He was so calm as he said all this that it took me a few seconds to take it in. Then rage rose through me fast and my hand flew out almost of its own accord and slapped him hard. It echoed in the lounge and I went for his throat with both hands. He just stepped back and laughed.
“You believe me, don’t you? Ha. I just said that to hurt you. Don’t worry, Stelios drowned without any help from me.”
I stormed past him to the door, but as I left he called out with heavy sarcasm, “Oh, and thanks for the puppets.” I found the director’s office and signed papers giving up any responsibility for Takis. I didn’t make any financial arrangement.
I’m stopping the tape here once more.
Now it’s weeks later. Sorry to have let so much time pass. I’m sitting here with the reel turning these last few minutes thinking how to continue. Nothing has changed, yet everything has changed. The day I last talked into this machine, the women went with me to Aphrodite’s hut but stayed outside the door as I went inside. The place had been cleaned. No chicken feathers, no musty rugs, even the bunches of herbs had been taken down and stacked to one side. You could walk about without them hitting you in the face. I supposed the other women had done it and I supposed rightly that Aphrodite wasn’t happy about it.
“Crows, that’s what they are,” she said, muttering from her mat in the corner. The women must also have perfumed the air with church incense as there was a sweetish scent that couldn’t have come from Aphrodite. “They’re worse than death. Make them go away. They’ll listen to you.”
But they wouldn’t. It’s the custom to gather round at such a time and there’s no changing this. Aphrodite knew that, of course, but what she did and didn’t know had already begun to blur. I couldn’t always tell if she was talking to me or to the icon of St. Athanassios on the wall above her. Her mind seemed to have turned into a kind of swamp, but here and there were islands of sense where she’d speak distinctly.
“There’s no turning back, no going forward or anywhere at all. And what of it?” She laughed, a long, wheezy kind of laugh, and reached for one of the crumpled handkerchiefs around her, all spotted with blood.
“Now, listen,” I said. “You can’t die yet. There’s something I want to know.” Who was I, she asked, thrashing from side to side. I’d brought a little flask of raki with me and got her to drink some. This calmed her and she fell asleep. I waited a few minutes, then nudged her awake. She began to ramble about various villagers, probably running through things she’d learned about the people she’d treated through the years. Disputes over dowries and property lines, the baker who mixed sawdust into his dough to bulk it up, the bribes for illegal building permits. I interrupted her.
“Do you remember Chrysoula’s boy, Takis?”
“I remember everything. It’s a curse.”
“Tell me.”
“Not right in the head, that one.”
“He used to say how Zephyra hated him because she was so jealous of his friendship with me.”
“Of course. She was like that, lonely and bitter. Nothing is as hateful as a bitter child.”
She told me all over again about Zephyra and the goat stealing, how her mother had put her up to wearing the skin to calm the goats she stole from the Germans (who’d stolen them from the villagers in the first place). And I remembered again the poor soul just before her death lying in bed making that sound, Maaahhh, maaahhh.
Now Aphrodite said the goats Zephyra had stolen weighed on her so much because of their connection to other worse things she’d done. When the Germans posted a sentry to prevent the thefts, that was the end of Zephyra’s stealing. She and her mother had to go back to eating snails and grass, like everyone else. Except of course for us at Chrysoula’s house where, thanks to Sophia’s gold sovereigns, we were eating much better. But the generosity of Sophia was apparently well-known.
“Zephyra had worked it out those nights when she was stealing goats,” Aphrodite said. “Ha! Something she saw or heard. Something. Maybe a person passing a window in Chrysoula’s house, maybe sounds from inside. And probably more than once. Zephyra put it together: there were more people living there than just Chrysoula and you and Takis.”
I remembered Chrysoula warning us when we wanted to put on shadow puppet plays, You will make a lot of noise and get us all shot.
