“He needs someone to make him laugh,” Yannoula said. “All men do. They forget how to laugh at themselves, tramping around in their big boots as if they owned the world. Then life punches a hole in the heart.”
Was that what had happened to my father? I wondered. And Stelios too? And what about Chrysoula? Or for that matter, me? I said that it wasn’t just men.
“Of course not, my child. My heart’s a leaky old sieve by now. But men, well, they need our help because they don’t recover as fast as we do, the poor babies. So it’s really up to us.”
“What is?”
“To put ourselves into their hearts when they’re not looking. Do some plastering, so to speak, some patching up. Run up fresh curtains, that kind of thing. They’d never manage it by themselves. Then, just when they start to feel that somehow everything is getting better, but they’re not sure why, there we are.”
I’d never thought of the heart that way, like a run-down house in need of redecoration. Yannoula reminded me a bit of Chrysoula talking about men: What men will and will not do is a very big subject, I’m afraid. What men were doing to each other every day in towns and villages across this island surely meant a lot of holes in hearts.
Just as Yannoula was drifting off, Takis came back with more driftwood and built up the fire. He and I lay awake a long time, watching stars.
“Do you ever think of my mother?” he said after a while.
“I was just thinking about her a few minutes ago,” I said.
“What were you thinking?”
“About some of the things she used to say. I thought she knew everything.”
“I . . . I can’t remember her face anymore. I try, but I can’t.”
I described her face, tone of voice, the funny things she said. If she’d seen the way he’d worked the puppets, she would have been proud.
“When I’m doing them,” Takis said, “I don’t have to be myself. I’m free. Do you know what I mean?”
“I do. I think the same thing happens to Stelios when he works them.”
“Stelios.” He paused for a moment then went on. “When he comes back, I won’t get to do them anymore, will I?”
“I don’t know. We can work something out.”
“When I play Karagiozis, I don’t have to think about anything else. I don’t have to think about my mother and . . .”
He didn’t say anything more and after a while I heard him turn on his side away from me. When he was calm like this, I always thought it meant he was getting better, that he’d be all right. But then he always slid back into his own darkness. Would it be different if he could keep working with the puppets?
Word of our performance had apparently gone around because the next night the audience was so big that we had to give two separate shows to accommodate everyone. People had little to pay but brought what they could—a few cigarettes, a bag of lentils or a bit of embroidery from a dowry chest. Some had nothing to spend; but no one was turned away. At the end, I looked from behind the screen at our departing audiences and wondered if anyone would ever help us find Stelios—the old woman in black with the cavernous face, the shopkeeper who laughed at nearly every line, the young shepherd who brought his crook with him and beat it on the ground instead of clapping.
When Thanasis returned the next morning, he drove us farther up to the high plain of Lasithi with its thousands of windmills. Villagers there used the wind power to irrigate the fertile plain, Thanasis said. But because they were at such an altitude, it was still chilly and the sails of most mills were furled. No, no one had seen anyone who matched our description of Stelios, but the villagers were happy to see the fresh produce from the plains down below and offered us simple hospitality, a drinking gourd of resinated wine or a handful of almonds to be cracked with a stone. Easter would come soon in early May. The villagers had been fasting for weeks.
“It’s easy enough to fast,” Thanasis said, “when there’s little to eat anyway.”
When he’d traded his fruit and vegetables for bags of local maize flour, he drove us into the foothills near Mt. Dikti. As we rounded a bend leading into a high village, its plateia came into view and from the lower branches of a huge plane tree we saw three hanging bodies. There were hoods over their heads, pillowcases actually, but from their clothing they appeared to be two men and a woman. They turned slowly in the breeze. Thanasis started to speed through the village streets, but I beat on the back window of the truck cab and screamed for him to stop.
One of the hanged men was wearing what looked like Stelios’s tweed jacket.
CASSETTE 4 Side 1
Yes, I know, what a place for the cassette to finish. And that was the last of those you left me, my little American scholar. I suppose you thought that was all I’d need for my laments. Of course I’m taking advantage of you a bit, telling so much more than you wanted. But laments are surrounded by life, even though provoked by death. They’re not separate from it, because on their own, laments don’t make much sense. They’ve grown out of my life as much as out of the lives of the dead.
No one here in the village carries cassettes, certainly not old Stamatis in his one-room shop, though he’s got all sorts of batteries and chips for gadgets like the one that you worked with your thumbs. He had to order more cassettes for me and apparently they’re hard to find because no one uses them much anymore. Old technology, he says, but who’s he to talk, still scooping salted cod out of the barrel for his customers, as he has all these decades? Anyway, they’ve just arrived finally—the cassettes, that is, not the cod—but while I was waiting for them, the forty days passed after Zephyra’s wake and funeral so yesterday her memorial service took place.
