The Daughter (4 page)

When her belly starts to show Aphrodite’s mother pipes up, Are you crazy? Getting yourself knocked up when everybody’s going hungry and starving! How are you going to manage? I really wasn’t all that wild about it, says Mrs Kanello. I’ll have a tough time hauling the ammunition, but my husband’s indoors all the time, he can’t go to the movies, can’t find his favourite sweets, what’s he supposed to do for entertainment? Still, she wouldn’t hear of getting rid of it, no matter what Plastourgos’s wife said, even if she was a trained midwife and an honest woman besides. So Mrs Kanello went about her work with a bulging belly, not to mention those Sunday outings of hers with the hand grenades.

But one day they call her into the Carabineria for
questioning
. Seems someone squealed on her about the outings with the mandolin. What I really mean to say is. I know who – a woman it was – squealed on her. She’s married to a member of
parliament
now, so I don’t want to get involved and maybe get my pension cut off.

We knew all about the Resistance; but even if they slit the throats of our dear ones we would never breathe a word, even if we were nationalists back then. Mother sent me to find Signor Alfio before it was too late, but I couldn’t find him. So they held her, questioned her for five hours in the Carabineria, even beat her, and her seven months pregnant. Fortunately Signor Alfio finally appears, I know the signora from the TTT, he says, she’s all right. And the whole time that dingbat Kanello is screaming at them, Let me out of here, it’s my shift, I’ll get fined! Finally they let her go. She lost one of her shoes in the beating – we all wore clogs with thick wood soles back then – and when they told her, Get going, off with you, she hustled down the stairs as fast as her legs would carry her. 

When she reaches the street she realizes she only has one shoe. Corporal, give me back my shoe! she shouts. An upstairs window pops open and the clog comes flying out, hits her smack on the forehead, you wonder how it didn’t knock the poor woman out – those women’s clogs weighed a good five pounds each. Anyway, she slips on her shoe and stalks off swearing, with a goose-egg this big on her forehead, cursing Italy up and down like you can’t imagine.

Like I say, all the women wore open-heeled wooden shoes back then: you tell me where were we supposed to find shoe leather – any kind of leather – for soles? When all their pre-war shoes wore out, the women changed over to clogs. Before, the only people who ever wore them were washerwomen, poor washerwomen at that, to keep from slipping on the soapsuds. But during the Occupation they were all the rage, even ladies from the best
families
just had to wear them. They made the soles from a solid piece of wood, with thick, high heels that looked something like upside-down castle turrets, and the uppers they wove into
patterns
taken from curtain material: then the women would take them to the shoemaker and he would tack them together, and hey presto, you’d have your year-round open-toe, open-heel model. In wintertime women wore them with long woollen stockings plus ankle socks against the cold: chilblains were the biggest problem. And when you’d get three women walking down the street together, the Italians would rush out on to the balcony of the Carabineria with their guns at the ready. The drumming of clogs on the pavement sounded like a machine-gun going off. Not to mention the howls of pain from inside the houses from sprains and twisted ankles and suchlike. What did they really want with those massive five-inch wood heels anyway? So you take the high heels and hunger, and people got so dizzy that the streets were full of women with dislocated joints, high society ladies too. Me, I wore clogs for the first time just before the
socalled
Liberation, when I began to be a little miss. 

Six weeks after the beating Mrs Kanello gave birth. The pains came at night but it was curfew; what a dingbat, always doing things topsy-turvy, just how were they supposed to fetch her mother all the way from the other side of Rampartville? Sure, Plastourgos’s wife volunteered. She was a trained
midwife
and as honest as they come. Lived close by too, but the women didn’t trust her. She was too educated they said and, worse yet, she was too young: they wanted somebody with plenty of experience. Fortunately Signor Alfio was just leaving our place so he escorted me over to fetch her mother, who
delivered
her just fine. The old lady had me stay to boil water but when I opened the door to hand her the kettle she cursed me for bringing an Italian to her house. Now people will say I’ve taken an enemy of the Motherland for a lover, she said. Anyway, the baby came out just as fine as you could wish, a little boy. That’s my last one, said Mrs Kanello. How was she supposed to know she’d have yet another one when the war was over, when Scobie was running the country.