Zephyra told her suspicions to her mother, Aphrodite said. She and others had already noticed that we of that house looked fairly healthy when everyone else was nearly starving. And this had to mean that whoever was in the house with us could afford to buy black market food.
“That’s why she got Zephyra to do it,” Aphrodite said. “That’s what she told me.”
“What who told you?”
“Zephyra. Before she died.”
“Told you that . . . ?”
“Her mother made Zephyra lead that German back to Chrysoula’s house.”
It was a moment before I could understand. What she said was clear enough, but somehow I wasn’t sure what she was talking about.
“What do you mean? Brought him when?”
“That night.”
What was wrong with me? I couldn’t understand her. She repeated herself.
“That night—the night of the killing.”
Then I got it.
“Zephyra?” I said. “It can’t be.”
“It’s what she told me.”
“Zephyra brought the colonel that night?”
“Was he a colonel? Who cares? Zephyra brought the German.”
Take care of your own mice that they don’t get us all caught, Zephyra’s mother had told Chrysoula when we were looking for snails and bulbs. And Zephyra herself had said at the end, Not my fault. But it was her fault, wasn’t it, the terror of what happened? And the mother who put her up to it. I clapped my hand over my mouth.
“But why?”
“Ha! Envy. Spite. You were eating and they weren’t. Hunger does such things. Well, you know. Those times, they made us that way. And Zephyra was always jealous of that boy. It weighed on her. That’s why she made goat noises at the end. When she could no longer speak, it was a kind of truth. A goat truth.”
Aphrodite began to laugh in little explosions. She’d quiet down and then say “a goat truth” again and start all over. Tears were running down her face.
I couldn’t speak for a moment as I tried to piece it together. Takis had left the house in a fit of bad temper and jealousy of Stelios. But of course we never knew what he did outside. Maybe he’d stormed around kicking stones in anger. Maybe he’d thrown himself down on the ground and screamed. It wouldn’t have been the first time. It was just our—Stelios’s and my—guess that he’d marched off to the colonel. We’d never thought that it could have been someone else, least of all Zephyra. Then we were all outside and there he was. The horror of seeing his mother shot before his eyes would have fallen on Takis and undone his already poorly hinged mind, shrouding that night from him for the rest of his days.
When I’d referred to it at the Zappeion, he’d asked, What happened? Something happened, didn’t it? And when he’d later come to Stelios’s house on New Year’s Eve, he broke down, saying, I want my mother. I don’t know what happened to her. Each time he fell into what Yannoula called one of his spells, it was usually due to either jealousy of Stelios or a reference to the events of the night his mother was killed. Or both. We’d all blamed him and he’d had to live under the weight of that blame and that would have led him where it did. That doesn’t mean it was my fault, he’d said in the camp on the island. Just because I can’t remember.
“But why?” I said. “Why could Zephyra tell you about this but only make noises with me?”
“Do I know? That’s often the way. Clouds of the mind parting just a little before the end. But not much. You must have seen such things.”
“But what I don’t unde
rstand,” I said, “is why her mother sent Zephyra to the colonel. Why didn’t her mother go herself?”
“The German liked children. That’s what everyone said.”
Villagers had seen Colonel Esterhaus talking to Takis. And the mother wouldn’t have been able to make the German understand without old Petros to translate. But Zephyra just took his hand and led him. His men followed.
“That’s what she told me,” Aphrodite said. But she began to drift off. She slumped back on the mat as I recalled how poor little Zephyra had wanted to come live with me and my father, but that wasn’t possible. And later she’d been so jealous when I moved in with Takis and Chrysoula.
“So it wasn’t Takis?” I said. “Even Takis believed it was Takis. So did we all.”
“What? What?” Her eyes jerked open. “Oh, that. The mother died long ago while you were away. So only Zephyra lived on, carrying her little secret.”
