My Last Lament

by James William Brown

  I told her that Takis and I needed to talk for a minute and then I’d go with her to the camp. I took him into the schoolhouse.

  “All right, you can stay a day or two, but that’s it,” I said. “There’s nothing here for you, Takis.”

  “You’re here. And you don’t seem to know whether you want me or not so I might as well stay until you decide.” He looked around the room at the cracked blackboards, the broken desks. “Theo mou, what a place!” he said. “You really live here? It’s so dirty. Where do you sleep?”

  I’d made a pallet on the floor out of my coat and other clothes. It wasn’t much, but considering that we’d lived in stables and even outdoors, it could have been worse.

  “It’s so uncomfortable,” he said.

  “Look, I didn’t ask you to come.”

  “Okay, it’s okay. I guess.”

  “A day or two, that’s all.”

  “I can’t go back. Theo said he never wanted to see me again.”

  “I don’t blame him.”

  “That’s mean. Why are you being so mean?”

  “Oh, Takis, I don’t know what to do with you. But I can’t think about it now.”

  On the way to see Stelios and Dimitri, Froso said, “It’s good he’s here. Now you won’t be living alone, which might give a wrong idea. As my mother says, men in small places are worse than ones in cities.”

  “How does she know?”

  “She knows everything.”

  Froso said this with no trace of humor. We walked on.

  At the camp, women were passing in and out of the blockhouse. When we went inside, we saw a wooden wall with open windows. Detainees sat on one side of the windows and visitors on the other. I gave Stelios’s name and waited. When his face appeared at the window, something in me turned over. Even before he spoke, I could see the change. There was no expression in his voice or face. His eyes had a flat, dull look as he slumped against the frame of the window.

  “I’ll never get out of here,” he said. “I’ll die here.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Some of these men, they’ve been here for a year or longer. When I told them I’d only been sentenced for a few months of exile, they laughed.” He sighed and ran a hand across the stubble on his scalp. “We carry stone up the hill near the quarry lake, then carry it back down again. The pointlessness is worse than the labor.” The mayor had given the new arrivals a talk outlining camp rules and regulations. He’d promised that after a few weeks of pointless work to break them in, they’d begin the real work of cutting stone with special saws and chisels for commercial use, the kind of work the other detainees were already doing. “He said it as if that would be our reward.”

  Some of the other detainees told Stelios they’d heard of much worse in other camps, where the prisoners were beaten and sometimes tortured until they signed a paper renouncing old partisan loyalties. But the guards here were bad enough, expecting bribes for leniency as they controlled supplies of food and water. Toilets were just fly-and-maggot-infested ditches at the side of the camp. And the tents were flimsy and offered little protection from weather. At that time, this didn’t much matter. But just wait until the winter wind and rain, the others said. Stelios hadn’t expected to be there then.

  “My life is over,” he said.

  “No, no, don’t say that. This won’t last. I saw detainees leaving on the ship this morning. No one’s here forever.”

  “Oh? I’ve heard some stories.”

  He looked around at the guards, who were mostly talking to each other.

  “From time to time, bodies are found. Sometimes along the shore; other times in that quarry with the water at the bottom. Anyone the guards don’t like, they just disappear.”

  I remembered what Froso had said about that quarry. There didn’t have to be sea creatures in it for it to be a watery gravesite.

  “But the relatives, don’t they cause a lot of trouble?” I asked.

  “Not everyone has relatives here. That’s why you have to come every day, Aliki. Those here inside with someone on the outside survive better. That’s what they all say. Just keep asking for me. Insist.”

  I thought that Takis could be another visitor asking for him, but I was still hoping to get Takis off the island somehow and soon. Could I bring some paper and pencils? he asked. Detainees were allowed to write letters, but what he really wanted the paper for was to write down a few more ideas for the rest of the play he’d performed that night at Theo’s. And maybe some of the stories he was hearing.

  “It will keep me from going crazy when I carry the stone.”

  I wanted to tell him about my plan to teach and maybe to use The Iliad, but the guards called out rotation time, which meant that new visitors and detainees replaced those of us still at the windows.

  On the way back to town with the other women, Froso said, “My Dimitri, he’s ill already. Such a cough he has, and no doctor in the camp.” I mentioned Stelios’s bad leg and his weight loss, which was worsening.

  “And no hospital or clinic on the island,” someone else said.

  “What’s to be done?” asked another.

  “What’s ever to be done?”

  That was the question. It would always be so as long as we were on the island. I went back to the general store to buy paper and pencils for Stelios. But there wasn’t much left of the money he’d given me in Agios Nikolaos. It was possible that he still had some, but I didn’t want to ask. He’d need it to bribe the guards. As I returned to the schoolhouse, I was thinking again about how to get started teaching. And what to do about Takis. And then I had an idea.

  “Did you bring the puppets with you?” I asked. He’d dragged one of the desks out to the middle of the room and was just sitting there.

  “Yes, everything; screen and backdrops. But why? You want to give shows here?”

