Eleni (29 page)

“Let me test it,” said Kitso Haidis, “before you children poison yourselves!”

As everyone watched in suspense, he bit into one. Under the bright shell was chocolate and a peanut. “Better taste another to be sure,” he said. He kept on tasting until the bottle was empty.

If Kitso got the candy, the girls got the expensive ties that Christos had meant for him. They thought the bright lengths of silk must be fashionable new belts, and wound them around their waists while their girl friends gritted their teeth in envy.

For the three oldest girls there were fine crocodile shoes with funny-looking high heels. They were as tricky as stilts, and Olga broke hers the first time she wore them up the mountain to the brook where the women beat the laundry.

The greatest mystery of all was a large colorful bunch of feathers at the end of a stick. No one knew what it was, but it glowed with tawny hues of orange and red. Eleni found a glass vase and put the thing in the center of the table in the good chamber.

People began to arrive from as far away as Babouri. They were led into the room where the feather duster reigned, upside down in the vase. Like a bouquet of flowers, but it never dies, they said. They think of everything in America.

Eleni found something to fill every visitor’s hands—a pair of stockings, a handkerchief, a length of fabric, or some of the precious aspirins. For days, people came to admire. “What wonderful things,
Kyria
Eleni!” they all marveled. “You are the luckiest family in the village!” And they would go away clutching a bit of the riches.

Some weeks later, on a day so hot that the dust did not move and the cicadas screamed, Eleni put Nikola on the mule, Merjo, and headed into the center of town to buy some supplies with the money Christos had sent. When she got there, Spiro Michopoulos called out to her from his
cafenion
. The postman had left a letter for her from America.

Eleni’s sense of good fortune evaporated when she read Christos’ letter, bitter with anger and accusations. Her father, Kitso, had written him demanding five hundred British sovereigns as payment for feeding the family during the occupation, he told her. “I was prepared to take care of your parents for the rest of their lives,” Christos wrote, “which you told me was the agreement you had with your father. I sent them all those clothes and gifts in gratitude, and now he’s demanding a fortune in gold! What kind of trick is this? Why did you get me knitted into such a problem? If I pay him, I’ll be broke and can’t afford to bring you and the children over.”

Eleni’s mind spun. How could her father have written such a letter without telling her? Shopping was forgotten as she led the mule with Nikola upon it toward her father’s mill, where he was living until he got his house rebuilt.

Kitso was unmoved by her rage. Yes, he’d written the letter, he said and shrugged. Rebuilding the house was eating up everything he had. He was an old man—too old to keep working the mill. He wanted to open his own business, a store in the Alonia, and that’s why he needed the sovereigns. “Your husband owes me for what I did for you,” he concluded.

Eleni accused him of exploiting his own daughter and grandchildren to get rich.

“I kept you alive!” he answered brusquely. “Can you deny that?”

She ached to slap him the way he had so often hit her. Choking back tears, she accused him of being a greedy, selfish old man who cared for no one but himself.

Nikola saw how his mother stormed out of his grandfather’s house and swatted Merjo sharply with the switch, a hard, distant look on her face. The animal lurched slowly into a walk. The great white mule, big as a horse, was nearly blind with age; his legs were stiff and scabby and he was always reluctant when the path lay up the mountain.

Eleni did not speak as they passed the ruins of the Haidis house and continued up. She felt caught like a hare in a hunter’s trap between her father and her husband, the metal teeth puncturing her skin, grinding toward the bone. All she had wanted was to keep her children alive, any way she could, and now the two men who should have protected her were both angry at her.

Just below the Church of St. Demetrios, where the narrow path cut between two large boulders, Merjo came to a complete stop. Eleni struck him on the flanks, but he seemed to go into a trance, standing like the rocks on either side, saliva dripping from his lips, his rheumy eyes glazed.

She shouted fiercely at Nikola to slide off, then began beating the stick on the mule’s flanks with all her strength, shrieking curses at him as if he could understand her. The stick splintered, but Merjo’s only movement was to lay back his ears with an expression of malicious stupidity.

Something snapped in Eleni’s mind and suddenly she was sobbing and
hurling stones against the immobile white flanks until a trickle of blood appeared. She scrabbled for more stones and threw them blindly.

