Return to the Motherland

(Chapter 1)

The two brothers were very young for such a long journey, from Kalymnos to Russia. The older one had only one year left to finish the six-year high school, but the younger had just graduated from elementary school. There was no other choice, though — their mother had been widowed and didn't have the means to feed them, so they had to reach their older brother abroad before the money ran out.

You can't really imagine what that journey cost them. Two minors, Greek by blood but carrying Italian passports because the Dodecanese were under Italian occupation, who traveled through the turbulent waters of Turkey and Greece, through hostile Bulgaria, all the way to the cold embrace of the port of Odessa. What kind of documents, what connections, what payments it took — nobody knows. What is known is that the journey succeeded, and the two brothers reached their older brother, who taught them the trade of shoemaking — the art of the slipper.

They made slippers, not the kind people wear around the house in Greece today, but the kind built for outdoor work and snow. Fur-lined slippers, like farm boots. The young ones worked, and whatever they earned they handed over to the older brother, who banked the money. This went on for as long as the Tsar lived.

When foreigners were expelled from Russia in 1918, after the Bolsheviks seized power and killed the Tsar, all three brothers came back. The younger two went to Athens — to Greece, as people said then, because the islands hadn't yet been united with Greece. They were hungry for it, this place they'd never actually known — a homesickness for somewhere they'd never lived.

The older brother, though, wanted to go back to Kalymnos, to see his wife and children. In those days, men left the island alone; they didn't take their families with them, they just sent money back. Still, in the decades that followed, the older brother's three children would not be able to resist Athens's pull either, since it was the city that gathered Greeks from everywhere and promised them education, work, and a future. Perhaps the older brother could already see this coming, which is why he used his earnings to buy a house in Athens — no small sum. He told his younger brothers to live in one room of the house, rent out the other room, and send the money back to him on the island.

They settled somewhere with a view of the Acropolis, in Neos Kosmos. It was close to Plaka, the neighborhood that drew in all the islanders, who built small whitewashed houses along wide stone-paved alleys that reminded them of the distant homes they'd left behind. In the center of Athens they could all do their business and make a living. They settled into the big city, into the heart of Greece — the longed-for homeland they'd been taught about in school and talked about around the family dinner table.

The younger brothers arrived in Athens with nearly empty pockets. They had a roof over their heads, but little else to show for their labor. Their money was rubles, which nobody would take anymore. After the revolution, the ruble had collapsed, the Russian currency reduced to worthless paper. But with what they had, they opened a shop and started working together, practicing their craft. They adapted it, though, refined it. They stripped the fur from the slippers, reworked the design, and transformed a farmhand's boot into something the Athenians could actually wear. The shop fed their family. It only closed after World War II, when illness and old age made it impossible to continue.

Their refined craft brought them customers from high society — the aristocracy that began taking shape in Athens in the twenties and thirties. And since few countries came out of the First World War as triumphant as Greece, the euphoria of the early victories and the new territorial gains was more than good for business for Giorgos and Stefanos.

By the time they arrived in Greece, Giorgos—the older of the two younger brothers—was already well past the age to be a bachelor, and he needed to find a wife. He was ready to make the long, hard journey back to the island, to choose a bride from his own place and to see his mother again. But fate had other plans: in 1922, Greece declared war on Turkey, hoping to annex Asia Minor — a hope that had been nursed for centuries and kept burning with fury and patriotic myth.

Giorgos was more than a patriot. He had seen the world by then. He had lived alongside Italian soldiers, visited Russian churches, and had come to believe with his whole chest that Greece was the place where everything had begun. The Greek language — his language — and his faith in the Orthodox God would protect him. It may also have been clear to him that only Greece would let him live as a free man. He took Greek citizenship immediately and volunteered for the war. They sent him to an unknown place to help people like himself. To help them feel they belonged to something larger, that they weren't immigrants or second-class citizens in the villages where they'd been born.