  “Not exactly. But I need money.”

  “I have some from what Theo paid me for Karagiozis.”

  “Hang on to it.” I told him about my conversations with the mayor and that I’d been wondering if I could teach a few simple things, like numbers and the alphabet and some practical reading skills. I didn’t know much, but then the children knew nothing. I figured I could stay a step or two ahead of them. But maybe The Iliad wouldn’t be best right at the start. Now that Takis had brought the shadow puppets, I could start by making up little scenes. Just ordinary conversations about going shopping, talking to a friend, making dinner, greeting people. Karagiozis and the other puppets would act these out and then the children would repeat the phrases. I’d write the words out for them and help them copy them down, sounding out each word, syllable by syllable. “It’ll seem like a game, but they’ll learn.”

  “Sounds kind of boring,” Takis said.

  “Does it? Well, it has to be simple at first.”

  “Why not just do the plays?”

  “Because once they’ve seen them, that’s that. This way, they’ll go on learning. And their families will pay whatever they can pay.”

  He tilted his head as if thinking all this through, then said, “So, does this mean you want me to stay? Or isn’t it more that you want the puppets, but you’d just as soon I go back to Crete? Or somewhere.”

  He looked hard at me and I paused before speaking. He had a point, of course. I couldn’t very well talk him out of the puppets and then tell him to leave. And maybe Froso was right that it would be better to have him living with me. And he was talented with the puppets. I felt myself sliding down an old familiar hill. He was Chrysoula’s boy and she wanted me to look after him. Oh, God. Here we were again.

  “If you want to stay, you’ll have to help me so we can help Stelios.”

  “You keep changing your mind. Did you tell him I’m here?”

  “Not yet. He was too upset when I saw him.” I described
the camp and its ways.

  “Theo mou! Let me out there. I saved him once—well, briefly, anyway. I can do it again.”

  I looked at him, unable to decide if he really cared at all what was happening to Stelios or if he just liked the thought of being a hero again. “You don’t know what it’s like, Takis. I don’t see how you could do anything. And anyway, we don’t know how long he’ll be there.”

  I could sense Takis thinking it over, perhaps working out that once Stelios was free, there’d be no need for him anymore. So was helping Stelios, even if such a thing were possible, a good idea? As the next few weeks became months and summer turned to rainy autumn, Takis and I slid back into our old ways with each other, like brother and sister. At least there seemed to be no more romantic notions on his part. But he was much more secretive, disappearing for long amounts of time, evading my questions about where he’d been. I’d catch him looking at me sideways when he thought I wasn’t paying attention, just as I went on watching him for signs of any downward mood shifts. We’d nearly run through the money from Theo that he’d brought with him. They were giving me credit at the store, but we’d need to start teaching soon. But it was increasingly difficult to keep Takis’s attention on the task and so it was taking us longer to prepare.

  At the camp, I’d been telling Stelios about my preparations for teaching, but I hadn’t mentioned the puppets since I didn’t want to explain how they’d come to be there.

  “I still don’t understand what you’ll teach, Aliki,” he said. “Words from The Iliad?”

  He looked a little worse every time I saw him, thinner, his face narrow and pinched, his uniform tattered.

  “No, not classical words,” I said. “Parents want their children to be able to read directions on tins of food. Or on medicine bottles. Or to read newspapers from the mainland. I’m working on it, making lists and plans.”

  He’d been telling me that the men were organizing themselves. They assembled at dawn and did exercises for a half hour, led by one who’d been a fitness instructor. Then they sang the national anthem and broke into groups, each with a leader who recommended work assignments—the cutting and carrying of the stones—to the guards, depending on strength and general health of the other men. The guards seemed to accept this, as the detainees were making the guards’ jobs easier. After all, there was no disobedience involved.

  “In this way we keep some pride,” Stelios said. But there was a rumor that guard reinforcements had been requested. Stelios lowered his voice and said that detainees like himself had not been released at scheduled times. I knew this, of course, but didn’t know if anything could be done about it. “There might just be a hunger strike,” he said.

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Wouldn’t there be reprisals of some kind? “If we can just wait this out,” I said, “maybe we can go home.”

  “We are home. We’re here together.”

  “Yes, but you know what I mean. We can’t stay on this island forever, camp or no camp.”

  But where would we go when all this was over? His family house in Athens? Back to my father’s house in the village? Soon we would have been on the island longer than the original sentence of three months. Winter was here with its winds and rain, and still there’d been no indication how much more time Stelios would have to serve. What if a strike brought on an additional sentence?

  “If you could see how it is here from the inside, you’d understand better.”

  This was probably true, but I was too frightened by the thought of a strike to care. I distracted myself by putting up posters in the general store about lessons in reading and writing for village children. I offered to teach for one week with no fee. If at the end of that time, the parents or children weren’t happy with my teaching, that would be the end of it. Otherwise, the lessons would continue for whatever the families could manage to pay.

  “What am I supposed to do in all this?” Takis asked. “Anything?”

