Authors: Pavlos Matesis
People are funny that way. First she survives. Then she
forgets
. Of course, maybe she didn’t really forget, deep down, you never can tell. Back then in Rampartville we all had her written off, all alone and helpless; thanks to Doc Manolaras we tracked her down. When her daughter died she locked herself into the house, never lit a lamp even. Only time she showed her face was at Mrs Kanello’s evening get-togethers, with her crochet hook and the thread rolled up in a ball at her feet, crocheting to
finish
the dead girl’s dowry, some habits you just can’t break.
Never set foot in our house. Only once, the night she knocked at our door just after Signor Vittorio left. Asimina, she calls,
open up, quick! We open the door, it was five till, almost curfew; there she stands with this strange woman. She’s looking for someone, she tells us. Then she goes off and leaves us with the woman, just like that. Come on in, Ma tells her, what was she supposed to say. The woman comes in; you could tell something was wrong. But she looked like a lady. Who are you? asks Ma. Not a word. Please sit down, I say; we were just sitting down to dinner. Bread and chick peas with olive oil, from Signor
Vittorio
that was. She takes a seat, but not so much as a glance at the food, nothing. Who are you? Ma asks again; don’t you want something to eat? Without a word she gets up from the chair, goes over to the bed, lies down and dies. Just like that. With her purse in her hand. We knew it right away. Dead people we saw every day. Ma stretched her out on the bed, closed her eyes, wrapped her jaw closed with a handkerchief. So get Mrs Kanello, she tells me, but now it was curfew. Mrs Kanello was working that night though so we waited at the window, the three of us, for her to come off shift. And wrapped up the stranger in some old clothes.
Around midnight we hear Mrs Kanello’s clogs rattling like a machine-gun; like a home guard she walked. With all due respect, I have to say there was nothing feminine about that woman. But then, I’m comparing her with me, you’ll say … anyway. Mum calls her over, she comes in, looks the woman over. Not from Rampartville, she says. Whereupon I pipe up (where’d I get the idea; I was just a kid) maybe she’s some kind of messenger for the partisans. I’ll find out in the morning, Kanello says, and leaves.
We kept vigil over the stranger all night, well, all right, so we nodded off a bit before dawn, and little Fanis snored right through the whole thing. To stay awake, I weed the new shoots that were popping up through the floor over in the corner, but Ma snaps at me in a loud whisper, Stop that and bring the lamp over here. So I stop my weeding.
First thing in the morning we go out and start asking around, all hush-hush. Nothing. At noon Kanello comes back from work: not a clue, she says; nobody expecting her, all the contacts got back safe. Seems she even telephoned around, not that I asked where, but however you look at it, we weren’t any further ahead than when we started.
Meanwhile our lady neighbours pass on the word to the priest, he’ll be having a funeral to do and little Fanis goes
running
off to the police station. Don’t know a thing about it, they tell him, Try the Kommandantur. Can you believe it, the kid’s supposed to go ask the Krauts? Finally Father Dinos shows up along with Theofilis the sacristan and the two of them lay her out in one of those church caskets they always kept handy, for the indigent, you know. We took the funeral procession through the whole town on the off-chance maybe somebody recognizes the dead woman, asking people on the sly. Not a clue. Probably somebody from the capital, they said. We ended up giving her a hasty burial seeing as it was just about curfew time, then we all hurried home. Didn’t write anything on the grave marker, what were we supposed to put?
I suppose I completely forgot about the incident, all these years. Anyway, just after Ozal gets in, I think it was, I’m back on the stage again, stand-in at some youth movement drama
festival
and who do you imagine I think of? That’s right. The
mystery
woman; not her face so much as her green coat. Even today, when I visit our plot in the cemetery I light my candle and burn my incense, then I drop an extra lump into the incense burner. For the unknown woman, I whisper. That’s what I call her: the ‘unknown woman’. Because I performed
The Unknown Woman
with this road company, you know. What I mean is, I played in
The Unknown Woman
, not the role of the unknown woman; had two lines to speak but I’m not complaining. It was prose after all, and besides, it was serious theatre. In the musical reviews they always stick me in the back of the crowd scenes or in the chorus.
The unknown woman, poor thing.
