My Last Lament

by James William Brown

  CASSETTE 6 Side 1

  When I first came back to this village in the 1960s, it seemed that I’d just imagined the life I’d lived away from here. Even the ruin of Chrysoula’s house with its chimney sticking out of the undergrowth—a burned shell of the house I’d lived in—didn’t shake the feeling that I’d never gone away. My own house was still standing though badly disintegrated. It hadn’t burned that night, but in the many years since then, the windows had been smashed out and part of the roof had collapsed. The rooms were full of fallen plaster, leaves and dirt. As I touched the moldy walls and warped floorboards, I remembered the morning we set out from here for Athens, Stelios limping and Takis completely unhinged. Since then the house had sat here empty and eyeless. My return was empty too with nothing of Stelios in it. But at least it was a place, my place.

  The very last of the sporadic fighting didn’t end until—What year was it?—1949, I think, give or take a year. How time punches holes in my memory. Some of the camps like the one on the island had closed before that, but others—really unspeakable ones such as Makronisos—stayed open well into the fifties. All those dollars that your Harry sent from the Land of Big Radios, where did they go? The ones that didn’t find their way into the pockets of politicians and government officials did provide some new highways and schools, a bit of rural electrification and indoor plumbing. But only a bit. Much of the country remained in ruins from the fighting, the railroads destroyed, the bridges blown up, a nearly worthless currency and a demoralized people. We’d done more damage to ourselves than even the Germans had done to us.

  True, foreign tanks and weapons helped end the war in the government’s favor, but, as they say, a war never truly ends. Even the decade of recovery that followed didn’t stop the resentments left over from the civil war. Old grudges and hatreds kept bubbling up like some nasty stew. And the divided country, with a new government every time we sneezed, became an excuse for the military dictatorship of the colonels in the sixties. By then the Land of Big Radios, thoroughly mired in our politics, ended up actually supporting that regime, with its censorship, election rigging and torture of those who dared to speak out. Shame on you! Well, not you personally. You know what I mean. It seemed like half the youths of Athens lined up to dump successive buckets of red paint on that statue of old Harry, who wasn’t even around anymore. Later they bombed it, pulled it down and smashed it, a symbol of the beginning of the end of our love affair with you all. Well, the statue is back in place now, or so I understand. Everything circles back, given enough time.

  Eventually we ran into the troubled arms of the European Union. Again all lilacs and roses to start, but even it was unable to save us from the folly of our leaders, with their secret bribes, payoffs and borrowing, taxes going mostly into the pockets of tax collectors, everyone cheating everyone, mortgaging the future for the present. I once heard that one of our ancient writers, this man Hesiod, said that you shouldn’t relieve yourself in a river upstream if you plan to drink from it downstream. Now, no one can doubt the wisdom of that advice. But that’s just what our governments did—left, right, or center. And that, I think, brings us more or less to now. The irony is that here we are stuck with Germany again, but in an economic occupation this time around. And after your Land of Big Radios and its allies meddled in the Middle East, we here in our nearly bankrupt state have had to deal with the river of damaged humanity, so many poor and desperate souls, flowing into Europe through our back door.

  Oh, yes, I know that’s a huge simplification of a lot of tangled history, but those are stories for other days, other cassettes. Are you still with me? I’m off the rails again, but I will get back to those laments that interest you, I promise.

  Just after I came back here to the village, I thought I glimpsed a bit of my father’s shirttail as he rounded a corner into the kitchen. But no one was there. I risked the rickety stairs down to the basement where I’d first met Stelios and his mother. Standing on the dirt floor in the dark, I heard the rustle of what was probably a rat in the wall. Except for that, the house seemed as empty as a shell scoured out by sand and sea.