Bright and early next morning Kanello is up and around, suckles her newborn, swaddles it and then herself; around ten she picks up her lunch bucket and an extra cooking pot and is just about to go out the door. Her mother is furious: You
heathen
, you’re not going out? You still got thirty-nine days to go, you’re unclean! But just try and hold her back, unclean or not: she wasn’t about to miss the Red Cross soup kitchen.

The lady neighbours – Aphrodite’s mother and the
Tiritombas
, you know, the impresario’s family – spot her queuing for her portion of porridge, looking pale as a sheet and thin as a rail. Padded belly or no padded belly, it was no use: she was
ash-white
from loss of blood and her eyes were glazed over. She did her best to walk like Scipius Africanus but she couldn’t stand up straight. What’s the matter? the impresario’s wife asks her. What happened to your belly? They prod her and poke her just to make sure, then carry her back home, and she’s braying the 
whole way back about losing her ration. Just then Mother comes out on to the street. What with Signor Alfio she didn’t have to queue at the soup kitchen. I’d go instead, with ration coupons; Sotiris was gone but we used his coupon anyway. So what, if it was illegal? The Red Cross ladies gave me his portion. They couldn’t imagine how a cute little girl like me could be cheating them.

While Mrs Kanello was recovering my mother put in her first appearance at the food line, to pick up her rations for her. At first the Red Cross ladies drove her away, but Signor Alfio went over and told them something in a low voice and they dished up the rations for Kanello’s family without saying a word; in fact, they even threw in an extra spoonful. It went on that way for a whole week, which was how long Mrs Kanello was bedridden. The other women in the queue made nasty remarks about Mother, here comes the collaborator, they’d hiss. Well, maybe we were collaborators, but Aphrodite’s mother and the
Tiritomba
family took our side. Poor Aphrodite, she couldn’t come to the food queue any more because she’d just come down with consumption.

Just as soon the new mother could get around, Ma stopped going to the soup line. But Mrs Kanello, she talked to us, treated us like human beings, even when they humiliated Mother in public right after the so-called Liberation. Anyway, before we knew it, she was back on her feet, caring for Aphrodite too. The girl’s consumption was getting worse by the day, but she kept on crocheting her doilies. One day Kanello tried to convince some village yokels to sell her a little olive oil. He kicked her out. Believe you me, was she fuming! On the way back to give Aphrodite’s Ma the bad news, she runs into the daughter of the local newsstand owner, Koupas was the guy’s name. Koupas’ brood mare, we called her; well-built and plump she was, and as far as we were concerned that made her just about the
best-looking
woman in town. Get a load of the fat oozing off her, the 
men would say, drooling. But she wouldn’t so much as glance at a man because she was shacked up with an Italian officer.
Anyway
, Mrs Kanello spies her coming down the street, shaking and shimmying, and out of the blue she grabs her and starts pounding her for all she’s worth. And the poor girl stands there whining, Why are you hitting me, Madam? Who are you? Have we been introduced? What did I ever do to you? Introduced or not, fires back Kanello. Take that, you fat cow!

That was the best she could do for Aphrodite. And
meantime
, the poor kid was getting weaker and weaker.

