(Chapter 2)
Maria's father kept her close on the day the groom came to call. The house had the kitchen and the shop on the ground floor, with the rest of the rooms upstairs. Maria was asked to wait in the kitchen, which was separated from the shop by a wooden partition, not a wall. At a certain point, her father knocked on the partition with his hand and called out: "Maria, bring two sweets" — the customary thing to do when a customer came in — "and come through this way." In those days the only sweets were spoon sweets. Maria spooned the preserve onto two small plates, set out two glasses of water alongside them, and came in through one door and out through the other.
As Maria entered carrying the tray, her father said: "Maria, this gentleman here" — and gestured toward Giorgos — "is going to be your husband." Maria very nearly fainted. The tray very nearly fell from her hands. But she kept her head down and didn't turn to look. A moment later, in a fraction of a second, her father slapped his hand on the table and said: "Are we going to wait all day for you to say yes?" And Maria nodded.
It was a Tuesday. The wedding was on Sunday, because Giorgos had to leave. If the Italians caught him, they'd put him in prison for being Greek, so he had to go back the same way he'd come — in secret. In the space of one week, from Tuesday to Saturday, all the wedding preparations were made.
The wedding was magnificent, because Antonakis was a man of considerable standing in Kalymnian society at the time. He invited the whole of the island's aristocracy — his clients from the shop. After the splendid ceremony and the great celebration in the village square, a ferocious rain began. It was the 10th of February, 1929. The rain didn't stop for an entire week — relentless, torrential. The couple retreated upstairs and waited for it to pass, so that Giorgos could take the boat back to Greece alone, since Maria had no papers yet that would allow her to travel and start a new life. For the whole of that time they didn't leave the house once. Eight days after the wedding, one day after Giorgos had slipped off the island, the Italian commandant came to the village with an interpreter, asking for him. He knocked on the door looking for Giorgos, intending to arrest him. Maria's family explained that he had already gone. The commandant looked at Maria — the Greek's wife. "Then you'll be going too," he told her through the interpreter. "Come to the administrative office tomorrow and we'll prepare your papers."
Maria's family celebrated the news and began preparing their daughter's official passage to Greece. Forty days after the wedding, Maria boarded a ship for Greece — properly, legally, with everything in order. She even managed to have her mother-in-law, kyra-Eleni, travel with her as a guardian. Giorgos had told her: "Don't bring anything with you — no clothes, no silverware, no glassware. I'll get you everything new in Athens." Maria was an only daughter, nearly thirty years old, so the dowry she left behind was substantial, in both quantity and quality. Clothing and glassware, all of it first-rate, because like everything on the island, it had come from Italy. Fine porcelain, Bohemian crystal — all of it left behind.
When Giorgos returned to Athens a married man, his brother Stefanos moved out of their shared room. He put a bed in the shoe shop and began living there. He lived like a man of the world who had taken monastic vows — all he was missing was the cassock. He kept the fasts, never missed church, read religious texts, attended spiritual gatherings. He was a remarkable and cultivated soul.
The women and Giorgos all lived together in one room. Maria cooked the midday meal for everyone, the men worked together in the shop, and in the evenings they separated to sleep. Giorgos's mother only went back to her island after Maria had given birth and baptized their first child, a girl. The mother-in-law had helped so much that Maria's own mother made an unusual request: she asked that the first child not be given her name, but the name of the mother-in-law — Eleni. But this was unheard of. The custom on the island was that the first girl's name belonged to the mother's family, especially because that name "had not yet been heard" — meaning none of Maria's siblings had yet given the name to their own children. If there was one thing that kept Greeks on the straight and narrow, it was doing their duty and honoring tradition. And so the first daughter was named Sevasti, after Maria's mother. A tradition that held, even though every party involved would have been perfectly happy to break it.
Little Sevasti didn't meet her grandmother until she was fifteen. It was after the Second World War, when Maria decided she wanted to go back to her island — to find out who had survived and who had died. She hadn't seen her parents or her family since the day she'd been expelled from the island, even if she had left celebrating. She couldn't read or write, and neither could her parents. Occasionally a fellow islander would track them down to pass on news, but there was no direct contact.
