with rotten vegetables or emptied the contents of chamber pots on them as they passed under balconies. Most, including Zephyra’s mother, had never returned to the village. I could understand all this in the case of poor Petros, though it wasn’t his fault that he’d been forced to translate. But Zephyra’s mother? What had she done?

  The women with me in Zephyra’s house had been little girls then, and who tells a child about these things? Children had been kept inside as the collaborators on donkeys passed through the streets. Zephyra would have known the truth about her mother, we assumed, but she’d never spoken about it to anyone, as far as the women knew. And in Zephyra’s presence, no one mentioned her mother. Some even said that it may have been Zephyra herself who’d accused her mother. But of what? And was that possible—a child accusing her own mother? Who would believe her? In those first months after the Germans left, accusations had been as thick as wasps in a nest, the women said. If anyone had seen you so much as saying hello to a German, they might accuse you. So in that sense, nearly everyone in the village had been a collaborator, willingly or not. When everyone had accused everyone else, matters could go no further and, in time, died out.

  A chill passed through me, remembering the soldiers in my father’s house, and thinking of Takis and the colonel. It was good that we’d left the village when we had, before accusations could take wing. None of the adults who’d been there that night—the women who’d thrown the pebbles, the neighbors who’d seen Stelios and Sophia—were still alive or, if they were, their minds had clouded over, and no one talked about it anymore. I wondered if we would ever know the secrets of Zephyra’s family. Was she likely to bother me from the other side the way my father was still doing? The dead often have more to say than when they lived just down the street. Would it be that way with Zephyra?

  There were a few other things in the velvet box that she’d probably collected as a child: a pile of polished stones, a doll made from a corncob, a necklace strung with uncooked macaroni. And that was it, we thought, putting the box aside, until we noticed some kind of fur on the bottom of the suitcase. It fell apart when we tried to remove it, but, putting the pieces together on the floor, we saw that it had once been the skin of an animal, now dry and cracked. The white-and-black-spotted fur came away when we touched it, but we realized it had been the pelt of a lamb. Or a young kid.

  Could it be the very one that Aphrodite said Zephyra’s mother had made into a disguise for her daughter? If so, why would Zephyra have kept it all those years? We could make out traces of partly disintegrated twine that could have been used to tie it to her arms and legs. I thought of how it had been there just under the part of the bed where Zephyra slept, where she’d made those goat noises the last day of her life. I told the others about my visit to Aphrodite.

  Yes, yes, it was true, they said. Zephyra’s mother skinned and butchered each goat Zephyra stole and then boiled hunks of it in a big stew pot. At least, that was what the neighbors saw, alerted by the smell, peering in the windows. They’d tapped on them, pointing to their own mouths, begging for just a bite, nothing special, maybe a bit of brain or tongue, a morsel of hoof meat. But nothing had been given.

  We moved the pieces of skin to the kitchen table, saying such are our lives, full of secrets and mysteries. And Zephyra, unlike other dead I’d lamented for, hadn’t appeared since her death. Only some did that and she wasn’t one of them. So I couldn’t ask her. We didn’t want to toss the skin out, as it clearly had some meaning beyond itself, though we didn’t know what. So we divided up the kitchen utensils, the mortar and pestle, the sieve, the bread bin and the other things. Moving on to the remaining rooms, we found nothing interesting. Zephyra’s other furniture was old and little of it was worth saving. The village junk man would take away what we’d thrown outside, the sad piles of shattered furniture, traces of her life. And what would become of the goatskin still there on the kitchen table? We agreed that some things just had to be left to fate.

  The ancients thought Fate amounted to three old women, the spinners, measuring out the thread of lives, deciding how long or short each should be. I imagine them to be vinegary old crones like me, sitting in that sacred cave up on Mt. Ida in Crete. Well, I don’t believe in them, though it does have to be said that much of whatever fate we four were to make for ourselves was partly woven in the mountains of Crete. Of course we had no idea about this when our ship steamed into the Heraklion harbor on Crete that day. We weren’t prepared for the destruction everywhere around us.

  You see, although the mainland had surrendered peacefully to the Germans, the island of Crete had not. Bombing had left ruined ships and planes half-submerged in shallow water. As our ship made its way among them, blasting its horn, it dodged enormous cranes fishing out whatever metal could be salvaged.

  We were barely down the gangplank when a young policeman not much taller than Takis demanded our names and the purpose of our visit. We were a family of Karagiozis players, Stelios said, but the policeman told us we would have to go to the central police station to have our luggage searched and pay for a permit to perform. He led us around piles of rubble in narrow streets between tall buildings, some laced together by graceful stone arches and trimmed with balconies of metalwork. Takis and I fell behind, stumbling into each other as we stared. The fronts of some buildings had been sheared off by bombs, but next door might be one in perfect condition where a woman on the third-floor balcony watered a potted palm as if nothing had happened.

  Up ahead, Yannoula was having trouble matching the brisk pace of the little policeman so Stelios had taken her arm. What she’d said in Athens about being too old to travel had probably been true. She looked and dressed younger than she no doubt was, but I could sense the effort and will in it. She barely resembled the crone in black who’d brought me soup my first night in Athens. “It’s so good to be needed,” she’d told me one evening before stepping in front of the screen to sing the opening verse. “It changes everything.”

