(Chapter 9)
The Doctor's Proposal and the Patisserie Bluff
"Every evening during the Occupation, my father would listen to the station 'Free Greece' through this hidden radio he had found, together with his friend the doctor. Free Greece broadcast from Cairo every day. And every day the doctor would bring treats for me — 'for little Sevasti.' My father was an innocent man; he couldn't understand why the treats were always for me. The doctor wasn't going hungry — he had food at the hospital — and he had no other way to get close to me. We children didn't understand either, and we shared everything; even my mother would eat from the sweets. But he always sent all the good things for me.
Until one day my father said to him: 'Doctor, I have something to tell you. I would like us to become family.' 'I want that too,' the doctor answered, 'but with whom?' And my father said: 'With my niece on Kalymnos.' He had a niece — twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the time — the sister of Andreas, the cousin who had helped me. She had a substantial inheritance from her father. 'Go and meet her, take a look at her, and let's become family.'
And the doctor said: 'Thank you very much, kyrie Giorgos, and I very much want us to become family — but not with your niece.' 'Then with whom?' my father asked. 'With your daughter.' 'Which daughter of mine?' My father was taken aback. 'She's a child!'
'She's a child now, but she'll grow. In five or six years she'll be eighteen. I can wait.'
'Leave it for now, Doctor, let's wait and see,' my father told him. My father was startled and went and told my mother.
My sister, who was always an eavesdropper — imagine, even as a small child she didn't sleep on the floor with us but had her own bed, right next to our parents' — heard everything one night. But she said nothing to anyone, not even to me. We quarreled often though, because she always wanted my toys, and one evening when we had a dispute over a toy I didn't want to give her, she told me that if I gave it to her, she'd tell me something that concerned me. That got my curiosity going and I said: 'Take it — what do you have to tell me?'
When I gave her the toy she told me: 'You know that doctor who comes with Papa every evening — he doesn't come here for our father. He comes for you. He wants to make you his wife. He wants to marry you.' 'Me? But he's old!' I protested. 'He'll wait until you're grown up. Papa told Mama.'
At that moment I went out of my mind. I was in shock. 'What do you mean, his wife?' — I didn't understand what that meant then. I thought it was an abduction, that he wanted to steal me away. I didn't want to leave my family. I started crying and went to tell my mother. I asked her: 'Is this person who comes here coming to take me? What will happen to me? I don't want to leave!' 'Calm down, child,' my mother told me. 'It's nothing.' She tried to reassure me. 'He loves you more like a little girl.'
Whatever my mother said did nothing to settle my mind, and I started behaving abominably toward him. If I saw him coming down the street, I wouldn't go inside — or I'd leave the house and stay out until he was gone. If I was outside, I'd wait two or three hours if necessary. If I was already inside and hadn't managed to get out, I'd hide under a bed and not come out until he left. He noticed this, noticed it thoroughly, and told my father about it: 'What is this behavior?' he asked. 'Leave it,' they told him, 'the younger one whispered it to the older one and now she sees you as an enemy.' Nothing could calm me down — I had turned wild. They scolded me for it, because it was rude, especially toward an established doctor, but I told them I wanted him to leave and never come back. It took a long time, but eventually his pride was wounded and he stopped coming. He vanished.
Six years passed. During those six years I turned eighteen. When I was twelve he must have been thirty-five — young enough for marriage, though not for me; for a twenty-five-year-old or even a thirty-year-old he would have been perfect. He was in his prime as a man, but I was still a baby.
In any case, he had been counting the years, and one day out of nowhere, there he was in the courtyard — a little changed, with greyer hair. He was forty-one now, still young enough, but by then I had met your grandfather. The first time I saw your grandfather as a man — as someone I truly saw — I was only seventeen, but he spoke to me when I was eighteen, right after I finished school.
When the doctor came, I was already eighteen, possibly nineteen, since I had finished gymnasium about a year before. He walked in smiling and it happened that I was there. I had changed, of course — I was no longer the wild creature; I was a serious young woman. We welcomed him warmly and graciously, and I myself brought him a chair and he sat down. We looked after him, offered him refreshments, and until he left, he said nothing. Everyone was pleased to see him, because he was a respected man and people always remarked on how kyrie Giorgos kept such distinguished company. A specialist at a hospital.
When the time came for him to leave, I walked him to the door, and as he was going he said: 'I expect you've understood the purpose of my visit.'
And I said: 'Well, what if I have?'
And he said: 'I would like the two of us to meet privately.'
I agreed. We arranged to meet at Syntagma, at a patisserie called Prapas. We didn't have coffee bars then — only patisseries. Prapas and Flokas, those were the ones. We went there for sweets or ice cream, or we went to the cinema. We didn't drink coffee; we didn't know what a frappé was. I went out with your grandfather once a week and he'd take me for ice cream or to the movies. We didn't go to the theater; there were no clubs or anything of that sort. The cinema was the greatest form of entertainment — places like the Attikon, or the one in the Grande Bretagne, or the Asty. Coffee bars came much later, when I was already grown — that was your mother's era.
We went to Syntagma for sweets. He spoke about the past, and I apologized for my behavior. I told him that first of all I owed him an apology and needed to explain myself, and that was why I had agreed to come. I owed him an apology even if I hadn't done anything truly wrong. It had been an ugly moment. I was only twelve years old and knew nothing about marriage or building a family. I may have been a little savage, but what I had been told was also very hard to bear — it was as though a thunderbolt had fallen on my head. As a child, I couldn't understand that what I was doing was so very unkind.
I asked him: 'And now — what is it you want from me?'
And he said: 'I was forced to stay away because I couldn't bear it — the hiding, the getting under beds, not coming into the house. The years passed and, as you can see, I haven't married. But now you are a mature young woman, a citizen of the world, you've taken your place in society. If you say yes, we can be married within a week.'
