Escape from Kalymnos and the Lost Caïque

(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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A Tree Grows Under the Acropolis

 (Chapter 8)

"Do you remember any other particular incident from the Occupation? Something that made an impression on you?"

The Blackout Trench and the Doctor's Radio 

Of course I remember, because I was the firstborn and wherever my father needed to go, he'd take me with him. Some evenings we'd go to a house in what's now called Dafni — Katsiipodi, it was called then — to a family whose father was like a brother to mine. They had two sons, Grigoris and Pavlos. Strong boys, both of them. They too had come from Russia during the revolution against the Tsar.

On the feast of Saint Gregory, the older one — Grigoris, or Grisas as we called him — was celebrating his name day and invited my father to a gathering. So he took me along and we went. These people had their own house, and the younger son Pavlos was very fond of music and played piano at the time. Of course, gatherings were forbidden, and there was a blackout during that period, which meant the windows were covered with sheets of blue paper so no light could be seen from outside. This was to prevent us from being bombed.

During the Occupation, the Allied forces came more and more frequently to bomb important targets like Hassani, even though Athens was considered an unfortified city. They bombed the airport and the port of Piraeus. We didn't learn the results of these bombings, whether anyone was killed or not, because there were no mass media. The press was controlled by the Germans, newspapers were censored, and information was tightly rationed. We only heard the planes approaching and the sound of the sirens indicating that Allied aircraft were coming. The Acropolis, though, was never bombed — not by the Germans, not by the Allies. They respected the monument. I never heard of any bomb falling there.

We sat and ate. There were only a few people in the house — my father and me, this family, and perhaps two others. There was no formal limit on the number of people, but everything was conducted with great caution. Then the time came to leave and it was already late. We said our goodbyes and stepped outside. When we came out, it was pitch dark — we couldn't see where we were putting our feet, nothing, no lights in the streets, none from the houses either. We went from the warmth and light inside the house straight into absolute darkness.

In those days the streets of Athens had been dug up and turned into trenches. Every time we heard the sirens and the enemy approached — even though the Italians and Germans weren't bombing Athens — people were frightened and threw themselves into these ditches, which were called shelters. As we were walking, we didn't see one of these trenches, and when my father lifted his foot and took a step, he fell straight into it and hit hard. He was holding my hand and pulled me down with him and I fell on top of him. It was a considerable depth, but I didn't get hurt — I was a child and my body was rubber. But my father couldn't get out; he had taken a bad fall and I couldn't help him. He was groaning, calling for help: "Help! Help!" We weren't supposed to be outside at that hour, of course, but he was calling out in the hope that someone in the neighborhood would hear and come out. I managed somehow, being a child, to climb out of the trench, but I couldn't pull him up. And rather than a door opening and someone coming out to help — nothing. Everyone was afraid.

Then an Italian soldier in uniform stopped, accompanied by a Greek girl. In those days, many Greek girls got to know Italian soldiers, married them, and left for Italy.

One of them is the sister of a friend of mine. She married an Italian, lived there, had children, built her family. Not long ago she came back to visit her sister who lives in Halandri. We attended a memorial service together — my friend Anna, her sister Aliki, and me. Many girls were in a situation like Aliki's. At the time, of course, girls who took up with Italians were condemned for it.

But to tell you the truth — when I started traveling for the first time after your grandfather died, I went on a church excursion and we traveled through Italy, starting from Venice, and I fell completely in love with that country. I loved it so much, I loved the land and the people so much, that I said I could live there. What can I say — I was only fourteen during the Occupation. If I'd been eighteen, I would certainly have married an Italian.

During that time, naturally, girls had no idea what Italians or Italy were really like. Many of them were simply hungry, and if they had an Italian companion, the problem of starvation was solved — because the Italians had food in abundance: cornbread, army rations, pasta, which they gave to their girlfriends, who then shared it with their families and friends. While there were many such stories involving Italians, very few girls got involved with Germans, because the Germans were considered a cold people, not easy to approach. And their commanding officers didn't permit it either. The Italians, on the other hand, were a warm people, a people of love. If anything, it was the Italian soldiers who did the pursuing. As for me, I was a scrawny, skinny little thing — who among the Italians would have given me a second look?

