Authors: Pavlos Matesis
So there we were, my mother and me, unstitching the flag. Lucky for us it was a big one; I can still remember how my father got it, years before. This butcher he worked for went bankrupt, owed Father for three days’ worth of washed guts and tripe. So Father requisitioned the flag and a scale, the kind where you hang the meat from a big hook to weigh it. He was too late for anything else, everybody else had got there first: the only thing left in the shop was the flag and the scale. When we unfurled it on October 28th, the day my father went off to war, it just about covered the whole front of the house. Reminded me of one of those patriotic songs we used to sing in school, the one about Mother Greece with her blue eyes tucking in her children for the night. Fortunately for us, Ma remembered we had the flag. At first we used it for a bed sheet. Now, after we unstitched it Mother cut it into four shifts and two pairs of drawers each. In fact, I remember mine were cut from the middle of the flag, the part with the cross: we couldn’t unstitch that part, so I
ended up with drawers in our national colours with the cross right in the crotch. Anyway, we wore those undies all winter long. And there was no danger of them finding a flag in our house – if you had one, you were resisting – if ever they searched us. Still, I’d given up hope of that. But when Father Dinos spots our underwear hanging out to dry on the line behind the church one day, he figures everything out. How could you, woman? he asks our Ma. And Ma snaps back Alexander the Great would do the same thing if his kids didn’t have any clothes to wear. The priest never breathed a word about our underwear again.
Truth to tell, the Authorities did come calling – once. Before the Occupation it was, during the Albanian war. Five months after my father left, he stopped writing. Mother sent me over to some neighbours who had a radio on the chance I’d catch his name in the dead and wounded bulletins. Maybe altogether ten houses in Rampartville had radios back then, all good families. The neighbours were theatre people which we called the
Tiritomba
family because they played in our town in a musical called
Tiritomba
, you remember that song before the war that went ‘tiritomba tiritomba’. They were really from Rampartville all along, but it was pure happenstance that they happened to be passing through town on tour when the war broke out. So they had to stay put. Good people, especially Mlle Salome, the impresario’s sister-in-law. They had a place of their own in Rampartville, an inheritance. Nice folks, I’ll tell you all about ’em later. The house is still standing today, not a brick touched. Seems they forgot to sell it.
Mlle Salome we asked to listen for the casualty reports so I wouldn’t go wasting my time for nothing. Went to police
headquarters
and to the prefecture too, looking for information. Were we supposed to put on mourning and hang the black crepe over the front door or weren’t we? But nobody heard my father’s name. Don’t worry, said Mlle Salome. If the
unthinkable’s
happened, the Authorities will inform you for sure, and you can pick up the medal.
That’s why we didn’t put in any black curtain cords either.
So, one day a gendarme and a guy in civilian clothes come knocking, asking Mother if she heard any news, or if she knew anything about Father’s politics. We showed them the postcards from the front, such as they were; what else were we supposed to show? He’d been absent without leave from his regiment for more than a month, they said.
As soon as Granny found out she rushed right over: just about tore my mother’s eyes out, in fact, on account of we
hadn’t
put up the black crepe. Granny wore black the whole
Occupation
: one day she managed to lay hands on some wheat, so she boiled it up as an offering for the deceased, sent us over a plate and for two days we had food to eat.
But we never hung up the crepe or wore mourning.
You won’t catch me mourning him unless I get orders straight from the government, besides, it’s bad luck Mother said. Later, a lot later, after Liberation, we finally got a letter from the government saying that my father Meskaris Diomedes had been declared missing on the field of honour and that his family was entitled to a pension. Well, it just wouldn’t have looked right to go into mourning then. Besides, the religious waiting period was long over. That’s the pension I still get to this day, but we only started collecting it much later, of course, after we left Rampartville for good.
Those two were the first officials ever to set foot in our house. Later, around the end of the first year of the Occupation they finally came looking for weapons. Italians, this time. They
rummaged
through the chest-of-drawers and then checked out the floor, some floor, nothing but hard-packed earth, wall to wall. One of the Italians took a long look at Mother. My name’s Alfio, he said, you can find me at the Carabineria. Looked like a nice man, the homely type; shy too. He spoke a few words of broken
Greek. After they left, my brother Sotiris called her a slut and I smacked him one.
