“Tell me a story,” I’d say in the dark.
And he’d say, “What would you like? Hector’s farewell to his wife, Andromache, before Achilles killed him? Or something more Old Testament—Ruth saying, ‘Whither thou goest, I will go’? Or Esther saving her people?”
As he talked, he smoothed out the bedclothes in front of us as if clearing a place for the story to happen, his fingers with their cracked and broken nails patting down here a battle plain, there a meadow.
“I used to tell myself about the courtship of my parents,” he said, “what I can remember of what they told me long ago. But do you know the plot of that movie where Charlie Chaplin as the little tramp is so hungry he has to eat his own shoe boiled? It still makes me smile.” When I thought I’d heard all his stories, he’d come up with others, some of them quite silly. “This is the story of Aliki’s right breast, so jealous of her twin sister to the left who gets more attention, or so she thinks. And it’s also the story of a journey into the velvet underworld that begins”—his hand slid from my breasts down my belly and between my legs—“right here.”
Some nights I heard footsteps and wondered if it was Takis moving around in the hall, listening. But I put him out of my mind. I did all I could for him in the daytime as we rehearsed together. He barely needed rehearsal, he was so good. But he rarely met my eyes anymore. And the nights belonged to Stelios and me.
I came to understand that Stelios was an altered version of the man who’d disappeared that night, though often he was just like the boy I knew who said the kinds of things I’d expect to hear. But other times, especially when we were alone at night, he was a voice in the dark that sounded like him and yet not like him. His experience in the mountains seemed a kind of prism through which he now saw everything. Our pleasure together was all the richer for it.
On the night of the performance at Theo’s café, the usual old men sipping ouzo and fingering their worry beads had moved to tables outside across from the harbor. Inside, it was all families, young couples with children and grandparents. It was chaotic with children chasing each other around the tables and playing hide-and-seek, boys pulling the braids of girls and being smacked by parents. Theo’s face was tomato red as he rushed around serving brightly colored ices and the sodas he made from sweet syrups and bubbly water. At the side of the room, Takis and I set up the screen and when Theo had sold as much as he could, he stood in front of our stage and clapped his hands, but no one paid any attention. So he shouted at the adults please to control their children so the performance could begin.
I took his place in front of the screen to sing the opening. Poor Yannoula had wanted to do it, but she seemed to drift between being clear of mind and foggy. The doctor said she needed some of a new kind of drug called antibiotics, which we’d never heard of, and none of it was available on Crete at that time.
I stood there trembling. Being behind the screen was one thing, but it was entirely another to be in front. My singing voice wasn’t strong and I knew Stelios was in the audience somewhere. I wanted to do well for him as it was the first time he’d just watched in a long time. I warbled the little verse and finished with:
And I’ll tell a tale to you,
to all this noble company,
and may the time pass pleasantly.
Then I ducked behind the screen and we began the fastest performance ever. Takis had developed wonderful timing. But he didn’t wait for the children to stop laughing at one line before sprinting into another. The laughter came in bursts and explosions and the children called out to the puppets.
“Don’t trust her!”
“Knock him down!”
“Look behind you!”
When we’d finished, they applauded a long time and then called out for us to do it all over again, which we did. At the end, Stelios came up to Takis and said, “You’re better than I ever was.”
“Really?” Takis beamed.
“You love it, don’t you? It shows.”
“Yes! Yes!”
They shook hands. Stelios said he needed to borrow the puppets the next day to rehearse something he’d been working out in his mind.
“Borrow?” Takis said. “But they’re yours.”
“Not anymore. They’re yours now by right.”
I’d never seen Takis look so happy. Stelios too seemed pleased and relaxed.
The next day, he worked constantly, painting new backdrops, making new puppets, scribbling in a notebook furiously. All he would tell us was that he was going to perform a new play in two parts over two nights and Theo had agreed to this. Working in a corner of the lobby, Stelios asked us to stay away and not to look at anything. When he took a break, I told him I missed the times when we read together and how I’d carried his copy of The Iliad with me everywhere.
“I’d rather tell stories,” he said, “than read them. You hold on to my copy for the time being, all right?”
He worked all of the next few days too. On the day of the first of his two performances, I went to the clinic to see Yannoula but was startled to find her bed empty. She was having tests, a nurse told me. Tests for what? I asked. The nurse didn’t know and said I should come back the next day. I didn’t like the sound of that and went to find a doctor. But there never seemed to be one around. Who was treating her? Who was making decisions? I found the office of the manager on the first floor, but he wasn’t in, either. I waited for what seemed like hours until it was time to go to Theo’s and meet Takis for Stelios’s first performance of his play.
The audience that evening was a mixture of old men with some parents and children who probably thought they were going to see more Karagiozis. But there was no opening song, no title or idea of what was to come. What we saw first were the shadows of a woman and boy crossing the screen. From behind the screen, Stelios raised his voice to be the woman.
