The Daughter Read online

  They were fine for clothes though: still had the late lamented Zambakis’ stage wardrobe. All their artistic accessories were stored on the first floor, in memory of him; they lived on the second floor. Managed just fine what with bits and pieces from this heroine or that, especially Mlle Salome, she was always dressing up in cloaks and lace shawls and pill-box hats. Mrs Adrianna had a knack with the needle and thread, so she would model the costumes a bit, Madame Butterfly, Lady Frosini at Ali Pasha’s Court, the Unknown Woman, you name it. But Mlle Salome would wear the evening gowns as is, all she had to do was take them up a bit at the hem. Why, even the German patrols stopped to look, like the time she went out in a three-quarter cape, just like Errol Flynn in Elizabeth and Essex.

  One time she even took the parrot along for a stroll. The bird was an engagement present from her former suitor and now it was all hers. When we took Korce, in Albania. Mrs Kanello taught the parrot to sing ‘Mussolini, macaroni’, you’d swear it was Sophia Bembo, the singer, even if he only learned one line. Come the Occupation, they locked him in the house and tied his beak shut on account of how he would pipe up with the song; even the parrots in our neighbourhood are in the Resistance, Mlle Salome used to needle us, back when we had Signor Alfio.

  Come the second winter of the Occupation Mrs Adrianna took pity on me with that thin cotton skirt of mine; she brought me over to her place and fitted me in a fustanella. That’s when she found out I was wearing drawers made out of a flag. I tried it on. Looks great, she said. A bit long, but you’ll keep warm, poor kid. Wear it, and as soon as we’re liberated bring it back.

  I liked it fine, even if fustanellas were men’s skirts and it was way too big for me. It came to below my knees and I held it up with a trouser belt just under my arms. Mother didn’t like it one bit but no way I was going to take it off, not when my bottom finally warmed up a bit.

  But when it came to shoes the Tiritomba family truly suffered. Had to wear clogs, same as everybody else. All they had in the wardrobe was men’s clodhoppers with tufted toes. At first they sold off some of the small stuff for food, but then Mrs Adrianna put her foot down, It’s profanation of our dear departed, she said.

  Back then we made the rounds of the villages, selling dowry supplies to the local yokels. Me, personally, I couldn’t sell eyes to a blind man, but I went along with Adrianna, to keep up her spirits. We traded hand-knitted goods and jersey underwear for a sack of wheat … Father Dinos’ wife even managed to sell off some of the priest’s vestments. And on the way back we gathered kindling for the charcoal brazier. Those outings of ours were pretty well organized affairs. I can tell you, several women all together, because if the peasants ran into a lone woman, they’d grab all her food, Even if they don’t rape us, Mlle Salome joked one time. Who could even think about rape back then?

  But we went on other outings too, the sneaky kind. Mrs Kanello, Mrs Adrianna and her daughter Marina. Mlle Salome and me and our little Fanis – the two of us they dragged along as a kind of alibi, who was going to suspect a couple of little kids? Plus, seeing as we were so small it was easier for us to squeeze through the holes in fences. We set out fully loaded. That loony lady Kanello had us draped with hand-grenades and ammunitions of all kinds; we pretended we were off to pick dandelion greens, but what we really did was deliver the stuff to the contact who was that pipsqueak Thanassakis, the schoolmaster’s son from Vounaxos village. The man who took final delivery of all the weapons. Today he’s a top man on the nationalist side, but I’m not naming names, might cause him embarrassment.

  Mrs Kanello took us down to the ground floor at her place, tucked our shifts into our drawers, the ones made from the national flag, pulled our belts tight to get the shifts to puff out, and then stuffed them with grenades. But before that she made us pee, whether we wanted to or not, so we wouldn’t have to untie our belts before we got where we were going. And as we walked along she hissed at me, Don’t you go leaning over forward, or so help me you’ll never know what hit you.

  Mlle Salome hid bullets in her turban and a hand grenade in each cup of her brassiere (she didn’t have much in the way of a bust either, always wore puffy, pinch-waist blouses). But she wouldn’t tote ammunition in her drawers. Makes me itch, she said, I’ll give myself away. Keep your head high or so help me I’ll whip you within an inch of your life, hissed Kanello as they strolled through the German lines. If you drop so much as one cartridge and the Germans catch us, I’ll rip you in half like a sardine; a team of wild horses couldn’t tear you out of my clutches, I swear to God.

