“It could be worse,” he said. “I suppose.”
I took him into my arms. “Yes. I saw an execution,” I said. “Six men; and afterward people applauded. One of the men looked like you. I thought it was you at first.”
“Theo mou. Where?”
I told him about the detention center. He’d been brought straight to the cinema and had never seen the center. But he’d heard that guerrillas accused by witnesses of murder were being executed without any kind of trial.
“Where are they sending you?” I asked. “And when?”
“I don’t know. The one decision came fast so the other is sure to be slow. Some of these men here have been waiting for months.”
He stood back from me and we sat down on the blanket on the floor. No one had told him anything more.
“I want to go with you,” I said.
“Only relatives can go; at least that’s what I hear. I didn’t expect to see you again and didn’t know how to get a message to you.” He paused and then gave me a little smile. “So I couldn’t tell you that in fact, there is a way.”
“A way?”
“Wives can go with the exiles. They can’t live with them, but they can see each other and, you know, be together sometimes.”
“Wives?”
“A wife. You could become mine.”
He glanced over my shoulder as he said this. I turned to see what he was looking at, but the room was no different. Up front, the red curtains across the stage hung in tatters. Above, a pair of plaster cupids flanked the masks of drama, one smiling, the other frowning. They might as well have been the faces of fate, uninterested in who lived, who died.
“I already am your wife,” I said. “In fact if not in name. Of course I’ll go with you, my dear.”
Stelios took my hands in his and said softly that the guards were open to bribes and for a certain sum, they would file marriage papers for us at the town hall and pay a priest to sign them. There weren’t civil marriages in Greece then, only religious ones. So a church document with a priest’s signature had to be forged as if a church ceremony had actually taken place.
“My Jewish ancestors might rise out of their graves if I married in an actual church. Funny, my parents weren’t observant at all; we didn’t even go to synagogue. And then my father and uncle were taken just because they were Jewish. Why? Why not Catholics or Orthodox? Not that I’d wish ill on any of them. But, I mean, why Jews?” He’d heard that on the other side of the island, near the city of Chania, the entire Jewish population had been herded onto German troop ships for deportation. But somewhere in the Mediterranean, the ship had been torpedoed and no one survived.
There was a commotion on the other side of the room and we looked in that direction. One of the guards was shaving the head of a detainee, who’d begun to cry, saying he wasn’t supposed to be sent, it was all a mistake, leave my hair, oh, please.
Stelios turned back to me. “Humans! Look how vile we can be. I think war’s just an excuse for everyone to lower themselves into their barbaric roots. I mean, both sides are mostly Christian—love thy neighbor and all that—but it hasn’t stopped the killing.”
He shook his head then pulled me to him and whispered into my ear that with a little bribe, we’d have the paperwork and be legally married. “Let’s make something good out of all this, Aliki. Some of the families will even leave on the same boat with us detainees.”
“Is that what you want?” I asked.
“No, in many ways, I don’t. It would be selfish of me to take you with me. It’ll probably be awful. But how can we know?”
He glanced away again and didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he waved his hand at the others in the theater. “Some of these have done the same thing. Been married, I mean. Look, I know it’s probably not the way you ever expected it might be. But, I mean, well, this is our life now, isn’t it?”
The captain had given him some money because he’d thought the decision of the committee unfair and he felt bad about what was happening. He’d told Stelios that he’d probably have to pay for his own food and shelter in exile. Stelios could pay him back when he returned. And then he could finish performing the play that had been interrupted that night in the café.
With several new scenes, I thought, maybe including this one.
“So what do you think?” Stelios asked.
“Yes,” I said simply. Then, “Yes and yes and yes.” I could feel the strength of the two of us together, even if physically apart. “You’re my good return,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“When I’m with you I feel as if I’ve returned from a long journey. You are my way of returning. We’re home now wherever we are.”
“Yes, Aliki, yes, that’s so.”
We stood in each other’s arms and I felt strength pour through me, strength that could get us through anything, could cope with the new place we’d be going to and everything that would come to pass after it. I thought of Chrysoula and her advice, but I wouldn’t have to learn to love the one I was marrying because I was marrying the one I loved.
“We’re going to be all right,” I said. “I just know it.”
“If you believe it,” Stelios said, not looking so convinced, “then I believe it.”
We didn’t say anything for a few minutes and my mind started racing through what I’d have to do before leaving. I needed to go back to Heraklion to collect our things and see how Yannoula was doing. I told Stelios how she hadn’t been there on my last visit to the clinic. And how I didn’t know what would happen to her now.
“That’s strange,” he said, “her not being there. Could she have walked out?”
“But she’s too sick. And where would she go? I’ll talk to Theo about looking after her. And Takis too. I don’t like to think what he’ll be like on his own.” I’d made a choice, the only I could have made, and I’d made it happily. But there would be consequences and Takis was the main one. “I don’t know how to tell him I’m leaving.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t. You’ll have to go back to Heraklion and wait until the captain lets you know that we’re leaving. Then just grab our things and get on the bus. Let Theo tell Takis you’re gone. If you tell him yourself, there’s bound to be a scene or worse. Anyway, you’d have to face leaving him eventually. He is capable of good things—after all, he did stand up for me about what happened there in the mountain village. So I’m indebted to him for that, I guess. But maybe he’ll grow up faster if he’s on his own, not always looking to you for help and sympathy. Anyway, we won’t be gone forever.”