I always say a little prayer for her, I know it’s being selfish but I’d like it if someone said a little prayer for me when … anyway, you know what I mean; well. I’m still young at heart and frisky as a filly, why, when I pop backstage after the show the people come up to me and say, Raraou you old fish, where’ve you been hiding yourself these days? just as nice as can be not how they usually talk to old people and pensioners generally speaking. Of course. I know what you’re going to say, I look a lot younger than my age. Don’t I know it. Even when I was a little girl I always looked younger than I was, didn’t even get a little bump of a chest until after I turned seventeen. When we used to go
splashing
in the puddles under Deviljohn’s bridge in the summertime I wore my drawers without a shift just like our little Fanis and the other boys. But my girl friends from school, they only took their clogs off. Well, really they were former girl friends because in the meantime I quit school; after the so-called Liberation I started going again but by then it was only once in a blue moon.
Still, I went visiting lots of other girls. Afternoons mostly. Always went home plenty early though, back then you had to leave plenty of time to get home before curfew because you couldn’t stay overnight at somebody’s house, forbidden by the Occupying Powers. If you wanted to put somebody up you had to write a petition and get the authorities to stamp it. They had their ways of checking up, too; every front door had this printed form nailed to it showing how many permanent residents lived in that particular house plus their names and how old they were. Mrs Kanello, well, life was tough and she was hungry but she could always find something to laugh about. So what does she tell us at one of those get-togethers of hers? At most of the
better
houses (did house cleaning on her days off, what was she supposed to do with all those mouths to feed?) they were
correcting
the women’s ages. Improving them, actually. From forty-eight down to forty-two first, then down to thirty-two.
And Mrs Kanello laughed and laughed, till all of a sudden one day it wasn’t funny any more. Seems she dropped by her mother’s and what do you think she saw? Her mother’s age listed as thirty-seven, that’s what! You’re nuts, Mum.
Thirty-seven
? I’m twenty-seven myself. But mother Marika wouldn’t budge. I am not nuts, she says. What am I supposed to do, stuck with an unmarried daughter?
Mrs Kanello had this younger sister name of Yannitsa, couldn’t unload her on anybody. One big headache, let me tell you. Finally they managed to marry her off though, thanks to party connections. Her other sister’s husband, the one in the partisans, he kind of forced one of his comrades to marry the spinster. Party orders, he told the man. Didn’t have much choice in the matter, really. So he married the girl, even though she was older by eight years. But they lived happily ever after, had a child even.
The fur really flew over at the Tiritomba’s too, age-wise I mean. Mrs Adrianna put down her real age, and that was that; her daughter was eighteen, she was forty-one and a widow, why bother to hide it? But Mlle Salome, who couldn’t have been a day under thirty-four, she wouldn’t hear of it. I’m not telling anybody my age, she declared. I don’t care if they shoot me. And there, beside her name, she writes down fifteen, doing her part for the Resistance, I suppose.
Aphrodite’s mother never crossed her dead daughter’s name off the list. But in the age column she wrote down ‘zero’.
Mlle Salome had her reasons, that’s for sure. Back before the war even she joined the old maids’ club; she had a swarthy
complexion
, all skin and bones, her hair was short and curly and she had beady little eyes like a chicken’s behind (what I’d give for those lovely eyes of yours, she gushed whenever she saw me) and a shrill voice, like somebody yelling at a deaf-mute. But all the same, she was a good-hearted sort. Not much later, the whole Tiritomba clan went off on tour, mind you. Well ‘went
off’ was hardly the word for it. What really happened is that they cleared out overnight, and all because a goat, if you please. Cleared out lock stock and barrel, in the middle of the great hunger, just as the Year of Our Lord 1942 was coming to an end.
We didn’t even have time to say goodbye and before we knew it, they were gone. If I’d have known they were going, I’d have asked them to take me along, I know I was just a little kid, but they were bound to have kid’s parts. I could have played boys even; my feminine charms weren’t all that developed yet.
That day us kids were snailing down by Deviljohn’s bridge bright and early. The snails were up and around at the crack of dawn, so we had to catch them before anybody else did. We used to eat them boiled and salted; in the coffee houses they served them as an appetizer, along with ouzo. Later on, we sold them in little paper cones at the movies, instead of roasted sunflower seeds.
