When he’d finished and was taking his bow in front of the screen, I went over and kissed him on the cheek, forgetting that the women I wanted to avoid would see me. He turned and put his arms around me, holding me to him as the audience applauded. It seemed to me that this was how it should be, a sun-splashed day with smiling children, Stelios and I holding each other in the applause, as if we were the play, characters in our own stories. I told him that as we bowed, hands over hearts.
“Yes, of course. All this around us,” he said, standing and waving at the trees, the people, the church, “maybe it’s just painted scenery, just some kind of backdrop. And we’re the shadows on the screen. We can’t grasp the actual lives we’re shadowing, not now, not while we’re living them. So how do we know what they’re really about?”
“Maybe that’s what laments try to tell us,” I said.
It must have been nearly time for the procession from the church, as a few of the parents were taking their children over to the side of the plateia, where they waited, looking expectantly at the church. In front of it, four men in dark suits were hoisting a platform covered with flowers onto their shoulders. The street was lined on both sides with guards from the camp, visitors in wheelchairs or on stretchers and others leaning on canes or crutches.
“Wait!” Stelios told the audience. “There’s more!”
He dashed back behind the screen and pulled out other puppets, attaching them to poles. They were the ones he’d made in Heraklion, the ones based on all of us in Chrysoula’s house.
“You want to do that now?” I said. “Here?”
“Yes, yes, let’s tell them our story, what we can know of it, anyway, just its shadows. I’ve been thinking about it all this time and I’ve made some changes. Stand over there, Aliki. Tell me what you think of it. Where’s Takis, by the way?”
I said I didn’t know. What I know now is that Stelios was probably aiming this performance at least partly at Takis, hoping to upset him just as he’d done in telling him about the place for disturbed boys. I started to tell Stelios what had happened at the schoolhouse, but he was ready to begin. So I stood beside one of the ilex trees to watch. Some of the parents and children who’d started toward the church paused to see what Stelios would do next. The play began exactly as it had that night in Theo’s café. The Sophia puppet spoke.
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 . . .
The play progressed more or less the same as in Theo’s café, but at the point where the Chrysoula puppet said, “It is good that you have come,” I heard a noise behind me and turned to see a barefoot girl half-hidden behind another tree. I turned away, but, struck by something familiar about her, looked again and realized it was Takis, in a green dress. His eyes were glazed; either he hadn’t noticed me or he hadn’t taken in who I was. I said his name, but it didn’t seem to register. I went over to him and put my arms around him. He looked directly at me but seemed unsurprised, as if I’d been there all along.
“It’s the same play,” he said.
“Where’ve you been? And why the dress?”
“Oh. It was on someone’s clothesline.”
“What happened to your own clothes?”
“I don’t remember.” He pointed at the screen. “That’s me again.”
There’s a ghost with orange hair
downstairs in the basement.
Do you play cards?
“Takis, let’s get you home and cleaned up and into your own clothes.”
“But what happens next in the story?”
“You know what happens next. Let’s go.”
“I don’t remember. Oh, that’s me again! And you.”
She hasn’t spoken since her father died.
She’s my friend . . .
After a few more scenes, a new puppet appeared, made of bark. It had to be the one Stelios had made at the camp. I couldn’t tell who it was supposed to be at first until I saw the crudely carved swastika. The Takis puppet was talking to him.
They’re in the basement,
the two of them.
Strangers from Athens.
Hiding.
Colonel Esterhaus. And a soldier was there in front of the house backdrop with its windows full of red cellophane flames. Stelios had added the scene on purpose—Esterhaus must have been the new puppet he’d said he had an idea for.
Now, beside me, Takis was shaking his head, saying, “I never said that, never told him that.” Then he shouted at Stelios, “It’s not true!”
Everyone turned to look at him, this shouting boy in a green dress. Stelios peered over the top of the screen. There was a moment of silence and then the mother of Andonis called out, “That’s him—the one who tried to blind my son! Look what he did.” She pointed to the bandage over Andonis’s eye. “And that teacher there, she protects him.” Several village men gathered around her, listening to her story, and turned to stare at Takis and me.
“We need to get out of here,” I said, grabbing Takis’s hand.
From the church came the blare of trumpets as the band started its march up the street past the plateia. Following it were a half dozen white-robed acolytes carrying the silk banners of the church on tall poles. Next came the bearded priest in a billowing golden cape. Leading other local dignitaries, the mayor walked after him in a crisp blue suit and tie with a sparkling stud. Behind them was the flower-covered platform carried on the shoulders of the four men in suits. It was like a wooden house of flowers open on each of its four sides so everyone could see the icon propped up inside. Its silver plating threw ovals of reflected sunlight over the crowd as it neared the plateia. The sick and wounded lined each side of the street, reaching out to the icon with one hand while crossing themselves with the other.
