Authors: Pavlos Matesis
The Germans stood there, smiling. And we stood there.
And then poor little Fanis comes running out of the crowd and makes for the middle of the square, ungainly as a plucked chicken. We stand there petrified. Little Fanis looks at Mother with a faint smile on his face and makes a bee-line for the
potatoes
and picks up all three of them. Nobody makes a move, then the smiling German with the machine-gun leaps down and smashes the boy’s hand with his rifle-butt. The potatoes
tumble
to the ground. Fanis bends down to pick them up and the rifle-butt comes smashing down on his fingers over and over again. I’m sure I could hear the bones snapping, but people say I’m being silly whenever I tell the story. The boy is howling now and all together, as one, we move forward. But the other three Germans take aim at us; I hear the click as they cock their rifles. We freeze again. The soldier with the machine-gun has it trained on us again. And in the middle of the square the kid is writhing and flailing around like a chicken with its head cut off. His hand was twisted backwards in the direction of his elbow. Then the Germans go back to work. Three Greek men take a step towards the kid, the Germans bring their rifles to the ready again, and the Greeks step back, while the little boy is still
dancing
around in the middle of the square.
And then Mrs Kanello steps out of the crowd and heads toward Fanis. My mother is about to faint. Holy Mother of God, his hand, she cries, and I’m trying to keep her upright but half of her is leaning against me and the other half on the ground. I’m doing all I can but she slips out of my hands and
falls. The soldiers pick up their guns again and aim at Mrs Kanello but she just keeps on walking towards our little boy as if she was God almighty. She kneels and takes him in her arms, she was wearing long black stockings, before the war the poor people wore them for mourning but come the Occupation who could be bothered with the niceties, bury them fast and get it over with, so the merchants sold off their stockings – nothing but useless surplus it was. As she kneels down to take the boy in her embrace, her stockings tear at the knee and run all the way to her ankle, I recall. A German comes up to her with a pistol, I can remember the dialogue to this very day, word for word.
German: Little boy of you?
Mrs Kanello: Yes. Of me little boy.
German: Him thief. Punish.
And the German turns on his heel and grinds the potatoes into the dirt, one at a time.
Mrs Kanello is kneeling there with one knee in the gravel, the boy’s head resting on her other knee. As a matter of fact, you could see the white flesh above her stocking tops. We didn’t have proper garters back then, they made their appearance
during
the Civil War. I remember just like yesterday how white her thighs were, there above her stockings. I wanted to help my brother but I was scared to death, besides, I was holding my mother’s head.
Meantime the German crushes the last potato. Slowly Mrs Kanello gets to her feet, begins to drag the boy over towards us as best she can, of course; she was as hungry as everybody else, suckled her kids until they were five when there was no bread to eat. But suddenly rage overwhelms her and she cuts loose at the Germans.
‘So he’s a thief?’ she says. ‘Me, I’m a thief too! And all these people, they’re nothing but thieves,’ and she points to us Greeks. ‘We’re all thieves. But what’re you? You call yourselves a country? Well, you’re nothing but a tribe. Your fatherland? I
shit on it. Your flag? I spit on it! I dance on the grave that waits for your kids! Us, thieves? Maybe so. But we didn’t build Dachau. We didn’t build Belsen!’
Mrs Kanello knew what she was talking about, she’d been to party meetings. But the German couldn’t have understood Greek much more than those few words of his.
Then she picks up the boy in her arms and strides towards us in a towering rage, turning her back on the German, as if exhausted, and he picks up his rifle and shouts: Halt! And Mrs Kanello never even turns to look at him, just speaks, her eyes on us all the while.
‘You want to shoot me?’ she says. ‘Go ahead, shoot. All you’re good for is shootin’ women. Screw them you sure as hell can’t.’
There she stood motionless. There stood the Germans. And us. Then, fearlessly, she turns back towards him (I was shitting my pants I was so scared, she told me dozens of years later) and lights into him.
