“It started back in my own village where so many were killed by the Germans,” I said. “But I don’t understand why or how it comes over me.”
The old woman who’d given us the bedsheets to tear into bandages came over to us and said, “We don’t want your laments. You can stay tonight, but tomorrow morning, take your foolish puppets and go, all three of you.” Behind her scowled some of the other women I’d peeled potatoes with earlier in the day. “You’ve brought misfortune on us and we don’t want you here,” she said. “You dishonor our dead.”
Yannoula and I looked at them without speaking. It was true that if Thanasis hadn’t brought the lambs, we might not have attracted the attention of the guerrillas. And if Vasili hadn’t given Takis the pistol, wouldn’t he still be alive? And Thanasis and my would-be suitor? But I could have gone backward with this line of thought forever: if my father hadn’t been executed, if my mother hadn’t left my father, if Germany hadn’t wanted the whole world. There was no end to these ifs just as there was no undoing any of it, ever.
“We’ve lost someone too,” Yannoula said to the woman. “You don’t own all the grief.”
But they’d all turned and walked away. Yannoula was talking to herself, muttering something I couldn’t catch. I went to find Takis. Would he leave with us? Did we want him to? Was this finally and at long last the place, the time, to cut him loose from my life? There was nothing more I could do for him, nothing he could do for me.
A large tent had been erected next to the church, just there where the guerrillas had taken Thanasis’s truck. I could hear talk, laughter from inside. I pushed back the flap and stepped in. Folding tables had been set up and the militia soldiers were eating and drinking, though the village now had neither food nor drink. At a central table with soldiers on either side sat Takis wearing one of their caps. I remembered him that day in Halandri, riding in the British jeep as the crowd cheered and threw flowers. So here we are again, I thought, another massacre with Takis at its center and again he is surrounded by soldiers. Cups were raised to him. Then he noticed me.
“Oh, Aliki,” he said, surprised. Everyone turned in my direction. I felt their stares travel over me.
“Let’s go outside,” I said to Takis. He didn’t move for a moment and seemed unsure about leaving his new friends to talk with me. One of the soldiers gave him a nudge and said something I couldn’t make out. Everyone laughed.
Once outside the tent and before I could tell him about leaving, Takis said, “I saw him. I tried to tell you earlier, but you ran off. He was right here, don’t you see, right where we’re standing now.” I must have looked blank so he added, “Stelios. He was the one who drove Thanasis’s truck away with the guerrillas. At least, I think it was Stelios. He has a beard now so I’m not sure, but otherwise it looked just like him.”
CASSETTE 4 Side 2
Yes, yes, that noise you hear comes from the women all worked up again, and gathered at my door as usual. They’re like crows on a fence waiting for the last of us old ones to be on our way so they can get into our houses the way we got into Zephyra’s. Well, there can’t be much of interest in Aphrodite’s house and she’s the one they’ve come about. If the filth of your house could do you in, she would have died long ago. The doctor who comes here from the nearby town talks endlessly about cleanliness, as if we keep livestock in our parlors. It’s insulting. But looking at Aphrodite’s house through his eyes, I understand.
The last time the doctor visited her uninvited, Aphrodite put a curse on him, waving burned herbs in his face and telling him that his wife would always be barren. The doctor just laughed so she went on to say that all his children would be stillborn, which, as the doctor pointed out, was unlikely with a barren wife. It was quite a show for the women who were hanging around outside listening.
I’m reluctant to visit because when I was last there, she said my arrival meant death was at hand. This time it might be true. Still, I don’t want my face in her doorway to scare her out of this life. It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. Perhaps it’s a gift to someone suffering, but relatives do not always see it this way. Everyone has their ideas about exits, even more than entrances. But one thing certain is that the world is a revolving door, swinging babies in one side and the dead out the other.
“You must go to her,” one of the women says through my window.
“It’s her time,” says another.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“Her nails have turned black.”
