The Daughter Page 7

  Us modern-day charmers we’re spoiled so rotten we don’t know what’s good for us, all the different creams we can pick and choose between, every drugstore’s got at least ten different brands. Plus they’ve even got European toilet paper, every roll costs as much as new release cinema ticket. Saw it in one of those high-class uptown supermarkets. Not that I do my shopping there, but whenever I get over one of my fits I ring up one of my neighbours and we head for the supermarket just to blow off steam; what a sight. We make like we’re buying, we load the shopping cart full to overflowing then we just leave it standing there and walk out.

  Not to mention all the nice people you run into in the supermarket. Stars even. TV stars. I mean, not real stars of the stage: still, they’re stars all the same, though. Furthermore, you can check out the exotic foods; why, they’ve even got canned goods from Japan; makes you sick to your stomach. Reminds me from the outside of the canned food we used to get from the English when we were in high school; I was back in school by then, for a couple of years. They came driving up in their trucks and handed out the food themselves, because the Prefect went and stole the first load himself, right after the so-called Liberation.

  Some of the canned food came from UNRRA, some was army rations. If you were lucky you got UNRRA: they were chock full of food. The army rations had a chocolate bar, a cookie, a razor blade and a condom. Truckloads of English soldiers would drive up and hand out the food in the break, they were all blond and cheerful but they still looked a lot like the Greeks with those low-slung behinds of theirs. We kids blew up the condoms and the whole high school was full of cheery balloons. Our singing teacher managed to snatch one of the good ones out of my hand before I could puff it up. Once in a while we’d even blow them up in class, during the physics and chemistry lessons mostly. One day I went home waving a blown-up condom just as pleased as punch, taking care nobody would pop it and, when Mother saw me, did she ever give me a whipping.

  Anyway, a trip to the supermarket makes you feel better than going to the park, where there’s nothing but little kids talking dirty and calling you auntie. At the supermarket you can keep in touch with things, social-wise; when I’m going up and down the aisles it makes me feel as if our royal family is still ruling, reminds me just a little of those German operettas at the movies back during the Occupation, the ones with all the food. Plus going up and down the aisles is a lot better than any tranquillizer, which are pretty expensive, still, God bless my medical insurance plan.

  One time at the supermarket who should I run into but our MP Doc Manolaras’s wife, he’s the one who fixed up Daddy’s pension for me. Gorgeous woman. I kissed her hand – I know how to show my gratitude, after all – but she blushed. What are you doing, Miss Roubini? she says, I’m young enough to be your daughter. Listen to the old boiling fowl, your daughter! Me, I don’t even show my age. But I was determined to respect the social niceties. Because if it wasn’t for her husband, Fanis would never be set up for life the way he is, and I would never have my orphan’s pension as an Albanian veteran’s daughter.

  I can still remember her husband as a forty-year-old doctor back in Rampartvillè, in my younger days. Doc Manolaras. Even before the war he was into politics. And generous too. Wouldn’t take a thing from a poor patient, But you’d better vote for me when I run for parliament, was his line. But even the better classes of people liked him. I’m the only one in Rampartville who’s seen every rear end in town, male and female, from every social class in the whole provincial capital, he used to say. Seeing as how the first thing he did when he visited some sick person was give them an injection, even before he examined you, whether it was the runs or peritonitis or the mumps. One day he stuck it into my godmother. Let me alone, you ungodly thing, she screamed, I’ve got measles, don’t! My dear departed husband never saw me naked from behind, and now people will start talking, and here I am on my last legs!

  Maybe they were goners, but he gave them the injection first, to buck up their spirits and make them feel like science was on their side, was how he put it. Free of charge. Didn’t make any difference if you were at death’s door, he’d say, You’ll repay me with your vote, old boy, when I run for parliament.

  Called on poor people for their name day, he did, but instead of sweets he popped them one in the bum. That was back then, before the war. Finally, after the war, they had the first elections and he ran for parliament and what do you know, he won hands down and came first for the whole prefecture. On to minister, we shouted. MP is fine with me, he said from his balcony. Athens, here I come. I can just see the bums just waiting.

