My Last Lament

by James William Brown

  “Yes, yes, of course. But our fear, it’s all we really own here. We have to do something with it before it swallows us. I learned that much from Stephanos in the mountains. Remember me telling you about him? He was wrong, but right to fight for his wrong.”

  At least Stelios had lost that defeated look he’d had at first. He was still as gaunt as he’d been when he came back to Heraklion, and he said that his leg wasn’t much better, but there was this new conviction in him. I told him that I’d heard how some newspapers from Athens were saying that guerrilla fighters all over the country were losing ground, but other papers said just the opposite. Who knew what to believe? We hoped it would all soon be over. “A strike right now could make everything worse, couldn’t it?”

  “It’s going to get worse anyway.” He glanced around, but the guards, as usual, were talking to each other. In a whisper, he told me there was a rumor that the camp was going to become like ones on other remote islands, where prisoners were tortured until they signed papers denouncing any past political loyalties and swearing an oath to the government. I remembered Froso telling me about this before we left Agios Nikolaos. So it was really happening?

  “We hear that those who don’t sign just disappear.”

  “Then don’t strike,” I said again.

  “Some men are already starving; others are sick. There’s tuberculosis here and pneumonia. We have to do what we can.”

  The next day we heard that the camp had been closed to visitors. Barricades were put up around the perimeter and the guardhouse remained shut. No one knew what was going on inside, but it was rumored that some of the detainees were refusing food. Apparently there’d never been a hunger strike at the camp before and the customers in the general store were talking about it. Some thought the detainees were right, but others worried what this might mean for the future of the camp. The island economy was dependent on it; the land for the camp was rented from the township and island food was purchased. Why should the men there expect to have rights? There was also the worry that if word of the strike got out, there might be inspectors from the International Red Cross, who had been known to close down camps. Though usually they reopened later after the inspectors were gone. We heard that more camps were opening all the time on other islands.

  There was nothing Takis and I could do about any of this so we tried to get on with our lessons for the children, and every day one or two more students joined the group. We divided them into two sections because we needed to start all over for the new ones while moving ahead with the others. Takis loved it all.

  “Teach me, Aliki, so I can teach them. I want to learn everything.”

  We prepared in the afternoons for the next morning’s lessons and Takis worked hard. When he wasn’t preparing or teaching, he roamed. I didn’t know exactly where, but the camp was closed so there was no way he could see Stelios. He must have been out that way, though, because he said once that he went to the far side of the quarry lake and stared down at the water for a long time, hoping to see one of the rumored sea creatures.

  “Do you know how to swim?” I asked. Funny—I’d known him all his life but didn’t know a little detail like that.

  “No.”

  “Then you’d better stay away from there.”

  “There’s not much to do here, as you might have noticed.”

  He sometimes told me stories about people in the village and I worried that he was lurking around, spying, maybe. He seemed to know things he shouldn’t have known—who had visitors late at night when the village was asleep, who had a bag of sovereigns under the kitchen floorboards, which husbands beat their wives or children. When I asked how he knew such things, he was evasive, repeating that old opening line of folktales: “Maybe it’s true and maybe it isn’t.”

  But what was true about the strike at the camp? At first we couldn’t get any news at all and I was lying awake at night wondering how long poor Stelios could survive without food. Then, in the general store on the third day of the strike, Takis heard about the forced feeding of detainees at the camp. I don’t know how the news made its way there, but perhaps the mayor had said something to his cousin, Stavroula, who wasn’t known for keeping secrets. Froso seemed to hear about it at the same time, probably from the same source. She and Takis came running over to the schoolhouse late in the afternoon.

  “Can you imagine?” Froso said. “The guards hold a prisoner down and put a tube through his nose and slide it down into his stomach. Then they pour in milk.”

  “There’s a lot of choking,” Takis said. “And gagging and bleeding. Sometimes they don’t put the tube in correctly. Milk went into the lungs of one man and it was like drowning. That’s what someone said, anyway. He drowned even though he was on dry land. Is that possible?”

  “What it is, is disgusting,” Froso said. “Most throw up afterward so what’s the point? I’m going out there and not leaving until they show me that my Dimitri is all right.”

  No one had heard any names of those who’d been force-fed. The three of us walked to the edge of the village where the road to the camp began and saw Cretan women coming from all directions, talking angrily. As we passed the abandoned village, a cold wind was stirring up little whirlwinds of dust and leaves.

  “Let’s let them know we’re coming,” someone said and began a song. Others joined in.

  Make sure in this life

  You get what you want.

  The years fly off like birds.

  The first wind lifts them and they’re gone.

  At first it seemed an odd song to sing, but then it didn’t. There were a lot of verses and Takis picked them up right away, but I didn’t feel like singing. I kept imagining Stelios being fed that way and what it would feel like to have the tube pushed through your nostril and down inside you. When we got to the guardhouse, there was no one around, but the metal barricades stretched out on either side of the guardhouse. The absence of anyone at all made us uneasy. Then Froso called out Dimitri’s name. And the others began to call out the names of their own men, repeating them.

  “Vangelis! Soterios! Aris!”