  That was the way Mrs Kanello talked. Even rubbed off on me whenever we met. She may live in Athens and her kids may be studying in Europe, but she still talks like a provincial. Me, I always make a point of speaking like a real Athenian in all my social encounters.

  So Mlle Salome had to walk head high with those pointy breasts of hers and a tall turban like Ali Pasha in Ali Pasha and Lady Frosini Dishonoured. I acted in that too, with a travelling company. Played the role of drowned woman number two.

  Mrs Kanello – she was as scatterbrained as she was daring – carried her grenades in a basket. When we got to our destination we met that other dimwit Thanassakis. Anagnos’ son, and handed over the stuff, for which we hid in a country chapel to undo our underwear. On the way back we gathered wild greens and onions.

  Whenever we came across a roadside shrine we had a race to see who would get there first. If we found the little lamp burning we pinched out the flame and stole the oil: poured it into a little bottle we kept with us. Mrs Adrianna always begged forgiveness from the holy icon; she was a devout woman. I have sinned blessed Saint Barbara, she would say, for instance: Forgive my sins, don’t be angry at me, a martyr like you should know what it means to go without, don’t be quick to punish me. Yes, I’m taking olive oil from you, but I’ll make it up to you in sheep’s-milk butter once our nation is restored, she said.

  Mlle Salome sang the same tune, but grimmer, turning to the icon and saying, You saints, what do you need? you can get along just fine without olive oil, particularly you. Saint Paraskevi, for instance, since you’re such a big name and number one in the heavens at that (Salome was always the one for compliments). But our kids can’t live without it. Besides, you’ve gotta keep the saints in line, piped up Mrs Kanello. If you don’t put your foot down, they won’t listen. Still, she said it with a fearful look in her eye, stealing a sidelong glance at the icon.

  That was when we hit a shrine with a lamp that was still operating. We divided up the oil. And that night we enjoyed a tasty meal of greens, porridge and olive oil to top the whole thing off nice. So what if the food tasted of burned wick; better, claimed Mlle Salome, this way we’re eating blessed food. So she was a Communist – still, every now and again she got religious.

  You figure it out. Today she’s up to her eyeballs in roasts and chops in that hick town with that butcher of hers. Sent me a double string of sausages for Mother’s memorial service though, how did she find out about it? Still, God bless her.

  Anyway, Mrs Kanello was scared of anything that had to do with religion, even if she called herself a left-winger. After the meal with the stolen olive oil she would recite an act of contrition.

  One time we filched some eggs from this chicken coop; the mother hen turned mean and put up a fight – she had one mean beak, let me tell you – but finally she backed off. Fortunately the eggs were fresh-laid. That evening, as each of us was eating an egg, we heard a dreadful ruckus from the Tiritombas’s place. Mrs Adrianna caught Salome with this strange beauty cream on her face. Her, instead of boiling her egg, she smeared it all over her skin. Not that you could call that skin, God forgive me. Still, I should be more tolerant. Because nature has endowed me with skin and with other qualities, I shouldn’t be so critical of my neighbour’s little shortcomings, should I?

  Sundays, mostly, was when we would make our ammunition deliveries; it was Mrs Kanello’s day off and the schoolmaster’s kid from Vounaxos wasn’t i
n school. How’d he do it, the poor freak, said Kanello with that provincial twang of hers, a job like that in the partisans? Had a streak of ambition, she did. Can you imagine? Actually wanted the Occupation to last so her son could become a messenger for the partisans too.

  Thanassakis was a little shrimp of a kid, twelve years old. Of course, you’ll say, it was all because he had a donkey. He was in his father’s class at the Vounaxos school house. When he finished primary school – had a bent for book learning even then, the kid – his father rented him a room in Rampartville, out past the railway station; you couldn’t really call it a room, it was more like a shed with a low ceiling, a bed, a window with no glass, only shutters, and a wash-basin and water jug just outside the door. He used the place to rest at noon and study for afternoon classes. We had school mornings and afternoons back in those days.