‘What’s wrong? Come on, shoot! Get it over with. No food for three days and my kids are all over me because I can’t feed them and Churchill with his baloney over the radio – come on, shoot, I need the rest, I can’t take any more. Three days without food in my own house! Your women have enough to eat, I hear, well, may you never be buried in your own soil, may the vultures eat your balls! Your women, all they do is stuff themselves and make lampshades out of human skin! Go on, you son of a bitch, shoot! You too, the rest of you!’ and she gestures at the other Germans, their fingers on the trigger. ‘Shoot, you assfucking queers, fucking yourselves so you won’t dirty yourselves on the Greek girls. Shoot! But one of these days you’re gonna pay! The Muscovite is coming – you know the song? You’ll puke it all up, every last bit.’
‘Unfortunately, Mrs Kanello,’ I tell her at Mum’s memorial service as we’re talking over the past, ‘the Germans never paid us back. Not then, and not now. We never even asked them.
Look how they’re our precious allies today, and oh so politely they let our men go to work for them, and in the United Nations they snap their fingers and we come running. We win the war, and them, they’re back on top.’
‘Us, win the war, Roubini?’ says Mrs Kanello, ‘you call that winning the war?’ And she broke down and cried. But at Mum’s funeral she didn’t shed a tear. Only at her husband’s funeral, but never mind, I won’t say a thing about that.
So Mrs Kanello turns her back on the Kraut and starts towards us.
He didn’t shoot. Meantime, Father Dinos had somehow got wind of the situation: there he came, full steam ahead, all decked out in his vestments – he’d left in the middle of a
wedding
– with his chasuble flapping in the wind. He came to a stop without a word. Mrs Kanello comes over, Get up Asimina, she tells my ma, we got to look after the kid’s hand, no time for fainting. Off we go to her house, me following along holding our little boy’s crushed hand. Straight up the stairs we go, rip up some old rags, and straighten out Fanis’s hand, and he doesn’t let out a peep, can you imagine?
I didn’t have a clue what was going on outside; I was holding the washbasin while we rinsed off his hand with boric acid and camomile. Seemed like thanks to Father Dinos the Germans were gone. With the potatoes. O thank you so much, holy father, says Aphrodite’s ma. Stuff it Mrs Fanny, snaps the reverend father. And he sends out an order for everyone in the parish to turn out for Sunday service; there he reads out a curse and an anathema on the whole Liakopoulos clan. Why, at the
Polytechnic
Institute during the dictatorship, if even one asshole of a bishop stands up on his own hind feet, you wouldn’t have had the tanks breaking into the Polytechnic, Mrs Fanny told me later, back in Athens. But I don’t want to get mixed up in politics.
So finally the kid comes around, Run and call the doctor, Mrs Kanello tells me. But as I’m on my way down, who should I see
coming up the stairs but Doctor Manolaras. Someone had passed the word. He unwrapped our crude bandage, felt the hand. Nothing serious, he said, quit yelling. A couple of broken bones, that’s all. He had gauze bandages and Mum broke off a stick from our garden fence and we set it up as a splint. Now give him something to eat: he shouldn’t move his hand for a week, use your other hand when you peepee, he told Fanis, and the boy blushed. He won’t lose the hand, but it’ll always be crooked.
The doctor gave him an injection, he was always injecting the hind ends of the just and the unjust with that Red Cross surplus of his. Then he said goodbye and left.
And we picked up our little boy to leave. Mother could barely look Mrs Kanello in the eye, I’m so sorry for all the problems we caused you, she said, your stockings are all torn and it’s all on account of us.
‘And you, you go showing off your thighs so the whole town can see,’ pipes up her husband from the next room, as if he was dishonoured. Saw the whole thing from the little window in the toilet, he did. But Mrs Kanello didn’t answer back; she always respected him.
We took the boy home.
Time passed and the hand got better but it was twisted for good. Couldn’t make a fist. After the Civil War, or was it a little before? Doc Manolaras – by now he was elected to parliament – took him on as a hired hand at his spread on one of the islands. That’s where he works to this day, Fanis does, as foreman and quite a spread it is, too; you’ll have a job with me for life, the doctor promised, and he kept his promise. So Fanis is doing just fine, even if I never see him. Every year I send him a card on his name day, drop it off at Doc Manolaras’ office. I don’t have to buy stamps that way. He can’t answer, seeing as how his right hand is the twisted hand, but I get all the news from Doc Manolaras, he’s been our family MP since way back then, for life
I guess you could say. If only I could latch on with a road show, I’d say to myself, and stop over on his island, so the kid could see me on stage before he dies. What kid? He’s past sixty now. And what do you think he asks me to send him, just the other day, the scallywag? Potatoes. And staring up Mrs Kanello’s thigh when he came to? A real Greek, what can you do?