WOMAN: Remember all this one day
when you return by this path,
when you have grown into yourself.
Listen, in spite of what we’ve seen,
the world is going on.
A twig snaps, the leaves whisper.
At a turn we see threads of cloud,
the wings of a hawk.
Now in a valley of olives,
smoke floats from chimneys.
BOY: We must stop. You are ill.
The shadow of a village woman in an apron appeared on the left of the screen.
VILLAGE WOMAN: It is good that you have come.
WOMAN AND BOY: It is good that we have found you.
There was a second boy here, small and jumpy, hopping around the new arrivals. And an older girl.
SMALL BOY: There’s a ghost with orange hair
downstairs in the basement.
Do you play cards?
BOY: Do you read books?
The girl shook her head and put a finger to her lips.
SMALL BOY: She hasn’t talked since her father died.
She’s my friend.
“It’s about us,” Takis whispered to me.
“Sort of,” I said. “But so much is left out.” And where was it going? I wondered. Up to the real events of that night, events that Takis had never faced? What was Stelios trying to do? He and Takis had been getting along reasonably well, so what was this about? As the play went on, Takis shifted in his chair and kept glancing at me to see my reaction. I was trying to keep my face blank and stay calm, but I worried that Takis could tip into one of his states.
“I don’t think I want to see any more,” he said.
But already puppets wearing swastikas were on the screen. Then a placard dropped down with the words TIME PASSES. When it was pulled back, we could see the outline of a house. In the windows were tufts of red cellophane flames. The three children were leaving.
BOY: Death follows as shadows
fixed to our heels.
Terror is the white bone
we found on the shore,
washed hollow by time.
We see at a turn threads of cloud,
the wings of a hawk,
now a city beside the sea,
the lost home found.
I was relieved. Takis had not been implicated in what happened. Was that what Stelios now believed or was it just a matter of keeping the story moving? But I couldn’t see where Stelios could take this—after all, our stories had no end yet. We were still living them.
Takis had gone quite still in his chair, but the other customers in the café looked puzzled—this wasn’t the kind of performance they were used to. I was looking around when I noticed the police captain come in the front door. He said something to Theo, who pointed at the screen. The captain walked through the tables to the front and behind the screen. The play stopped while he and Stelios talked. The audience grew restless.
“What’s going on?” someone called out.
“Continue the show!”
“Or give us our money back.”
Theo rushed back toward the screen, but just then the captain and Stelios emerged. Stelios looked flushed and angry. He was still holding the pole with the girl puppet when the captain told the room that the security committee in Agios Nikolaos had ordered the arrest of Stelios for collaboration with the guerrillas. There was a collective gasp, then customers began to mutter. One booed the captain, and some shook their fists at him. Someone else smashed a plate against a wall. Hands were waved in the air, insults were shouted about the mother of the captain, about Theo, about God and the Virgin Mary. But the captain moved calmly through the angry customers, holding Stelios by the arm.
As they neared us, Takis jumped up and said, “It’s a mistake. I was there; I saw what happened.”
“I was there too,” I said, though I hadn’t seen Stelios with the other guerrillas.
“I’m sorry,” the captain said. “I have orders.”
Stelios handed the puppet to me as he said to the captain, “But no one has asked me what happened,” he said. “Can’t I talk to that committee?”
“It’s in Agios Nikolaos. That’s where we’re going.”
And they were gone. It was fast and there was nothing to be done about it. We stood with Theo outside watching the taillights of the captain’s car disappear, thinking about the rumors of life in the detention camps.
“Is there a bus to Agios Nikolaos tomorrow?” I asked Theo.
“Yes,” he said, “but if you’re thinking of going there, don’t.” Stelios might well be back in a few days anyway. It was all probably just a misunderstanding and meanwhile the captain, when he returned, would let us know what was going on. “A detention camp is not a place for a young woman.”
“I’ll go with you, Aliki,” Takis said. “I’ll protect you.”
“No, no,” Theo said. “I’ve advertised more children’s performances this week and next. If all my puppeteers are in Agios Nikolaos, what’ll I do?”
“What do you want me to do, Aliki?” Takis asked.
“Stay. This is your time. You’ll have to work alone, though. Can you do that?”
“Stelios did it, didn’t he?”
What I’d heard about any kind of arrest was that detainees who had relatives or friends to inquire after them and bother authorities, well, they seemed to do better than those who had none. When I stepped off the bus in Agios Nikolaos the next day, I recognized it as one of the places where Thanasis had stopped with us to sell his produce. The town itself seemed pleasant enough, built around a curving bay. There was a lagoon that stretched into the middle of the town, with cafés and restaurants around it. It didn’t seem like the sort of place to have a detention center. I asked for directions to it and made my way to the outskirts. The detention center looked more like a warehouse, which was probably what it had been before the war. Barbed wire had been thrown up around it, but people were coming and going through the main gate casually. I would come to learn that disorganization was the rule in such places.