I knew he was right, but I was going to put Takis out of my mind for the present, along with Chrysoula’s words, Treat him like a brother always. Well, even brothers had to grow up, didn’t they? As for now, I was a bride and that was what mattered.
We’d probably have to get the marriage papers first just in case Stelios got shipped out right away. If that happened before I got back from Heraklion, I could follow after him.
“But you don’t know where you’re going,” I said.
“The captain will let you know.”
We sat silently for a while. He pressed some folded bills into my hand and said this was for the small hotel down the street. Why didn’t I spend the night there; I must be exhausted. Maybe after he’d done his time in exile, maybe then we could have a proper ceremony of some kind, if I’d like that. But it didn’t really matter to me. I’d never imagined myself in one of those big white dresses that made brides look like enormous cakes.
The hotel turned out to be full of wives, children and soon-to-be brides. I had to share a room with one of them, Froso, who was going to have an actual church ceremony the next day.
“What do you think?” she said, trying on a dress she’d rented from a photographer who specialized in weddings and rented out the same bridal dress several times
a month. She was too plump for its tight satin bodice. “I can’t breathe,” she said. “And I can smell the perfume of the last bride. But who cares? Just so I step on Dimitri’s foot before he does mine.”
It was the custom that when the priest led the bride and groom around the altar the traditional three times in what was called the Dance of Isaiah, the first one who stepped on the other’s foot would dominate the marriage.
“Like my mother says,” Froso told me as she preened in front of the mirror, “life is short, but marriage is long. My Dimitri, he’s a nice boy, but no one’s going to tell me what to do.”
She’d warned him not to get involved with those crazy communists, but had he listened to her? Some of the nationalist troops had tried to seize land owned by his mother. So his communist friends, “. . . they hanged two of the nationalists from the old plane tree in the meadow,” she said. “Not Dimitri himself, you understand, but it was his family land, his meadow, his tree. So they took him too. You know how it goes.”
The result was this hurry-up wedding and detention in some probably dreadful place. But she and Dimitri were going to build a house in their village near Ierapetra.
“It’s my dowry that’ll pay for it,” she said, “and it’ll stay in my name. Dimitri, he’d give everything to the poor if he had the chance. So, what’s your fiancé like?”
I hadn’t yet thought of Stelios as a fiancé, but I supposed he was then. I had a flush of pleasure at the thought as I answered her question.
“A puppeteer?” Froso asked. “He can make a living at that? Well, I hope you have a good dowry, that’s all I can say. My mother says that most men are useless when it comes to money.”
In a couple of days the wedding papers had come through. It was official and again I felt my conviction that Stelios and I would get through anything life threw at us. Back in Heraklion, I went straight to the clinic. I found Theo and Takis there, standing in the hall outside Yannoula’s room. I avoided meeting Takis’s eyes, thinking of what I was going to do. But from his and Theo’s faces, I could see something was wrong. I asked them what was going on, and they explained that, shortly after I’d left for Agios Nikolaos, Yannoula had been found in the basement of the clinic, muttering among the brooms and mops. No one knew how she’d got down there and no one mentioned her having any kind of tests. Theo said her infection had returned.
“She has full-blown septicemia now,” he said. “Or that’s what they say, the doctors. But what do they know, bah!”
Yannoula still needed medicine not available on Crete. Couldn’t the nurses just clean the wound and patch it up the way they’d done before? I asked. Theo didn’t see why not. Yannoula was a tough old bone, as we’d always said. She could get through anything.
“She keeps singing the same song,” Takis said. “About a carriage.”
He and Theo had to get back to the café for the evening’s performance so I went in to see Yannoula alone. She seemed to be talking to the wall and went right on as I stood beside her bed.
“. . . my second husband, Manolis, in the river wading toward me. But no, it was—guess who—Karagiozis. He said he’d carry me across; I should just hop on his back. So, fool that I am, I did it. Partway across, just as we got into water over his head, he said he’d forgotten to tell me he couldn’t swim. When I said we’d both drown, he told me no, only I would, because he was just cardboard and would float downstream.”
She looked at me then and raised an eyebrow as if trying to remember who I was. “And here you are,” she said. “But why? Did you come to rescue me? A little brandy might keep me afloat. If you could just look in my suitcase . . .”
“It’s probably at the boardinghouse,” I said.
“Oh?” She glanced around the room as if surprised to find herself in it. She looked as thin as a twig under the covers. Closing her eyes, she turned away from me toward the wall.
“What’s this I hear about a carriage?” I asked.
The word seemed to rouse her. She turned back to me and sang tunelessly in a croaky voice.
See how the carriage passes by
with you and your love inside?
It passes by, it passes by.
How the carriage passes by.