So there we were in the early morning cold, gathering snails under the bridge when all of a sudden we see Tassis’ wood-
powered
jitney go by like a shot – Tassis was Mrs Adrianna’s brother. Well not exactly ‘like a shot’; the old rattletrap was doing maybe ten miles an hour. And in it, who do I see but Mlle Salome, Mrs Adrianna, her daughter Marina, plus an archangel, which may have been part of some stage set, or maybe it was a plaster statue, I couldn’t tell for sure. There were Albanian kilts and medieval costumes flapping in the wind on the side.
Traviata
and the like. Before I knew it, they turned off towards the mountain villages. As soon as the jitney was out of sight we went back to our snailing. We were cold. There was no sun but even with sun we would have been cold. Not enough to eat, that’s what it was. But the cold couldn’t spoil our fun. What did spoil it, around noon, was the domestic animals from town.
Down by the riverside there were two cats crouching, waiting to pounce on the first frog that popped up. Or staring up at the sky, maybe the poor dumb creatures were waiting for a bird to
drop at their feet, so to speak. Dumb animals when you come right down to it.
House cats weren’t much good back then, what’s a mouse going to do in a hungry man’s house? They wouldn’t even let us get close enough to pat them, the cats. I mean; they were angry because we couldn’t feed them any more. Mrs Kanello had a cat but she had to tell it I don’t have anything for you, sweetie-pie, you’ll have to look out for yourself.
One day we spotted a mouse in our house. Must have been just passing through, or maybe it just strolled in through the wrong door. Mother almost took it as a compliment. Mice only lived in rich people’s houses now. Back in the days before the war we had a few, but for Mother a mouse in the house was a kind of disgrace; cleanliness is next to godliness, she always said. We kept traps with bread fried in olive oil for bait. But when the Albanian front fell apart, well, that was it for the bread in the mouse-trap.
We had a cat too, but she wasn’t really ours. More like half a cat. Showed up on the days Father brought the tripe to wash in the yard. I never knew who the cat belonged to. We got ourselves half a cat, Father joked. We always left her a plate outside the back door, along with a little bowl of water. But when we lost our liberty she lost the food on her plate. We still gave her fresh water every day so she would always have plenty to drink at least. At first, she kept on coming around. She came scrambling over the wall, stared at her plate, then leaped down for a closer look, dumb animal. But there was nothing on her plate, nothing but rust spots from the rain, mixed with dust. The last time she showed up on the wall she spotted the empty plate, then turned towards us and glared at us as it she was accusing us of
wrongdoing
, like the picture in the cathedral where you see the Archangel glaring at Eve, the one where it says The Banishment from the Garden underneath. Took one look at us and
disappeared
. Disowned us.
I didn’t even try to find her. Firstly, she wasn’t even our cat, and secondly, what was I supposed to say to her, Come back home for some food? I was embarrassed to look her in the face. When she went away she had the same kind of look on her face as my big brother, back then with Signor Alfio. I was lying a while back when I told you my big brother Sotiris called her a whore. When he saw it was Signor Alfio going out the door and saw the basin full of rinsing water under Mother’s bed and the food on the table he didn’t curse her or call her names, nothing like that. In fact he sat down and ate dinner with us and then he said, I’m going out for a walk. Even though it was curfew we didn’t try to stop him. He was gone. For ever. Today he’ll be over seventy.
And that’s how our half a cat left. I never saw her again, not even down by Deviljohn’s bridge where the cats went frog hunting.
But that day, when the jitney with the Tiritomba troupe
disappeared
over the hill, all us kids heard a strange sound coming from the town, a soft humming sound, like a deaf-mute crying. We stopped our playing and looked up. The road was empty but the sound kept coming closer. So low that it was more like a dream. Then we saw them, the pets of Rampartville.
Lots of them. They filled the road like a silent
demonstration
, dogs and cats together, marching along with a determined look on their faces. Not so much as turning to look at us. All the pets of Rampartville were deserting the town. And here they were, streaming past us, along the road leading to the villages and the valley. In their eyes you could see it, the look of a mother trying to save her children. And nobody can stop her. They were heading for the countryside, looking for food. A couple of pups were hanging back and sniffing along the roadside, then they dashed along after their parents. The two frog-hunting cats joined the march, alongside a couple of dogs. Not one of them came back again, ever.