Whenever I think back to the episode with the potatoes and the garters, and I see my own suspender belts hanging from the little line over the bathtub (I’ve got a second pair), I say to myself, Honey pie, when it comes to wrapping a man around your little finger, us modern-day vamps, we’ve got it all. Take toilet paper. I mean, back then newspaper was all we had for wiping ourselves, and I’m talking about our kind of girls,
well-groomed
girls with self-respect. Even in the bathrooms of the finest homes in Rampartville you wouldn’t find toilet paper. Only newspaper. I should know because I worked in more than a couple of homes like that after the so-called Liberation.
Newspaper
cut up into little squares with scissors all nice and neat (I did the cutting), but newspaper all the same. It was God’s
miracle
that we got as far as we did with the men, considering we put out and still kept our virginity up front. Ah, the little ditties we used to sing back before toilet paper! Not to mention
underarm
deodorant. How did we ever manage to turn mens’ heads when we had so little to work with I’ll never know. And today all the girls want to talk about is solitude and angst and now they’ve got all the deodorants and creams and I don’t know what else for the most confidential uses. Us, we used cotton sheets cut in the shape of a ‘T’ over and over again until they wore out. Plus we hung out our washing over the balcony or in the yard and
everyone
in the neighborhood knew our time of the month. Well you can just imagine the gossip, seeing as how some of the local women were keeping track. Why, you heard things like, Did you see, Karatsolias’s wife is late with her monthlies? Nothing on the line today, what’s going on? maybe she’s in a family way?
Today, nobody can tell one way or the other. Sure, sure, no more flowers that bloom in the springtime for me, I know that’s what you’re thinking. But I still buy the sanitary pads just so I can see the look on you-know-whose face. Still, they’re like a little friend sitting there in my handbag, even if I don’t use them all that much.
Us modern-day charmers we’re spoiled so rotten we don’t know what’s good for us, all the different creams we can pick and choose between, every drugstore’s got at least ten different brands. Plus they’ve even got European toilet paper, every roll costs as much as new release cinema ticket. Saw it in one of those high-class uptown supermarkets. Not that I do my
shopping
there, but whenever I get over one of my fits I ring up one of my neighbours and we head for the supermarket just to blow off steam; what a sight. We make like we’re buying, we load the shopping cart full to overflowing then we just leave it standing there and walk out.
Not to mention all the nice people you run into in the
supermarket
. Stars even. TV stars. I mean, not real stars of the stage: still, they’re stars all the same, though. Furthermore, you can check out the exotic foods; why, they’ve even got canned goods from Japan; makes you sick to your stomach. Reminds me from the outside of the canned food we used to get from the English when we were in high school; I was back in school by then, for a couple of years. They came driving up in their trucks and handed out the food themselves, because the Prefect went and stole the first load himself, right after the so-called Liberation.
Some of the canned food came from UNRRA, some was army rations. If you were lucky you got UNRRA: they were chock full of food. The army rations had a chocolate bar, a cookie, a razor blade and a condom. Truckloads of English
soldiers
would drive up and hand out the food in the break, they were all blond and cheerful but they still looked a lot like the Greeks with those low-slung behinds of theirs. We kids blew up
the condoms and the whole high school was full of cheery
balloons
. Our singing teacher managed to snatch one of the good ones out of my hand before I could puff it up. Once in a while we’d even blow them up in class, during the physics and
chemistry
lessons mostly. One day I went home waving a blown-up condom just as pleased as punch, taking care nobody would pop it and, when Mother saw me, did she ever give me a whipping.
Anyway, a trip to the supermarket makes you feel better than going to the park, where there’s nothing but little kids talking dirty and calling you auntie. At the supermarket you can keep in touch with things, social-wise; when I’m going up and down the aisles it makes me feel as if our royal family is still ruling, reminds me just a little of those German operettas at the movies back during the Occupation, the ones with all the food. Plus going up and down the aisles is a lot better than any
tranquillizer
, which are pretty expensive, still, God bless my medical insurance plan.