There was angry muttering near the door and a few people pushed their way outside. Vasili stared straight ahead while others in the room turned to see who’d left. “And as for the government militia and the police,” Vasili said, “who are they really? From what government?” There was more muttering, though this time in approval of what he’d said.
When by evening deep shadows had crept across the village, we set up our screen and lit our lamps in the open space in front of the church. The villagers spread sheepskins on the ground and sat there to watch. Everyone came, from children to crones, and Vasili sat in front. Thanasis had told us that Vasili was known for his formidable memory and could recite the whole of Erotokritos, a Cretan epic poem from the seventeenth century, consisting of some ten thousand lines in rhymed couplets. Because of this, we felt nervous putting on our own poor play. But the children were ecstatic; jumping up and down, cheering Karagiozis and booing the sultan. Their reactions made us all work even harder to please them, especially Takis, who was almost as good a puppeteer as Stelios. The children had never seen this kind of thing before or indeed any other entertainment besides church rituals, their parents told us later. When we’d finished, Vasili said, “You honor us with this gift. It lifts the hearts of our children, and that lifts ours too. You must stay here as long as you like.”
Thanasis left the next day, saying he wouldn’t be back until Good Friday. But before he drove off, Yannoula loitered around the truck watching him load the casks of olive oil he’d bought from the villagers. She kissed him on both cheeks, but he pulled back and waved a quick farewell as he climbed into the cab of the truck. Her eyes had misted over when she turned to us, but she said nothing.
We performed each evening for the next few days and then had a simple meal, usually thin soup and boiled greens, with a different family each night until we had broken bread with many of the villagers. After dinner we listened to stories told late into the night around a fire, tales of long-standing feuds between villages, of a bride abducted at gunpoint, of a wisewoman in the valley who cast spells, of a wolf that got into a house one winter night and made off with a baby. Its bones were found in the spring near the mouth of a cave. While stories were told, the young men of a family stood at the window staring into the night, pistols tucked into belts. Though so far the guerrillas had left this village alone because, it was suspected, they had relatives here. I remembered those who’d left the room the first night when Vasili referred to this.
Each morning the children were bused to a town where they went to the area school, which had reopened. They invited Takis and me to come with them, but I was too embarrassed. I’d wanted to go to school for so long, but now that it was possible, the fact was that I was older and much taller than the others. I would have felt foolish sitting in their class. And I didn’t want them to see that, despite my age, I didn’t know my multiplication tables or how to spell or what countries sat along the equator. Takis went with the other boys his age, though he said later that all he’d learned was that guerrillas had abducted several men from the town and regularly broke into shops and warehouses at night. The militia had caught a few and taken them back to Heraklion. Any one of them might have been Stelios, it seemed. They all looked alike—beards, boots, ragged clothes, guns—who could tell one from the other? I was losing heart that we’d ever see him again and couldn’t stand to imagine life without him. We had planned to live our lives together. Was it possible that our time was already over? Maybe we should go back to Heraklion with Thanasis when he returned and wait there, I thought. I was losing my sense of the safe return that Stelios always gave me. We weren’t getting anywhere here in this high village, though the villagers were happy about having us as their guests for Easter week.
“We will teach you our dances,” Vasili said. “After we drink the rest of last year’s wine.”
Yannoula had started helping out in the village store, a one-room place that carried everything from nails and bolts to lentils and soap. It was a gathering place for the old men, who sat on upended barrels, turning their strings of beads over in their hands, telling stories of the war. I preferred the little church, the only place where the electric light was strong enough for reading. Most of the houses had only a dim lightbulb on a cord hanging from the ceiling in the center of one room. And some had no electricity at all. But once I’d turned on the lights in the church, I could take out Stelios’s copy of The Iliad. Puzzling out new passages and rereading ones I already knew made me feel close to him. Under the cold stares of the saints in their icons, I sounded out the unknown words and guessed meaning from context, as Stelios had taught me. My reward was to catch the sense of a line.
. . . the goddess filled her heart with yearning warm and deep
for her husband long ago, her city and her parents.
I could certainly understand that yearning warm and deep. This woman of so long ago, fought over by two armies, had felt something that I too felt sitting there thousands of years later in a mountain church. I looked up from the book and silently asked the saints if they’d felt sweet longing too. But maybe it was the absence of it that had given them such disapproving looks. Anyway, they weren’t saying.
I couldn’t use the church on the day before Good Friday because the women were cleaning it for the coming ceremonies. Yannoula and I stood outside where the boys gathered around Vasili. They wanted to borrow the pistol tucked in the sash around his waist.
“Boys become men before their time,” he told Yannoula and me. “All our boys here, they know how to shoot. My brave grandson, Christos, only fourteen years old he was, when he shot and wounded a German officer right over there in that valley.” He pointed to it and then to the cliff above. “And up there is where the officer’s comrades took Christos after they’d caught him. Those ill-fated ones—they threw our little hero into the ravine below.” He crossed himself three times and said, “And they wouldn’t let us go to him for more than a month. By then the animals . . .” He stopped a moment, collected himself and went on. “So now it’s not the Germans we fear but some of our own, even from this village.” I remembered again how a few villagers had walked out when he’d referred to this the day we’d arrived.
