(Chapter 18)
The Invisible Dowry and the High School Essay
My daughter was an easy child — she didn't wear me out at all. She was quiet at home and did well at school. Nothing bothered her, nothing weighed on her mind. Since she was such a good student, I enrolled her in French lessons too. I started her in fourth grade, because children weren't allowed to begin a foreign language any earlier. The French Academy branch was right downstairs from our front door. That was the one extracurricular she did, because children didn't take all sorts of activities the way they do now — multiple languages, karate, and everything else. Maybe those things existed back then too, but I didn't have the time.
For ten years, until my three children were grown, I didn't know who was sitting next to me. I didn't have time to so much as lean out the window and see what was happening in the street — I was locked inside, within four walls. Helping the children with their lessons on one side, doing the housework on the other, cooking on top of that; I couldn't even get out to do the shopping — my husband did all of it. Uncle Stefanos was still helping, of course, walking the children to school and bringing them back. Sometimes he'd ask: 'Can I bring you anything?' and depending on what we needed I'd send him to the grocer or the bakery for a few slices of bread to have something in the house.
My mother used to say a proverb: 'The load teaches the mule driver.' And that proverb was true through and through. When I got married I didn't know anything, because my mother never let me do a thing — everything passed through her hands, so I didn't even know how to boil an egg. But when I was on my own, I had to do everything, and I learned everything.
I'll tell you — right after we got married I once cooked a whole chicken with all its innards still inside. Because back then you didn't buy your chicken from the supermarket the way you do now, cleaned and ready to go. You bought them whole and had to prepare them yourself. At the market they were sold simply plucked — no feathers, but nothing else done to them. One day Telemachos brought home a chicken for me to cook, and since it had no feathers, I just dropped the whole thing in the pot. As it boiled, it opened up on its own, and everything that was inside — gizzard stones, corn kernels, gravel — came pouring out and filled the pot.
When I opened the lid and saw it — imagine how little I knew — I said, 'But honestly, I didn't put any of that in there! Where did all this come from?' I wasn't from the countryside, I didn't know what chickens do or that they have a stomach. And why would I? Do you think my mother ever bought a whole chicken? We ate meat once a week, and she would buy a little beef and feed it to us — a small piece each. The rest of the days we ate legumes, vegetables, that sort of thing. Meat every day only became normal later, when you could find it pre-packaged at the supermarket.
That gap—not knowing how to manage the practical world because I had been kept so sheltered—was exactly why I became so insistent about my daughter's independence. I didn't just want her to know how to run a house; I wanted her to have the education to stand on her own two feet in the world. So, years later, when she finished elementary school, Lili was ready for high school and it came easily to her. She graduated from the same girls' school I had graduated from, and she even had several of my old teachers. She did very well, except that at the end they gave her grades in language that were simply not fair to her ability — they left her at fifteen or sixteen out of twenty, which was not the grade she deserved. That was proven when she sat the university entrance exams. She did so well that she won a scholarship — meaning she received money. With some of that money she even bought her brothers a bicycle, something they had been longing for for years. From my daughter's school, only a few girls went on to university — very few — so it was remarkable that Lili got in on a scholarship.
I remember once Lili wrote an extraordinary essay on the role of the clergy in the War of Independence. Her teacher refused to believe that a girl could write that well and reprimanded her, accusing her of having it written by me. That was where the injustice showed itself plainly: if a girl stood out, the system moved swiftly to cut her down. I don't remember which grade she was in — third or fourth year of high school, probably — and the next morning I got up and went to find the teacher.
I told her: 'I am deeply sorry that as an educator you have wounded a child who worked hard on this essay. If you wanted the essays to be purely the children's own work, with no input from home, then you should have had them write it in class — you had no business sending the topic home for them to work on. Of course the child sought out information and found it somewhere. How else would a child have knowledge of the past, of the role the priests played in the Greek Revolution? I simply shared a few things with my daughter as her mother — a mother who lived through things, who studied, who gathered knowledge from the Church. Was I not supposed to pass something on to my own child? She found encyclopedias, she read on her own, and instead of praising her — because you surely recognized it as the best essay in the class — you hurt her. I am truly sorry for you.'
And I added: 'I would ask that this conversation not be used against my child — that it ends here. Because if I find out that my speaking up has been turned against her, I cannot tell you how far I will take this.' She didn't say a word. Not a single apology, nothing. She just sat there like a wet cat.
