by Lena Manta
The main thing is, we’re fine—on our feet again. And besides God, I warmly thank two people who, as I wrote once on Facebook, held his heart in their hands and saved him. Victor Papayiotakopoulos and Nikos Baikousis, I thank you. What you don’t know is that, by saving him, you saved me, and gave me back my smile and my strength.
When we returned home, during the difficult period of Yorgos’s recuperation, I escaped into my words, into the games I played with them. My heroines were waiting for me. Smaragda, Chrysafenia, and all the other members of the family gave me peace of mind and restored my balance. The pages I filled were a refuge, their adventures and love story a relief. Also, yet again in my life, the truth of the saying “never say never” was borne out. I thought that I had freed myself of Constantinople with Theano, one of my earlier heroines, but as it turned out, the city wasn’t finished with me. My story wandered again in its own haunts. Except that now I had learned more, and had a lot more to say.
And something else strange about this book: I don’t know if I loved it. Perhaps I didn’t have enough time. It came out of me violently, as if it was hiding, and as soon as it found a way out, it slid indignantly onto the white pages and mocked me, the ungrateful wretch! I know what I felt, though, when I had finished and was revisiting it for a second reading to make any corrections or additions before I wrote the words The End. I felt myself bound to it with unbreakable bonds. Something familiar but also previously unknown to me. Usually, when I finish a book, I bury it deep in my mind, together with the others, and I almost forget it. But this was and is different. As if it had moved in with me.
What’s more, it is the only book that my husband didn’t read as I was writing it, but only after I had finished. And that too was a first.
Writing these words, I realize that now I’m saying good-bye to it. Good-bye, Smaragda; good-bye, Chrysafenia; good-bye, Fenia. I’d especially like to give you a kiss. We became good friends. Apart from your own life, you know about the tears, the agonies, and the sleepless nights I suffered for Yorgos. So, here’s to you, and to him too . . .
Lena Manta
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2016
Lena Manta was born in Istanbul, Turkey, to Greek parents. She moved to Greece at a very young age and now lives with her husband and two children on the outskirts of Athens. Although she studied to be a nursery school teacher, Manta instead directed her own puppet theater before writing articles for local newspapers and working as a director for a local radio station. Manta was proclaimed Author of the Year in both 2009 and 2011 by Greek Life & Style magazine. She has written thirteen books, including The Gold Letter, her second book to be translated into English, and the bestselling The House by the River, which has sold almost 250,000 copies. Hers is a voice to be reckoned with, and each new book is a tour de force in the Greek publishing world.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © 2016 Cornell Publicity
Gail Holst-Warhaft is a poet, translator, musician, literary scholar, and the poet laureate of Tompkins County for 2011 and 2012. Her books include the poetry collections Lucky Country and Penelope’s Confession as well as the nonfiction works The Cue for Passion: Grief and Its Political Uses, Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature, Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music, Road to Rembetika, and The Fall of Athens, a memoir in prose and poems. She has translated The Collected Poems of Nikos Kavadias and I Had Three Lives: Selected Poems of Mikis Theodorakis. Her poems and translations from Greek, French, and Anglo-Saxon have been published in many journals and anthologies, including Literary Imagination, Per Contra, Translation, Southerly, Antipodes, and Stand. Holst-Warhaft lives in Ithaca, New York.