The First Loneliness of the Year

(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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The Accidental Sale and the Mosaics

(Chapter 16)

Previously: The move to Menidi, far from her family in Athens, sends Sevasti into a depression. The depression worsens after the birth of her first child.

Do You Ask a Sick Man If He Wants to Get Better?

The first day my mother left our house in Menidi, I had that whole ordeal with the crying baby — not knowing what was wrong or what to do. Thankfully, a kind woman appeared, knocked on my door, and helped me. When Telemachos came home from work he found her there and heard about our day. The night passed, we slept, and the next morning he said: 'Pack your things — we're going to your mother's.' And we stayed with my mother until the baby was eight months old. Summer came and we had to baptize her, so we went back up to Menidi. Four more months passed and we celebrated her first birthday up there. But it seems that by that point he had already made up his mind.

My husband kept his cards close to his chest, never said anything, and always presented me with a done deal. But it seems he had been suffering too. During the months I spent in Athens while pregnant, and then after the birth, he had been going up and down constantly, back and forth for me, the baby, and the house. At some point he arrived at the idea that we needed to move to a new house, in the city. When it was just the two of us, it didn't bother me not to have electricity or running water — we managed, either with an oil lamp or I would go and fetch water in a small jug. As for the clothes, my mother would take them, wash them, iron them, and bring them back. But now, with a child, electricity and water had become urgent necessities, and the laundry was an enormous problem.

When we celebrated the baby's first birthday, he had already taken a house — on his own, without telling me a word — right next to my mother's house, at Agios Panteleimonas in Ilissos, at the Steps. He hadn't said a thing. After the birthday celebration was over, he said: 'Do you want to go to Athens?'

'What would we do there?' I said. 'Just walk around?'

'No — to stay!' he said.

'You know,' I told him, 'what kind of question is that? Do you ask a blind man if he wants to see? What are you asking me? You've seen for yourself how hard life is up here.'

'And where would you want to live?' he asked again.

'What do you want me to say?' I told him. 'We need to be close to my mother so we have some help.'

'Get ready,' he said, 'because that's where we're going.'

'Where?'

'At Agios Panteleimonas, at the Steps.'

But that was my own neighborhood. No further description needed — I knew exactly which house it was. 'And why didn't you say anything?' I asked him.

He said: 'I had things to sort out, a lot to get done before it could happen. I wanted it to be a surprise. Now we just need to find a day to move our things.'

And one day, a Sunday, we closed up the house in Menidi and brought everything — there wasn't much — to Neos Kosmos. We left the Menidi house behind to use as a summer retreat, somewhere to go with friends in the summer. And that's what we did, until we sold it once the children were a little older.

My three children were two years apart. We stayed four years in that house in Neos Kosmos and that's where my first son was born. But when I was pregnant with my second son, we realized the house was too small — it couldn't hold us all. It had a hallway and two rooms, that was it. There was no sitting room, only bedrooms. But I had gotten used to it and I loved being close to my family. I loved that my church, Agios Panteleimonas, was right across the street with nothing blocking the view from the window. I could walk outside and be immediately in the church square. Every evening, grandma Maria would come and take the children to play outside the church courtyard.

So when my husband said we would have to move again, to a larger house, I objected. I didn't want to go anywhere else because I had a comfortable life. I told him: 'Where would we go?' and he said: 'If you stay here, you'll be squeezed for the rest of your life, with no room. In such a small space, we can't even bring in furniture.' And I told him: 'What does it matter if we don't have furniture — don't we always celebrate your name day? Don't we always manage? I don't want to leave here.'

But one Monday I went to do my shopping at the street market that was held every Monday right in front of the house. There I ran into the sexton of Agios Panteleimonas, a man called kyrios Pantelis [Mr Pantelis] — named after the saint, like the church. I said: 'Hello, how are you?' I was smiling, and I had my older daughter by the hand because I always took her with me. My mother stayed home with the younger one, the little boy. And I had my belly rounded out because another baby was on the way.

I went to church in those days, but not as regularly as I'd have liked, because there were no diapers then. When I took my daughter, she would wet herself and soak the floor and I was mortified. I used to put small cloth squares on them but they didn't last long. There were those plastic pants that children wore over the cloth, of course, but they were uncomfortable for the poor little things. The children didn't like them — they got a rash. In the end — imagine — I couldn't keep up with my son anymore and I ended up letting him run around the house bare, even in winter. I told myself: he'll do what he does and I'll clean it up afterward.

So that day I see kyrios Pantelis and say: 'How are you?' He says: 'I'm trying to find a house to buy.' And on a whim, teasing, I said: 'I'm selling mine!' The house we were in had been built on his father's land — he had been born on that very plot. He, the sexton of the church across from our house, had been walking around our house looking for something to buy. I didn't know that — so I said it as a joke.