It started in the church with young Father Yerasimos up front in his brocade robes waving censers around until the clouds of incense sent some of us into spasms of sneezing. Through multiple prayers we sneezed, cupping the flames of our candles that represented our souls. When Zephyra’s own soul had received as much repose as our prayers could manage, we moved forward to put our candles in the candelabra in front of the crucifix. But as we stepped up, I sneezed once more, so hard this time that I blew out my little flame and another one. I got the giggles thinking, oh, well, out goes the soul on the breeze of a sneeze. Father Yerasimos gave me such a look.
As we walked behind him to the cemetery where he was to bless Zephyra’s grave, I mentioned to the other women that I wanted to visit my father’s grave there too. Funny you should mention it, they said, and they told me that during her nights of goat stealing as a child, Zephyra had sometimes seen my father in the shadows alongside the houses, moving from one to another. Oh, he would have been stealing those squash, I said. They looked at each other and smiled. What Zephyra had seen in the time of the Germans, others had known long before, they said. It had been going on for years. One of the women snickered and then the others.
My father was a bee, they told me, gathering nectar. And not from only one flower. They drew their black scarves over their mouths. It wouldn’t have done to look amused as we walked to the cemetery. Other villagers stood by the side of the road or on balconies above to watch us pass.
It started long ago, the women said, even before my mother fled the village. What was the it exactly that had started? I asked. But I didn’t need to hear their answer and none came. Was that why my mother left? I wondered. As a child, I’d worried it was something to do with me, that through some fault or flaw of my own, she hadn’t wanted to stay. All at once as I walked beside them in the street, I felt lighter, as if something I’d carried a long time had been lifted, the dark little burden of being unloved by my own mother.
“It went on for many years,” one of the women said.
“You’ve already told me that,” I said.
“He went to this one and then that one.”
“Oh, please. There can’t have been that many unfaithful village w
ives. Were there no suspicious husbands?”
He’d nearly got himself in trouble a few times, they said, but it hadn’t changed his habits. I did remember that he often went out after he’d put me to bed. And sometimes later, waking from a dream, I would hear noises from his bedroom: a cry, a laugh. When I called out, he would rush in to soothe me. But later the noises would start again.
How had he managed to get away with it? Village husbands were not so easily fooled about the virtue of their wives. Of course there were always widows, not to mention unmarried women living on the thin charity of relatives. But would there have been enough of them to keep him as busy as he evidently was? The women had no answer for this, saying only that my father was as clever as he was handsome. It was hard for me to think of him that way; to me he was just my father. I remembered Chrysoula saying what a good man he was. Had hers been one of the houses he’d visited? Well, I’m not going to begrudge them a bit of happiness after all these years, if that’s what they had. And I hope it was. Poor Chrysoula—no wonder she was so shattered by his execution. But what about the others? There’d certainly been a lot of wailing at his wake; that I remembered.
As we followed Father Yerasimos through the cemetery gates, I paused just inside at my father’s grave with new interest. All that after-death complaining about misplaced tools and not being able to get a good cup of coffee over there—was that all he had on his mind? Or was it just that matters of the heart—I use the word loosely—did not carry over to that side? Scanning the other graves from his time, I wondered how many of them held women he’d once held. And where on this earth was the grave that held my mother with her tattered heart?
Father Yerasimos waved more incense at Zephyra’s gravesite with its sad funeral flowers long since dried out in the sun. The wind carried off the incense along with his chanted blessing:
. . . give rest to Thy servant Zephyra
in a place of light,
a place of repose . . .
And a place without gossip about my father, I said to myself. And without goats.
I didn’t wait to eat the boiled wheat and raisin mix, koliva, offered in memory of the dead. Walking home alone, I thought of the three dead hanging from the plane tree that day I was describing before the third cassette ran out, one of them Stelios, I thought. Did anyone ever give them a funeral or memorial service or offer koliva in their memory? And I remembered what I wanted to finish telling you, for I left you, as well as them, hanging.
Thanasis braked and backed the truck up under the swaying bodies. Takis and I had already climbed down and stood to one side with Yannoula, who was holding me to stop me from shaking. The one in the tweed jacket was Stelios, I was sure of it. As Thanasis climbed into the bed of the truck with a knife, Yannoula turned my face away. I could hear Thanasis sawing through the rope and then the awful thud of the body falling into the truck. I couldn’t bear the sound of it and cried out. Yannoula held me tight until Thanasis had pulled the hood off and asked that one of us tell him if this was the Stelios we were looking for.
Takis started forward, but Thanasis said, “No, not you. You’re too young.”
“I am not, and I want to see!”
Yannoula let go of me, telling me to stay put. She walked to the back of the truck, where I heard her give a little cry and then she began to retch. I ran to the truck.
“It’s not him,” she said. “But don’t look. It’s horrible.” She crossed herself three times. Takis ran around the back of the truck and, before Thanasis could stop him, jumped up to see the body.
“Why is his tongue sticking out?” he said. “And it’s all purple, ech!”
“Shut up, Takis,” Thanasis said. “Show some respect.”
“But, you know,” Yannoula said, “that is Stelios’s jacket. The one that was his father’s originally. That cigarette burn on the lapel—his father did that years ago. I tried to mend it for him.”