  At the police station, she perked up in the presence of the handsome young police captain at his desk beneath a framed photo of the king. The captain had a black handlebar mustache and hooded eyes that looked at us without expression. When he asked why we’d come to Heraklion, Stelios started to speak, but Yannoula cut across him, saying, “We’re artistes.” As if to prove her point, she took out her squeeze box. “You Cretans,” she said, “everyone says you have such poetry in your souls. Such music. Such joie de vivre.” She began to play and sing.

  The daisy told me you don’t love me,

  petal by petal, can it be true, my sweet?

  She smiled and winked at the captain. I’d never seen her so coquettish.

  The captain ignored her. But when he noticed me, he swept off his cap and placed it over his heart. I felt my face color up as he stared boldly into my eyes, flashing a smile full of huge teeth.

  “You see how it is with Cretans,” Yannoula said, annoyed.

  Stelios stepped in front of me and asked the captain please to contact Theo and gave the name of the café. The captain sent the short policeman off, but while we waited, he picked up the phone and ordered coffee for us. In only minutes a boy rushed in the door and set up a little table with white cups. We’d just begun to sip, surprised to find it was pure coffee, not watered-down chickory like most those days, when Theo, in a dirty apron and with his face red, arrived.

  “Come, come,” he said, motioning us to our feet. “I have advertised the first part of The Hero Katsondonis for today. You wrote that you know it, yes? We must hurry.” He tapped the side of his head as if to emphasize the point and showed the captain the performance permit he’d already obtained. Offering the captain free seats for himself and fellow officers, Theo gave a little bow as he said, “If you will so honor us.” The c
aptain stood and bowed back to Theo, then flashed me his toothy smile again.

  “Are all Cretans like that?” Stelios asked Theo when we were in the street.

  “Like what?” Theo said.

  His café was in the old fishing harbor on the other side of a seawall from the main harbor. Pointing out a massive stone fortress, Theo said it had been built centuries earlier when Crete was part of the Venetian empire. I’d never heard of Venetians and was more interested in the hundreds of small fishing boats bobbing in the water there, each with eyes painted on either side of the bow to help it see, Theo said, through darkness or fog. The boats knocked into one another in blasts of wind off the water. Nearby sat fishermen mending their yellow nets or calling out the day’s catch to passing townspeople.

  At the far side of the harbor was Theo’s café. Because of the wind, we set up inside its main room with all its tables and customers. The air was almost blue with the cigarette smoke of the men drinking ouzo or raki. On the walls hung yellowing photographs of Theo’s ancestors in suits out of another time. Theo himself waited on tables but went out front from time to time to call out the news that our performance would be starting shortly. In the doorway, Takis was selling tickets, but he’d never learned much arithmetic so Theo had to help him make change. Just before we started, the captain and several other officers took seats at tables near the stage. Then Yannoula stepped out, played a little riff on the squeeze box and sang the opening.

  Red twine braided fine,

  tightly wound around a wheel.

  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.

  Partway through the play, two puppets entered, made in the likeness of Stelios himself and his mother. These must have been what Stelios was making that night on the ship from Piraeus. I’d dozed off and then woken briefly to see him working away at something. Now they spoke in chorus to the soldier (Karagiozis) outside the cave where Katsondonis was hiding.

  SOPHIA AND STELIOS: We are travelers seeking shelter.

  SOLDIER: There is none here.

  SOPHIA AND STELIOS: But isn’t that a cave? We could rest there.

  SOLDIER: It is occupied. Move along.

  SOPHIA AND STELIOS: Who’s inside? Can’t we share the shelter?

  SOLDIER: Move along, I say. You would not be safe here.

  SOPHIA AND STELIOS: There’s little safety for us anywhere. But farewell, friend.

  At the end of the play, when the angel descended to take Katsondonis to heaven, someone in the audience shot a pistol out the front door. And then someone else. We threw ourselves to the ground and accidentally pulled the screen on top of us. But the audience only laughed and Theo helped us to our feet, saying, “They love you; that’s how they show it here on Crete.”

  “Bang!” Takis said, aiming an imaginary rifle at the departing audience. “We love you back.”

  I asked Stelios about the new puppets.

  “Did you like them?” he asked.

  “Well, yes, I suppose. I didn’t know Karagiozis could play other roles than himself.”

  “Oh, you mean as the soldier tonight? Well, he’s always himself. And everyone else, like a kind of stand-in for the rest of us. But what about the other two?”

  “You and your mother? Why were they there?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ll have to find more for them to do. I mean, I just like the idea of mixing our own stories in with the old ones. It keeps the stories fresh. And Mother and I did once try to hide in a cave before the partisans brought us to your village.”

  That evening over dinner Theo told us about the battle of Crete. When German paratroopers started to parachute down onto the island after the mainland had been taken, a child in a Heraklion street cried out, “Mama, Mama! Men with umbrellas are falling from the sky!” People rushed out to see and when they understood this was an invasion, they grabbed anything they had: scythes, pitchforks, spades, even kitchen knives.