“Her face is gray.”
“She may be in a trance,” I say. “I’ve seen her like that.”
“She’s been so for days.”
“She’s a healer,” I say. “She’ll heal herself. She’s done so before.”
They insist that Aphrodite has lost her powers. Just a month ago, she used homemade oil of mouse to treat a cut on a small boy from another village. It didn’t stop the bleeding so the doctor was brought in. But Aphrodite said she’d made the remedy as always, drowning a pink and hairless baby mouse in a bottle of olive oil, which she then left out in the sun for a year or more, the longer the better. Such a stink came out as the bottle was opened, but when Aphrodite brushed the oil on a wound and said her special words, it always stopped any bleeding. When she heard it hadn’t worked this time with the boy, she blamed the mouse.
“You can’t count on anything these days.”
But the women say now that the real problem is Aphrodite herself, whose powers are waning.
“She can’t heal anyone, not even herself.”
“Her hour is near.”
“And she may have things to say to you.”
“About Zephyra.”
“About your father.”
Oh, dear, do I really want to know more about his nighttime trysts or about Zephyra’s infernal goat noises? What the dying have to say is worth hearing and it’s an honor to listen, but sometimes I’ve heard more than enough. One old shepherd told me that he’d cared more for one of his sheep than for his wife. He’d moved the sheep into his house after the wife died. Oh, my. And remember Zephyra and her goat noises? But Aphrodite? It won’t be a matter of sheep or goats, of that I’m certain. I still can’t lament for her until asked by her or her relatives, and she has no living ones, as far as we know. I remind the women that my calling is only to compose the lament for the wake.
Stelios once said that our stories never finish. They just get braided with those of others into some larger strand that only later generations can understand. Yes, I know, that doesn’t really sound much like him, does it? But he started to say that kind of thing after he returned from the mountains. We didn’t know what to make of it at first. But then, we were still stunned by what had happened in that village—the deaths of Vasili and Thanasis. Especially Yannoula, who was growing more glum and unresponsive.
The militia allowed her and Takis and me to ride with them in the back of a troop truck to a place where we could catch a bus to Heraklion. Wedged among soldiers who sat on wooden benches on either side, we tried to stay dry. But rain leaked through the canvas tarp above and blew into the opening in back. With Yannoula positioned between us, her arm in a Red Cross sling, Takis and I took turns holding an old jacket over her head.
She seemed dazed and didn’t notice the weather. She didn’t respond when Takis told us that he’d heard from the soldiers that the guerrillas who’d raided the village had already been caught. Their mistake had been to panic and take Thanasis’s truck rather than returning on foot to their hideout. The truck was well-known in these parts. With militia blocking most roads, there’d been little escape for a known vehicle loaded with stolen provisions, not to mention the bodies of the guerrillas’ fallen comrades. Those still alive had already been arrested and taken to Heraklion to be turned over to the police there for questioning.
“Does that mean they have Stelios too
?” I asked Takis, leaning over Yannoula. “Was he really the driver?”
“They just said they’d caught them all.” His expression didn’t give away how he felt about any of this. “But I did see him drive away. Mitso and I were still inside the church at the window.”
“Did you tell them that he isn’t a guerrilla, that he was abducted? They’ll believe you since they think you’re such a hero.”
“I did tell them. And I am a hero. They don’t blame me the way you do.” He turned away and stared out the back of the truck into the rain.
I didn’t say anything, as I felt too empty to argue. And what individual soldiers thought about Stelios wasn’t going to matter much anyway. The lines of authority among local police, government militia and the shadowy groups called security committees—which took the place of courts—would be confused and confusing. People were arrested, then freed, then rearrested. It didn’t make sense. But the Heraklion police captain knew us all. Could we rely on him to help Stelios?