That earth floor of ours was nothing but trouble. Ma was a real housekeeper; like mother like daughter, I always say. We had to keep the floor damp all the time. If we used too much water it would turn to mud. So we all took a mouthful of water and sprayed it over the floor to keep down the dust and make it hard like cement. Sprayed it during the winter time, too, all of us together. And after the spraying came the tamping. We’d lay down a board and all of us walked up and down on it, then we’d move the board to another spot and start all over again. Because if we didn’t look after the floor it would turn back into dirt, and weeds would start to grow, mallow mostly, but once a poppy sprouted right next to the sink.
I know, I know it’s sinful to say, but I always loved that earth floor of ours. Maybe because I always had a love for earth, ever since I was a kid; figure it out if you can. I was always dreaming I had a little piece of earth all my own. Always carried this lump of earth around with me in my school bag. And I had this little corner in our backyard all to myself, called it my ‘garden’, built a little fence with sticks and planted green beans, but they never grew, planted them at the wrong time of year it seems. After that, I set up a little garden, right under my bed.
In winter we kept the floor covered with rag rugs and dusters but it was no use, the weeds kept popping up. One day, early in the morning it was, I look over and I see the rug moving, rising up: it’s a snake, I say to myself. I lift up a corner of the rug and look: it was a mushroom! Like the sun rising right out of the floor.
We did our best, whitewashed every Saturday and dusted every day, but there were always fresh cobwebs in the corners. But the spiders always popped right out and wove their webs all over again. Leave them, Mother told me one day, they don’t hurt nobody and they eat the flies besides. What’s more they keep us company.
Must be from back then that I get these dreams of mine about snow falling in the house. Here I sit in my apartment in Athens, and there’s snow right in the house. Snow in the corners, snow at the feet of the console, snow on top of the chest-of-drawers and all over the washbasin. How can that be? I say to myself: doesn’t the place have a roof? Then I wake up. Sometimes I dream there’s snow in Mum’s grave. It’s nothing but a little hole in the ground: can’t imagine how I’ll ever fit in when the time comes. There are snowflakes in the corners. Nothing else. Not even debris from the casket; nothing. Nothing’s left of Mum but snow.
So, we’re in the second year of the Occupation, and one day I burst out laughing. Let’s make a bet how many days we can last, I tell my brothers. Twenty-six days without bread, weeds and raw coffee, coarse-ground coffee was all we had to eat. A couple of days before there was a grocer’s break-in, but all I could grab was some coffee. We had a handful each to eat every afternoon, then go outside to play. Ma didn’t like us playing because we fainted a lot: we weren’t hungry any more, but we walked really slowly. The shop break-in was the first; up until then, self-respect was all that held us back, the whole
population
. But that day the Red Cross was supposed to distribute free food. The three of us queued up from eight that morning; I didn’t go to school that day, in fact we didn’t go to school much any more. Mother never went to a food handout, I don’t know why, maybe she was embarrassed. But she gave us permission, as long as we were clean.
There we were, queuing. Around half past three they announced there wouldn’t be any food distribution. Then all of us, must have been close to 300, kind of shuddered at the same time. Silence. Then we all turned back and broke down the doors to three shops, pushing with our backs. One was a ladies’ drapery that had been closed for a long time. We snatched
whatever
we could lay our hands on. There were civil servants’
wives, and even Mlle Salome, strutting around dressed to the nines. People were trampling over someone lying on the ground. It was my brother Sotiris; but he wasn’t hurt, he was just lying there letting the people walk all over him while he stuffed something into his mouth. I managed to snatch a can, turns out it was full of that coarse-ground foreign-tasting
coffee
; the only kind of coffee we ever had at our house, before the war that is, was the Turkish variety. Like an apparition I see Mlle Salome come sashaying out of the ruined shop just as pleased as punch even though they’d ripped the fur collar off her coat. Always the charmer, she was. She’d looted some
cosmetics
, some rouge, a box of Tokalon powder and a lipstick, she showed it all to us afterwards. Found out later she was in the Resistance, even if she was from a good family. But what do you expect from an impresario’s sister-in-law after all.