That injustice stung my daughter, but it hardened her resolve to prove herself in the university entrance exams. When the time came and she had finished school, her father didn't want her to sit them. I had to fight for her right to take those exams. 'Why does she need to go to university?' he would say. 'She's finished high school, she can read and write, her French is advanced. I can arrange a position for her in the public sector, I have property to give her as a dowry. What's the point of her spending all those years at university?'
But she was crying — she wanted to take the exams. I told him: 'The child is going to sit those exams and I will find the money.' Because in those days everything had to be paid for. I told him: 'I'll ask my relatives, I'll find a way, but that child is sitting those exams whether you provide the money or not. You ruined me — do you want to ruin your daughter too?'
He had told me before we married that he would never allow me to work. So later, when I asked for money to continue my own studies, he refused. He said it and he meant it. I had accepted the part about work, but he wouldn't even let me finish my education. He figured that studying would lead to a job, and he was afraid — afraid that if I went out into the world and mixed with educated people, I might meet someone else.
In the end, my husband accepted that his daughter had passed the university entrance exams and allowed her to attend. But the fear of women getting an education was most visible in what he did to me. He said it was a matter of principle that a wife shouldn't work, so as not to suggest that he couldn't provide for her — but I don't believe that was the real reason. Because even if I had needed to work out of necessity, I know he still wouldn't have let me study. He was jealous and he was afraid. Above all, perhaps, he was afraid of me. I think his reasoning went: 'If I let her start university, she might build a different life — I'll lose her.'
It wasn't that Telemachos forbade women from doing what men did — it's not as though he let the boys go out freely while keeping the girls locked in. Though I can't say for certain, because my children generally didn't go out on their own. Imagine — when they were older I used to push them out the door and say 'Go outside, make some friends.' But the two boys especially would always stay together, and since we had no balcony, they'd open the window, push up the shutters, settle themselves on the sill, and let their legs dangle out over the street. They'd sit there for hours on end. That was their way of being outside. They watched who walked by and had their own conversations.
The boys didn't have much of a social life, but my daughter did — especially through university, even though she studied constantly. When she started her first year she came to me and said: 'Mama, I want a favor. The small room next to the kitchen, the one you've turned into a storage room — I want it cleared out completely and given to me as my study. I want to go in there to read and I don't want the noise from the street or from the boys.' That room has a large window looking out onto our courtyard and a lot of light comes through it. We got a small chest of drawers, a little nightstand, a desk, and a chair. Her brother Tassos, who was good with his hands, built her a hanging bookshelf himself and started filling it with her books.
Through all her university years she lived in that little room. If friends came to visit she would take them somewhere else in the house. She never went through a rebellious phase, never did anything reckless the way young people do — she was a straightforward girl. And in those years, love wasn't the simple thing it is now. Lili had met her person, but their studies separated them for a while when he went to another city. When she finally confided in me about the relationship, I understood that if she was telling me, the decision was final — because back then, telling your parents about a relationship meant a lifelong commitment. Even though Telemachos was strict, and I was not exactly an easy mother myself, I decided to become her secret ally. I covered for her so she could write letters and stay in touch — just as my sister and my mother had once done for me. It was a chain of protection, passed down. I wanted my daughter to begin her new life not by running away from something, but with her own voice and her own degrees behind her.
I understood, though, that the world around us was changing. Up through my generation, education for a woman was considered a threat to the peace of the family. But watching Lili and the man she would marry, I grasped something deeper: for the educated men of the new generation, a woman with a university degree was no longer dangerous — she was a necessary partner. The diploma had become the new invisible dowry, perhaps more valuable than land or a government post.
Her father would tell her to go out and give her a little money to enjoy herself. But until she came home, he'd be sitting in the armchair by the front door, waiting. He would not go to bed until he'd seen his daughter walk through that door. She noticed. She saw that when she was out, her father didn't sleep — those were his principles. He stayed awake, and she didn't want to be the cause of that, so she didn't go out much either.
My husband was very proud of his daughter and he proved it by dividing his property while she was still unmarried. He had a soft spot for her and had already put land in her name as a dowry. The boys, too, were steady and never gave him trouble — they didn't bother him at all and he was content with them. It was me who was constantly exhausted, with a large family and endless work. Every last bit of the responsibility had landed on me.
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