(Chapter 5)
Giorgos was born in 1890 and left his island — Italian territory at the time — when he was sixteen. He spent just over ten years in Russia — Saint Petersburg, Kyiv, Odessa — until the Communist Revolution of 1917, when he came to Greece, to Athens. He used his Russian with his brother for business matters, so that nobody in the house could follow what they were saying.
When Giorgos took Sevasti out on errands, he would run into compatriots — people of various nationalities who had lived in Russia and found their way to Greece — and he would speak to them in Russian.
"Does she speak Russian?" they would ask, nodding toward Sevasti.
"No."
"You're not doing right by her, kyrie Giorgos. What a shame, not teaching the child the language."
Sevasti always felt the sting of this — that her father wouldn't share his second language with her, because she had the ability to learn languages. She had picked up a few words over the years and knew how to say "Christ is Risen" and the response "Trampling down death by death" in Russian. Her uncle had taught her the hymn, written it out for her in Greek characters, but she never had occasion to use it. Every religious service she attended was in Greek. Which was precisely what Giorgos thought — that Sevasti would never have any use for Russian. She would marry a Greek man, and as a woman she would have no need to conduct business in Russian.
"But a language is a culture," his friends would say.
"Exactly. Sevasti will be Greek. She will never be Russian, and I take full responsibility for that."
As fate would have it, Russia stayed Communist for almost the whole of Sevasti's life, and as we've said, her family had been driven out by the Communists — so she never had reason or desire to visit, whatever her complaints. And despite her father's concerns, Sevasti was never pulled in two directions between languages and cultures. She had only one allegiance: the language of Homer, which was also the sacred language of the clergy, the language that bound every speaker to Greek identity.
To master modern Greek in its literary form — to master the katharevousa — was her ultimate goal, and she understood it as her destiny. Every Sunday she went to church alone, without family or friends, and by repeating the liturgy she memorized all the archaic noun endings, refining her speech to bring it as close as possible to the language of the New Testament, to the divine words of Jesus.
And yet Giorgos couldn't account for every available path or where they might lead, because Sevasti became a passionate student of French. She loved the language so much that she managed to persuade her father to give her money to attend the French Academy in Athens for beginner classes.
English was never a language option — the British Council either didn't exist yet or, if it did, she didn't know about it. It would take decades for English to acquire the global reach it has today, for America to become a superpower, and for English lessons to become a trend in Athens.
"All languages are tools. All of them, except Greek — because Greek is who we are," her father would say.
But the money for French classes ran out, and before long, the swift currents of life intervened—an unforeseen marriage to a man many years her senior. Her youth gave way to womanhood. She made herself a promise: if any of the children from that marriage could learn French, she would make sure they did. And so she added this disappointment — that she had not learned other languages — to her long list of dreams that had come to nothing.
Greek became her identity, but she had none of the other tools to work with it that her father had. Giorgos loved the Greek language deeply — the language of his homeland, the language of the longed-for soil. And Sevasti loved Greek deeply too — the language of her ancestors' hunger for life, the language of her own faith and her people. She was glad to be Greek. But occasionally she would wonder what it might be like to become a bird and open her wings like all those people who came and went from Greece.
"Father, I want to become a flight attendant." She and her sister would collapse laughing just imagining how they might break the news to him. They never did break it. Not to him, not to her husband, not to anyone. She ought to be grateful for what she had managed to learn, she was told. Count your blessings. And when Sevasti's children were finally grown and she found a little time for herself, she learned Braille — the language of the blind. She translated the Odyssey for the Center for the Blind in Kallithea.
Sevasti had found her own language at last. Her fingers danced across the paper as she translated the Odyssey, each Braille dot a small act of defiance. Where her father had refused to teach her the languages of strangers, she was now building bridges in a language no one in her family could read. Every time her students read with their fingertips about Odysseus sailing the seas, Sevasti felt she was sailing with them.
But the only journey she ever made was with her eyes closed. She was acutely aware of her inability to see the things she wanted — the things she needed — and she held that awareness like an Oedipal curse she was fated never to escape.
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