The Stutter, the Screwdriver, and the School Years

(Chapter 17)

Books and Screwdrivers

The children were born and grew up in Koukaki, with few things of their own in that house. There was so much empty floor space that they didn't just play chase — they roller-skated and rode bicycles inside. Sliding doors were in fashion then and we usually left them open.

The children didn't fight much among themselves. Especially once the baby grew a little, the two boys became inseparable — they were hardly ever apart and almost never disagreed. The younger one, Giorgos, was a better student than the older one, Tassos, but Tassos was his hero. He followed him faithfully, as though they were unconsciously replaying the family story — that absolute devotion that grandfather Stefanos had for his brother, my father. They wanted to be one person, inseparable.

Tassos was a good child, quiet, but school didn't come naturally to him — his mind worked differently, more practically. The problem was that he had a stutter; he couldn't get through a whole word. But as he grew older it went away, he shed it. Was it anxiety? I don't know — we never looked into it. When do you find the time, with three children, to go searching for doctors to find out why one of them stutters? There were others in the family who had the same thing and I put it down to the genes. In those days we didn't know about dyslexia or learning difficulties — we just said, well, that child isn't cut out for books.

But it reached the point where even little Giorgakis, who had no problem of his own, started doing the same thing. Giorgos loved Tassos so much that he copied even his difficulties — as though he wanted to share his brother's burden, he began to stutter too. I scolded him, told him: 'What on earth are you doing?' Then if Tassos didn't study, Giorgos didn't study. If Tassos studied, Giorgos studied.

I had a hard time with Tassos. That child is extraordinarily intelligent — at his work he's an ace, at the trade he learned he's flawless, there's no one better. But when he was at school, we would study together the evening before, and while he knew everything at home, the dread of school would lock his mind shut. He would freeze and couldn't get anything out. In the morning, getting ready for school, his mind would go completely blank — as though we had never studied at all.

The teacher would call on him to recite a lesson, he would freeze, start to stutter, the teacher would sit him back down and give him a poor grade. The teacher called me in once to reprimand me, but I gave him something to think about. 'Listen,' I told him, 'this child has a problem. The child always leaves the house prepared. But by the time he gets to school, he has forgotten everything. Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why? Have you thought about it? Have you ever asked yourself whether your own behavior might be affecting him negatively?'

The child used to come to me in tears because they shouted at him, dressed him down in front of the whole class. The teacher had even struck him once — in those days teachers handed out slaps and didn't think twice about it.

'Have you noticed that the child stutters? Have you ever tried to help him? Not at all. You simply berate him, and if there's anything in his mind at that moment — it's gone, everything goes blank.'

I said all of this to the teacher in one of the later years of elementary school. I don't think he listened, and I don't think the situation improved. But with great difficulty, Tassos finished elementary school. Because in those days they gave exams every year to pass to the next grade, and I drilled him through it with enormous effort. It broke my chest. But he managed to pass every year and get into gymnasium.

He even managed to pass the entrance exams for a well-known gymnasium in the center of Athens that was considered a model school at the time. It was an old building, almost ramshackle, with a door that had fallen off its hinges and was hanging loose. One day the headmaster said: 'Which child can fix this door?' 'Me, me, sir!' said Tassos. He had a screwdriver in his pocket, as always. Out it came, he went over, tightened the screws, and fixed it. Where theory defeated him, his hands and his practical mind worked miracles. That boy was born with a screwdriver in his hand.

But in gymnasium the work was harder still, and as he grew and progressed, the problems multiplied. Which is why he asked to transfer to a technical school — and eventually did.

Giorgos, then, was a much stronger student. Later, when Giorgos started elementary school, Tassos would slip out of his own line and stand in Giorgos's line and follow him into his classroom — and the little one loved it. Later, when they would pull Tassos out of Giorgos's classroom, the little one would follow, stand in Tassos's line, and walk into the class of the older children. When they finally separated Giorgos from Tassos's classroom, Giorgos would cry. The teacher called me in and said: 'What are we going to do about this situation with your children?'