The troop truck stopped at the side of a meadow and there sat the dilapidated country bus with a spray of bullet holes along one side. Half the windshield was a spiderweb of splintered glass. On top of the bus were so many bundles, suitcases and boxes that the bus sat low to the ground. Milling around the bus were passengers and soldiers smoking and talking. We’d heard this was the only bus of the week through this remote area. And it wouldn’t go back to Heraklion the way we’d come with Thanasis, but instead would travel there by backroads, stopping at every village along the way.
Inside it so many passengers were standing that the seated ones weren’t even visible. A pair of armed soldiers stood in front, one of them paring his fingernails with a knife, the other reading a comic book. They were there for our protection, I assumed, because guerrillas had been known to stop buses to rob passengers or take hostages. But they didn’t make me feel any safer.
Village women with black head scarves pulled across their noses and mouths sat with baskets of cabbages or potatoes wedged between their legs. One woman had two live chickens trussed at the feet and hanging from a rope tied around her waist. Sweat stains blotched everyone’s clothes; the weather was clearing and turning warm. In the back of the bus a baby was squalling while on the floor two boys punched one another between passengers’ feet. As the bus started off, an old man tilting up a wicker-covered demijohn of wine for a drink spilled it over people near him. A woman told him he was not fit for human company and he said, well, he’d never cared much for humans anyway since all they did was kill each other.
Before long I felt a hand sliding up under my skirt. We were packed so tightly I couldn’t turn to confront the person so I reached down, got hold of one of his fingers and bent it back as hard as I could until I heard a cry of pain. The hand dropped away.
“I’m dying,” Yannoula said. “I can’t stand this.” It was the first time she’d spoken all day. After the next stop, Takis found a vacated seat for her, but then a young shepherd got on with a goat, which promptly wet her shoes and then began to nibble the hem of her skirt. The smell of the goat was overwhelming, but the shepherd looked away.
“Here you are, dear,” said a plump woman in a flowered head scarf next to Yannoula, handing her a bunch of herbs. “Hold this under your nose. It’ll revive you.” While Yannoula was sniffing it—strong mountain sage—the woman took off her shoe and gave the goat a crack on its head with the heel. “That’ll turn out his lights,” she said as it stumbled to its knees. The shepherd turned on her and accused her of trying to kill his animal that he was taking to market; it was all he had left to sell. The woman said she’d only been protecting the old one there, indicating Yannoula. The shepherd fired back a stream of curses and so did the woman. On and on they went.
It was already night when we dragged ourselves and our luggage from the Heraklion terminal to the boardinghouse. How much warmer it was down here near the sea. In the chill of the mountains, it was easy to forget that it was late spring here down below. As we rounded the corner, we saw a figure standing in the shadows in front of the entrance. The streetlight lit him from behind, a gaunt man with a scraggly beard. When he turned and saw us, I couldn’t tell if his smile was really that or only a shadow across his face. Stelios.
He hurried toward us with difficulty—there was a limp—and Yannoula gave a little cry as he tried to gather all three of us in his arms. His face was wet and his beard scratchy, but my knees weakened and I fell against him. All in a huddle, we made our way into the lobby. He glanced around the room, saying, “I didn’t expect I’d ever see this place again. Nothing has changed.”
“Except for you,” Takis said.
“Yes, well.”
In ordinary light, Stelios looked not so much older as weathered down. Burned dark by the sun, his face was a map of tiny creases. Sharp cheekbones emphasized sunken eyes that held a tiredness beyond sleep. And the remnants of his clothes hung from shoulders that looked no stronger than a wire coat hanger.
“They let you go?” Takis asked. “Just like that?”
“It was the captain of the police here,” Stelios said. The militia had brought him and the others to the police station and the captain recognized him at once. But he sent for Theo to identify him as the abducted puppeteer and, after that, released him. “I guess I have you to thank, Takis. Thank God you saw me and spoke up to the militia in that village.” He collapsed onto the old sofa next to Yannoula.
“So it was you driving the truck?” Takis asked, looking pleased with himself. He glanced at me as if to say, See.