  Takis and I called out for Stelios, but the sound was just one of so many in the air that it was impossible to make out individual names anymore. Some women were shrieking as if in pain and others began to pull their hair, keening as if there’d been a death. “Ooo, loo, loo, loo, loo, oo loo, oo, loo . . .” The sound surged and fell and surged again like a living thing with a momentum of its own.

  The door of the guardhouse flew open and a uniformed guard with a rifle stepped out and shot once over our heads. The screaming and shouting stopped and there was a long silence. Beside me, Takis snapped to attention; I’d almost forgotten his reaction to military uniforms. The women in front of the crowd pressed forward and the guard said something to them that we in the back couldn’t hear. But the women turned and passed the word along: finished, the hunger strike was finished. Go home, the guard told us, no visits until tomorrow.

  The women in front hissed at the guard and jeered.

  “Son of a whore!”

  “Sperm of the devil!”

  “Eater of men’s souls!”

  He turned and went inside. We sat down on the ground. And then the calling out of names began again.

  “Andonis! Stamatis! Pavlos! Dimitri! Stelios! Lambros! Haris! Sotiris! Aris! Michaelis! Vangelis!” Some of the women called on saints too.

  “Agios Georgios!”

  “Agios Panteleimon!”

  “Agios Polycarp!”

  Others called out the names of long-dead relatives or of God Himself or Panayeia, Mother of God. There was no movement in the guardhouse.

  “This is great!” Takis said. “Let’s do some more.”

  “It’s not a game, Takis.”

  The women were roaring again anyway and continued until throats grew raw and voices ho
arse. And then we roared some more.

  Finally the door to the guardhouse flew open again and out came two guards dragging the slumped body of a prisoner. They pitched him forward into the mud in front of the barricade. From the rear of the crowd we couldn’t make out who he was, but as he fell, I saw that his hands were tied behind his back. He lay still on the ground.

  “If you don’t leave at once,” one of the guards shouted at us, “there’ll be others.” Then the pair went back inside.

  The women in front surged toward the body on the ground as Takis pushed through the crowd. One woman seemed to be propping the body up, pinching his nostrils closed while breathing into his mouth. Another splashed his face with water from a flask and then slapped his cheeks. But he slumped back into the dust. Then there was a scream and it took me a few seconds to realize that Froso wasn’t with us, that she’d got to the front and the scream was hers. By the time I made it there, the other women were pulling her off the body, which stank of the sour milk that saturated his clothes. Takis was staring in rapt wonder.

  There were no marks on Dimitri that we could see, no bullet holes in his clothes, no signs of a beating. Froso had begun rending her face with her nails until the other women pulled her hands behind her back and propped her up between them. We made a kind of loose stretcher out of blouses and shawls and lifted Dimitri into it. With two of us carrying at either end, we all began to make our sad way back to the village. Froso shrieked most of the way until she collapsed, and the women made another kind of sling out of scarves so she could partly walk and partly be carried.

  Stavroula let us use her house for the wake, though she wasn’t sure her cousin would approve. “It’s the decent thing to do for the husband of my poor tenant.” She even donated one of her late husband’s old suits and she and two of the other women washed and dressed Dimitri in a room next to the one Froso had rented. The village coffin maker donated a pine box and, once Dimitri was in it, we all filed past tossing flowers onto him. In death, he looked more a boy than ever.

  In the room with the amber light words still flowed, or so I was told afterward. I said something like this:

  In the hills above our village,

  I trapped hares with my brother,

  and later trapped the men who took our mother’s land.

  We hanged them in the orchard by the old fence

  that needed the repairs it never got

  because we were taken, first my brother,

  then Mother and finally me.

  The soldiers took us all,

  away from the hills above our village.

  There was a lot more of it, Stavroula told me afterward, but I didn’t remember anything else. The next morning, I returned to the camp with a bag of bread and other food. Everything looked normal again with no sign of what had happened the day before. When Stelios came to the window, his face was so thin and drawn as to be almost skeletal and his voice was flat and without expression. He wheezed a bit when he said, “May the earth rest lightly on Dimitri.”

  After the first few days of the strike, he told me, the guards chose men for forced feeding, picking out mostly the younger, weaker ones who’d been fainting from lack of food in the cold. A pair of guards tied each one to a chair with hands behind the back and one guard held the prisoner’s head while the other inserted a rubber tube into one of his nostrils.

  “We were made to stand and watch. Some of us, we begged to take Dimitri’s place, but they wouldn’t listen. He fought, Theo mou, how he fought! Who would have supposed the boy had such strength? The milk was coming out everywhere. It went on and on. He was choking and it looked like he couldn’t breathe, but they kept on, those malakes, until Dimitri turned blue. Only then they took the tube out. But it was too late.”

  Stelios rubbed tears from his eyes as he talked. He pounded the window frame with his fists and swore. A coughing spasm shook him. It was wet and awful. He had to hang on to the sill to steady himself. Water streamed from his red-rimmed eyes. I tried to hold him, but the guard came and pulled Stelios to his feet.