  I’d saved some money from my work in Athens after I left the island and there also were the proceeds from Stelios’s house in Kolonaki. So I restarted my life here in the village by trying to get my house renovated around me while living in only one room—a good way to lose your mind. Unlike the rest of the country, the village seemed much more prosperous in general because the quality of the local olive oil had been discovered by the world outside. A processing plant and bottling works stood near the place where I used to hop around showing Takis how my father made charcoal. No one made it here anymore. We who’d survived the war years had become like charcoal ourselves, burned down to a dark core that glows for a long time before becoming ash.

  The old dirt road into the village had been widened and paved and a few of the villagers even had cars. They drove them back and forth on the new pavement, honking horns constantly to let us all know who could afford them. Everyone had running water indoors so women no longer gathered at the fountain outside Chrysoula’s house. The fountain itself wasn’t even there anymore and neither were the women, a fact that startled me at first.

  What had I expected, that those who were the grown-ups when I was young would still be here to greet me? In my mind I’d carried them along through the years just as they’d always been. When I got off the bus with my suitcase in the plateia under the tall plane trees, it was a shock to recognize no one. And of course no one recognized me. Then I felt foolish not to have realized sooner that the generation of women with their wisecracks and leathery old faces was mostly over in the cemetery with my father, Chrysoula and Sophia. Children I’d gone to school with before the war had grown up and were already growing old, like me. When I explained to them who I was, they said they’d heard of my family but thought us all long dead. And I might as well have been, because for the first few days back here, I felt like a ghost flitting around looking for signs of the life I’d once lived.

  Could I become part of this place again? Did anyone still want laments? Well, I needn’t have worried about that. Aphrodite was here in the next village where she’s been since we were children, my sister in dread. Even now the other women our age sit on my front steps waiting for a sign so we can all rush to her hut to be part of her last hour. Yes, there are always more of the dead. And they remain as busy as ever, whining and complaining to me almost as if I were already one of them. Some mornings, trying to persuade my ancient bones to rise from bed, I think maybe I’ve joined them in the night. Considering all the things that want you dead in this world, it’s improbable to be alive at all. No wonder I can’t let go of the dead, who are often more real to me than when they were living. It’s the loving that does it, I suppose, keeps them tied to us in a kind of half life. We keep dragging them back with all this love, everyone loving someone, even when they’re dead. Death and love—they’re braided together so tightly they can’t ever be combed out straight.

  Take Stelios, who still touches my shoulder in sleep when I whisper, “Tell me a story.” How did it finish, I ask him, your play with all of us in it? I’d seen the beginning twice but no middle and no end. How does any story end? he says. It just turns into the beginning of another one, the one about us all.

  The dead say things like that. But I wanted details, the kind I eventually got from Takis about what happened at the camp and quarry before I got there that day. The story came out in pieces and in no order. He was incoherent at first and confined to the camp. I wasn’t so coherent myself, weighed down by grief as surely as if I carried one of those blocks of marble. Raising an arm or leg, opening my mouth to speak—it all took effort. But I forced myself out to the camp again, forced myself to sit there in the unreality of him on the other side of the window instead of Stelios. I had to know.

  “Get me out of here!” was all Takis would say at first. I told him I couldn’t. T
he mayor had ordered him held for the time being. It was probably the safest place for him, considering that the mother of Andonis, along with some of the other mothers, was still saying that Takis was disturbed and should be put away. The priest too spread tales about Takis, how he’d brought a curse to the village when the icon fell to the street. Then there was the question of what exactly had happened in the quarry. Other detainees had talked about the way he and Stelios argued all the way from the plateia back to the camp. How was it that the boy had survived and not the man? everyone was asking.

  What I pieced together out of his rambling was first that the voice of the wind had told him to run from the plateia. That would have been when the guards were leading him, Stelios and the other detainees away.

  “The wind in the trees,” he said. “I heard it as clearly as I hear you, Aliki.”

  How reliable was what he said if he thought wind was the source of trouble? But that had often been the way with him. He’d tried to obey and run off, he said, but one of the guards handcuffed him to Stelios in the hope of calming him. The other men were no help, laughing at his green dress and asking if he was a boy or a girl. By the time I talked to him, he’d exchanged it for one of the drab camp uniforms way too large for him. I was reminded of his huge British Army uniform at the barracks outside Athens. We seemed to have come round to that again.

