When they brought in the coffin for the wake, I asked them to take off the lid so I could see him one last time. He’d gone all gray and his hair was oiled down on his skull so you could see its whole shape. Gravity had tugged down the corners of his mouth as if in disapproval and I thought how death had aged him already. There he was, the bald and crabby old man he might have become, the one I loved. I’d asked one of the Cretan women to read a short passage Stelios had once pointed out to me in The Iliad, about one of the ships leaving for Troy.
Dawn came early, a palmetto of rose,
Time to make sail for the wide beachhead camp.
They set up mast and spread the white canvas,
And the following wind, sent by Apollo,
Boomed in the mainsail. An indigo wave
Hissed off the bow as the ship surged on,
Leaving a wake as she held on course through the billows.
So Stelios had a kind-of lament by none other than Homer himself. Maybe that’s what The Iliad is, after all, one long lament for the dead. It could as well be for all of us, dying on a dusty plain of our own making, wherever that turns out to be, with or without the futility of war.
A while back, someone told me about another one of these ancients, this man Herodotus, some kind of historian, I guess. Anyway, he insisted that Helen was never in Troy in the first place. She and Paris were blown off course when they sailed from Sparta and ended up in Egypt. There, the pharaoh, enraged that Paris had stolen his host’s wife, allowed only Paris to sail on to Troy and kept Helen until after the war, when she was returned to her husband, Menelaus. At Troy, the Trojans kept telling the Greeks that they didn’t have her, but the suspicious Greeks wouldn’t believe them. Well, she was probably just a pretext for a war as heartless as our own civil struggle. But as Homer knew, it made a better story if Helen was there. And, in the end, we become the stories we tell, as Stelios once said.
The story of Takis was in question; he was too young to remain in such a place. What would they do with him? My state was still so vague and meandering that I was only dimly aware that some officials from the Red Cross had arrived to investigate what had taken place here. Then the mayor told everyone with any connection to the camp to clear out immediately. All the guards except one (for Takis) left the island and the loyalty oath was never administered. The remaining detainees were taken to a holding camp somewhere to await notification of any further penalties. No charges were to be brought against the Cretan women and myself if we would leave the island at once. We were being erased, or whitewashed, the way the village had erased the forced feeding and death of Dimitri.
Well, there was no reason for me to return to Crete. I had to wait for a ship to Piraeus and could get a trolley from there to Athens. The Cretan women and their men—those well enough to travel—gathered in the harbor. I stood with Stavroula and other islanders to watch them board the ship back to Crete.
“Now we’ll be nothing again,” Stavroula said. “The world will forget us here.”
I didn’t care. I just wanted to get out of there and I couldn’t bear to see Takis again. But Stavroula told me that the mayor wanted me to come to his office in a building on the other side of the plateia from the church. Inside it reminded me of the office of the police captain in Heraklion, the framed photograph of the king on the wall behind his desk. Here too a boy was sent to the café to bring back coffee. The mayor seemed a bit deflated, as if he’d shrunk inside his suit. He no longer had the camp, its staff and detainees to command so maybe that was why he seemed as diminished as his role. What did the mayor of such a small place so far away from any other have to do anyway? I supposed that was why he now had time for me. Or did he understand his part in what had happened? If he hadn’t sent Takis and Stelios off to the camp together so the precious parade could proceed, would the worst have happened? But if that was on his mind, he made no direct mention of it.
“It’s not up to me,” the mayor said, “what happens to your brother. He is your brother, isn’t he?”
I nodded. I couldn’t change my story at this point.
“He’s underage, and probably not responsible for his behavior. But what to do with him? I’m waiting for word from a government social service agency in Athens.” Of course everything was still chaotic; the fighting had ended, but the government was all upside down and it wasn’t clear who was in charge of what, or which agencies were actually functioning.
“It will take some time. Everything takes some time.”
He looked out the window. I followed his gaze to the plateia and was startled to see that Stelios’s shadow puppets and his screen, also the suitcase we carried them in, were all stacked under one of the ilex trees. I’d forgotten about them.
“I hear that you did a good job at our little school,” the mayor said, “until the unfortunate accident with Andonis. So I wanted to tell you how sorry I am about the man who drowned, your husband?” Was it a question? I didn’t answer. He stood up behind his desk, a signal for me to go.
I collected the suitcase and puppets from the plateia and left for Piraeus the next day. From the deck of the ship leaving, I said good-bye to Stelios again, buried forever in the heart of the island in the heart of the sea. I remembered him talking about The Count of Monte Cristo and the idea that only someone who experienced deepest grief could know the greatest happiness. But some people don’t get out from under grief or are permanently numbed by it, or so it seemed to me on board the returning ship. And happiness—wasn’t it just a giddy idea?