“Not so little. It ruined Takis.” But that wasn’t it, I thought. It was we who’d ruined him by believing him guilty and treating him as if he were. Until he’d become guilty in deed of other, larger things. Leading me to abandon him at that school in Peristeri. What if Zephyra had kept her suspicions to herself and the Germans had left the village at the end of the war without incident, as they had in so many other places? How our small universe had turned on the jealousy of a child. And the envy of her mother.
Aphrodite fell back again before she could say more and the women, peering through the door, apparently thought she’d died. They rushed into the hut shrieking and tearing at their hair, snatching up blankets and saucepans, smashing a spindly chair and a washbasin. Aphrodite’s eyes flashed open and, grasping my shoulder, she actually managed to get to her feet.
“Out!” she said. “All of you, out!”
The women flapped around, dropping things they’d picked up, pots and pans, and rushed for the door. Aphrodite handed me a bunch of dried herbs—it looked like oregano, thyme and rosemary—along with a box of matches. “Burn it,” she said. “Wave it around. Smoke out those crows.”
The herbs were so dry that they flared up at once and burned themselves down. The thick herbal smoke filled the room and made me start coughing.
“Wave them here at the saint.” She pointed to the icon of St. Athanassios sitting in the mouth of a cave. “He knows all our secrets. Let’s see if he has another.”
She was mumbling at the icon as if in conversation with it. It seemed all nonsense words or some strange language I couldn’t follow. And then the nonsense turned to sense, something about my father and Chrysoula after my mother left the village. How Chrysoula’s husband wouldn’t have understood it, crazy as he was, always accusing people of plotting against him.
What was he to understand exactly? Then I recalled the other women saying my father had been like a bee gathering nectar from other flowers. Was this what they meant? Aphrodite said there’d come a time when Chrysoula and her husband went away to a clinic for treatment for him. A place near Athens. Kifissia, it was.
Kifissia? Could it be the same place? Chrysoula had put her own husband there? Surely there weren’t two such places in the same suburb of Athens.
“She came back alone months later,” Aphrodite said. “With a baby. Let’s see, you would have been about what, seven or so? Didn’t you ever notice that you and Takis had the same nose, eyes and hair?”
“What do you mean? We certainly did not.”
She teetered around the room, surprisingly agile for someone who’d been near death only minutes before.
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“It’s what Zephyra also told me,” Aphrodite said. “But what did she know, that old goat-thief?”
“Told you what exactly? That my father . . . ?”
“Oh, you work it out. I’m too tired.” She flopped back down on her rugs, wheezing. Then she added, “Chrysoula told everyone that her husband was in no state to care for their new child; she’d do it alone until he came back. But he never did.”
“I don’t believe it. And how would Zephyra know anyway? She would have been little when all this happened. If it did.”
“Her mother, of course. She knew everything.” Aphrodite paused and then asked, “Well, isn’t half a brother better than none?”
So my lie was not an untruth after all. The last call I’d had from St. Elena came a few years after my visit, when the school was closing. The caller told me that my brother had stayed until he’d joined the army, but he’d left a suitcase behind. Did I want to claim it? I didn’t and heard nothing more about him until one day, sometime in the sixties, old Stamatis in our village store showed me a newspaper with a photograph of some military men. He told me that the article said that one of the men was from here, our very own village—did I recognize anyone? I looked closely at the photo and, matching it to the names beneath, I realized that, sure enough, the third one in was Takis, grown to manhood and looking spiffy but stern in his crisp uniform.
Well, well, I thought, he finally got one of his own and at least this one fits. But when I looked even more closely, I saw the insignia of the dreaded military police. This was during the years of the junta dictatorship in the sixties and seventies when military police persecuted and arrested leftists along with any other real or imagined critics of the right-wing regime. It saw plots and enemies behind every lamppost, under every stone. I was sickened to think that Takis was part of that national paranoia. Could I have saved him from it if I’d taken him in? I tortured myself with this question for some time but thought finally that maybe he’d been on that path most of his life. When the regime fell in 1974, many of the military police were tried and imprisoned; others simply disappeared in acts of retribution by relatives of the previously persecuted or murdered. I never heard anything more about Takis. But I worried that he might still turn up one day. And now was I to believe that he was in fact my brother?