Maria never let out so much as a sigh in front of her children. Nobody knows whether this woman ever felt joy, love, or grief. She never spoke about her family or her past. The house was always clean, the meals always cooked and ready, and she lived her life entirely for her three children. Sevasti, the oldest; Eleni, the second daughter, a year younger; and Nikolas, the last-born, ten years behind his sisters.
When the Second World War ended, Kalymnos passed into British hands. Maria reckoned that if the British found her out, it wouldn't be too serious a problem — she was Greek, an ally, expelled by the Italians. Still, she would be careful. She didn't talk much about her desires or her plans; she didn't see much point in expressing herself, or even, really, in having feelings. One day she intended to take her little boy, along with her eldest daughter who carried her mother's name, and go find them. She would leave the second daughter behind in Athens to look after the men.
There was, of course, no regular boat connecting Athens to Kalymnos at that time. Her goddaughter's godfather, however — Sevasti's godfather — was a man of means who had also come to Athens. He owned a caïque —a traditional wooden fishing boat— which in those days was no small thing. To own a caïque was to be a shipowner. He was a captain, and he ran what were known as "shadow routes." He also had a large house, a proper standalone villa with many rooms. He was a man of a different order. One day the godfather proposed to his goddaughter's family that he take the child — little Sevasti — under his protection on one of his runs and deliver her to the island. Maria and the boy would follow on a separate fishing boat. This was a mistake. Because his caïque took seventeen days to reach Kalymnos. Sevasti was on that boat with the godfather and his wife all those days, lost at sea. They kept putting in at various islands but couldn't go directly to Kalymnos. The engine would break down, and they'd scramble for the nearest island to fix it. They'd fix the engine, then wait for a wind to sail by. They drifted so far off course that even the sponge-diving boats — the official lifeline connecting the Aegean islands — couldn't locate them.
Maria would go down to Vouliagmeni and ask the fishermen on the boats whether they'd seen Karabetsos's caïque. No one had. After two weeks, everyone believed that Sevasti and the godfather had drowned. On the seventeenth day, after enormous hardship, they found their way and got word back to Athens. Maria immediately boarded another fishing boat to reach the island and find her daughter. It took her only nine days. Seventeen days and nine days — the school holidays were nearly over, and they barely had time to get back to Greece before anyone could suspect that these first dangerous, forbidden holidays on the island had ever happened.
Maria's father they did not find. He had died. Her younger brother was now married and had an only child. Old Sevasti, the grandmother, was still alive, and was able to lay eyes on the granddaughter who carried her name.
Little Sevasti was in a wretched state. Seventeen days of seasickness. Even though she was the youngest on board, the godmother had looked after her so carefully that she'd given her the only bed — the captain's bunk — and refused to let her sleep on the deck or on beaches the way the others did. Even so, she had managed to catch lice, lose weight, and fall ill enough that she felt she needed a hospital. But when they finally reached the island it was night, and the godmother took her straight to her own house to wait for the family to come and collect her. She spent the night there with another girl from the boat, a little older, also waiting for relatives.
The next morning, the godfather went out to let the rest of the family know she was there. As her godfather, he knew where the family lived — in those days there were no street names — and went directly. The fewer people who knew, the better. Because the British were no improvement on the Italians; in some ways they were worse. They followed their manuals to the letter, and if those manuals said prison, they wouldn't even entertain the argument that Maria had been expelled by the Italians. Once the news reached the right ears, Maria's younger brother — Sevasti's uncle — came to the godmother's house to collect his young relative.
It was early morning and Sevasti had only just woken up. When the uncle walked in, he found two girls. "Which one is my niece?" he asked. The godfather said: "Ha! You'll find her yourself — I'm not going to point her out." Sevasti was disheveled and sick, but she had taken her mother's features. The uncle took his time and looked more carefully. "That one," he said, and chose correctly. Sevasti was beautiful, like her mother.
Her mother never took off her headscarf except to wash her hair, but everyone could see her beauty through it. She was a woman who always wore her gold jewelry over her modest clothes, and a remarkable gold cross at her throat.
Sevasti had come home for the first time. A home she knew, like so many Greeks in the stories of their own lives, only from something close to legend. Though she felt deeply welcomed — this was the place where everything had begun — she understood that it was a place destined to send its people away and keep only their memory.
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