I saw a girl approaching — one of ours. Our eyes had adjusted to the dark by then and we could make out faces and everything. She came up and said: "What's happening?" and I told her: "We'd gone out to celebrate a name day for a nephew of my father's, we came out of the house into the dark and didn't see the trench. My father fell in and I fell on top of him but managed to get out. He's hurt and can't get up." She spoke to the Italian, explained what had happened, but he had already sprung into action — he was already half down in the trench and pulling him up. Once he had got my father out, he put him on his back.

From that spot to our house, all the way until he laid him down in bed, my father was carried on the Italian's back. The girl and I followed behind. I will never forget that. When we got there, my mother took over, and my father stayed in bed for two months — that's how badly he'd been hurt. I don't know if anything was broken, but he was in pain all over his body. And if something had broken, it would have mended on its own, because — where would we have gone? There were no doctors, no hospitals to speak of. We did the old remedies: poultices, rubs, whatever my mother knew for the pain. She thanked them, but after that we lost them — we never saw them again, never found out what became of the girl or the Italian. But that incident left an indelible mark on me and I will never forget it, as one of the most significant chapters of my life. Even though I was only a child, it made a tremendous impression on me.

And when all of it was over and the front collapsed, when the German flag came down from the Acropolis and the Greek government returned from Cairo, the celebrations lasted a full week. What went on in Syntagma Square — joy and festivities, I can't even begin to describe it. And by then I was no longer a girl. I was growing up, and boys had started to notice me in the street. I had come into myself as a young woman — I was seventeen, a girl on the verge of becoming a woman, and it was my turn. I remember that wherever I walked, boys would whistle and flirt. Walking from my house to the Third Girls' Gymnasium on Tsami Karatassou Street, I remember passing the boys from the Sixth Boys' Gymnasium on Falirouand Petmezas, and all the boys would be posted there waiting for the girls of the Third Gymnasium to walk by.

Many romances developed this way, despite the fact that schools were separated by sex. If boys saw you on the street and made eyes at you and you responded, they'd find a way — they'd wait somewhere to talk to you and things would progress easily from there. As they say: when both the bride and groom are willing, who cares what the in-laws think.

I lived through that phase too, walking those streets — but I had no interest in any of it. I didn't respond to a single whistle, a single teasing remark, because I had other things on my mind. I was devoted to studying. I wanted that competition to continue — the worthy competition — I wanted to keep the approval and affection of my teachers. These things filled my soul, and nothing else interested me. I didn't reciprocate, didn't even seek out social contact or friendships.

As for my sister, she had a different life. She became a seamstress and stayed home. Despite our poverty, my father bought her a Singer sewing machine — the kind you operate with a foot pedal — which was a good machine, and she began to sew. He bought it in installments with easy payment terms, and so my sister started taking in sewing for households in the neighborhood and became a skilled dressmaker.

I did have one dear friend, though, whom I still remember — a truly close friend, who lived comfortably because her family was well off. They had money and lived in a nice standalone house. The family was just the mother and two daughters, because their father had died, and the mother worked as manager at a well-known jewelry shop. The shop's owner had been godfather at her wedding and helped them financially.

The younger daughter, Chrysoula, was my classmate. She wasn't a strong student. Her house was further down on my route and many times when I set out for school, we'd run into each other at the corner and walk together. And on the way back, we'd walk together again and part at the corner. At some point she said to me herself: "Would you like me to come to your house sometimes so we can study together?" — because she needed my help. She had books, she had everything. I, on the other hand, had no books — only the papers and notes I kept in class. We had no money for books and I learned everything from the lessons themselves. "Come and we'll study," I said. And so she started coming to my house with her books. After school we'd part at the corner — she'd go home and eat whatever you could ever wish for, the full works, and then she'd come to mine. Meanwhile, we ate feta cheese and bread every single day, bread with salted herring as the saying goes, and if we wanted something a little more special, we'd make a salad.