Suddenly I was angry at Aphrodite, the wheezy old know-it-all, waiting to tell me things that could no longer be proven true or not. “Oh, really, how can we believe this?” I said. “It’s old gossip. Deathbed chatter, nothing more.”
“Suit yourself. Maybe it’s true; maybe it isn’t. Do I care? Not when I really can’t breathe. Help me; there’s no air in here.”
I tried to fan her with the stub of the burned bunch of herbs I was still holding, but I was paying little attention. Maybe it was the smoke in the room, or, as she said, the lack of air, but I felt detached suddenly, drifting. Chrysoula had once said that Takis was so strange and unpredictable that he certainly didn’t take after her. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but that didn’t sound like my father either. Of course in those times there was so much intermarriage between families and even between relatives that there was often no sure way of knowing who was really whose. Any shame was quickly covered up. The truth is that the baby Chrysoula brought back to the village—if that’s what she did—could have been anybody’s. Poor Takis with such a clouded inheritance, though he never knew it. I thought of Yannoula that night in the mountain village saying that he would always be a boy hearing voices; he wouldn’t grow out of it. Perhaps he never did.
I seemed to be above Aphrodite, looking down on her wretched old head, her matted hair, the mess that she was and maybe we all were. Such messes we made of our lives. Such messes the times made of us. I felt sick and dropped the burned herbs in Aphrodite’s lap. I was back beside her.
She shrieked and said, “Now can everyone please let me get on with dying?”
The women in the doorway rushed back into the hut. They moaned and pulled their hair, all the while casting their eyes around at Aphrodite’s few possessions, the ones they hadn’t grabbed before. Here was another woman without family, but there wasn’t much to bother with, it seemed. I walked out.
I didn’t even take a pair of her shoes to help me with a lament. In fact,
no lament came to me at all. It was not a matter of deciding against it but rather that, for the first time, I had no urge to do it. My lament for Zephyra had been my last. I think it’s because I no longer end up in that room with the open door and the amber light beyond. How can there be any kind of a truth behind that door? And why did I think so for so long? Maybe the fact that there isn’t one is the truth itself. When I realized that, the vision stopped coming to me, and the laments.
It’s awful to have lost that vision after so many years. But gone it is and with it the voices of the dead; they speak to me no more. It’s like losing all your friends at once. Even my father has stopped complaining, though I must say I miss him turning up in my back garden for a smoke. I’d like to ask him: So was Takis really your son and my brother? And his madness didn’t come from Chrysoula’s mad husband? From you, then? Or from Chrysoula herself, with her stories of wild chickens and her curious advice to other villagers? Does my abilty to lament come from the same place? What gets passed on through families and what is learned? Do you know?
The question is too simple, I imagine him saying, and the answer too complicated. He fishes for a cigarette in his breast pocket. I can see through the bullet holes where his heart once was. But he has nothing more to say.
So in the telling of my story, it has changed. Or is it I who have changed? I just listened to the beginning of the first cassette and can hardly believe that chirpy old bird is me. And here is this letter from you, my little scholar, which came a while back, between cassettes four and five. I didn’t open it when it arrived, expecting that you would want to know how the lament cassettes were coming along—and what could I say? That I’ve used up all the cassettes for my own purpose? When I did finally read the letter, I understood it to say that you’re coming back here to see me and as it turns out, this is the day. Well, here are the cassettes and maybe in fact they do contain what you asked for. A record of a life nearly complete could also be said to be a lament for that life, couldn’t it? When I started, I wanted to keep these cassettes to remind me of, what, myself? But in the telling, I’ve worn myself out, and grown tired of my own voice, tired of this story. So take them!
My Last Lament Page 34