In Piraeus, construction was under way all over the port. I dodged cement mixers and scaffolding to find the trolley to Athens. With a pang, I realized that I was passing the café where we’d performed The Hero Katsondonis in another time. Above the café were the rooms where Yannoula had told me about her music hall career while we listened to the rat-a-tat of gunfire outside. Now only the noise of jackhammers pounded through my longing for those days and nights. Then we’d wanted the fighting to be over and now I understood that it was what held us together.
In Athens, I walked through Syntagma Square in front of Parliament, where crowds had gathered to celebrate the liberation on the night Stelios and I arrived from the village on the back of a truck. As I neared Kolonaki, I felt my life was running in reverse so that I might at any minute turn into my younger self when I opened the door of the house. But it was hanging on its hinges. The house had been broken into and ransacked. Even the light fixtures were gone. In the parlor where Yannoula brought me chicken soup that first night, I sank onto the bare floor and leaned against the wall in exhaustion.
At least it was still standing, I thought, more than could have been said for me. I didn’t know then how long I’d stay in that run-down house—right through the fifties—while the city rebuilt itself around me. Stelios’s father never returned to read whatever his son had written in the letter left for him, which had, of course, disappeared. I heard that Greek Jews had been taken mostly to Auschwitz, where they were considered too disruptive for any kind of work detail so they were sent straight to the gas chambers. I knew it had happened; there were the photographs taken when the camps were liberated. But part of me never accepted the truth of anything that monstrous. Stelios’s father and uncle would have been among those who perished. I couldn’t bring myself to imagine them in those awful piles of lost humanity.
I found work at one of the switchboards of the telephone company, specializing in—what else?—long distance. People all over the country were trying to trace relatives they hadn’t heard from since the German invasion. When I connected multiple callers, I couldn’t help eavesdropping. There were the calls of the three sisters in Crete whose father turned out to be one of the unidentified bodies in the Athens morgue. And the woman who traced her soldier husband to a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy. The people of a village on the island of Samos, who thought their men had been executed, found that the
y were living in caves on another island. Their lives with guerrilla comrades had made them lose interest in returning home. Well, at least they were alive. For a while, there seemed to be weekly discoveries of more mass graves on Mt. Hymettus, just behind Athens and elsewhere, followed by the agonizing phone calls of officials to relatives.
When I took off the headphones at the end of a day I felt that a large measure of the national grief had washed through me. Sometimes I wished for someone I could phone with my own story: Once a girl and her father lived in a village . . . That had been the story of Stelios’s play without an ending.
Eventually I was promoted to supervisor and, with the extra salary, was able to make a few repairs to the old house. But living alone in the place I thought I’d be sharing with Stelios was hard. At first I thought it might get easier in time, but it really didn’t. So I finally decided to sell the house and go back to my father’s house in the village. But before I could do this, I received a letter from the director of a place called St. Elena School for Boys, out in Peristeri, a poor suburb of Athens. Takis was there—would I please contact them about him? I didn’t respond. Then another message came.
I knew that there were a lot of unclaimed children moving across the country. During the civil war years, we found out afterward, communist partisan fighters had taken children from rural families and given them to families in Eastern Europe to protect them from fighting, or so they said. But it was widely assumed they would get political indoctrination there. Whether they did or didn’t, some were now returning, but in many cases, their families had died or disappeared. On the other side of the struggle, the queen of Greece had set up boarding schools for nationalist children where indoctrination also took place and those children too were now released. Institutions run by the church and government agencies were taking in the refugee children, but they seemed to be mixed in with all other kinds of children damaged by the war in one way or another. That would have included Takis.
When I finally phoned from the switchboard, I was told that he’d been passed from one institution to another because of behavior problems before arriving at St. Elena. But they had few of his original records so they weren’t sure how he’d come into the system in the first place. It was the same with so many of their boys. They were hoping to apprentice him in a trade, plastering maybe, or plumbing, something he could use after completing his military service. But they were desperately overcrowded and couldn’t house him much longer now that he’d medically stabilized, whatever that meant. Could I help?
No, I said. I couldn’t explain why, but taking him back was unthinkable. Wasn’t I his sister, the only living relative? they asked. It’s hard to escape your own lies, though they later turn out to have been true. Even if I couldn’t take him, there were papers to be signed and I’d need to go there.
Well, anyway, he already had a trade, I thought, and pulled out the suitcase of puppets. He might be able to make some sort of living with them. He’d been so good with them; even Stelios had said so. That was all I was willing to do for him.
St. Elena was a ramshackle place, a two-story, gray stucco building with sprays of bullet holes still in its facade. A high fence of metal spikes surrounded it. I pressed a button beside a gate to ring a bell, but there was no sound and no one came. I called out to a boy in the yard, who went inside and came back with an old man who said he was the janitor. He showed me into a shabby lounge, where I put the suitcase next to an armchair and asked to see the director. I planned just to leave the puppets for Takis, sign any necessary papers and then go. At least, that was what I told myself. I didn’t really want to see him, but had I been firm about that, I probably wouldn’t have come at all. In any event, only a few minutes later, there he was in the doorway and a slight chill ran through me. He’d grown taller, leaner and was a young man, altogether more poised and collected than the rambling boy I’d last seen in the detention camp. Outside the school, I might not have recognized him. From the way he looked at me, I thought I must have changed too.
