The Daughter (18 page)

The first collaborators to pay the price were Madame Rita and Siloam.

Madame Rita was a whore by profession. Rita was a
pseudonym
, Vassiliki was her real name. Madame Rita was the most respectable whore in Rampartville. A real star she was, I copied a lot of her tricks later on in my acting career. She had her own brothel, but she did call-out work too. For the Germans mostly, at the Crystal Fountain restaurant where I took her the holy bread from Father Dinos that time during the Occupation. The rumour was they had relations, that Father Dinos, he was a real skirt-chaser, plus his wife was super-religious. Plan too.

When Rita went by in the street all the honest women crossed themselves. Holy Virgin protect us from such a fall, Ma said one time, right in front of Mrs Kanello. That was back in the Signor Alfio days. No smart remarks from Mrs Kanello, though; she never looked down on Ma because she was seeing two Italians.

Madame Rita was a public official. Swished around like a church bishop, she did. Everybody greeted her in the street, 
even the judges, and as she walked along she was glancing right and left and making a mental note when someone didn’t say hello. A man ignored her at his risks and perils, and if he did. Madame Rita tore into him right there in public, in the middle of the market with curses to make your hair stand on end, reminded him how many times he visited her girls, at half price even. Only accepted high-ranking civil servants, she did. And military men, from captain up.

Me, back before the war, I got goose bumps when I saw her, how grand she was. Only two people gave me goose bumps as a kid, Madame Rita and the queen, when I saw her for the first time. Unfortunately, we never met again. She came to
Rampartville
on the royal tour, still only the wife of the heir to the throne she was, so the little people would fall in love with her. There was such a huge crowd at the welcoming ceremony, we lost track of Ma. The crowd kept pushing us back until we ended up in the very last row, Daddy hoisted me on to his
shoulders
, Look at the queen, he was shouting, look at the queen. There was a big crowd and we were all the way to the back, and Daddy never even saw her in the end, being so short as he was, but he was weeping with devotion. Madame Rita was there too, even though she wasn’t with the dignitaries. Greeted the
Prefect
even; smart man, he returns the greeting, How are you, Madame Rita, and how is business?

After Liberation they demolished half her brothel to make an example of her, and took away her permit for a whole year. But she opened right up again when the Allies arrived, thanks to our member of parliament Doc Manolaras; he was still a doctor back then. In fact later on she added three extra rooms on to the main brothel with money from the Marshall Plan people said, from the budget for war reparations, claimed it was destroyed in the bombing, all of that during the Tsaldaris administration.

That was how Madame Rita was punished for collaborating with the Enemy. 

Siloam was the other one.

Siloam was a tailor. He only went with men and didn’t even hide it. Stelios was his real name, I didn’t know what it meant, ‘going with men’, or why they gave him a woman’s name (Picked it out myself, dear, he tells Mrs Adrianna latterly; everybody who comes up to me, I want them to know what I fancy, not going around afterwards saying I lied to them. Like a sign in a shop window so people know what they’re getting and who they’re getting it from. You’ve got to tell the truth.)

Siloam was nowhere near as grand as Madame Rita. But he was good natured and a bit of a sad sack, nobody was scared of him, or should I say her? Everybody who went by he greeted with deep bows, as if he was begging their pardon and they were obliging him by saying hello. Orphaned from age thirty, he was, and he kept his hair combed into a pompadour.

A first-class tailor though, took pride in his work and if he wanted to swear on something, he said ‘by my scissors’. Just how good a tailor, Doc Manolaras told my father, back before the war. And a useful man to have around; he was the one who made men out of most of the boys of Rampartville, on top of him was where our young men learned their lessons. Seeing as the girls were all honest and they never went with a man before marriage, first they got married and then they took a lover.

Anyway, nobody bothered him. Seems he knew plenty of secrets; many of the worthiest married men of Rampartville served their apprenticeship with Siloam. God forfend I should ever say a word! he used to say, Ass may not have bones but it surely can break bones.

Collaborated with the Occupiers too. Come the Liberation they arrested him but in jail he cooperated with the partisans so they let him go. After, the X-men arrested him but in jail he cooperated with the X-men so they didn’t ship him away.

When you come right down to it we never did figure out what Siloam’s real political beliefs were, if he was left wing or
royalist
 
maybe. They were influenced by his emotions of the moment. He was in love with a partisan? Well, you got a lecture about Marx and a little embroidered hammer and sickles. He was head over heels with an X-man? You’d find him wearing a little crown pinned to his lapel. But he was no double-dealer, he stood up for his beliefs every time. Once during the Occupation he even gave me an egg. And when our whole family left town after the public humiliation, he stopped by to pay Mother his respects.

Siloam stayed on in Rampartville. But after the partisans, the X-men and even the Brits (they took the bread out of my mouth, he always said) let him down, so people say, he finally put his foot down, cut his hair and went and got married. Today he’s faithful to his wife and his scissors, turned out fine
children
. So I heard. Of course, it did happen that he fouled his wedding wreath from time to time. They say he used to tell his wife: listen here woman, society is society, family is family, and ass is ass.

Siloam and Madame Rita may have been the first of the
traitors
to be punished, but the other women collaborators weren’t far behind.