  He helped me straighten out my pension problems. He remembered the spicy sausages and skewered liver my father used to make. Liked good food and plenty of it, Doc Manolaras did. And when the official returns came through seems like everybody the good doctor ever pricked in the behind came to praise him, and there he was, on the shoulders of the riffraff, swaying back and forth like a flag flapping in the wind. Manolaras, Manolaras, they chanted. Your mother’s ass, croaked some dissidents, but they got the stuffings whipped out of them.

  Boutsikas the town porter actually did the shoulder-carrying, by the hour. So maybe he was short, but he was all brawn: why, he could unload two horse-carts in a half hour. Boutsikas had a big family and a more solid supporter for our MP you couldn’t hope to find. Maybe he wasn’t on the same side of the fence as Doc Manolaras, politics-wise, but who cares; the whole family voted for him, out of respect.

  Boutsikas got himself a pension too, thanks to Doc Manolaras. Hauling the doctor from one end of Rampartville to the other on his shoulders he came down with a hernia; that was the end of his portering days, for sure. What a hernia it was, let me tell you; everything just sort of slipped down to his knees; take one look at him below the belt with his pants puffed out right down to the knees and you couldn’t keep your eyes off and you’d say, God almighty, now there’s a man who’s got it all. Why, some women who didn’t know he was ill were jealous of his wife’s good fortune. Anyway, thanks to the pension he came up to Athens, family-wise, with all the little Boutsikases, eight or nine of them and today they sell lottery tickets at the best locations without a police permit and the mother is a night cleaner in two tax offices; they even built themselves a place, way out in the sticks plus illegal to boot, but they’re doing fine for themselves, whatever they take in they drink it away every night, their ma too thanks be to the hernia they all have work and so they always drink to the health of Doc Manolaras: wonderful people, salt of the earth, never forget a good turn.

  Asimina old girl, that’s how Manolaras talked to Mother (she was the only woman he never managed to puncture with his needle), you’re the wife of a hero. And all together you’re four votes, he was counting Sotiris, our eldest. Not counting the relatives.

  He started procedures a few days after they paraded Mother through town. As widow of a soldier fallen on the field of battle, with three orphan children your mother is entitled to a pension, he tells me. Ma wouldn’t admit she was a widow, but you couldn’t budge the doctor. You lost him in Albania, he tells me. I’ll get you a pension, the lot of you, so shut up.

  One thing was certain. My father was lost, literally. After four months of cards, we never had another sign of life from him. Or death, for that matter. Never put down as officially dead, or missing in action, never turned up when our boys withdrew. Never listed as prisoner of the Italians. Mother asked at the police, asked Doc Manolaras, even Signor Vittorio if it could be that somewhere at the front he ran into a man who etc. etc. Not even the Ministry of War knew what to say.

  During the Occupation whenever people asked after her husband her answer was, He’s gone abroad. Well, she couldn’t very well go saying he was dead because it was bad luck, and because she would be obliged to wear black social-wise and religion-wise. So she said, He’s gone abroad. When you get right down to it, Albania is abroad after all. Sure, it’s not Paris, but still, it’s abroad. And she said it with a
kind of pride, Mother did. Because back then not everybody and his brother went abroad.

  That’s when Doc Manolaras gets his bright idea. Asimina old girl, he says, you’re entitled to a medal you know. And one of these days I’ll get you a pension, for all those spicy liver sausages the dear departed used to make for me.

  Mother thanked him, not that she believed him of course; but she did ask him not to call my father dear departed.

  Doc Manolaras actually had the grit to come to our place after they publicly humiliated mom. He ignored the public outcry for three votes, that’s how Mrs Kanello put it. Finally the pension came through; it took four years, and we were living Athens by then; but it came through. And after Ma died it stayed in my name, as I was the unwed female child of a heroic soldier of the Albanian campaign, missing in action. From then on, Doc Manolaras kept our voter registration books locked in a drawer in his office, six in all, two for Mother’s parents, and our four (he took out a book in Sotiris’s name too). Every election time I picked up my book and Mum’s along with the ballots which were already marked. Of course, I always threw away the ballot he fixed for me and filled in a new one where I wrote ‘I vote Royal. Raraou.’ The boys’ books he looked after himself.

