(Chapter 15)
Previously: Telemachos won the lottery and built a house in Menidi so he and Sevasti could marry.
When I moved to Menidi from Athens it struck me as a terrible place, because I was a city girl. I remember that sometimes before we were married we would sit together and I would say to him: 'As long as we're together' — and I would point to the top of Hymettus and say — 'even if there were just one small room up there at the peak, just for us, that would be enough. That's all I need.' He took that to heart. But when it actually became reality, I fell into a depression. After the wedding, I fell into a depression.
I had a few neighbors. When I say neighbors — not next door; the nearest one lived about a kilometer, maybe eight hundred meters, down the road. You couldn't even call out to borrow an egg. Every morning after the wedding, I would take a small clay jug and walk to fetch water so we would have something to drink. As for him, he left for work every morning and came back around two or three in the afternoon, because it was a long journey there and back.
I was alone in the wilderness, but it was safe in those days — there were no thieves, no violence. None of the doors even had locks. When we left Menidi to go into Athens to visit my mother, we would leave the house and the vineyard behind us and pull a simple wooden door shut — no lock, just held in place with a nail and an empty tin can. We would go and stay with my mother and nothing would happen; it was perfectly safe.
When my husband came home he didn't go anywhere — not even to a café, because there was nothing in the area. But whenever he had to go somewhere in the Menidi village for work, he would take me along and we would walk together. He genuinely loved that life. Four years passed like that before your mother was born, because she didn't come straight away, and those years were hard for me. I had this heaviness inside me. My whole mind was pulling back — to my mother, to my family, to my old neighborhood.
I would sit at home all day, waiting impatiently for him to come back. When he returned, we would sit together. When we went for a walk, we went together. Where did we go? Usually to his sister's place in Galatsi. We would pass through Kokkinos Mylos and walk for an hour and a half — normally it would take two hours, but he knew shortcuts and back paths. Sometimes we would take the bus back. We did it so that I would get out and walk, because otherwise I would have spent the entire day sitting inside the house.
But when he had to stay the night at the station, he would tell me to go and sleep at my mother's house. He would ask me to pack his bag, I would put in a sheet, and in the morning he would take me with him and drop me at my mother's. The first time I spent the night at my mother's house while he stayed at the station, he came to collect me the next day, but I refused to leave. I told him: 'You stay there — I'm not coming.' He said: 'But sweetheart, but darling, we have the chickens, we have the dogs.' He had brought animals too.
Things clarified when I became pregnant and had my first child. The pregnancy was difficult and the doctor told me to stay in bed. Who was going to look after me in Menidi? So I went back to my mother and he stayed alone in the house, managing everything himself. After the birth, my mother suggested I stay with her for the forty days after delivery and leave afterward.
But when the fortieth day came around, Christmas was close and my mother didn't want to let me go. She adored the baby, everyone was enchanted by the little one. So we decided to spend Christmas together in Athens. All the visitors who came to see me and the Christmas gifts — all of that came to us at my mother's house. But on New Year's Eve, we realized we had to go back to Menidi to celebrate Telemachos's name day in our own home. My family finally let me leave, and so we went up there, to the house that had been closed up.
We didn't have much furniture — but we had no chairs, and yet we were going to celebrate. My mother could stay only one day because she needed to get back quickly; she had a large family of her own to look after. It was one thing to be under her roof with everyone fussing over me, quite another to be in my own house.
So for the first time, on the second of January, I was left alone with the baby. My mother went back to Athens with my husband — he went to work and she went home. The house emptied out, there was sudden absolute silence, and the baby started to cry... she wouldn't stop. And I didn't know what to do. No neighbors to go out and ask what was wrong with her, and no telephone to call my husband and tell him the baby was crying. I was in despair.
So there I sat, in the kitchen — Telemachos had added an extension onto it and it was enormous. The kitchen had a large window that looked out toward the railway tracks and another that looked toward Athens, making the room very bright. I sat in that kitchen holding the baby and we both cried, because I didn't know what to do. We had no electricity, no running water, and without those things I had very little to calm the child.
And then suddenly, around midday, there was a knock at the door. I was in the kitchen because my whole existence had centered itself around that vast kitchen. I spent every hour in there because it had a wood-burning stove that gave off warmth. I had put a wide daybed beside the stove, and the baby's cradle next to that, and the rest of the space I used for cooking. So I went to open the door with the baby in my arms, the baby still crying.
The woman standing in front of me was the wife of a friend of his. She had gone to visit her brother who lived further up the road, and since she had been a guest at our celebration the day before, she knew the way to our house. Naturally she found it — as if there was another house in the area; ours was the only one.
She knocked and I went to open the door with the baby still screaming in my arms. I asked her: 'Kyria Eirini, which God sent you? Which saint?' She said: 'Why, what's wrong?' 'What can I say?' I told her. 'I don't know what I'm doing. Since my mother left, this child hasn't stopped for a moment — she hasn't stopped crying.'
'Where are you sitting?' she asked. 'In the kitchen,' I said. 'That's my headquarters — that's where I find warmth, that's where my fire is.' 'Come, let's go there,' she said. 'You'll make a little chamomile.' She saw that I had chamomile and said: 'Put a little oil in a small pan.' We added the chamomile flowers and she said: 'Now put it in the baby's bottle — add a little formula milk too.' One way and another, the baby calmed down.
When Telemachos came home and found the woman still there, and found me in a state, unable to manage the baby, he understood just how hard it was for a woman alone with a small child — and he made a new decision."
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