He took it seriously. 'Are you pulling my leg?' he said. 'Not at all,' I said. He told me: 'I want to buy it so I can come back to my father's land, back to where I was born, back to my own home.' I thought to myself: hold on a moment — this is a real opportunity, because whatever price I name, he'll pay it. So I told him: 'I mean it. We're selling for a hundred and fifty thousand drachmas.' I knew prices, knew what houses cost, and knew that for our standard of living, that was a lot of money.

'So much!' he said. 'Yes,' I told him, 'because the house is move-in ready — anyone can just walk in.' Which was true. But I told him to come at midday to speak with my husband. 'I'll come,' he said, 'I'll definitely come — I'm very interested.' And he did come, though Telemachos had come home earlier because I had left a gap. Kyrios Pantelis asked me: 'What time should I come?' and since I knew my husband came back around two in the afternoon, I told him to come at three.

When my husband arrived I said: 'Shall I give you the news? I sold the house!'

'You're impossible,' he said. 'Be quiet — what are you saying? You didn't want to leave the house and now you're telling me you sold it?'

'I went and sold the house and I sold it at a good price,' I told him. 'Don't say a word,' I told him.

'How much did you sell it for?'

'A hundred and fifty thousand.'

'You're impossible!'

And I told him: 'Get ready — kyrios Pantelis is coming now to discuss it, and don't drop the price by a single thousand. If you drop the price, we won't sell. Hold firm to what I said.'

Kyrios Pantelis arrived and said: 'Your wife told me such-and-such... Is it true?' And my husband told him: 'Yes, it's for sale.' 'But for 150,000...' he said, with a grievance in his voice. 'That's what I'm selling it for. Take it or leave it.' We didn't tell him we were moving for the children's sake. Kyrios Pantelis wasn't worried about space anyway — he had three grown children himself and they would all fit. He wanted that house so badly that he accepted, even though Telemachos wouldn't budge on the price. They drew up a preliminary agreement then and there and he paid a deposit.

He was in a hurry to move in, since he was renting and wanted a home of his own. The only condition my husband set was that we be given two months to find another place and move out — July and August. They went to a notary, drew up the contract, and kyrios Pantelis handed over all the money. And so we began looking for a house.

In the end, though, we didn't come out ahead. We ended up paying more to move into the new place — for one reason or another we were constantly spending money.

The only thing we found at that point was a a ground-floor apartment in Koukaki for a hundred and eighty thousand, and it wasn't even finished — it had all sorts of things missing. It was just a roughed-in set of rooms, plastered but with no interior fittings, only external ones. So at least it was lockable and had a door. And the seller wouldn't come down from a hundred and eighty thousand, nor would he do any of the work himself.

Telemachos thought it over — he had seen how much I loved the light that poured in from all the windows when we looked at it, how much I loved the view over Faliro and the Acropolis — and in the end he agreed to take it. To agree, he had to take out a bank loan. Which is why for the rest of his life he never wanted to hear the word bank. Because the bank is the greatest loan shark and the most official thief there is. He took out a loan — sixty thousand, I think — and I don't even know how much it ended up being by the time he paid it off, because interest piles on interest and the money keeps growing. Not to mention that the bank puts a mortgage on your house, meaning that if you can't pay they take it.

We worked at tremendous speed because we were under pressure from our buyer to move out in less than two months. 'Kyrie Pantelis,' I told him, 'don't you understand that I have three small children, two of them infants, one still in my belly — and we found a house but we found it half-finished. Give us a little more time to get it ready so we can move in. Don't hold a knife to my throat as well. You have a house, for better or worse — you won't end up in the street. Do us this favor. I don't want to be out on the street; I want to have a place to live.' He was a good man and gave us one more month — but not a day more.

Going back to my husband, I told him: 'Before anything else, if you don't put floors in that house, I'm not going in — I don't care whether it's wood or mosaic.' In every house I had ever lived in, the floors were bare concrete. And I had seen what a nightmare it was to do floor work when you had a family, while other things you could at least manage.

And so it was done. Telemachos moved fast and found the mosaic tiles and had them laid. They are exceptional tiles because he knew a craftsman from Menidi who was famous in the trade — they called him 'the king of mosaics.' The craftsman came and asked if I wanted one room with a real wood floor. I told him: 'No, no — I have small children and they wet themselves and wood doesn't clean easily. Not to mention it warps and soaks up all the moisture. Put mosaic throughout so I can mop it.'

As for the patterns, he chose whatever he liked — didn't even ask me — but I trusted him because he had done extraordinary work in Menidi. He did it all himself, without any other workers, and very quickly. When the owner who lived on the first floor saw how beautiful it was, he was full of envy — he called the craftsman and had his own place done too. And the basement and the upper floor. The entire building now has mosaic. He even did the staircase, the shared areas, and the courtyard — right out to the sidewalk. We were the only building in the neighborhood with a mosaic sidewalk.

But then the electricity company came along and dug up the pavement, then the water company, then the telephone company — and they destroyed it. A little while after we moved into Koukaki, in November of '59, my youngest son was born there. By that time the house was furnished and I was at peace.

I knew this was where we would live our lives.

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