  “It was all Stelios’s fault,” Takis said. “Everything. I shouted at him that I didn’t want to be one of his puppets anymore. Not ever. Not a bad puppet in a stupid, untrue play.” Stelios was coughing so hard he could barely speak but managed to say that the play was just a story. A story that didn’t have to be true. “But I said that he thought it was what really happened with the Germans back then. And you do too, don’t you, Aliki?”

  “I don’t know what else could have happened, Takis.” The words came out of my mouth slowly, as if I had pebbles under my tongue.

  “That doesn’t mean it was my fault. Just because I can’t remember.”

  There was no point in going over this again. It wasn’t why I’d come. I wanted to know what else happened on the way to the camp.

  “I kept telling him that he’d put it in the play on purpose.”

  Takis was probably right about that. Stelios would most likely have decided on it the day I told him Takis had been on the island all along. Stelios went off to work on a new puppet, probably of Colonel Esterhaus. What had Stelios wanted to do, drive Takis away or just drive him crazy or both? Well, it was true that Stelios and I both, in our ways, wanted Takis out of our lives. But that wasn’t what we’d got.

  “We were all right, weren’t we, Aliki, before Stelios ever came along? Back in the village, I mean.” Takis gripped the edge of the window frame and his voice went up. “That’s what I told Stelios, how we were just fine without him and his mother. Why did they have to come to our village anyway?”

  Stelios told him it hadn’t exactly been a matter of choice; the partisans had brought them. Takis tried to pull away from him and Stelios yelled for him to stop. The handcuffs were cutting into both their wrists.

  Takis ignored this, saying, “We played cards and we laughed and Aliki showed me about making the charcoal and . . .”

  Stelios had begun coughing again so hard he stumbled and fell to his knees. Takis was pulled down with him and they sprawled together in the dust until the guards hauled them to their feet. At the camp, the detainees assembled below the tent area. It was said that the mayor would join them after the procession to administer the dreaded loyalty oath that no one wanted to sign. But what were the consequences of not signing?

  “What did I care?” Takis said. “All I could think about were the things you and I did together in the village before Stelios came and how much better everything was back then. Except for that girl who hated us—what was her name? Started with Z.”

  “You mean Zephyra?”

  “That’s the one. She hated us. Well, she hated me, anyway. She wanted your friendship and didn’t want me to have it. Her mother was a real witch too.”

  Now, remembering what he said then, I’m reminded of the goat noises Zephyra made when I visited her just before she died. I must ask Aphrodite more specifically about them before she dies too.

  Takis said Stelios was so exhausted from coughing spasms that he lay down in the dust again, forcing Takis down with him. “I knew he was sick, but there was nothing I could do about it. He wasn’t listening to me anyway. He just went on coughing over the top of everything I said. He was doing it on purpose. I couldn’t stop talking.”

  “About . . . ?”

  “You, you, always you, Aliki.”

  I can see the look in his eyes still, as ardent as any lover. I felt sick at the thought that his feelings for me had helped bring us to this point: Stelios dead, Takis detained in the camp. It was my fault; I should have cut myself loose from Takis long before. If only we’d been able to arrange something on Crete with that doctor, awful though it might have been.

  It was while he was sitting on the ground with Stelios coughing, Takis said, that they heard the rifle shot from the entrance and turned to see us women there. The guards stopped what they were doing and ran toward us as the detainees scattered. Stelios stumbled to his feet, pulling Takis up with him and saying something about finding a sharp rock. “I didn’t know what he meant but he was limping along, pulling me, and I had to go with him.” They climbed the hill together, as I’d seen them doing from afar. Takis said he was still talking, saying how he and I had never needed anyone else. And we were both going back to the village soon, where everything would be just the same.

  “It’s true, Aliki, isn’t it? We will now, won’t we?”