'Thank you very much,' I told him, 'for the proposal you're making, but it's too late. I already have a relationship — a very serious one.'
And he said: 'You'll forget about that relationship; it's nothing important.'
'Nothing important? It's extremely important,' I told him. 'Because this relationship was imposed on me by no one — I made it myself. And the person I love, I chose on my own, I loved on my own. It isn't easy to let go of.'
'It's very easy,' he said. He wanted to know who the man was and what he did for a living, and the moment I told him he said: 'I can offer you a much better life.'
'I'm not interested in a grand life,' I told him. 'I'm interested in what my heart tells me. I'm used to living simply. I've been raised to live without much.'
He pressed on, I pressed back, and in the end I was forced to tell a lie. It was a lie because your grandfather and I had not been intimate, but I told him: 'But what are you asking now... Apart from my heart, I've also given him my body. It's done.' Because I expected that to be the end of it. But the answer he gave me... What did I expect — he was a doctor.
'Let me tell you something,' he said. 'If you think that a woman's morality is measured by a small piece of tissue called virginity, you're mistaken. I don't attach any importance to such things. What I value is a woman's moral character, her principles, her integrity. That is what counts for me. Virginity is of no interest to me.'
'Well, good for you!' I thought, and also realized that it was impossible to outmaneuver someone like him, and that I had made a mistake with my answer, because he would now go away with the impression that I was, as they used to say, ruined. 'I've really stepped in it,' I thought.
I turned to him and said: 'I lied to you. Forgive me — I thought that this way I'd put you off. It didn't work. But know that nothing has happened; I'm untouched.' And he got angry and raised his voice: 'Why did you do that? You tried to fool me — me, a man of science — you, a little girl, you tried to test me? For that very reason I now demand that you test yourself, abandon this feeling, and come back to me.'
'No,' I told him. 'Doctor' — I didn't know how else to address him, I always called him 'Doctor' — 'please don't insist. This is the first and last time we go out. We're done. Go and build your life,' I told him. 'You're still young, you're at a good age to find the right woman and build your life. Forget about me.'
He left and we never saw him again. Two years went by; I was ready to marry your grandfather. At some point I was walking somewhere and I felt a tap on my back. It was him. He said: 'You see how fate works? Meeting again, even by accident.'
We didn't sit down anywhere — right there on the spot he said: 'I hold to my proposal. Have you perhaps changed your mind?'
'No,' I answered. 'We're done, we said that.'
I told your grandfather and he was furious — he asked me who this man was and whether he needed to go find him. I told him to calm down and that I could handle it myself. I asked him to stay where he was and keep his pistols for another occasion.
Many years later, through the Kalymnos Association, I heard about the doctor's life — that he had married and that he died at a ripe old age.
A large age difference was very common then — a gap of twenty years was considered perfectly normal. A man was expected to be older than his wife — or rather, was supposed to be. An exception were your grandfather's parents, because when your great-grandfather married your great-grandmother, she was five years older than him. So when his sons married younger women, he said just one thing: 'At last — I don't care what kind of women my sons have married, but they married younger women!' He was glad of it, which shows he must have had some grievance. Your great-grandmother Vasoula was so much older that she only managed to have three children before she stopped having her period. In those days women's periods stopped early — they didn't remain fertile long because their nutrition was poor. But it was also partly because your great-grandfather had gone to America for a while, and only when he came back did he have his third and last child.
People didn't know how to use contraception and simply had as many children as God gave them, which is why my grandmother Sevasti had twelve children and the mother of your grandfather had the same. But children died — they didn't survive. Every year they produced a child, and whichever one lived... Children died without anyone knowing why. Born healthy, and then at a few months, at a year, at two years, they died for nothing. There were no medical means then — no way to understand what was happening, no way to help.
So, as I was saying, an age gap like the fifteen years between me and your grandfather, or even the twenty with the doctor, raised no eyebrows. Even so, I was young, just not young enough for anyone to protest. When the doctor proposed to my father, my father told him his daughter was too young and couldn't give an answer then — but he didn't turn him away either. He didn't say: 'You're too old — what are you thinking?' He simply said: 'She's a child and I can't say anything yet. Let's wait a little.'
I was twelve years old and not all that far from marriageable age. For example, if a young girl happened to fall pregnant at sixteen, her parents would try to marry her off — either to the father of the child or to someone else. Today things are more open; even if a girl becomes pregnant, parents accept it and raise the child themselves; she doesn't have to be married off.
Do you see my nails? They're very beautiful because I go to a shop that opened near me — a Bulgarian woman runs it, very good at her work. I mention it because she told me she's only forty and already a grandmother to a three-year-old girl. She's married to a Greek now and they live here, but she has a daughter of twenty-five, whom she had when she was fifteen in Bulgaria. That daughter gave her a granddaughter. It happened because this woman had a very strict father who wouldn't let her terminate the pregnancy and actually married her off to someone else — not to the father of the child. That is exactly what happened in Greece too.
Even though I was so young and these men couldn't possibly know the depth of my character, they were drawn by my youth and my looks. That's why the doctor was so persistent. Your grandfather, because of his work, had traveled all over Greece and had had girlfriends, but the moment he saw me, his eye locked onto me. He knew I was a child, but that didn't stop him. He told me later that he had known I would grow into a beautiful woman.
And he watched me too, without my knowing it. He kept track of my progress because, by coincidence, two girls who were daughters of his relatives were classmates of mine at school. One was the daughter of his first cousin and the other was the daughter of his best man. He visited both houses and asked after me."
"You have to tell me about Grandfather."
"What is there to tell about your grandfather?"
"Tell me how the two of you finally got together."
"That is a different story. And it didn't begin the way you think."
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