  After a few years went by I let him look after ours too: Mother had put on weight and we weren’t going to queue with all the rabble and the riffraff every four years. After I buried Mum I asked him to give me back her book, I wanted it for a souvenir. But he wouldn’t give it back; just leave it to me, Raraou, he said (finally called me by my stage name, you see), leave it to me; your dear departed mother can help us even after her death. I didn’t make anything of it, but I was a bit upset, let me tell you; that little photo made Mum look really good.

  Truth is, even Mrs Kanello told Ma not to wear mourning. Missing in action is one thing, Asimina, she said, dead’s another story. Forget the mourning, you’ll only get your kids upset, plus it’ll cost you money.

  Mourning cost a pretty penny back then, it wasn’t just a black dress and that’s all. People hung black sashes on all the curtains and put a black ribbon crossways on the tablecloth and covered up the mirror completely or hung it with black tulle for two years. Not to mention the little cakes and sweetmeats. During the Occupation of course, only the upper class could afford that kind of thing; we couldn’t even afford the flour.

  So that’s how Mother didn’t go into mourning. Besides, it was the Occupation; how were we supposed to afford black when we had to cut up the flag to make our drawers? Plus it wouldn’t have been polite for Signor Alfio to see mourning bands on the curtains. What kind of hospitality would that be? So he was an enemy of our country, but Greek hospitality has to be just so, you can’t go upsetting an invited guest even if he’s from an occupying army. And all this for what? The motherland? What’s that? Can you see it, touch it? Signor Alfio, he was real flesh and bone; not the motherland.

  Some people in the neighbourhood looked down on the Italians because they made passes at the girls and they ate frogs, so people said. But the best families in Rampartville wouldn’t hear of it, and I agreed. Nothing but lies! they said. Plus these days we’re sophisticated: you can find frozen frog’s legs in all the better class of supermarket. But back then if you ate frogs it was as if you were eating filth.

  People said the Italians caught them in nets under Deviljohn’s bridge just outside town. We kids played a lot near the bridge; the place was crawling with big fat frogs, but we never knew for sure whether they did it or not. During the first years of the Occupation curfew came in at six o’clock. So people who didn’t like the Italians claimed they went frog fishing after six: you figure it out. Later on, everybody forgot about it. But back then the rumours were flying thick and fast ‘the Italians are eating the tadpoles!’ Maybe they didn’t have everything they wanted in their canteens? In fact, word got around that some of the families who invited Italians for dinner actually tried frogs in tomato sauce. But that was probably just nasty left-wing gossip.

  Anyway, Father Dinos tried his best to protect Ma. That much I found out from Mrs Fanny, Aphrodite’s mother, back when we had Plastiras for prime minister. One morning, she told me. Father Dinos comes, pisses out behind the church, shakes off his birdie, pulls down his robes and calls our mother Asimina, come to the church at five o’clock, for confession. Mother kisses his hand and goes back into the house, that was back in the Alfio days.

  ‘Asimina,’ he tells her that afternoon in the confessional, ‘don’t worry about “the other thing”, personally speaking I give you my absolution and I take personal responsibility. Of course it’s a sin what you’re doing, but I take it upon myself. But how in the world can you let people who eat frogs kiss you?’

  Mum is upset. ‘Now you listen to me, Father,’ she says, with all due respect (even though he was younger than her). ‘Firstly, I don’t believe it that they eat frogs because they’re Christians too. But mainly no Italian and nobody else ever kissed me, nobody but my husband. All ‘the other thing I admit, he does it. But me, I’ll only kiss the husband that married me. When he comes back.’

  ‘Comes back from where, my poor child?’

  ‘When he comes back.’

  ‘Comes back from where? You think he’s some kind of ghost? He was just God’s little lamb, how could he ever end up a ghost?’