I had no social circle for flirting, but plenty found their way to me all the same. There were people who asked me out — not schoolmates from the gymnasium, but older. I met people at friends' homes: university students training to be doctors, engineering students at the Polytechnic, law students. Despite the many proposals I received from people I met at those gatherings, I accepted none of them.

Especially that one medical student from Kalymnos. All the young people I knew were from Kalymnos, come to Athens to study. My brother's godmother — whose husband was a prominent doctor — had several rooms in Neos Kosmos that she rented out to students from the provinces. Through my brother's godmother I happened to meet many of these young people. One of them, Aristeidis, was a student at the Polytechnic, and since both my friend Chrysoula and I had trouble with mathematics, we'd go there for help. We'd say: "Let's go to Aunt Frosso" — meaning my brother's godmother — "so Aristeidis can work through the problem with us." This young man had made me a proposal, and we'd gone out one afternoon so he could speak to me privately — to ask if I wanted to be in a relationship while he finished his studies at the Polytechnic, and so forth. I said no.

I didn't like that particular person, and I didn't like the other one either, the medical student from Kalymnos I mentioned. That medical student, on the other hand, was deeply, helplessly in love with me. He went to my mother and proposed marriage, and my mother told him: "What can I do? She's young, she's still in school, and you're still a student yourself. What are you asking me to arrange? Finish your studies first, let her finish school too, and then you can discuss it again." But he didn't hear any of it. He went so far as to stage a hunger strike for fifteen days because I wouldn't give him the time of day. In any case, let's leave all of that — it means nothing to me now. These things have no bearing on our lives.

But what I wanted to tell you about was the Occupation, and a friend of my father's who used to come by — a man who had a radio that hadn't been confiscated and sealed. Because they had seized radios and you couldn't listen to whatever you wanted. I was still just a girl, I was twelve when I met him and this man was thirty-two. There was a twenty-year gap between us, or perhaps even more — he might have been thirty-four. He was an established doctor, a gastroenterologist at a hospital. And so every day, this man would come for my father — every single day he did this — and the two of them would go to his home to listen to that radio.

A radio in those days was a rare thing, a luxury. If anyone found out that your radio hadn't been sealed, they might have shot you. You'd go before a tribunal — the occupation court. In any case, he had hidden it well, and my father was careful; after the news he'd come straight home.

The doctor's house was a good distance from ours — a grand, elegant home — and he lived alone, being unmarried. Inside he had a piano. He had no parents, but he had siblings: some lived in France, some in Athens. There was an age difference between him and my father, but as it turned out, it wasn't really my father he was so fond of, or thought of as a close friend. It was me he had set his sights on.

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Traps Made out of Love

 (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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Rooms for Rent

 (Chapter 10)

"When I was in seventh grade, in 1947, there were no apartment buildings — only rooms for rent. And not just for vacations, the way it is now; whole families would rent these rooms and live in them. Our courtyard had five rooms, but our family had the right to use the kitchen, which was an advantage. The others kept their cooking things along the side of the shared yard and brought them out when they needed them. Each family would claim a corner of the courtyard and set up a table to wash their dishes at the common water tap.

We moved to that house before my brother was born, in 1937. Another woman in the yard was pregnant at the same time as my mother and they had their babies together — ten days apart, both boys. They grew up side by side and became the closest of friends. My brother was called Nikolas and the other boy was called Filippos, and people called them Philip and Nathanael, like the apostles of Jesus who were great friends and strengthened each other in their faith.

One day, when they were three years old, they set off hand in hand, pulling each other along, walking toward the horizon. They lost their bearings and got lost. Their mothers went out of their minds with worry and searched everywhere, up and down every alley, until they finally made it to the police station and reported that two small children had gone missing. The boys had made it all the way to Vouliagmenis Avenue and were walking along the sidewalk one behind the other, crying, because they had realized they were lost.

An old man found them and said: 'Where are the two of you going?' They said: 'Home.' He said: 'And where is home?' They said: 'We don't know.' So he took them by the hand and walked them to the police station. In those days there weren't many stations, so they simply sent a child to our house to let us know the boys had been found. Those two were together their whole lives.