I backed away, terrified by the sight of my mother suddenly turned into a madwoman, screaming and hurling stones at the old mule who stood there, immobile as a mountain. The sight of this raging anger coming from the one person who had always given me security and love was more frightening than an unexpected attack from anyone else. I was sure the mule had done something terrible when I wasn’t looking that set her off like this, and I was even more afraid that I would inadvertently anger her too and have that murderous rage directed at me. Too frightened to cry, I ran up and threw my arms around her, begging, “Please stop it,
Mana!
Merjo didn’t mean it!”

She looked at me in surprise, as if she had forgotten about my existence. When she saw how frightened I was, the anger seemed to drain from her. She collapsed on the ground, burying her face in her arms and sobbing. I could see that the fury was gone and hugged her, trying to console her, but she wept uncontrollably. I began to understand that it was not the mule who had driven her into this frenzy, but something that concerned my grandfather.

Neither my mother nor I ever told my sisters about the moment when she lost control and attacked the mule. Later, guilty about her outburst, she blamed herself unreasonably for Merjo’s fate. When I was old enough to understand the pressures tormenting my mother at that moment, I was surprised that her frustrations didn’t explode more often. Looking back, I was glad that once, during that brief respite between the wars, she allowed herself the indulgence of collapsing.

She was brought up to be dependent on others and was so sensitive that in 1937 she became ill from her unhappiness. But when the world war broke out and her personal problems were overshadowed by the necessity to keep us alive, my mother never allowed herself to break down. And when, after that brief two-year period of tranquillity, civil war erupted, bringing with it torments that drove many others to despair or madness, she would never permit herself to take refuge in weakness again.

A week or so later the family found Merjo on his knees in the stable, unable to get up under the weight of his twenty-two years. His eyes were clouded and he made no sound. They burned straw under his nostrils but he didn’t move. They pried open his great bloodless lips and poured in camomile tea but he wouldn’t swallow. As the sun rose higher, his head sank to the floor. At the end a terrible ague seized him until, like an oak falling, he rolled over dead. Eleni started to cry, and Nikola and Fotini, seeing her tears, began to wail. Olga watched with amusement. “He’s only a mule—an old mule!” she shouted. “What are you all carrying on about?”

“He was like one of the family!” Eleni said, trying to explain her grief. “When you were babies, he carried you. He went through the war with us.”

Olga pointed out that the carcass would stiffen quickly, and they’d never fit it through the door of the stable. Eleni sent Fotini for Andreas and began tying a rope under the animal’s forelegs. When her brother-in-law came, they managed to drag the corpse out the door, the legs bumping awkwardly against the doorjamb, but once they reached the rocky path, they couldn’t budge it any further.

Still shaking with sobs, Eleni tied another rope around Merjo’s hind legs and directed Olga and Kanta, who had been found hiding in the outhouse, to start pulling. The mule’s body jackknifed, and with much yanking and angry shouting, they managed to force him through the gate. By now most of the neighborhood had come out to see the reason for the uproar and began shouting encouragement.

It was only about three hundred yards up and over to a great cliff on the western edge of the village, but it took an hour to inch the great white carcass that far. Olga and Andreas were laughing while the others wept. The neighbors followed behind like a real funeral procession.

As they dragged the mule to the edge, Fotini’s playmate, seven-year-old Alexandra Bollis, came down the path and took in the lugubrious scene. She had been taught by her mother what to say in such situations. She came up to the family, who were drenched with sweat and breathing hard. “May his death bring you life and may he prepare the way to Paradise ahead of you,” she chirped solemnly, extending her hand to Eleni. The onlookers burst out laughing and Eleni threw back her head and laughed with them, tears still wet on her face.

They all crouched down facing the ravine, put their hands on Merjo’s back, and with one last “Heave!” pushed him over the edge. At first it seemed he wouldn’t go, then slowly, as a shower of stones preceded him into the great emptiness, the mule rolled majestically off the cliff and revolved in the air, legs extended like twigs. Over and over he turned, diminishing in size until, with the dull sound of a wine skin, he settled into the underbrush far below, and a cloud of dust and startled birds flew up in his wake. There he lay, until the vultures and crows picked his bones clean.