  ‘He can do whatever he wants. He’s a man and he doesn’t have to answer to me. But me, I’m not going to kiss anybody. I swear it on my wedding wreath.’

  Mrs Fanny gave me the whole story, back when Plastiras was prime minister. The reverend just couldn’t keep his mouth shut, as you can see; go for confession and you’d end up confessing him. Anyway. God bless him (he’s still alive). One thing for sure, Mrs Fanny’s no liar. Moved up to Athens too, along with her husband the former partisan but whatever she did, it was her own two hands that did it. That husband of hers, no sooner than they hit town, he goes and gets mixed up in the December uprising and gets his throat slit from ear to ear. It was the royalists from Organization ‘X’ – ‘X-men’ we called them – that done it. All that money for the move from Rampartville to Athens, gone to waste. Why didn’t they just kill him back in the Resistance; they were going to do it anyway, weren’t they? But what can you do? Besides it didn’t seem to bother Mrs Fanny one way or the other; after I buried my daughter I got the trick, was how she put it. So she kept on turning out the lace doilies. Being as how she didn’t want to sell her place in Rampartville she boarded up the front door and left. That’s the way it is to this day. Whenever the boards rot, Mrs Kanello nails up new ones to protect the place. I’ll never sell, said Mrs Fanny. And when I die the crows will build their nests and give me forgiveness.

  Got a ride to Athens in a truck, You can let us off here, they said a little outside town. The truck belonged to Doc Manolaras. So the driver drops them off near a little hillock, a barren place with a blockhouse on top. Mrs Fanny had it all picked out from far away; she and her husband climb up to the top and all by herself she moves her household effects into the blockhouse. Then he heads off to Athens to look for his party comrades and they bring him back with his throat slit, he was still breathing. She buries him as quick as she can, ties some dry thistles together to make a broom, sweeps the place clean, plugs up the gun ports with newspapers and turns it into a place to live. Her first night as a widow she shoves the commode over to block the door. A miracle how she ever managed, selling hand-made lace doilies, tatting and needlepoint, and all the time new patterns.

  Little by little she settles into the blockhouse, puts in a door, windows, two pots of flowers in front, builds a little wall, fixes up an outhouse and a little kitchen: she was a proper homemaker let me tell you. Later, during some election campaign, the place gets incorporated into the city plan even if it was unauthorized and she gets water and light, just like that. Still keeps up her crocheting, opened a little shop, more like a hole in the wall if you want to get right down to it. Not too long ago she tells me
she’s putting in for a telephone then all her prayers will be answered.

  People are funny that way. First she survives. Then she forgets. Of course, maybe she didn’t really forget, deep down, you never can tell. Back then in Rampartville we all had her written off, all alone and helpless; thanks to Doc Manolaras we tracked her down. When her daughter died she locked herself into the house, never lit a lamp even. Only time she showed her face was at Mrs Kanello’s evening get-togethers, with her crochet hook and the thread rolled up in a ball at her feet, crocheting to finish the dead girl’s dowry, some habits you just can’t break.

  Never set foot in our house. Only once, the night she knocked at our door just after Signor Vittorio left. Asimina, she calls, open up, quick! We open the door, it was five till, almost curfew; there she stands with this strange woman. She’s looking for someone, she tells us. Then she goes off and leaves us with the woman, just like that. Come on in, Ma tells her, what was she supposed to say. The woman comes in; you could tell something was wrong. But she looked like a lady. Who are you? asks Ma. Not a word. Please sit down, I say; we were just sitting down to dinner. Bread and chick peas with olive oil, from Signor Vittorio that was. She takes a seat, but not so much as a glance at the food, nothing. Who are you? Ma asks again; don’t you want something to eat? Without a word she gets up from the chair, goes over to the bed, lies down and dies. Just like that. With her purse in her hand. We knew it right away. Dead people we saw every day. Ma stretched her out on the bed, closed her eyes, wrapped her jaw closed with a handkerchief. So get Mrs Kanello, she tells me, but now it was curfew. Mrs Kanello was working that night though so we waited at the window, the three of us, for her to come off shift. And wrapped up the stranger in some old clothes.