I had an idea, because we had Uncle Stefanos — my father's brother. He was devoted both to the family and to God, like a monk without the habit. He fulfilled his duties as a Christian and he also helped our family — especially after I was the first to leave home and I had three children. That was also part of why I had come back to Athens — with so many children I needed help. But it wasn't only my mother who helped me; she could offer very little, since she still had a large family of her own to look after. We had Uncle Stefanos, who took the children to school, brought them back, and was deeply happy in all of it. He considered them his own grandchildren. And us — he considered us his own children.

So I said to the teacher: 'We could arrange something with this grandfather who comes to collect the children. Let him stay in Giorgos's classroom for at least a week, sitting next to him at the desk, until the little one gets used to the idea that this is his class and this is where he belongs.' The teacher agreed. The better to keep Giorgos from pushing the doors open and slipping out, it was best to have his grandfather right there inside the classroom.

Outside school, Giorgos was a quiet child, but there too he followed Tassos everywhere. It was an unspoken alliance. Giorgos only felt safe alongside Tassos's boldness — because Tassos wasn't exactly wild, he was fearless. He did things that carried serious risk; danger meant nothing to him. Every time we went to the countryside, he would go climbing on the rocks. When the children went on walks, he would leap from branch to branch like a monkey. The other children would tell me: 'Your son doesn't walk — he jumps from tree to tree.' Giorgos loved being close to his brother; they thought they were looking out for each other, but in reality they were both getting into mischief together and collecting plenty of thrashings.

As for my daughter, who was the oldest, she was the quietest of the three and never gave me or her father a moment's trouble. She loved reading and would go off on her own to study, which I wholeheartedly approved of. When she started elementary school, I tried to help her with her lessons for exactly fifteen days and then she sent me away — she didn't need me. She wanted to study alone, and she became the top student. She told me she didn't want me sitting beside her and pressuring her, since she managed perfectly well on her own. And the truth is that when I sat with her I wasn't calm — I had two other small children pulling me this way and that, I never had a moment's rest, and I might have lost my patience and gotten short with her.

Their father, on the other hand, didn't have much direct involvement with the children, especially when he was working. Yet all three of them adored him — the moment he walked through the door, wherever they were, they all came running to him. The boys especially: when he sat down to eat, one would sit on one knee and the other on the other and they'd eat his food right off his plate. I waged a constant battle over that.

Telemachos was a very serious man, and somewhat stern. I can say that he loved his children — but without showing it openly. He was the kind of father of that era: his presence was our security, not his words. He didn't know how to play with them — perhaps he felt it would diminish his authority — but his eyes were always on them. He had left everything to me, both guidance and upbringing, perhaps because he had complete confidence in my judgment when it came to raising them, or perhaps because he felt I understood their inner lives better than he did. In any case, everything had fallen on me.

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Love and Degrees: An Invisible Dowry

(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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Among the Judges

 (Chapter 19)

Supreme Court Friends, the Arrogant Contractor and a New Baby

For a stretch of years, until my children were grown, I had no life outside the house — my sole occupation was raising them, and that went on for the better part of a decade. I had no social world of my own. Whatever contact I had with people came through my husband. When we went out, we went out with his friends. That was partly the circumstances, but also because I hadn't yet come into myself — I didn't have the confidence to build a circle of my own.

I didn't have that confidence in front of my husband. He had known me without friends, without a social life, and it would have taken courage to change and tell him: I am not the same person you married. To tell him simply: you met me when I was young and now I have grown. I was always sociable by nature, but the demands of family life had made it impossible to keep up with other women. Many women were in that situation.

There was also our significant age difference, and what happened was that as he began to slow down and wind down, I was coming back to life. That was the natural order of things: Telemachos was beginning to look for the quiet of retirement while I, having gotten through the first great chapter of raising children, felt that my own time was finally starting. I grew into myself and began taking initiative. Where he had once placed me in his social circle, I built one of my own and brought him into it — naturally, without any pressure, offering him a new kind of companionship. In the decade after the children were grown, I started going out, making acquaintances. Mostly through church. One woman would introduce me to another and my circle began to widen.