  All he could talk about was resuming our childhood as though nothing had happened at all. But Stelios was gone and the life he and I had hoped for was gone with him. I tried to keep my voice level as I asked Takis just to tell me what happened next.

  At the edge of the quarry, Stelios found a rock with a sharp edge and tried to position Takis opposite him with a block of marble in between. Pulling tight the links that bound them together, Stelios raised the stone in his free hand.

  “I thought he was going to kill me and throw me into the quarry. That’s what he wanted, I’m sure. But I guess he changed his mind because he slammed it onto the links. Over and over again.” He told Takis to pull the chain tight so the stone would come down on the same link each time, weakening it. “Then one broke and I pulled my hand free. But I stumbled backward and lost my balance. He reached for me and caught my hand, but I was already falling. I took him down with me. I didn’t mean to, Aliki. It was just what happened.”

  Takis gave me a sharp look as if trying to figure out if I believed him or not and then rushed on. “He fell on top of me. I couldn’t breathe and the water was cold. We sank. And came up and sank again. I thought I was going to die.”

  That was what I saw as I reached the edge of the quarry: two figures thrashing in the dark water below. I was trying to get to them, scrambling down the half-chiseled marble blocks that jutted from the sides of the quarry while shouting for help. I saw Stelios surface, gasping, but Takis was flailing and hitting him in the face, yelling that he couldn’t swim. Above them, I had to turn away to watch where I put my feet or else I would have fallen too. When I looked back, Stelios had struck out for the flat rocks at the side of the water, swimming weakly with one arm and pulling Takis with the other. But I could see that Takis was going under. Stelios turned and put Takis’s arms around his neck, trying to swim with Takis on his back, but the weight seemed to push them both under. Stelios had been ill, of course; he wouldn’t have been strong enough for this, especially with Takis hanging around his neck. Gravel skidded out from under my shoe and I had to flatten myself against a boulder to remain upright. Below, they were close to the side of the quarry.

  “I jumped off and touched rock bottom
,” Takis said. “I thought Stelios had too. Then you were there.”

  Takis was collapsed on the ground, panting and spewing. But Stelios was facedown in the water, not moving. I ran in and pulled him ashore, thumping on his chest, blowing into his mouth while holding his nose. I didn’t know what I was doing. I called his name over and over. Then I started shaking him as if that would bring life back into the limp body. Takis was no help, lying there semiconscious.

  It was a while before anyone saw us down there or heard my cries for help. Back at the entrance of the camp, we heard later, the guards had finally subdued the other women, but it was only when they tried to round up the scattered detainees that they realized Stelios and Takis were missing. In time they found us, and men lowered themselves down with ropes and stretchers.

  “Now you hate me, don’t you?” Takis said, tears starting to flow. “I’m alive and he isn’t and you wish it was the other way around.”

  I have to stop the tape here.

  All right, back again. It’s an hour later. I’ve poured myself a raki (or two). While I was drinking and trying to raise the strength to go on, the village women here gathered outside to gossip about Aphrodite, who seems to be worsening. She’s been asking for me and I’ll go to her soon, as I have a question of my own for her. But I want to tell you the rest quickly now while I can bear it and while the raki gives me its false strength.

  I seemed to be in a kind of trance those first few days after Stelios died. Not the kind where I end up in the room with the door and the light beyond. I couldn’t lament, couldn’t think or sleep. You don’t lose a person all at once. It happens in stages. Every time you remember something else you’d almost forgotten, the old misery starts up again. It sickened me to recall my thinking in Agios Nikolaos that Stelios and I would be able to survive anything yet to come and that Takis might grow up and grow away. Except for him, Stelios would have been alive. But it wasn’t really drowning that killed Stelios so much as war and imprisonment and stupidity and being in the wrong place in the wrong life, in the wrong century even. And maybe some of it was that he died of my loving Takis sometimes more than him, or at least so it must have appeared to him. In the night I know that’s so, and in the morning when I rise. I’d lost my good return.