Aphrodite, now there was a real beauty for you. With a real bust. She and her mother crocheted lace for other girls’ dowries, but come the Occupation the customers dried up. I never had much of a bust myself, before or after the Liberation, and later when I was in the theatre, you know, my various lovers and admirers really let me hear about it, teeny tits they called me. Not only did Aphrodite have a bust, she had lovely skin, the colour of ripe grapes, and clear blue eyes, the only pair of blue eyes in the district, all the rest of us were darkies. Me, I only turned blonde since the Dictatorship. She had this warm laugh and hair that seemed to curl in the wind. A gorgeous girl. But six months after she got consumption all that was left of her was a shrivelled up sack of skin, like some saintly relic. Even her eyes went pale. Ma would take her margarine whenever Signor Alfio brought us some, but the girl kept getting thinner and thinner. Her knees where thicker than her thighs. Be brave my little one, her ma would tell her as they crocheted away, We’re almost there, Mr Churchill says so. That was because we heard over the underground radio that Churchill was winning and Hitler was losing. Mrs Kanello told us the same thing when she’d come back from her ammunition delivery outings with a basketful of wild artichokes. She had bats in her belfry, that woman. One day, so she said, as she’s slogging along bent double under the load, she reaches the top of a little hill. All around her, nature 
(what does nature care about people’s troubles, anyway?) is dolled up in its Sunday best; she turns to Salome and says, I’m going to celebrate, and blow off a hand-grenade. Been carrying them all this time, never once heard one of them go off. So she climbs up the hill, pulls the pin – that’s what she called it – and heaves the grenade down the hill. All springtime echoes with the explosion. In fact, one of the strings on Salome’s mandolin pops. Then two German soldiers come dashing out of the swamp at the bottom of the hill, underpants down to their boot tops; they must’ve been performing some unnatural act or other when the grenade went off. The Germans officers wouldn’t let the soldiers go with local women, that’s why they had to satisfy each other, so people said.

Mrs Kanello’s front window was bright and sunny all day long. Later, when our Fanis came down with adenoids because he grew too fast and had to spend most of his time in bed, Mrs Kanello would invite him over and sit him down in the window, The sun’s full of calories, nothing like it for what ails you, she said. We gave him a medicine called antipyrine, something like quinine powder but bright yellow and bitter. Our front window got no sunlight. We only had one floor and it was behind the church.

That’s when Mrs Kanello got it into her head to bring Aphrodite over for some sunlight. But Aphrodite didn’t care about anything any more, all she did was smile that faint smile of hers. She didn’t even care that she wasn’t getting any news from her father in the partisans. Plus in addition we had some unseasonal rain storms. Aphrodite would sit for hours on end at her window, with the curtains half-drawn, staring off into the distance, seeing nothing. As her condition got worse, her mother had to lift her up and carry her over to her chair. For hours on end she would draw invisible shapes on the window glass with her fingertip. I waved at her from the street as I went by, but I don’t think she even saw me.

In the meantime the Tiritombas family left town, on tour, believe it or not. I’ll get around to that in a minute, it’s a whole story in itself. If you can imagine. A whole company going on the road on account of a goat!

We weren’t hungry any more. Not that we were living like royalty, mind you, but with what little Signor Alfio brought us every week we managed to stay on our feet, and little Fanis got over his adenoids. Signor Alfio kept on seeing Mother: better for him than going to some streetwalker not to mention no worry about venereal diseases. Besides, he was married back home plus he was shy, he couldn’t have made it with a whore, also he loved his wife, and praised her to the skies whenever he talked to us. So that’s why he preferred to satisfy his sexual needs with a nice clean-living little housewife.

Leave the house? Mother wouldn’t hear of it – except maybe the odd evening when Mrs Kanello invited her over for some chit-chat, or maybe to help hang out the washing. Meanwhile, the toughest regulations were lifted; the conquerors realized we were law-abiding subjects, the curfew didn’t begin until
midnight
. The movies started up again: now it was all German operettas, of course, with Marika Rökk, and those Hungarian tear-jerkers with Pal Javor and Katalin Karady, plus the odd Italian item.

Fanis and me would go to the movies together. Signor
Vittorio
would get us in for free, he was from the Carabineria too – a replacement. Signor Alfio had gone back to his home country by then. It was cheap, general admission – only five million. Nothing, really, when you think that a box of matches went for three million, but where were we supposed to find the money? Anyway, I stuffed Fanis’s pocket full of raisins and off we went to the five o’clock show. Before we went in we asked old Uncle Grigoris at the ticket window, Any food? And if he nodded yes, then we went in.

Because we only went to the movies that showed food. 
Nobody ever ate a bite in the tear-jerkers. But in the operettas there were always banquet scenes, tables piled high with food, while the leads just talked, and no one ate, hardly touched a bite. It was so bad one day a man shouted out at Willy Frisch up on the screen, Eat something, for God’s sake! People came to drool over the food scenes, and they burst out laughing. But this
German
soldier, he thought they were insulting the fatherland, so he ripped the man out of his seat and beat him.