  Besides the guns and bullets Thanassakis carried messages for the partisans from a couple of school teachers. Mr Pavlopoulos, who was kind of partial to me, and a tall, handsome man called Mr Vassilopoulos, Alexander the Great we nicknamed him in class, died young, poor fellow. Everybody trusted Thanassakis, first because he was so dumb nothing scared him, second because he could carry things. His father knew exactly what he was doing. What’s more, seeing he was such a tiny little squirt, with such innocent blue eyes, who could ever be suspicious of anyone with blue eyes? He knew all the minefields, learned them from his father, a devout man he was all the same.

  The fields outside Rampartville were thick with German mines, but fortunately for us, nobody got hurt. Because the numbskull Germans told the Italians, and any Italian who had connections with a Greek family told them what places to avoid when they went out looking for greens. I suspect the Italians did that because the Germans treated them like second-class allies, people said, so they turned right around and passed on the information to us; what better chance to show how gallant they were, plus get back at the Germans.

  Signor Alfio let Mother know where not to go for greens ‘under any circumstances’. And Thanassakis discovered two mine-fields all by himself. When classes were over in the morning ing he went back to his room to study. And when school got out in the afternoon he and the other village kids would go back to their village. It was only three-quarters of an hour by foot but they had to make it fast, because after seven it was forbidden to cross the German lines which were just the other side of Deviljohn’s bridge. But you expect kids to worry about things like that? So they were always stopping along the way, to spin their top, which was really an empty English hand-grenade. Anyway, by the time they got to the German lines, the hour was late and the barrier was down. In wintertime the kids would just duck under the bar and go on their way: because of the cold the Germans stayed crowded into the little brick hut they used as a guard house. (Thanassakis blew it up on them with a real grenade not long before the English arrived, wanted to blow off steam.) But come springtime the Germans would be standing there at the barrier like tenpins, firing off shots every time they heard footsteps.

  Thanassakis watched where the Occupation forces would go to answer nature’s call, and where they wouldn’t. That’s how he discovered the two mine-fields – ‘turd fields’ is what he called them – and so, from then on, they could come and go as they pleased.

  In the adjacent mine-field there was a kind of round mine planted, roasters, we called them. Thanassakis, that crazy kid, danced around right on top of the mines, couldn’t have weighed more than fifty pounds dripping wet, besides, you’ll say, those mines were built for heavy vehicles, nothing for the kids to be afraid of. Only one time one of them blew up when a cow stepped on it and all the nearby trees were full of chops; our little Fanis got there in time to grab an armful of meat, for two days we had enough to eat.

  There was the other mine explosion too, the one that blew Thanassakis sky high, but we’re talking about the Tiritomba family right now, and for what reason they so hastily went on the road.

  Mrs Adrianna fought it as hard as she could but hunger was closing in on them, no matter how many roadside shrines they busted into. One Sunday she went and fainted on one of our outings and we just about panicked because she was loaded to the teeth with grenades. Had to drag her back to town.

  Her brother Tassis was in love with that rattletrap bus of his. He was always saying, Boy, I can’t wait for the English to get here, get me some spare parts and some petrol. In the meantime he converted the thing to wood-fuel. But finding wood was another story, as you can imagine. The hills were crawling with partisans. So he stole grapevine stumps from the nearby villages. His sister would send him out to scare up an ear of corn or two, but he would always come back toting a bag of vine stumps. That dingbat Kanello even got Adrianna’s daughter Marina – she was a bit older than me – mixed up in resistance stuff. Mlle Salome, you say? Out of resistance to that fiancé of hers who goes off to Albania – now there’s a man for you – to escape the marriage and who turns out to have a face like Hitler in the bargain, Mlle Salome spent all her time getting dressed up to the nines or knitting and underpants for the partisans. Occasionally we had little soirées at their place, what I mean is we had to stay over seeing that with all our chit-chat we lost track of the hour and by then it was curfew time, in which case we’d all cat-nap together. Other times we had to spend the night whenever we got word from Thanassakis that the Germans were going to seal off the town, just in time for Father Dinos to signal Mrs Chrysafis’s son Valiant not to come home, that was before his ma hauled him home shot dead in the two-wheeled cart, of course, at which time we had one less job to do. Father Dinos sent messages with the church bells. Sometimes, out of the blue, the bells of Saint Kyriaki’s would start ringing mournfully, as if for a funeral, or joyfully; at first we didn’t know what to think. That’s it, the priest’s lost his marbles, we said, but finally we figured out that he used the church bells the way we use the telephone today, some even said that he had a special way of ringing the bells to let Madam Rita know she should wash up and expect him that evening.