Turkey may have lost the First World War, but the question of Asia Minor was far from settled. The Turks had been calling that land home for generations too, enraged at watching their farmers slaughtered by an infidel mob. As the drama hurtled toward its familiar tragedy — the Asia Minor Catastrophe — it was at the Battle of the Sakarya that Giorgos was shot near the heart and had to be sent back. He found his brother still working in the shop, and the two of them renewed their oath to live for each other. The bond between younger and older in families like theirs was a blood oath — two lives stitched together, without so much as a whisper of personal concern or ambition.

The younger one, Stefanos, had no intention of finding a wife; the finances didn't stretch far enough for two households. Besides, Stefanos was a man devoted to his God. He prayed for his brother and took pleasure in the spiritual satisfactions that his education allowed him. In the end, his schooling had come from the church — he was close to religious texts, to the writings of the holy fathers of Orthodoxy.

So Giorgos watched Italy's weaknesses carefully, and in 1929, he managed to slip out of Greece quietly, taking a fishing boat from a coastal port in Athens, from Vouliagmeni. He was thirty-eight or thirty-nine by then. Too old to be an appealing groom. He left his brother alone and promised to return with a bride from their village. He found his mother alive, stayed in her house, and told her all the adventures her children had been through. They had a lot of catching up to do — sending letters wasn't easy in those days, and whole years could pass between messages. It was also clear that Greece was preparing to enter another war, this time against Italy, which still held the Dodecanese under occupation. And their mother couldn't read or write, so the news was sparse. Like all Greeks, they simply knew they shared the same sea, and it was the sight of the waves that brought back memories.

Giorgos had already reached out to a childhood friend who had known his father, and this friend said he'd be happy to arrange the introductions — a matchmaking on the island, on his behalf. This friend already had someone in mind: an unmarried girl, though she was already on the older side at twenty-nine. The girl's father, Antonakis, was a tailor — he made suits, which meant he had a refined trade for the time, and it brought him into contact with the better circles of the island. So he knew this friend too, the man with the connections to the mainland.

When Giorgos arrived on the island, his friend went to Antonakis and told him that a man from Greece had come looking for a bride to take back with him. "What do you say, Mast' Antoni? Your daughter isn't getting any younger and her best years are behind her. Think about this offer. Otherwise you might have to keep her at home. Right now she might help around the shop, but when you're gone, she'll become a burden to her brothers."

Maria had two brothers. A younger unmarried one who lived on the island, and an older one who had gone to Argentina, married there, and was never seen again. Argentina was farther away and it wasn't easy for her to go find her older brother the way Giorgos had done for his. As for the groom from Greece — even if he was weathered and worn down by the wars, he was presentable, he was only one sea away, and he could make her a Greek citizen.

Maria hadn't married yet because she was a beloved only daughter and her parents had wanted to match her with only the best. And so the years went by. But how could her parents know whether Giorgos was a good man, a safe bet? As they say, it was a pig in a poke. He'd come from Greece, so perhaps this was the stroke of luck they'd been waiting for for their daughter. They leaned heavily on the common friend's good word. Maybe it was an opportunity — though of course they'd have no way of knowing whether their daughter would be moving into a palace or a hovel in Athens.

Maria was beautiful too, but very introverted, a closed-off person. She couldn't read or write — women didn't learn such things then; it was considered unnecessary. She was an exceptional homemaker. She worked constantly, and like any island woman, every week she whitewashed the street in front of her house. She used lime to whitewash the house itself and carried on this habit in her new home in Athens, whitewashing the entire courtyard too. In those days there were no apartment blocks in Athens; families lived in rooms arranged around a shared courtyard. Five families lived in the rooms around the courtyard where Giorgos and Maria raised their family. Everyone had two or three children and the yard was like a nursery. The housewives would set out low tables — sofrásia, they called them — and stools in the courtyard, and whenever anyone roasted potatoes they'd call all the neighborhood children over to feed them.

Every Saturday, once Maria had a family of her own, she'd send her daughters to the hardware yard with two drachmas to buy a bucket of lime. That was the measure of her — there was nothing more complicated to say about her character. With this woman, Giorgos was content beyond measure. As for Maria, since her father was satisfied with the groom, no further reflection was required on her part.

But Maria's father kept her close by his side on the day the groom came to call on her.

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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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