  “Be the puppet master.”

  “I can’t teach anything because I don’t know anything.”

  “I don’t know much either. Just do these little sketches and leave the rest to me. We’ll see how it goes.”

  When we’d first unpacked the shadow puppets, we noticed that they included the ones Stelios had been using at the last performance at Theo’s café, the ones of all of us; there were also others we’d forgotten about, soldiers with swastikas on their uniforms.

  Takis had looked startled. “I don’t remember these.”

  “Oh? They were in his play that night in Heraklion.”

  “I didn’t watch that part.”

  He turned away from me but not before I’d caught the slight glazing of his eyes, that telltale loss of focus.

  “Oh, well,” I’d told him, “we don’t need them.”

  He tossed them in the corner.

  Our first students were a brother and sister, a shy and undernourished-looking pair about six years old, along with an older boy who said he was a cousin. Takis and I had placed the best of the old desks in a semicircle facing the puppet theater. We turned out the lights and used kerosene lamps to create shadows on the screen. The first lesson was learning the numbers one through twenty, in numerals and words, but the three students had never seen shadow puppets before so Takis first introduced Karagiozis the baker dancing and counting his fingers. We’d worked out this song for him:

  Trin, trin, trin,

  I can count to ten.

  But what happens then?

  Do I start again?

  Ten fingers, ten toes,

  And this bread, how many loaves?

  Who knows, who knows?

  We got the three students to sing along the second time around and then Karagiozis counted out his pies, cakes and loaves of bread while making silly mistakes. Two pies or ten? Count again! I wrote the numbers on the blackboard in numerals and words as he talked, and then I got the students to sound everything out and copy from the blackboard. Their shyness dropped away as they laughed and called out to Karagiozis, “Count again! Count to ten!” We sent them home with their drawings of the puppets and lists of numeral words.

  They must have told their parents good things about us because after a few days, more students came. Takis and I quickly learned to plan everything carefully in advance, working out the little conversations and scenes for the next day so the students would always be busy. Any lull in activity meant trouble.

  “Catch, Takis!” one of the boys said, after he’d leaned out the window and pulled an orange from a tree. It went flying across the room and Takis tried to catch it, but it burst against the opposite wall. The boy’s sister brought a pair of scissors from home and, when no one was looking, cut letters of the alphabet out of her dress or anything else she could find: my scarf, her brother’s jacket, pages of an old textbook.

  At first they treated Takis as an equal since he was only a few years older. He would move among them, taking away oranges and scissors, correcting written work if he knew the answers. Sometimes he got into pinching and poking contests with the boys and I had to shoo them all outside for a break.

  “We have to make them respect us,” I told Takis after class. “You can’t act like one of them and expect that to happen. Grow up.”

  “I think I’m growing down.”

  “Try sideways. This will never work unless you act like a real teacher.”

  “I’ve never had a real teacher.”

  “Well, all I had was the old schoolmaster back in the village before the war. Remember Petros? He used a stick to keep us quiet.”

  I shouldn’t have said it. Takis brought a stick to class and smacked it loudly against the blackboard to startle students into silence. He liked doing this and did it regularly, making them jump in their seats. One morning a girl burst into tears and had to be calmed with sweets.

  “You�
��re frightening them,” I said.

  “Good,” Takis said. “It keeps them quiet.”

  “I don’t want them quiet. They have to speak to learn.”

  “You know what, Aliki? I like this. Do you think I could be a real teacher one day? In a real school?”

  “Well, I don’t know. You’d have to go to school yourself for many years.”

  “But you’d come too, wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, Takis, I don’t know. We’ll have to see about that.”

  At least we were being paid a bit, mostly in produce from gardens, and from the shops—lentils, beans and rice along with yogurt and cheese. The food at the camp was minimal—day-old bread, and onions and rubbery potatoes made into thin soup—hardly enough to sustain men who worked at hard labor in the cold wind. The guards charged ridiculous prices for the sparse food. So I’d taken to bringing Stelios extra produce.

  “My Dimitri, he has such a terrible cough,” Froso said. “No one does anything for him except your Stelios, who tries to keep Dimitri warm by giving him his own blanket.” There was little shelter for the men in the quarries. Stelios had torn apart an old tent and made floppy canvas hats for Dimitri and himself. When I handed the bag of produce through the window to Stelios, he said, “I’ll give it to the others, those not going on the hunger strike.”

  It was to begin the next day, he said, and last as long as necessary, a protest against delayed releases mostly but also the poor food, the lack of sanitation and the heavy work. The men wanted to be able to form classes and teach one another skills they could use after their sentences were finished. There were many trades represented: tailoring, plumbing, carpentry and others.

  “We’re supposed to be in a camp for exiles, not prisoners. That’s what they told us in Agios Nikolaos. We’re supposed to do service to the community. But the guards and that mayor, they treat us like slaves.” About one-third or so of the men were going to strike, he said. The others were too afraid of reprisals.

  “And you?” I asked. “Aren’t you afraid?”