We were liberated a good three weeks by then, cleared away all the dead bodies from the city streets. The burned stench just wouldn’t go away, but we were used to it by then. The only thing we couldn’t stand was this particular stink, right in our neighbourhood it was. Wouldn’t be coming from your house, by any chance, said this woman cattily as she went by; from a
couple
of streets over she was, dead now.

One morning we were playing with Mrs Kanello’s seven kids in front of our houses and I lean against the wall of the church and I feel a kind of dampness on my back. I turn around, there’s a thread of green slime oozing down the wall, from the top of the bell tower all the way down to the ground. And that’s how we discovered that the little partisan’s dead body was still there, 
all those weeks. Some people climb up to the top, covering their noses with hankies. He’s decomposed, they yell down. Mrs Kanello hands a sheet of muslin up to them, and they haul him down. The body was dripping, nothing was left but this sodden shapeless thing like crushed grapes in the muslin. How can you bury this, this … thing? somebody said. Day after day we scrubbed the street, sprinkled quicklime, nothing doing. The stink was still there when we left Rampartville, probably still there in fact.

They took him to the graveyard; I didn’t take part because at that very moment the truck came to take Mother away. Mother didn’t put up any resistance. I can’t even remember where our little Fanis disappeared to, but I wanted to follow along, only the vehicle was moving too fast and I couldn’t keep up with it.

Maybe an hour later it was, I spotted her in the main street, you know, where the nice folks take their evening promenade, she was standing there in the back of the open truck. The sun was hot. The truck was an open truck and the women
collaborators
were standing there, thirsty, hanging on to each other so they wouldn’t fall over. But they didn’t have to worry; the truck was moving really really slow now, at a slow walking pace so everybody in town could enjoy the public humiliation. All the women’s hair was gone, cut off with sheep shears. Mother’s hair too was cut off. There she was, standing at the back of the truck, not even trying to hide, she wasn’t. Was she looking at
something
? Don’t know.

The truck was just crawling along, the driver had his
instructions
, but there were people everywhere, in front of the vehicle, behind, on all sides, and so the driver was creeping forward, had to be careful not to run down any of the citizens, laughing
merrily
as he went. The whole crowd was enjoying itself in fact, everybody was laughing and all the windows were full of on lookers and the proper gentlemen stepped out of the
coffee-houses
to stare at the passing truck. Most of the people in the 
crowd were carrying goat horns or full animal guts cut open, all free from the municipal slaughterhouse, some others were
ringing
sheep or goat bells, where did they find all that stuff? Some were carrying flags, and waving them patriotically over their heads. And the goat horns they were waving them in the air too and dancing around and sticking them to the sides of the truck like votive offerings and some people were throwing the guts against the truck. What I mean is, they were trying to hit the sheared women but they were missing mostly and only
spattering
them with bits of green filth, plus a few of the honourable people standing around, but nobody seemed to mind what with the general Liberation high spirits and they just kept on
dancing
around and around.

I got my hands all smeared with the stuff, I was hanging on to the truck like a bunch of grapes, but when the second slug of guts hit me I fell off, and now I had to run, run to catch up, Ma was all the way to the side of the truck now, as if she wanted to climb off and guts were smeared all over her, up climbs another guy, hangs a pair of horns tied together with animal innards around her neck, and a sheep’s bell, and everyone is clapping and cheering and there I was, following along behind in slow march step.

That went on from ten in the morning till maybe six in the evening, up and down every street we went, downtown and uptown, but I wasn’t going to leave. And lots of people were hammering on empty tin cans with stones. And church bells were ringing. Not at Saint Kyriaki’s, though; Father Dinos refused, locked the church doors tight.

Come afternoon we passed by the Venice pastry shop, the place where the better families of (Rampartville, used to go for French pastries before the war. During the Occupation, of course, all they served was diluted grape marmalade on tiny
little
plates. Fortunately for me I fell off right in front of the Venice, seeing as Doc Manolaras’s wife was sitting with some 
friends of hers right there at one of the tables, and she shouted, Don’t trample the kid! Waiter! And when I came to, the waiter poured a pitcher of water over my head. Mrs Manolaras had a name with a big reputation. So she says, Go home little girl, what are you doing here? Go on home, you shouldn’t be seeing this, you’ll only remember it all your life, go on home and don’t worry, it’s just one day and it will be over soon, this evening they’ll let them go.

I felt better already. Then I remembered something Mrs Kanello told my mother, So maybe you were a whore for a while, but it was for Christian and moral reasons. Mother never did admit she was a whore because she had two Italians. But she was an illiterate woman and she respected Mrs Kanello’s opinion and since Mrs Kanello said she was a whore, that got Mother really upset, but she accepted it. So when the truck stopped outside our house to pick her up for the public humiliation, Ma climbed right up almost eagerly, never crossed her mind they were wronging her, punishing her the way they did.

I grab the pitcher out of the waiter’s hands and run off to catch up again and scramble up the side of the truck and pour water over my Ma, standing there all day in the hot sun with her hair cut off, can’t let anything happen to her, I was saying to myself. And the sun was getting hotter even though it was almost afternoon, the sun was getting hotter and I don’t remember anything more.