“Teach me,” Takis said to Vasili, “teach me to shoot.”
Vasili looked down at Takis and said, “Aha, my little warrior, are you old enough to learn?”
“I’m fourteen,” Takis said. He would have turned eleven around the time I turned fifteen in the past year.
“Are you indeed?” Vasili said, rolling his eyes at Yannoula and me. But he pulled his own pistol from his sash and said to one of the other boys, a tall lad with a black braided headband, “Here, Mitso, take this and teach our friend something useful.”
Yannoula and I exchanged glances of alarm at the thought of Takis armed. Yannoula told Vasili this wasn’t a good idea, but he said not to worry; boys needed to know things beyond what women understood. Mitso was a good boy who would look after Takis. We both tried to explain that Takis had many problems, but Vasili said only that this was so with all boys.
“Learning to shoot is a manly thing. We all do it here. It’s part of our fate.”
Boys with guns, I thought, the same old story. But this might be an even worse one. All afternoon we heard Mitso and the other boys shouting encouragement to Takis as they threw pinecones into the air as targets. They told him not to shoot directly at one but at where it would likely be when the bullet struck. Tying a Cretan bandana around his forehead, they called him a palikari, a brave young warrior. Takis puffed out his chest and attempted a manly swagger.
That night, Yannoula and I spread blankets on a pile of hay in the stable behind one of the houses; it was all that particular family had. They’d actually offered us their own beds in the house, saying they would sleep in the stable, but that was taking hospitality too far for us. Their donkey in its corner watched us with a single eye, its other
just a blackened hole from a farm accident. Takis was staying with the family of Mitso, the boy who was teaching him to shoot.
“I wish Thanasis would come back,” Yannoula said, fussing with her blanket and then warming her hands over our single candle in the neck of a bottle. “Chances are I won’t make it through another winter.”
“You always say things like that. But you’re a tough old bone.”
“It would be good to have someone to look after.”
“We just met him a while ago.”
“At my age, who has time to spare? People who live alone don’t live long.”
“You’re not living alone.”
“Not now. But you and Stelios, you’ll want to make a life of your own eventually. You won’t need me.”
“But his family house is your home. We could all live there again. That’s, of course, if Stelios . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Of course he is. Alive, I mean. Isn’t that what you were going to say?”
“I guess. Yes.”
Where are you? I asked him again silently. I felt that he was near, but this was probably only my wanting him to be. Still, it was some small comfort.
“I feel like our life together hasn’t even begun yet,” I said.
“Oh, it has, trust me. It’s here and now; life always is.”
“I thought it would start when the fighting is over. When Stelios is back. And when Takis is . . .” I couldn’t finish that sentence either.
“I think . . .” Yannoula said, then paused and shifted on her blanket, scratching her legs roughly. “You know what’s in this hay, Aliki? Fleas. Worse than bedbugs. Wrap yourself up. Leave no inch exposed.”
We pulled our blankets around us like cocoons covering even our heads so that only our eyes were exposed, peering at each other in the dim light of the candle and a slice of moon through the window. Then a shadow fell across the moon. A face looked in the window and I screamed.
“No, no, it’s all right,” a man’s voice said. “Just checking on you.” The voice was familiar, though we couldn’t tell which of the village men it belonged to. “But best to put out your light.”
Yannoula blew out the candle and the voice wished us a good night.
“Theo mou!” she said. “You terrified me, Aliki.”
“He terrified me. I could just see the shape of a head. How was I to know?”
“We’re all a little jumpy at night, I guess. At least we know we’re being looked after. What good people these are. Imagine that family offering us their beds.”
We didn’t say anything else for a while as we snuggled down into the hay and tried to get comfortable. “What I was going to say,” Yannoula said into the dark, “before the fleas and our visitor, was that I think Takis may always be what he is now.”
“What? How do you know?”
“I just feel it. Inside, he’ll still be a boy hearing voices. He won’t grow out of it even when he grows up.”
“That’s not possible, is it? Everyone grows up. Everyone changes.”
“Outside, yes. But maybe not inside. Long ago they might have thought he was a seer, one who could see what’s visible to no one else.”
A gust of wind rattled the roof tiles, pushed the latched door open slightly and slammed it shut. We both pulled our blankets tighter around us. “Oof, what a place,” Yannoula said. “At least it’s too chilly for Takis to wander around without his clothes. In fact, I hope he doesn’t start delivering messages from trees while we’re here. That old Vasili, I don’t know what he’d make of it.”
“I hope you’re wrong about Takis.”
“I hope so too. Either way, he won’t have an easy life, that’s for certain, and possibly not a long one. But who does anymore? Now, me—I keep getting new beginnings. That’s about as much as we can hope for. I thought Thanasis might be another beginning for me, but am I one for him—that’s the question.”