The officer at the gate couldn’t find Stelios’s name on a list but said it wasn’t up-to-date because it changed throughout the day. I’d have to look for him myself, he told me, waving me through. Inside, several hundred men were lying on the floor on blankets. I supposed the women were in another part of the building. Many prisoners had their heads shaved. I asked one what this meant and was told that they were to be shipped to prison camps on islands. Half-eaten loaves of bread and plates of food lay here and there among the men who were reading newspapers or playing cards or chess. Family members came and went while children chased each other around the walls of the huge room. Among the prisoners and their families moved armed guards singling out certain men and leading them outside. Others brought new captives in, though there was really no space for them.
I worked my way along one side of the room, stepping over people, but couldn’t see Stelios among them. Then I did the other side with the same result. Some of the men made lewd gestures as I passed and one caught my hand and tried to pull me down beside him. I gave him a kick and went to the exit, where a family group of visitors was leaving. Mixing in with them, I was waved outside by the guard.
The prisoners who’d been singled out inside, a half dozen of them, were now lined up and guarded in the open space in front of the warehouse. Townspeople stood around watching. Then, from the prison, an equal number of soldiers emerged and lined themselves up, each with a rifle, facing the prisoners. I realized with a start that an execution was about to take place just as I noticed that one of the prisoners did resemble Stelios—that same shaggy beard. There was a shouted command, the soldiers fired in unison and the prisoners pitched over backward or sideways. The townspeople applauded.
I found I couldn’t move. The speed of the execution and its almost routine, matter-of-course feeling froze me in place. Had those inside known that the men led out were to be shot? Had the men themselves known? There hadn’t been any tearful farewells that I’d noticed, no wailing women or children, no attempts to escape. And the crowd outside had watched with the same level of interest they might have brought to one of our Karagiozis performances. The soldiers then marched back inside and the crowd broke up and trailed away. No one approached the bodies; no one claimed them. They didn’t even look much like bodies now; they could have been piles of soiled laundry.
Looking around, I wondered if anyone else had grasped the horror of what had just happened. But there was no one there until two more soldiers appeared leading a horse-drawn cart. Moving from body to body, one soldier would take hold of the feet while the other took the arms. They’d swing each body back and forth between them for momentum, then sling it onto the cart. When it was full, it passed by me and I saw that the bearded one wasn’t Stelios. But he might as well have been. He was the same age and build, his sharp cheekbones and sunken eyes still open, an expression of surprise on his face.
When my legs began to work again, I stumbled back into town, where I immediately got lost in a tangle of narrow streets. I came out at the waterfront and sat on a bench there, trying to collect myself. It was a sparkling day; light dazzled on the surface of the water and people strolled past racks of drying fishnets as if nothing had ever happened—war, executions, guerrilla raids. I put my face in my hands and tried to decide what to do next. It was the chief of police who coordinated these matters in any town, I reasoned, so the captain from Heraklion would probably have taken Stelios to the local police station.
After asking around, I found the place, a renovated two-family house with a wraparound porch and a Greek flag, facing a square. There they did have Stelios’s name on a list but would give me little information since I wasn’t a relative. What they did tell me was that the newer detainees were being housed in an old cinema because of overcrowding a
t the detention center. When I found the place, I saw the tattered movie posters were still on display, stars whose names I’d barely heard of then: Clara Bow, John Gilbert, Leslie Howard. The lightbulbs around the posters had all been broken.
Inside, it was much like the detention center with people coming and going. The seats had been removed and men sat or lay on the floor on blankets. When I asked a sentry about Stelios, he waved his hand at someone standing on the other side of the room. I could see from there that his head had been shaved. But was it Stelios? I hoped not, knowing what a shaved head meant. He turned as I came toward him.
“Aliki!” he said, putting his arms around me. “Aliki.”
His scalp was a mess. There were nicks and scabs among a few remaining tufts of hair. Worse were his eyes, which had taken back the look of exhaustion they’d had when he first returned from the mountains.
“I’m to be sent away. Exile, three months, maybe more. It’s an open-ended sentence, like most these days.”
“Oh, no. How do you know? You’ve only been here overnight.”
The police had told him that the security committee understood he’d been abducted, but it was their understanding that Stelios had cooperated with the guerrillas. He’d driven the getaway truck after the driver had been murdered.
“It was decided before I even got here.” He sighed. “They wouldn’t see me or hear what I had to say.” His voice thickened and he put his hands over his face for a moment, saying behind them, “And there’s no way to appeal.” He didn’t know exactly what exile meant, but he’d learned from some of the other detainees that it was not the same as the dreaded prisons or the so-called reeducation camps, where torture took place. Exiles were detainees—people that the security committees thought should be “banished temporarily for the good of the body politic.” Stelios was to be sent to an island, where he and other detainees would have to work for the local community under supervision of local authorities. He might or might not be released in a few months.
My Last Lament Page 24