  Those overnight stays, Mrs Adrianna would brew up hot herbal tea, and throw in a dried fig or some grape juice molasses if she had it, for sweetening. Showed me how to weave rag rugs, she did. We tore the rags into narrow strips, rolled ’em up and I stitched ’em to a piece of matting with a darning needle, each colour – the red, the green – in its own place; Mlle Salome did the design.

  We couldn’t get by without those rag rugs at our place, because the earth floor was always damp and slippery; not to mention the shoots that were always sprouting up in the corners and under the bed right on top of the pullet’s grave which kept getting deeper, by now the fowl must have worked her way as far down as dead people do, I said to little Fanis. That means our pullet is as good as any human, he said. We liked the idea.

  The wool for the vests the women were weaving on those long dark evenings came from Mrs Kanello, but where she got it was a mystery. Except for all the old woollen stuff we unravelled. Plus somewhere she’d picked up a teach-yourself Italian book and she studied it so she could listen in on what the Italians were saying over the telegraph, that explains why they gave her the medal when the Republic came in. Why, she can still talk some broken Italian to this day.

  Mlle Salome’s speciality was underpants, Well, each to her own, piped up Mrs Kanello. Salome’s knitted underpants were enormous; when she tried them on her brother Tassis, they came up to his ears. Must be starving, poor girl; why knit them so big, you’re wasting all the wool, shouted her sister. What’ll they use that crotch sack for, bombs? You don’t know what you’re talking about, says Mlle Salome. I may be a royalist, but I respect the partisans. What d’you take them for, pedigreed freak halfbreeds like the king of England? (I guess you’d have to call her a localist; no way she’d insult anything Greek.) They’re all tall, like Captain Courageous. Me, I knew the partisans were small, mostly, and badly fed, that much I knew, ever since the Germans started dumping dead partisans in the town squa
re.

  The Tiritombas were weak from lack of food; what could we give them? it was all we could do to get by on what Signor Vittorio brought us, not to mention Mrs Adrianna wouldn’t accept help from collaborators. One day, three Italians brought Mlle Salome home, unconscious. Panic. That’s it, we whispered, she’s blown the whistle on us. But no, we were wrong. Salome had gone out for a stroll (which wore her down all the faster) just as all Rampartville polite society would do every afternoon, come hell or high water, right up and down the main street. Still do the same thing today. I found out. Hunger was one thing, cutting off the evening promenade was another, even girls from the lower social classes would join in, putting on like people were bothering them or following them around. Anyway. Mlle Salome insisted on doing the afternoon stroll to demonstrate that she belonged to polite society, but wearing those high-heeled wooden clogs of hers and faint from hunger, she keeled over, twisted her ankle, and collapsed right in front of the Carabineria. The three Italian soldiers carried her back in a dead faint, as stiff as an Easter lamb on the spit. What really happened was that halfway back she came to, that much she confessed when I ran into her in that hick town of hers, but when she realizes she’s in the embrace of three men, she told me, is she so stupid as to come to? Officers would have been better, of course, but when times are tough, you have to make do with what you’ve got, even if it’s only soldiers.

  So the foreign lads carry her home, all I’ve got is water, Mrs Adrianna says. Plus who should the Italians bump into on their way out but Mrs Kanello who’s just sailed in with a straw basket full of wild herbs. Marina, all she was hoping was for Kanello to show up with some edibles, so when she spies the basket she pipes up, right in front of the Italians, Sweet Jesus, more hand grenades!? What happened to the corn meal? Shut up, idiot, hisses her mam. Fortunately the Italians were making eyes at the girl, they didn’t notice a thing. All this time, Tassis was out scouring the valley and when he came back he brought some vine stumps and an inner tube, stole it from a stalled Italian truck.