Suddenly Takis pulled away from me and ran into the crowd. Several of the men who’d been talking to Andonis’s mother ran after him. There were screams in the crowd as people in wheelchairs or on crutches tried to get out of the way. Someone collided with one of the men supporting a front corner of the platform and that corner dipped. Though the other three men struggled to keep the platform upright, the icon fell clattering into the street in front of an old man on a stretcher.
A gasp went up from the crowd as the procession halted and the band stopped playing. No one said anything for a moment while everyone stared down at the icon, its silver still gleaming in the sun, the Virgin now glaring straight up at the sky. Then the old man rose from his stretcher, crossed himself three times and picked up the icon.
“He walked!” someone nearby shouted. “It’s a miracle!” The word passed through the crowd as hundreds of hands crossed hundreds of chests.
“No. No, you fools,” the old man said. “There’s nothing wrong with my legs. I’m here for my migraines.” He handed the icon to the priest, who’d come fluttering up in his robes like a golden butterfly. From the church came the shouts of the village men and camp guards who’d apparently cornered Takis inside and now marched him out, holding his arms behind him. I ran over to them. His eyes were full of terror.
“Stop it!” I said. “He’s done nothing wrong.”
Stelios was there beside me still holding his Takis and Esterhaus puppets on their poles. “It’s my fault,” he said with a troubled look. “My play upset him.”
The priest rushed over to us and said, “The boy caused the icon to fall. It’s a bad omen for the village.”
“And he hit my son with a stick,” the mother of Andonis called out, trying to get through the crowd to us. “My Andonis may be blind now.”
“The stick broke,” I said. “It wasn’t . . .”
“And just look at him wearing a dress,” the mother said, now bes
ide me. “Something’s wrong with him. My neighbor saw him peeking in her bedroom window.”
“Who are you, boy?” the priest asked. “Where are you from?”
Takis couldn’t speak. His eyes darted from one to the other of us and his mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.
“He’s my brother,” I said.
“And you are . . . ?” the priest asked.
“My wife,” Stelios said. “Leave them alone.” He brandished the puppet poles as if about to strike the priest. “Let go of him.”
One of the guards lunged at Stelios, but the mayor bustled up, waving him away.
“So, it’s you,” he said to me. “Our little teacher.” His eyes slid over Stelios and he frowned but made no comment, probably remembering him among the men in the strike. Then he noticed Takis in the dress and asked, “And what in creation is this?”
The mother started to talk about what Takis had done and I was saying it wasn’t true while the priest was insisting that the procession must go forward with the icon in place. The mayor cut us all off, saying the priest was right. He called over some of the camp guards and told them to take all detainees back to the camp.
“And this one too,” he said, nodding at Takis. “We’ll straighten all this out later. We can’t hold up the procession. We must consider our visitors.” He waved an arm at the crowd of people now gathered around us, the sick and the lame, the blind and crippled. Then he took his place in the street and the priest returned the icon to its platform, which was then righted. There was a clash of cymbals and the procession started up again.
Takis looked wild-eyed as they took him away, but Stelios had an arm around his shoulder and seemed to be trying to comfort him. Stelios had tossed his two puppets to the ground. I went over to pick them up, but instead I just looked down at them. They lay together, limbs splayed, Takis and Colonel Esterhaus, always with us. Only minutes earlier Stelios and I had had a bit of near bliss, but we couldn’t hang on to it anymore. It was almost as if we were trying to drive Takis into one of his states. And maybe we were meaning to without directly meaning to—was that possible? Stelios had told him about the doctor in Heraklion and I’d told him we were married. The anger and despair Takis felt led him to slamming the stick in the classroom, which injured Andonis. Then Stelios had played the scene of Takis betraying him and his mother to the colonel. Were we as awful as this place was awful—the camp, the townspeople, the church and its icon, the false promise of cures? There was no cure for anyone, not for war or its miseries or anything else; it was all a fraud.
“It’s not right,” one of the Cretan women said, coming over to me. It was as if she’d been reading my thoughts, but she was talking about Takis. “He’s just a boy.”
Several other camp women joined us and said they’d been talking to some of the wounded visitors to the island who had themselves been former inmates of such camps elsewhere and had been released because of their medical conditions. They were surprised that the same thing wasn’t happening here and that detainees at our small camp hadn’t had their sentences reviewed and in some cases reversed. But official news of anything like this hadn’t reached here as far as anyone knew. Or had it? Maybe such possibilities were being suppressed by the mayor to benefit the local economy as long as possible.
“We should be out there at the camp,” one woman said.
“Who knows what might happen?” asked another. She repeated the rumors that some of the staff in mainland camps had been torturing prisoners. And there were even worse rumors that guards had been getting rid of prisoners who might likely testify after they’d been released.