“Yes. But what were all of you doing there? You were actually in that village? Hard to believe.”
I explained about our travels with Thanasis in search of him. Stelios had been posted as a lookout at the edge of the village, so he hadn’t seen the villagers and certainly not us. He’d just heard the shooting. Then there’d been this argument between the guerrillas and the owner of the truck.
“Thanasis,” I said, interrupting. “He was the one who brought us to the village.”
“I’m sorry about him. I didn’t see who shot him exactly, but someone threw me his keys.”
“That’s when I saw you,” Takis said. “You were starting the truck.”
It had all been chaotic, Stelios said, with the loading of the stolen provisions and the bodies of the dead and wounded. Then, only a few miles outside the village, the militia blocked the road, arrested them and brought them back here to Heraklion. The militia soldiers told the captain that the boy, Takis, who’d shot the guerrilla leader had identified the driver of the stolen truck as the abducted puppeteer everyone had been looking for.
“But it’s not over,” Stelios said, sighing. “They could still charge me with something, I don’t know what.”
The other guerrillas had already been sent to Agios Nikolaos, a town we’d passed through with Thanasis. The security committee for the area was at a detention center there. But what had happened the night he left the boardinghouse?
“I went across the street to think things over,” Stelios said. While he was sitting there in the empty café, an old rattletrap truck drove by and then came back and stopped. He stood up and started back across the street. The next thing he knew someone grabbed him from behind and pressed a wet cloth into his face.
“It smelled sweet, but that’s all I remember. When I came to, I was lying in a dank cave somewhere cold and had a terrible headache. Worse than that was to come, because I . . .”
“Ah, my little cabbages,” Theo said, walking into the lobby with a basket of food: warm cheese pies, bread and a demijohn of wine. “All together again, yes? Thanks be to God.” He embraced us one by one, kissing us on both cheeks, and we caught him up on what we’d been saying. The captain had already told him about Thanasis.
“Ah, my poor friend. They buried him there, yes? May the earth rest lightly on him.” He tapped his head in
thought. “Everyone around here knew him and the sad story of his wife. He was the best of men.”
“Thanasis?” Yannoula said. It was the first she’d spoken since we arrived. She’d apparently missed other mentions of Thanasis. Her face was flushed and her eyes darted feverishly from one of us to the other. “Isn’t he here yet?”
In our excitement at being together again, we hadn’t paid much attention to her. Theo felt her forehead. “She’s burning up,” he said, then pointed to her sling. “What happened to her arm?” I told him and he said, “We need to get her to the clinic near the plateia.”
He and Stelios helped Yannoula to her feet, but Stelios was unsteady too so Theo said no, Stelios should rest and have something to eat. “Takis and I can manage.”
“Where are we going?” Yannoula asked.
“For a little walk.”
“Too tired to walk.”
“We’ll help. Takis, take her other arm. That’s it.”
When they were gone, Stelios and I sat on the sofa with the basket between us, not talking much, breaking off chunks of bread to eat with the little pies. I got some glasses and we drank quite a bit of Theo’s wine. Stelios looked so much like the shaggy guerrillas who’d raided the village that I felt a little shy with him. There was a lot I wanted to ask, but I didn’t know how to begin. I became aware of one thing strongly.
“What would you think about having a bath?” I asked.
“How did you know?” We both laughed. “There was this mountain stream we used when it wasn’t frozen. That was it.”
I ran up the stairs to turn on the wheezy old water heater in the bathroom. When I came back, I helped him up the stairs and asked about his limp. He said the guerrillas moved camp regularly to avoid discovery and often treated him like a pack animal. They called him a city boy because he wasn’t used to climbing over rocks and boulders like those that littered the icy mountain passes. His shoes were soon shredded by the sharp stones and he fell repeatedly, dumping the rolls of bedding, pots and pans and other gear. He’d had to crawl around gathering them up only to fall again later.
My Last Lament Page 22