I had sociability in me. Because the education I had longed for had been taken from me, I always felt drawn to people with culture and standing — I was born for those circles and I always sought out people who had something I didn't, a certain social position, a certain education, and the moment I found that something more, I would connect. Not out of snobbery, but out of a hunger to learn — because I always believed that you only grow, you only fill your own gaps, by surrounding yourself with people who are better than you.

When my children were small I had no complaint about having no free time, because I didn't have enough free time even to feel lonely. But as they grew, naturally, I began to go out — and the first place I went back to was church. I didn't go to church to make connections; I went because the church was a place of peace, a place to breathe. But like it or not, you come into contact with people, because the word 'church' — ekklesia — means assembly, a gathering of people.

In the early years my husband didn't attend the liturgy. But when he retired he gradually began to come with me. He wanted to be at church on Sundays. I went from the early morning — I liked to hear the whole service, not just arrive for the final blessing. He would follow a little later, arriving roughly midway through. But he did like passing through the church on Sundays.

When he was younger we had his social circle — people from work and family as well. You can't overlook your relatives; whatever they're like, you tolerate them. For us the family was always sacred. Crooked or lame, they are your people — whereas friends you choose, and if they don't suit you, you can say goodbye.

He also had one very good friend, Sotiris, from gymnasium. They weren't from the same village — they had met when they went to gymnasium in the nearest central town, where all the surrounding villages sent their students. Later, when both came to Athens, their paths diverged: Sotiris enrolled at the Athens University of Economics, while Telemachos, for various reasons, joined the gendarmerie. For a number of years they lost track of each other, until they met again in Xanthi, where Telemachos was posted and Sotiris was doing his military service. One day they ran into each other by chance in the street. 'Well, Telemachos!' 'Well, Sotiris!' They embraced and never lost touch again after that. My husband always had someone.

So when I had grown into myself and my children had grown up, I found myself at a point in life where I was very content. I enjoyed my circle of friends and my husband enjoyed it too, because I never pushed anything on him that he didn't want. We mostly saw women friends — not necessarily couples or families — and my husband came along. The period when I brought him into that circle was remarkable. I'll tell you one thing that happened right here in this house: I set a table for people from the Supreme Court. I had the former President of the Supreme Court in my home.

I met him at the church of Agios Spyridonas, where he used to come to worship — he was a devout Christian. I used to go there with my choirmaster to study Byzantine music. And it turned out that for some years the President of the Supreme Court was also studying Byzantine music. One day I asked him: 'Do you perhaps know Manthos T., the public prosecutor?' 'Manthos!' he said. 'A wonderful young man! How do you know him?' 'Manthos,' I told him, 'is a family friend — our parents have been friends since before we were born.' 'I'll see him at the Supreme Court and give him your regards!'

There was a young woman named Lina, who'd later become Manthos' wife. I had held Lina as a baby and rocked her to sleep. I knew her because her parents were also from Kalymnos and we lived in the same neighborhood. Back when my mother took me to learn dressmaking to pull me out of school, she took me to Lina's mother, kyria Thalia [Mrs Thalia].

At that time Lina's mother was still unmarried. But her brother was studying law and had a fellow student from Rhodes. Eventually kyria Thalia the dressmaker married that friend of her brother's — his name was Lefteris. When the islands were reunited with Greece and needed to be staffed with professionals — doctors, lawyers, notaries — Lefteris asked to go to his home island of Rhodes and become a notary there. They had two children.

We had a piece of land in Rhodes that belonged to my father, and when we went to see to it we stayed at Thalia's house. That's when I held little Lina in my arms and played with her. But when the girls were grown, Lefteris sent them to Athens to study. Both of them got into the Law School.

When the girls came to Athens, their father found a place a little further down from here. He found the apartment and came to see me — I was married by then, with a husband and children. I introduced him to my husband and said: 'This is kyrios Lefteris from Rhodes, a notary. He has brought his daughters to study.' He explained that he had brought them here because the university was nearby, and he also said: 'I've brought them here so you can keep an eye on them.' I was surprised — 'How am I supposed to keep an eye on grown girls?' He simply meant that if they needed anything, they would have someone to turn to, they could knock on my door.