“I’ve never had a visitor,” he said.
“How are you, Takis?”
“I told them where to find you. I was sure that was where you’d be.”
He seemed cool and contained, standing there in the doorway. I didn’t know what to say.
“You left the island without even saying good-bye,” he said. His tone was flat and matter-of-fact.
“I was too upset about Stelios.”
He didn’t say anything for a full minute or more and I expected him to ask if I still blamed him. And to tell me that nothing had been his fault, that it all had to do with wind in the trees. But instead he said mildly, “Would you like me to show you around?”
There didn’t seem to be anything else for us to do so I said yes. He took me to a dining hall, a clean but spartan room with rows of trestle tables. It smelled of cooked cabbage. Then a dormitory with dozens of bunk beds, all neatly made. The windows were high up and barred. In general, St. Elena seemed to be a clean and well-organized place, though in poor repair. As we walked and talked, he relaxed a little. In a hallway with classrooms on either side, he said, “I know how to read and write now, probably better than you. I can even spell. Say a word, any word, and I’ll spell it for you.” A bell rang just then, doors opened and the hall was full of boys.
“Should you be in class?” I asked.
“They gave me a pass because of you. I’ve never had a visitor before.”
“So you said.”
“I don’t know anyone except the people here. They’re all right, I guess. I’ve been in a few of these places. Some are worse than others. They don’t beat us here, anyhow.” There was an edge of bitterness in his voice but no self-pity.
“They beat you? In some other place?”
“Only when I got, well, you know. Here they just give us pills that make us feel stupid.”
I supposed this was what was meant by medically stabilized. I thought of the purges at that place in Kifissia. St. Elena was at least an improvement on that.
“And they lock us in at night.” He paused, then asked, eyes downcast, “What did they say to you about me on the phone?”
When I’d told him, he said, “Well, what do you think?”
“About your coming to live with me?” I wavered and couldn’t get anything out. His poise had slipped away and he looked earnest and lost. He didn’t act crazy. He was Takis from my village; I’d known him all my life. He was as close to a brother as any I was likely to have. His eyes were filling slowly. How could I not do something for him?
“I can give you some money,” I said, though that wasn’t what I’d thought to say. It had just come to me that when I’d sold the house, I’d be able to afford something, maybe a monthly stipend. “If that will help you make a new start. But you can’t live with me again.”
His face fell and he wiped his eyes. “I wasn’t asking for money.”
“I’ll talk to them in the office. Try to set up something for you. I’ll sign papers as your sister, but you know I’m not really a relative of yours. And I don’t want to be contacted again.”
I could see in his face the struggle to control his emotions, sadness giving way to anger. He took a few seconds to collect himself, then narrowed his eyes as he said, “You’ve changed, haven’t you? You’re cold and hard. I should have guessed.”
His tone was spiteful, like that of a child not getting his way. But he was right: I had changed. The years alone scraping by in the old house, with little to look forward to other than trudging off to work, had thinned down my ability to see or take any pleasure in life. A kind of numbness of the senses had set in. My face in the mirror had taken on a pinched look with the mouth set in a line. It was mostly because I didn’t care much for this person I saw each morning and night, that I’d decided to go back to my village. No matter what had happened there, it was where I was from. I felt
pulled back to my father’s house.
Takis turned abruptly and started walking me back toward the lounge. He didn’t speak until we were there, and then, in a voice full of bravado, he said, “Well, I’ve changed too. I don’t care anymore. I don’t care about anything.”
I ignored the bravado and said, “I just think you’ll be better off here. And they’ll help you find a place in the world, a trade perhaps.” We were back in the lounge and I noticed the suitcase. “Oh, I almost forgot. I brought you these.”
I picked up the suitcase of puppets and handed it to him. Takis looked surprised but then seemed to recognize it and frowned.
“What would I want with those?”
“You were always good with them so I thought that maybe . . . Well, it’s a kind of trade, isn’t it? Better than plastering or plumbing.”
His face contorted and he dropped the suitcase on the floor. “Don’t you remember the last time Stelios used them?” His eyes blinked rapidly and his voice went up. “How could you forget?”
“I didn’t forget, I just thought . . .”
He glared at me for what must have been a full minute, then turned to leave the room. But partway to the door he turned back and said, “Listen, you might as well know this—I held his head under the water.”
“What?”
“Stelios. The fall knocked the breath out of him. He was weak and struggling. When I was on his back, I just pushed his head under and held it there. You were only halfway down the side of the quarry and you didn’t see, did you? I did that for you, Aliki. I thought we could be together someday. But now I see we can’t. So you might as well know.”
My Last Lament Page 33