  “He’s ill,” I said. “He needs a doctor.” But the guard, whose eyes had the look of the island lizards, shrugged and took Stelios away.

  Back in the village, Takis and I walked with Froso to the ship for Crete. Some of the village men carried Dimitri’s coffin. We all shuffled along behind it. Froso’s grief seemed to have turned to anger. She muttered as she walked and kicked stones in the road. “Now I have to grow old alone,” she said, “a widow pitied by everyone, living with my know-it-all mother.”

  CASSETTE 5 Side 2

  No one in the village talked much about what had happened at the camp in the months afterward. Even Stavroula, cleaning out Froso’s room for whoever would be the next tenant, said, “Well, it’s too bad what happened, but that’s all over now.”

  But it wasn’t. I was sure the command for the forced feeding had come from her cousin, the mayor, so no wonder she didn’t want to talk about it. In the streets and the general store, the townspeople tried not to meet our eyes when we, the camp women, passed them. It seemed to me that in some way the village felt shamed by what had happened at the camp and this was mixed with worry that it might be closed. The fighting on the mainland went on through the next spring and summer and seemed without end. There’d been huge battles won by government forces in the north of the country and in the Peloponnese region, as well as southwest of Athens. Many of the guerrilla forces were imprisoned or forced into exile. At least, that was what newspapers from Athens were saying, and by Easter of that year, many people uprooted by fighting in those areas were on the move. That would have been in, let’s see, ’46, was it, or ’48? Sorry to be so muddled about dates. Looking back, it seems that one year ran into another without a break in the national misery. Anyway, by that midsummer we started to see the arrivals on the island of many of the wounded and maimed, hoping for miraculous cures from the holy icon during the festival of the Dormition of the Virgin. The festival had been small the previous summer because of the difficulty of travel to the island. It wasn’t much better this year, but people seemed determined to come; a lot of rooms had been reserved in village houses. So a general sprucing up was taking place all over the village. Men from the camp had been brought into town to scrub the pavements and storefronts with bleach and water.

  “We must provide a nice clean face for our visitors,” Stavroula said, pausing while whitewashing the street side of her house. It was as if things that had happened at the camp could be whitewashed too.

  “And if we clean our face for our visitors, we do it for ourselves too. This is how it is every year—our new beginning. You women and your men, you’ll be leaving, but we’re here for life. It’s different for us.” She turned back to her whitewashing and said over her shoulder, “We won’t even remember you.”

  “But we’ll remember you,” I said. “And your cousin.”

  Her brush slapped whitewash fiercely onto the wall.

  And suddenly he was everywhere—the mayor—directing the repair of broken roof tiles on the church, the filling of potholes in streets where the church procession would pass, the planting of red and white oleanders around the plateia.

  It was ridiculous, Stelios said the next time I brought him a bag of food, that the kind of work they’d been supposed to do as exiles—work to benefit the local population—was what they were now being told they had to do to prepare for the holiday.

  Tasks were being handed out to prisoners depending on their skills: painting, carpentry, masonry and so forth. Stelios’s only skill was with the shadow puppets and because he was always coughing, they didn’t really know what to do with him. But he’d volunteered to put on a Karagiozis performance so he supposed he’d have to make some puppets out of bark again. He was already working on one but asked me if I knew where I could find more bark as there were few trees around the camp and quarries.
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  “I keep making them,” he said, “first at Chrysoula’s then in the mountains. And now here. This time I’d better save them.”

  I couldn’t keep from him the fact that the actual puppets, the ones he’d had from childhood and the new ones he’d made on Crete, were here on the island.

  “What? You mean . . . ?”

  “Yes. He followed me. The next boat the next day.”

  “Takis has been here all this time?”

  I nodded. But I couldn’t say anything else for a moment as the shame of not telling Stelios sooner began to consume me. I felt as hot as the sun, radiating embarrassment. When I could speak again, I told him about how we’d been using the puppets in the classroom. And what an enthusiastic teacher Takis had become. Stelios didn’t say anything for a moment and seemed to be having trouble taking in this information. He started to cough but put his hand over his mouth and choked it off.

  “You didn’t tell me,” he said. “Where’s he staying?”

  “At the schoolhouse.”

  “With you? All this time?”

  “Yes.”

  A tiredness came into his eyes beyond what had already been there. The coughing started up again.

  “I’ll get you the puppets,” I said.

  He turned away and muttered, “I’ll make my own.”

  I couldn’t stand the dejection in his voice and told him how sorry I was not to have told him sooner. But the first time I’d seen him at the camp, he’d been so unhappy. I hadn’t wanted to make things worse by telling him about Takis. The two of them had got along much better in Heraklion before Stelios’s arrest, but I’d sensed that telling him about Takis on one of my visits to the camp would be a mistake. At least, at first when he was so unhappy. And as time went on, it became more difficult to tell him.

  Stelios was still looking away without saying anything so I said that maybe he should have something to eat. I’d already passed him the shopping bag, but he hadn’t taken anything out of it, saying then only that he’d share it with some of the others. I took from my pocket a bar of chocolate I’d half eaten and passed it to him. He took it but just looked at it.