Filippos's mother lost her husband young — he died at forty-nine, leaving her with nothing, no income, nothing at all, only two small children and the one room she rented in our courtyard. I used to visit her even in recent years and she was always glad to see me, because she had a soft spot for me from the old days. I was the oldest child in the yard and because I was a go-getter, I ran errands for her, and I even helped her get a small pension. She didn't know the first thing about pensions — she was from a village near Markopoulo — but I was in high school by then and could help her with the paperwork.

She had to raise her children. She rented a second room in our courtyard, brought in two barrels — they had grapes from Markopoulo — and started selling wine. Everyone knew that the best wine in the neighborhood came from kyra-Marika [auntie Marika]. Then she bought a loom and started selling rag rugs, and my mother was her first and best customer. My mother would bring her scraps of fabric and she would weave them into rugs. When I got married I took one as part of my dowry, because rag rugs never go out of style. She raised her children on rugs and wine and the small pension I had gotten her. When the children were a little older, she moved everything into one room and left the second one empty, which meant it was available to rent.

In those days, rooms for rent were in very high demand in Athens, and there were no rental listings — everything went by word of mouth. My father managed the courtyard because the houses belonged to his older brother. But the older brother was now comfortable and had his own family well established, and he didn't mind that it took my father a while to find a tenant for the second room. One reason my father wasn't in any rush was that I was seventeen at the time and my sister was around fifteen. Young men came up from the provinces to study in Athens and were always looking for rooms, and whenever my father was approached by young men, he turned them down — he was afraid his daughters would get mixed up with them.

Your grandfather Telemachos was young too, but not twenty or twenty-seven — he was thirty. Well-built as he was, though, he looked older. He had gone back to the village around that time and brought his sister Eleni back with him — she was older, unmarried, because there were no eligible men left in the village. That was when he learned she was still unmarried; there had been no communication in all that time, and he'd had no news from his family for years.

Your grandfather was born in 1918. He left his village in the Peloponnese at eighteen to come to Athens. Someone talked him into joining the Gendarmerie, telling him they would provide free education. They also told him that if he joined, he would do his military service there and wouldn't have to go to the front if war broke out. The catch was that he hadn't finished high school in his village, which was a requirement for entry. He told them he had been home-tutored, sat the entrance exams at the Evangelical School, and passed.

The Evangelical School was the most celebrated school for the Greek Orthodox community of Smyrna. After the Asia Minor Catastrophe, the school was transplanted to Athens — they say they literally carried pieces of the buildings onto ships and reassembled the school in a neighborhood settled by prosperous Greeks from Turkey, which was called Nea Smyrni. The exams must have been serious.

When the Second World War broke out, Telemachos was sent to the border in Macedonia. Because he was in the Gendarmerie, he had a dual capacity — he patrolled cities and was also part of the military, which meant he could carry a weapon. Regular police forces existed in only four cities in Greece at the time: Athens, Piraeus, Corfu, and Patras. So the Gendarmerie took on policing duties in the cities during the war.

Your grandfather didn't want to go to war. He was devoted to his country, but he didn't want to risk his life, didn't want to kill people. He wouldn't have liked me saying that, though... He was proud of his country, loyal to Greece, and very brave — because whatever his country ordered him to do, he would do it with zeal and without a thought for himself, not for any party, but for Greece. He never got involved in politics, never argued over such things. In the end, I knew more about politics than he did.

And even though he managed to avoid the front lines during the Second World War, he couldn't avoid the Civil War. His job was to hunt down the communist bands, and I don't believe he ever forgave them for that. During the Battle of Makrigianni he was right here. He had reported for duty and the fighting caught him inside the building.

Imagine — someone had told his mother that her son had been killed in the Civil War, and they had held a funeral for him, and had already done a memorial service for him when he walked through the door. It was a mistake, but the old woman had believed it. Imagine her joy when he returned to the village alive and in the flesh. She went out of her mind with happiness — she thought she was seeing a ghost. And imagine your grandfather's shock when he found out they had held a memorial service for him while he was still alive.