The idea of new love between older people like Yannoula and Thanasis seemed strange to me. It would be a while before I would grasp that the gray-haired and wrinkled need it as much, if not more, than the young.
When Thanasis climbed down from his truck the next morning, he went round the back and pulled down a tarp. Beneath it lay two lambs, cleaned and dressed, ready for roasting. He told us he’d been back to Ierapetra, still heavily protected by militia. The shopkeepers there had bought all his produce because they had to feed the militia stationed there. But there was little cash to pay Thanasis. They’d been doing the traditional butchering of the spring lambs so they’d given him these two instead. They would be the village Easter feast.
“I’m no cook,” he said, “but I know how to stuff these with herbs and sew them up. Yannoula, can you help?”
She looked pleased to be asked, but before she could say anything, Vasili stepped forward and said, “We’ll all help. It’s not enough to feed everyone, but with lots of roasted potatoes and salad greens, there’ll be plenty. And with enough wine, who will care? We’ll ask Brother Pavlos to bless it all when he comes today.” A monk from a nearby monastery, Brother Pavlos was going to help with the Friday and Saturday night services because the village was too small and out of the way to have its own priest.
It was later that I heard that Thanasis had told Vasili there’d been brutal fighting outside one of the villages a ways from Ierapetra. Government militia had killed a number of guerrillas, including one of the leaders known for brutalizing area villages. After he was dead, militia soldiers had severed his head and right hand, impaled them on a pole and carried them through the villages he and his men had terrorized, inviting villagers to spit on them. Thanasis hadn’t seen it, but everywhere he went, people were talking. Vasili told only one or two people, but in only an hour or so, everyone in the village seemed to know. Yannoula told me only because she knew I’d hear one way or another.
“Thanasis didn’t want you to know because it would make you worry even more about Stelios. But there’s no reason to think . . .”
“Oh, God. Oh, God.” How hideous it was. How could men do such things to one another? How could they do it to someone like Stelios, who’d never harmed anyone? “One of them was Stelios, wasn’t it?”
“Now listen, Aliki, all we know is that someone took his jacket. That’s all we know. This new story has nothing . . .”
“Oh, God.”
“He’s not anywhere near where this happened, I’m sure of it.”
“How?”
“I just am.”
That evening, dulled by worry, I joined the others around the little church. Takis was there with his new friends and passed beeswax candles to Yannoula and me. Inside, Brother Pavlos, a bony young man so thin you could see the outlines of his skull through his face, sang the Good Friday lamentations in a high, nasal voice. Wrapping the icon of Christ in a white cloth, he placed it in a coffin that the women covered with flower petals. Thanasis and five other men lifted it onto their shoulders and, with Brother Pavlos leading the way in front of the coffin and the rest of us behind, we began our slow procession through the village lanes. Brother Pavlos led the singing as we walked.
Sun and moon together darkened.
Like loyal servants, they wore their
grief, wrapping themselves in darkness
like a shawl.
Earlier that day I’d overheard Vasili talking with Brother Pavlos before the ceremony began, about the beheading of the dead guerrilla.
“It’s not the first time,” Vasili said. “There’ve been other cases. On both sides.”
“They debase themselves,” Brother Pavlos said. “We must pray for them.”
“You pray for them, Brother. I teach our boys to shoot straight.”
Easter Sunday was sunny and warmer as Thanasis and Yannoula prepared the lambs for roasting, stuffing them with rosemary, thyme, hea
ds of garlic and whole lemons. Village men built a fire in a pit and watched it burn down to hot coals. The lambs were threaded onto spits positioned over the coals and two men at a time turned them slowly while brushing them with bunches of rosemary dipped in lemon juice and red wine. The air became so savory that you could taste it. In the meadow, Takis and the other boys went on with their target practice while I helped some of the women peel and quarter potatoes in the same house we’d been in the first night. Yannoula and the others gathered greens on the mountainside.
“Are you spoken for?” asked the woman who’d fed us that first day. Though we’d mentioned Stelios then, we hadn’t talked about any connection between him and me. There’d been no particular reason to do so. “We see how our young men look at you,” she said.
“I haven’t noticed that,” I said. I usually tried to keep my eyes lowered around the village men.
“They burn for you,” the woman said. “It’s in their eyes. You could choose one, stay here, make babies. Why not?” She said this lightly as if the decision to marry someone unknown and start a family in a place that, only a little while earlier, I’d never heard of was an ordinary thing to do.
“I’m sure there are already worthy young women here,” I said.
“But what kind of life is it for you, traveling through these mountains? Anything could happen.”
The other women peeling potatoes all nodded and repeated, “Anything, anything.” Then the crone asked me what kind of dowry I had. I thought of my father’s house so far away and felt a pang for it. Was it still standing? Would I ever see it again? But I didn’t want to mention it as that might be laying a card on the table.
“Alas, I have no dowry,” I said.
“Ah, such a pity, but never mind. A woman’s good name is always the best dowry. I myself could help you. I’ve arranged many matches.”
My Last Lament Page 20