In July, Eleni was distracted from the gloom caused by Merjo’s death and the estrangement with her father by the news of Stavroula Yakou’s engagement.

Stavroula was the tallest and handsomest maiden in the village, but no one expected her to marry, for her family was at the bottom of the social ladder, and she had no hope of a decent dowry. When Stavroula was only seven, her father, Panayiotis, a tinker, had gone on a working trip to Kalambaka at the foot of the great Meteora crags and discovered that there were women there with perfumed hair and oiled bodies who would give him
sex for money. That’s when Panayiotis decided not to return to Lia and his rough-skinned wife Anastasia.

Anastasia had barely managed to keep herself and the two little girls alive doing housekeeping and farming chores for others. The sight of her knocking on doors and begging for work had always filled Eleni with a sympathetic terror, imagining herself in the same position. Before the war cut off her money, she regularly hired Anastasia to help with the chores and never passed her house without dropping off a gift of oil or sugar.

Because of her poverty and her father’s scandalous behavior, Stavroula seemed destined to become an old maid, but besides being a beauty, Stavroula was a woman of spirit, and if there was any escape from her plight, she meant to find it.

Salvation presented itself in the person of Dimitri Dangas, who had grown up in a house only five hundred yards from Stavroula’s but now worked in a bakery in Khalkis on the Euboean Straits, fifty miles north of Athens. Dimitri, a tall, polite, personable lad, was younger than Stavroula, and one of the few in the village even taller than she was. He had curly black hair and high cheekbones, and his father, who had a tinker’s shop in Khalkis, had managed to find him the fine job in the bakery, a guarantee of security—for who had ever heard of a baker starving?

Dimitri had come home for a visit during the annual festival of the Prophet Elias and happened to pass by the millstream where on Saturday mornings the women of the Perivoli gathered to boil, beat and wash their laundry while they caught up on the latest gossip.

His eyes were drawn to the figure of Stavroula, beating some homespun dresses on the ferny bank. Her sleeves were rolled up, and the sun, filtering through the overhanging plane trees, touched the golden fuzz on her round arms as she raised and lowered the flat paddle. Her kerchief had slipped back, and wisps of her hair clung moistly to her cheeks. Gold against white, Dimitri thought, like the gilded crusty loaves he made from the finest white flour. He stepped on a dry stick, and Stavroula turned around, leveling on him the full force of her azure eyes. He was as hopelessly bewitched as if she had fed him a love potion made of the combined milk taken from a mother and daughter who were both nursing at the same time.

Dimitri waited by Stavroula’s gate for her to pass with the freshly laundered clothes. She did not snub his greeting, despite her mother’s admonitions, for she sensed an opportunity.

Soon Stavroula was finding frequent need to visit her girl friends or go to the outhouse at night, and during moments snatched from these outings, she and Dimitri would meet. Because she knew that his parents would oppose the match, Stavroula advised Dimitri to come personally to ask her mother for her hand instead of sending a go-between. He went, and despite the unorthodoxy of having a groom speak for himself, poor Anastasia was only too glad to promise her twenty-two-year-old daughter to this handsome man who did not mention a dowry.

When presented with the fact of her son’s engagement, Dimitri’s mother, Alexandra Dangas, wept, pleaded and threatened. She wrote his father in Khalkis, who wrote back: “Of all the respectable doors that there are in Lia, couldn’t you have found one to knock on?”

But Dimitri could see no farther than the blue depths of Stavroula’s eyes. He threatened to take his love with him and go away forever if his parents didn’t agree to the marriage. His mother rapidly gave ground at this threat. To never see Dimitri again would be death itself! She forced herself to look on the bright side of things: Stavroula was a big, strong girl. She would make fine grandchildren and be useful around the house. It was time for her to reap the rewards due a mother-in-law after all those decades of slavery.

The mother-in-law was the cross that every Greek village bride had to bear, taking comfort in the knowledge that, God willing, someday she would be a mother-in-law herself. It was customary in Lia for the bride to spend her wedding night sleeping not with her new husband, but with his mother, to dramatize whose property she was.