So, having survived a war and his own funeral, when he finally came back to Athens, he brought his unmarried sister Eleni with him, hoping to find her a husband. She had pleasant features, but she was from the countryside, she was getting on in years, and she was heavy — and back then all of these things counted against you in terms of marriage. Your grandfather knew many people, though, and someone among them was bound to help him marry her off.

But first things first — he had to find her a room in Athens. Where he was posted as a gendarme, they weren't permitted to live off the premises because of the Civil War, so they slept in their station. He couldn't put her there. He had a cousin in Agia Paraskevi and he took Eleni there for a few days while he looked for somewhere closer to him.

At Makrigianni, where he was stationed, there was a headquarters, and right next door on Hatzichristou Street there was a barbershop. There were many houses on Hatzichristou Street back then — the state later expropriated them all to build the Acropolis Museum. The barber on Hatzichristou, a man called Theodosis, was a friend of your grandfather's. Directly across from our courtyard there was another barbershop, owned by a man called Michailidis — I can't remember his first name. Theodosis and Michailidis knew each other, being in the same trade. My father went to Michailidis for his haircuts, and the barber knew there was a vacant room in our courtyard.

One day when your grandfather stopped by to see his barber Theodosis, he said: 'Listen, I've brought my sister up from the village to find her a husband, but I've left her temporarily in Agia Paraskevi. Let me know if you hear of any rooms.' The barber said: 'I don't know of anything in Koukaki.' In those days Koukaki, the neighborhood right next to Makrigianni, was all private houses and old money — a much better address than even Kolonaki.

As for Theodosis, he told your grandfather he would look in Neos Kosmos. There were no telephones back then, so he paid a visit in person to his colleague at the barbershop in Neos Kosmos to ask around. The only telephones in the neighborhood were at the baker's and the grocer's. When something was needed, the grocer would send a boy and say 'Go to kyrie Giorgos's house' — imagine how few we were that everyone knew everyone's home by name.

Theodosis went and told Michailidis that your grandfather was a friend of his looking to rent a room, and the two of them went together to ask the owner. My father wasn't the owner — he was the manager — but everyone treated him as if he owned the place. 'Fine,' my father said, 'let this tenant come so we can see who he is.'

It was a Saturday afternoon. All that time I had been going to school — we had classes on Saturdays too. In that little empty room I had set up a small table where I could study in peace. Six of us were living in our courtyard room, and the house was filled with my father's things — he was making slippers at home by himself in those days. That particular Saturday, when I came home from school and we'd had lunch, I put a small pot of water on to heat and brought my wash basin into that room for my weekly bath — as I did every Saturday.

I had just finished bathing and hadn't yet had a chance to empty out the water when a whole delegation arrived at the door — Michailidis, Theodosis, a friend of Theodosis', and your grandfather in his uniform, since guards weren't permitted to wear civilian clothes off duty. I had just stepped out of the bath, my hair was wet. It was long then and I had gathered it into a ponytail, and I was wearing my black school apron. I had nothing else to put on — after my bath I just put my same clothes back on. My father did his usual checks and decided to trust your grandfather, because it never crossed his mind that I might get mixed up with him. He saw an older, serious man, a full-grown adult. He told him: 'All right, I'll give you the room for your sister.'

This room opened onto the kitchen, and my father called out: 'Sevastoulá' — out I came — 'bring a chair for the gentleman.' All the others were standing, all four of them looming over my father like the four horsemen. There was a window too, with half of them on the outside and the other half on the inside. The second chair was needed so the two parties could sit and sign the rental agreement.

I brought a chair from the room and said: 'Please, sit down, sir,' and it was then that he turned his head for the first time and looked at me. I will never forget that look. When he turned to say thank you as I brought him the chair, those green eyes of his went over me from head to toe. What an impression I must have made on him — fresh from the bath, still damp. But a woman, even a barely-hatched young woman, has the instinct to know when someone is looking at her and exactly what that look means."

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