  “They were housewives, priests, farmers, shopkeepers,” Theo said, “but they pounced like lions on the Germans as they touched down. Before they could even get untangled from their gear.”

  Theo lunged forward at the table, pouncing on a plate of salad, scattering its contents. “Sorry, sorry. But you see what I mean. Just imagine it! If only I hadn’t been in Athens.”

  This fierce resistance had gone on for days, aided by Greek troops and the Allies—British, Australian and New Zealander. But it became clear that the sheer number of Germans would prove overwhelming in the end. Most of the Allied troops finally evacuated to Egypt, though a few stayed in the mountains to help the villagers there harass the Germans. Once the invaders were in control, the reprisals began. Entire villages were sacked and burned, the residents massacred.

  “Sometimes they went through a whole valley, the Germans, burning all the villages, killing everyone, with no more pity than for chickens or sheep.”

  But the Germans on the island had been in retreat since before the liberation of the mainland. Those left had been trapped by British and local forces near the city of Chania in the west. And the civil fighting had not been as bad as on the mainland. Theo said that bands of communist guerrillas were still forcing mountain villages to pay tribute. Sometimes at night, guerrillas came down from the mountains to settle old scores from before the war and even to blow up police stations. “Banditos,” he said, and he spat on the ground. They even took hostages and demanded ransoms. “As if anyone has anything to give after all these years of fighting.”

  Takis was taken by the idea of banditos; he was sure they were everywhere. In the days to come, he’d ask, “Do you think he’s one?” pointing at an old man in a café who looked entirely harmless to me. “Or him?”—a grocer stacking oranges outside his shop. At the next performance of Katsondonis, Takis was convinced banditos had bought tickets from him and were sitting at the tables among other customers. “I can hear their voices,” he said. “They’re here somewhere.”

  Stelios added banditos to the plays over the next six weeks or so. Theo liked this because we presented some of the same plays again and again. So by the end of March, audiences started to thin out. “Don’t you have anything new?” Theo kept asking. Stelios said he was working on something, but it wasn’t finished. Before long, he’d made puppets of us—Yannoula, Takis, me—and started to work them into existing plays, as if trying them out. We appeared whenever there were supposed to be crowds of people. I wasn’t sure what he meant by it since we were the only ones who noticed; to the customers in the café, they would just have been other puppets.

  Each morning, we all gathered in the lobby of the boardinghouse where we’d taken rooms, a few blocks from Theo’s café. We lived on the second floor of the run-down building. Takis’s room faced the street and was next door to mine. Yannoula’s was on the other side of mine and next to Stelios. A communal bathroom with wheezy plumbing was at the end of the hall. Downstairs, the lobby was a musty old parlor with faded floral wallpaper, furniture losing its stuffing and stacks of prewar magazines and newspapers. We’d used many of them for my reading practice, so my notebook included words like appeasement and treaty from the newspapers along with phrases from magazine ads, like banishes wrinkles overnight.

  Yannoula preferred romantic novels, which she could read perfectly well for herself. But they were hard to find in those days and she joined us in order to keep an eye on Takis.

  Our only book was The Iliad, contributing rage, elated, slaughtered and doomed, among others, and graceful lines that Stelios pointed out and I copied whole: A thousand watch fires were burning upon the plain. We didn’t really need any other books, he said, because this was all of them rolled into one. Takis said it was stupid for all these men to be fighting and dying just because of a silly woman.

&n
bsp; “I mean, she couldn’t have been that pretty.”

  “I don’t know,” Stelios said. “The old men of Troy said it was no wonder that they should endure long years of war for such a woman.”

  . . . she is dreadfully like an immortal goddess; her beauty

  pierces the heart.

  “Read that other part again,” Takis said, referring to the bit where Patroclus speared the man like a fish. It was one of the many passages of gore in battle that Takis liked. Spears crunching through helmets, heads and limbs lopped off, teeth splaying out of a mouth, innards spilled from a belly wound—all the hideous grit of war intrigued him. But that passage fascinated him more than any other and he badgered Stelios to read it every time we were all together in the lobby.

  “Later,” Stelios said that day, holding the book for me while I copied the lines about Helen into my notebook. A gull’s feather lay in the margin of The Iliad like a bookmark. Stelios picked it up and stroked the back of my hand with it as I wrote. He was so close that I could feel the warmth of his breath on my neck. It took some time for me to form the words.

  When we looked up, Yannoula and Takis had gone. We didn’t see them the rest of the day. Yannoula came to the performance alone.

  “He was angry and wanted to go back to the harbor,” she said of Takis. “You know what his anger is like. It comes out of nowhere. When I stopped to talk to one of those nice young fishermen—that little one with the bushy eyebrows—Takis ducked behind a pile of nets and was gone. I’ve been looking for him all afternoon.” Her voice wavered with fear. “It’s the second time I’ve lost him.”

  She took Takis’s place selling tickets and when the performance was finished, the three of us went to the other end of the harbor where she’d last seen him. A few men were sitting on the ground around a lantern under a fern tree, drinking ouzo and mending holes in their nets with wooden needles. Maybe they’d seen Takis, maybe not, they said.