The younger daughter, Lina, followed a legal path and became a judge. She spent her early years on the bench in Patras. But whenever she came to Athens for any reason, she would always come to visit me. One day when Lina came to see me, she noticed that a short way down from my building an old bakery had been demolished and a new apartment block was going up in its place. She thought she had a little money saved and perhaps with her father's help she could buy an apartment in Athens. So she went upstairs and asked for whoever was in charge. She told him she was interested in one of the apartments, from the plans.

But the contractor, looking at this small young woman, spoke to her with contempt. She explained that she was a district judge and so on, but he laughed — he roared with laughter — and said, 'Ha! And I'm a Supreme Court Justice.' Dripping with sarcasm.

She kept talking to him: 'But… I am interested in buying one.' In the end he told her: 'Off you go, sweetheart — bring your mother and we'll talk.'

She didn't look the part because she looked so young. She came to my house in tears and told me: 'Kyria Sevasti, [Mrs Sevasti] what happened to me! Could you please come with me and say that you are my aunt?'

'We're going right now,' I said.

'Listen,' I told him, 'what exactly do you need, sir? Shall we bring a birth certificate to show you how old this young woman is? Or her university degree to convince you? I am sorry,' I told him, 'but you mocked and sneered at a woman who is currently a serving member of the judiciary. Now then — I am her aunt. What is it you want?' And I finished with: 'Come to an agreement with this young woman, who has both the will and the means to buy an apartment in your building. Will you sell to her or not?'

'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' he began, 'it's my fault entirely, I apologize both to you and to the young lady. She didn't register to me — I took her for a high-school girl and I was joking around. That's why I told her to bring her mother.'

I told him: 'And how would her mother come? This young woman is from Rhodes — her parents are in Rhodes. She makes her own decisions. She is a district judge, sir. Is she not capable of making decisions about her own life?'

The contracts were signed on the spot, and you should have seen the accommodations he made for her afterward. He agreed to her payment terms and every single modification she requested for the apartment. He was delighted — everything was still on paper, and he had managed to sell his very first apartment to someone of that standing in the judiciary.

She bought her apartment, and it was around that time that she met Manthos, who also served in the legal system. They were married at Agios Dionysios the Areopagite, and they lived in that apartment for many years. It was there that she brought her first child into the world — the child who is now a distinguished doctor with a postgraduate degree and her own clinic near Alexandras Avenue, little Thalitsa. They brought Thalitsa to this house of mine for about three and a half years, because Lina used to leave for the courts early in the morning and I looked after the little one. My own children were all grown but none had married yet and had children of their own, so I didn't yet have my grandmotherly duties. My husband was either at work or at the coffeehouse, and I had a great deal of time.

One morning Lina came and asked me: 'Please — I have a very early court session and I have nowhere to leave the child. Could I bring Thalitsa for you to keep until midday?' I told her: 'Lina, what are you even asking? Bring her here with her stroller and everything that comes with her.' The little girl would stay with me until midday, until her mother came to collect her. I made Lina a proposition: 'Whenever this happens, bring her — don't hesitate.' And that's exactly what she did.

But before long I had gotten so fond of the child that I was asking for her every day. I loved that little girl because she was so gentle and so bright. She was a treasure. Once she began to understand the world around her, she started asking questions — endless questions. Always asking. If I answered one, she went straight on to another — why this, why that — until finally I'd tell her: 'Well, I don't have any more answers for you!'

It was plain that this child was going to become something extraordinary. And she had grown so attached to me that she didn't want to leave. When her mother came in the afternoon to take her home, she would cry and say: 'We'll stay with Kyria Sevasti.' And I had such a wonderful time with her — I would take her with me when I went to visit my mother, and she made my mother happy too.

Our whole lives, my mother and I and the other women — we raised children together. Our friends' children were our own.

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