“Do you know who I am, Yannoula?” I asked.
“Of course, Aliki, why wouldn’t I?”
“You’ve been very sick, I hear.”
“I fell down, that’s all, in the basement. I was just trying to organize things down there. I don’t know why everyone got so upset. No one has a sense of humor anymore. Where’ve you been?”
I told her about Stelios, how he was being sent into exile on an island still unnamed. She looked puzzled for a minute, but then something of her old self came into her eyes. “Oh, that’s right. They took him away right in the middle of the performance. Theo told me.”
“We’re, well, married now.”
“What? Whatever for?”
“So I can go with him.”
“Go where?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.” She glanced at my hand. “In any case, you’re not wearing a ring.”
Rings! She was right. We’d forgotten to get them.
“We’ll buy them later.”
“Not possible. They’re part of the Orthodox ceremony. You couldn’t have gone through it without them.” I’d never been to a wedding so I didn’t know that. She studied my face. “So, are you married or not?”
I explained.
“Oh, well, what does it matter? You two have been married for a long time as far as I’m concerned. But where will you go? That reminds me of the time when Manolis—he was my second husband, you know—took a salesman’s job and went off somewhere . . . now where was it? And what was he selling, do you remember?”
I said I hadn’t been around then, probably hadn’t even been born, but she paid no attention and rambled along, lost the thread of the story, doubled back, then trailed off and closed her eyes. I wasn’t sure what to think. She seemed herself and not herself by turns. I wanted to talk to a doctor. When I leaned over to kiss her forehead, which was hot, her good arm suddenly shot out and she grabbed my wrist.
“Don’t tell Takis,” she said.
“Don’t tell him what?”
She squeezed my wrist hard. “He comes to see me every day, poor boy.” She let go of my wrist and turned back to the wall. “He talks only of you,” she mumbled.
CASSETTE 5 Side 1
I sit here now at the kitchen table thinking of poor Yannoula, who was so gallant and carried her misfortunes so lightly. She told me once that we—Stelios, Takis and I—were a kind of gift to her, a bit of new life. But it was really she who was our gift, with her lightness, her silliness, her advice, her strength. She leavened those bad times for us. And of course they were also good ones because they kept us together and, though we didn’t understand it then, taught us to rely on each other, because what else could we do? Resentment would have burned us up. We saw enough of that in the towns and villages we’d passed through, people consumed in the slow fires of the soul. They were still walking around, but to look into their eyes was to peer down empty hallways.
I could fill this new cassette just with my thoughts of Yannoula, but I suppose I should move along. One of these days you’re going to show up, my scholarly friend, to listen to the laments I’ve recorded, not to mention everything else I’ve babbled about. Oh, before I go any further, I should tell you that eventually—sorry to be so inexact, but you’ll be like this when you’re my age—the British announced they could no longer afford to aid Greece. They’d been supplying arms and men to the royalist government (returned from exile in Cairo, remember?), which was chasing the communist guerrillas in just about every corner of the country. The king himself would finally return after a positive referendum only to find, a
year later, that the Brits were pulling out. Well, who could blame them? They’d been bombed flat by the Germans and had their own country to glue back together.
And in time, your old Harry Truman over there in the Land of Big Radios would decide to rush in to replace the Brits with American weapons and aid? I’m not sure, but what I remember was that he and his Congress feared that the communists might win here and install Stalin in the Parthenon. Who could imagine such a thing? Well, Harry could, I guess. So before long you Yanks were everywhere, like ants. Tall, well-fed young men with miles of very white teeth. First it was just tanks and weapons. But before long they were joined by engineers, architects, nutritionists, road builders—the whole lot. Everything from medicine to mules. You Americans, you tend to go too far—I hope I can say that to you without offense, my friend. You wouldn’t have been born yet, of course. But it was as if your Mr. Truman thought he would not only defeat communism but drag Greece and the rest of Europe into the twentieth century. Ha. Our Byzantine ways and snaky politics were not so easily untangled.
Well, that was the beginning of our love-hate affair with you all. Like most affairs, it began with lilacs and roses (roads, housing and weapons). The end would be another story entirely. Still, the effort would be enough for old Harry to get his own statue in a public plateia in Athens. More about that later. I’m rambling again and I’m sure I’ve got way ahead of myself. Where was I? Oh, yes, Yannoula.
At least I should record her lament, as much as I can remember of it. There’s no need for a lament for Aphrodite just now. She’s improved, or so the women have told me. She may be having that burst of clarity that the nearly dead often have. They come back to themselves a bit and then they’re gone, as if Death gave them one last look, home before dark.
I sat with Yannoula the night I got back from Agios Nikolaos. Takis was there too, after he’d finished his performance at Theo’s café. I looked at him, his sadness at what was happening to Yannoula, and wondered how he would cope with my leaving in addition to what he was already feeling. A doctor came—plump, balding, with flat, lifeless eyes—and listened to her chest, saying only that her infection was advanced and would soon take her. She’d also contracted pneumonia, he said, maybe from other patients in the clinic.
My Last Lament Page 25