More women joined us and agreed that it was best to go out to the camp to see what was happening and try to find what they’d done with Takis and the others. And we should go right then, when most everyone else was still occupied with the church procession. Yes, I thought, yes, we must. These women seemed at that moment outside the ugliness of the world, of this place and of myself.
As we passed the abandoned village, some said it was foolish for us to go just as we were, as we had done in the past. We should have something to show we were serious this time. Did we want to be just a bunch of angry women with empty hands? We fanned out in the empty village, some wrenching out fence posts or lintels from collapsed doorways. One woman found an old rusted scythe; others pried shards of glass from broken windows and gathered up scattered pieces of old silverware in abandoned kitchens—dull forks and spoons.
As we continued walking, the women talked about what their husbands or brothers would do when they were free and everyone could go back to Crete. Where would I go when the time came? they asked. I assumed Stelios and I would return to Athens and maybe one day go back to my village to see if my house was still there. But it was hard to imagine what kind of life we would have. In a way, the war and the civil fighting that followed had been a kind of temporary answer. Everything had been postponed until later.
When we got to the guardhouse, no one was there. We called out but got no response.
“Let’s see if we can force the door and go onto the grounds,” one said.
“Who’s to stop us?” asked another.
He was—the guard who opened the door of the guardhouse at that moment. He was young, probably younger than most of the prisoners. In a voice attempting gruffness, he told us not to go any farther. What did we want? Visiting hours were not until the next day. The guards had just brought the prisoners back from the procession.
“We want to see them now!” we said, and we told him that this camp should close as others were doing.
“What?” he asked. “I know nothing of this.”
We said we wouldn’t leave until we saw that our men were okay. And what about the boy, Takis? What had become of him? The guard closed the door and we sat on the ground and started calling out the names of our men again. After a few minutes of this, the door opened once more and another guard came out. He was an older, much larger version of the previous one but with a dark beard. Walking among us and shoving his rifle at us, he told us to leave or else our men would not fare well. It was up to us, he said, what happened.
“That’s right,” a crone in black replied, and she rammed a fork into the calf of his right leg. He screamed and fell to the ground, holding his leg. The crone quickly climbed on top of him, pulled off her head scarf and stuffed it in his mouth. The women nearby also threw themselves onto him and held him down while one grabbed his rifle. It all happened so fast and with no plan on our part, so that we looked at each other, astonished. We had a detainee of our own. Some of the women were so excited that they looped arms over each other’s shoulders and drew themselves into a line for a little victory dance in front of the guardhouse, blocking the view of anyone inside. Humming tunelessly, they took a dozen or so steps counterclockwise and two back, then a little leap for the joy of it.
We almost didn’t hear the old truck wheezing its way toward us. With a squeal of brakes, it stopped. The driver was one of the men from the harbor who hauled blocks of marble down to the boats. He paused, looking us over, and honked his horn to get us out of the way. He didn’t appear to see the guard on the ground with the women sitting on him. He was choking by then and someone took the head scarf out of his mouth.
“Murderers!” the man on the ground shouted. “Assassins!” But he was barely audible above the ratchety engine of the truck. The crone stuffed her scarf back in his mouth.
The young guard opened the gate beside the guardhouse and signaled the truck to enter. The dancing women parted for it, but, as it passed, some of us ran behind. One jumped up onto the bed of the truck and pulled others up until several of us were on, including the woman who’d taken the rifle. She was figuring out how to fire it when the young guard saw us on the back of the truck and ordered us to get down. The rifle went off; he grabbed his shoulder and fell.
Inside the cam
p, we could see that the other guards and prisoners were a way off down a slope among the white tents. But at the sound of the shot, some of the guards turned and came running in our direction. We scrambled off the truck and scattered. The guards tried to chase us, but there were more of us than them so although they caught some of us, others ran off toward our men, who were laughing at this spectacle of women and guards. But seeing the guards so distracted, they soon began to scatter back up the hillside at the rear of the camp. I couldn’t see either Stelios or Takis, but I ran toward the backs of the running men and tripped on one of the chunks of marble that littered the ground and fell on my face. Maybe I knocked myself out just briefly, I don’t know, but the next thing I saw was that most of the men had got to the top of the hill. And then I saw them, Stelios and Takis, up there too. It seemed at first that they were holding hands, but from the glint of metal, I realized that they’d been handcuffed together, left wrist of Takis to right wrist of Stelios.
Neither could make much progress because of the other, though they were trying to run in unison, Stelios limping badly. He fell and Takis helped him up. I called out to them, but they couldn’t have heard me. I ran on, realizing that they had to be close to the edge of the quarry lake. Then I saw that they’d stopped. Stelios had something in his hand—a rock?—that he was raising in the air with one hand and bringing down hard. There was a sudden blast of gunshot behind me and I looked over my shoulder to see complete chaos, women on the ground but also guards. When I turned back, Stelios and Takis were gone.
My Last Lament Page 31