So Stelios must have been in the area and someone had taken his jacket? Because he was dead and had no need of it? Or maybe he’d been forced to give it up? Thanasis put the hood back on the body, jumped down from the truck bed and lifted the body gently in his arms, laying it next to the trunk of the tree. “I can’t just leave these others,” he said, so he cut them down too and carried their bodies over beside the other one.
Back in the truck, we drove through the center of the village and stopped in front of an old woman in a doorway to ask her what had happened back there. She crossed herself three times and said the government militia had hanged the three, who were “communistas guerrillas.” There’d been no trial of any kind and no one from the village knew any of the three. The village just happened to have the best hanging tree in the area.
“Let the crows have them,” she said, and she spat on the ground, then crossed herself again. We described Stelios, but she just shrugged and said, “There are many who look like that.”
Driving higher into the mountains, we looked out at what I thought Stelios must have seen if he’d been brought here. Where is he? I silently asked the craggy slopes we passed. What have you done with him? I demanded of the little collections of huts like eagles’ nests perched on ledges above steep ravines. None of the villages here had been burned and the men we passed looked as tough and gnarled as mountain pines, their faces burned to leather by sun and wind. Many still dressed in the traditional Cretan way we’d sometimes seen on market day in Heraklion—black head scarves tied into bands around the foreheads, trouser cuffs tucked into jackboots, purple sashes around the waist. Some men had pistols jammed into their sashes.
At these heights gusts of frigid wind flung handfuls of rain into our faces. Pulling my own coat tighter, I thought of Stelios without one. How had his jacket ended up on the hanged man? I could feel again the warmth and weight of his body that night in my room. If only I hadn’t made him stop, we’d still be in the boardinghouse, maybe warming each other again under blankets.
Takis and I huddled against the wind and rapped on the window of the cab to ask that we stop soon. It was too chilly for us to go on riding outside and there wasn’t enough room in the cab for all four of us. Thanasis called back that we were almost there, but we didn’t know where. Shortly after that, we pulled into an open space near a small church that seemed tucked in just under the clouds. As Takis and I climbed down and looked around, we said this had to be the top of the world. It was almost as if we could reach up and touch the clouds scudding past. The wind was sweet with the scent of jasmine. Could it bloom at such a height? How could anyone live here? But plumes of smoke rose from the stone huts that made up most of the village. And a few village men in sashes and headbands came out to the truck.
“Eh, Thanasis,” one called out, gesturing at us, “what kind of cabbages have you brought us today?”
“Not ones for boiling,” he said, laughing as he unloaded bags of maize flour. The men stared at us with such suspicion that had it not been for Thanasis, to explain about the puppets, who knows what would have happened?
Yannoula tugged down the hem of her skirt and whispered that I was not to meet anyone’s eyes. Even so, only the older villagers had heard of Karagiozis, not the women and children, who, when they joined the men, were shy and stood back. After everyone had stared long enough, the children came forward and reached out to touch us, our clothes, our hair and, as we took our things down from the truck, the puppets. We were led to a large stone house to refresh ourselves, as the villagers said, where a crone with stony eyes and yellow teeth sat us down at a long wooden table. She ladled lentil soup out of a cauldron over a hissing fire in a fireplace big enough to roast a whole sheep. Along with the soup she gave us thick slices of coarse bread and quarters of raw onion. The wine she poured was so resinated it might have been steeped in pinecones. But after our cold ride, everything was fragrant and delicious.
Yannoula whispered that she couldn’t eat anything
because she couldn’t stop thinking about the face of that poor hanged man. Thanasis touched her shoulder gently and said it was the same for him, and with the smell of the bodies still in his nostrils, but we all had to eat. It would be insulting not to do so.
“These people have little to give but give it anyway.”
As many villagers as could squeeze into the house did so while the others stood outside peering in as we ate, as if expecting us to do it in some strange, new way. Then the questions came from all sides. They rarely saw strangers “from below” and wanted to know: What was it like down there—had the Germans really and truly left, or were they still trapped in the west? Had the Allied troops, Australians and New Zealanders come back, they who’d fought so bravely? A few men of the British special forces had helped the guerrillas harass the Germans here in the mountain passes—but where had those brave British gone? Had the king returned from exile? No one seemed to have a radio up here and there were no newspapers. We answered as we could, Thanasis saying that there was to be a referendum on the monarchy at some point and, depending on which way it went, the king might or might not return.
We had questions of our own. I described Stelios, but no one recognized him from my description. Yes, they’d heard about the hanging of the three in the other village. It was terrible that one was a woman, they said. It wasn’t right to hang a woman.
“The others, well, they can go to the devil,” said the village elder, a strongly built man with white hair, a beard and a wide mustache that curled up on both sides. His name was Vasili and everyone stopped speaking when he spoke. “We have nothing for guerrillas to take. What will they have of us—our small green olives, so slow to ripen here? Bah! They think they own these mountains.” He glanced around the room. “Some say they have relatives here in this very room.”
My Last Lament Page 19