It was our twenty-seventh day without bread. The coffee was gone too. Mother had been gone all morning and the three of us were huddled in bed together, trying to keep warm, if only we had the pullet to sit on our feet and keep us warm. Poultry give off more heat than people, you know.
The pullet was a present from Mlle Salome, bless her heart, wherever she might be, even though she never made it to Athens. Broke into somebody’s chicken coop, stole the bird and passed it on to Mother. Boil it and feed your kids the broth, she said, their glands are starting to swell.
The pullet had bright-coloured feathers and a long neck; a lively bird she was, too. Didn’t have any idea we were in the middle of an Occupation. Ma please let’s not kill her, we begged. All right, we’ll let her grow a little, maybe we’ll get an extra portion. Maybe she’ll even lay an egg or two. But the first eggs we had to eat were when the English marched in to
liberate
us. So we kept the pullet about six months, tried to feed her, and I even dug up the odd worm: put her out to peck around for weeds and bugs in a vacant lot up the hill. We had to make sure
nobody would steal her so the three of us carried her hidden under Sotiris’ overcoat. We had to carry her, it was all she could do to stand up she was so exhausted.
That day when we get to the vacant lot I put her down to scratch for worms but she flops over on her side and looks up at me, too weak to scratch. I give her water but she can barely drink. Kids, I say, she’s not long for this world, let’s get back home so we can cut her throat before she croaks. But Ma says, No I won’t do it, and later that afternoon the chicken looks me in the eye one last time and drops dead. From hunger. I picked her up; she was heavier dead. You’re not going to bury her? You’re crazy, you think you’re rich or something? Mlle Salome shouts from her balcony when she spies me digging a hole in the yard. She’s still warm, come on, pluck her and boil her! A whole chicken going to waste!
I go back inside. Saying, Ma, where’s the trowel? My
brothers
pull back the bed and I dig a hole right in the corner I was saving for my little garden and buried her nice and pretty then we put the bed back, just so. Every morning after that I moved the bed so I could have a look. One morning I found a snail right there on top of my pullet’s grave. Now you decide to show up, says Ma. Where were you when the chicken could have used you for food? And she picks it up in the palm of her hand and puts it outside in the grass. O she talked lots about the chicken, we even had a name for her, but I can’t for the life of me
remember
what it was, now, decades later.
So there we were the three of us, huddled in bed trying to stay warm. In the afternoon Mother came back from the nearby villages where she’d been making the rounds and she had some fresh broad beans and a pocketful of wheat which she boiled up for us to eat. There’s no olive oil? asks Fanis, the youngest of the lot. Of course he knew there wasn’t any. No, says Mother. But if we had any you’d give it to us, isn’t that so Ma? asks Fanis, looking for reassurance. But Sotiris gets to his feet. Ma, I’m
going to puke, he says. And Mother pops him one. It’s a sin to throw up good food, she says. You’ll go straight to hell. You don’t respect me, isn’t that so? Try to pick a few beans for you and get shot for my trouble. It was true: her head was spattered with blood, there, around her bun. Sotiris blushes, then pukes anyway. Ma slaps him without so much as a word, marches him over to the sink and washes out his mouth, and sits down on the window-sill. When night comes she gets to her feet, opens her little chest and pulls out her face powder – it was her wedding present – and powders her face. Then she takes her big sewing scissors and lets her hair down. She always kept her hair in a bun. That hairdo makes you look older Asimina, Mlle Salome would tell her. You look like a little old lady.
When Ma let down her hair it fell almost to her waist; me, I get my lovely hair from my mother, that’s for sure. So, as I was saying, she goes over to the sink and starts to cut off her hair with those sewing scissors of hers while we look on wide-eyed. As soon as she finishes she cleans up the sink, twists the cut hair into a braid and throws it into the garbage can and tells me, Go ask Mlle Salome if she’ll lend me her lipstick.