Eleni

by Nicholas Gage

  “He wants light!” Eleni exclaimed, and begged the invisible women around her, if they had candles, to help. A few inched forward, holding tapers, and the boy began to nurse as grotesque shadows flickered over the cavern’s walls. Eleni looked around at familiar faces, distorted by their anger at the baby’s crying, made monstrous by the eerie light.

  She felt her separateness like an ache. From birth she had been one of them, but now, more than ever, she sensed the otherness signified by the name “Amerikana.” Since Fotini’s death she had thought of escaping. The desire began at the same time as her illness. She had tried to explain it to Christos, but he hadn’t understood.

  The burning started in her lower abdomen, flaring up whenever she ate, making her vomit, so that she couldn’t stand the sight of food. “My navel has unraveled,” she would say in the village phrase, as the women worked over her.

  It was Eleni’s sister who finally called Christos back from America in the winter of 1937. Nitsa secretly made nine-year-old Olga write the letter because like most village women, she was illiterate. They had done everything they could, Nitsa told him: the ceremony of tying up the navel, exorcisms, leeches, venduses—the glasses upturned on the belly with a candle burning inside to draw out the evil humors. They had even sent to Povla and Lista for doctors. But nothing helped. Eleni was becoming thinner every day and couldn’t eat or stand up. “You can always find America again,” Nitsa dictated to the little girl. “But if you lose your wife, you’re not going to find her again. And what are you going to do with your daughters?”

  The daughters—that was the burden that no one wanted if Eleni should die.

  The villagers knew perfectly well what was wrong with the Amerikana. It was the evil eye, which was attracted by envy. No woman in the village was more envied than Eleni Gatzoyiannis.

  Eleni herself knew the risk of jealousy, and always tried to be more generous and discreet than any woman in Lia. She had been envied even when she was simply the second daughter of Kitso Haidis, the millwright. “Such red cheeks, such blue eyes!” the older women could say as she passed, spitting at the evil eye.

  After Eleni was selected as a bride by Christos and moved into the four-room house, complete with a brass-ornamented arched gate, a separate entrance for the animals, a hand-turned food grinder and an outdoor shower made of barrels, then there was too much temptation for the evil eye. No wonder each of Christos’ visits had produced only girls, the villagers whispered, and no wonder the fine Amerikana now lay dying, her cheeks the color of Good Friday candles.

  When Christos received Nitsa’s letter, he had just taken on a new partner in his produce business, a native of the village next to Lia, and it worried him to leave the truck in the hands of the profligate Nassios Economou, who pursued young girls with the passion Christos reserved for fine clothes. But when he learned of Eleni’s illness, Christos set out at once for Greece. He was a responsible man, devoted to his young wife, and he couldn’t allow her to die. He prepared himself for the mission with characteristic thoroughness and efficiency. They were killing her with village superstition and he would save her with American know-how.

  Christos prided himself on being a real American. From the third-class deck of the liner Themistocles steaming out of Corfu in 1910, he had thrown his red fez and white baggy breeches into the waves and begun to study the English dictionary in his pocket. He quickly assimilated the American virtues of cleanliness, honesty and industry. He worked two jobs, in a factory by day and a bowling alley at night, making $9 or $10 a week, until he had enough to buy a half-interest in a vegetable wagon.

  Christos would go hungry to buy the finest suits available in Worcester, Massachusetts. On his rounds as a tinker’s apprentice in Greece, it was the sight of two stylishly dressed Greek-Americans that had first put America in his mind. Although he was short and portly, Christos always dressed so well that people took him for a professional man rather than a vegetable peddler.

  On one of the first warm days of June 1937, the villagers of Lia were drawn from their houses by the sound of bells: not the deep knell of the church’s cabana or the clanging of the lead goats, but the special sound of the mule train belonging to the Turk, Mourtos Gajelis, who brought people from the outside world after the end of the road deposited them in Filiates. The few Greeks of the Mourgana who had made their fortune abroad and returned for a visit had dubbed his five mules “the American Express.”

  Throughout the northern province of Epiros, there were still large communities of Moslems like Mourtos, remnants of the Turks who had ruled until 1913 and of the Greeks who had been converted to Islam, who were called “Chams,” after the region they came from, Chamouria. Although they were transformed overnight from rich landowning rulers to a tolerated minority, for the most part the Moslems hid their resentment behind a smile. Christos always tipped Mourtos generously and threw in a silk tie or a pair of American socks. He was sure that Mourtos, baptized or not, was his friend.

  Christos rode into Lia seated on the lead mule, the sun reflecting from his white short-sleeved shirt, his glasses and bald pate, for he had removed his straw boater and the seersucker suit coat. He nodded to the excited crowd but never let his pashalike dignity lapse.

  Kanta, then four, and Glykeria, three, didn’t recognize the apparition at their gate. Glykeria, taking in his well-fed appearance and soft gentleman’s hands, insisted it was another doctor for their mother, despite the neighbors’ claims that it was her father.

  Christos stalked into the good chamber, and shooed out the women crowded around the invalid. Eleni tried to cover her waxy cheeks with her hands and said she should have had enough warning to prepare properly for his arrival. He came and sat next to her.

  “I didn’t tell them to send for you,” she said apologetically.

  “I know.” He took her hand. “I’m going to make you well.”

  The tears spilled over. “It hurts so much,” Eleni said and turned her face away.

  While the crowd of villagers in the yard gaped, Christos set about with American efficiency, launching his plan to cure his wife. He had brought everything he needed. First he unrolled a great coil of wire screening and nailed it up at all the open windows. Then he produced a Flit spray gun and annihilated the clouds of flies inside the house. Finally he unpacked some choice beef that he had bought in Filiates and began to cook a meal with his own hands.

  The onlookers buzzed. Did American men cook for women? they wondered. Hearing them, Eleni was embarrassed, but she vowed to eat whatever he brought her, and she did, already calmed by his presence.

  Christos had arranged for the mule driver to take them the next day on the eight-hour journey to the old port of Saghiada, where they would hire a boat that would take them to Corfu. There, European-trained doctors would examine Eleni. She was sure the long journey would kill her, but she would not disobey her husband. Also, the thought of Corfu seized her imagination. Although everyone called her “the Amerikana,” Eleni had never been farther from the village than the provincial capital of Yannina, forty miles southeast of Lia.

  The next morning Eleni put on her best costume, with a gold-embroidered vest, necklaces of Turkish piastres, a large silver belt buckle and the burgundy flowered kerchief she had worn on her wedding day. She had become so thin that the skirt hung loose.

  The immensity of the sea was terrifying to the two mountain women and the small caïque seemed to toss helplessly toward the abyss. When the boat passed safely between the two forts guarding the entrance to the port of Corfu, Eleni’s strength left her and she couldn’t stand. Christos picked her up and carried her off the boat and across the short distance to the Hotel Nea Yorki, owned by a man from a village near Lia who welcomed them like kin and gave them a room overlooking the harbor.

  Eleni was scarcely conscious when Christos placed her on one of the scarlet-covered beds in their hotel room. When she came to, she saw Christos bursting through the doorway carrying a pair of European leat
her shoes for her and a bottle of the native kumquat liqueur that he made her taste.

  The next morning Christos brought two doctors to the room. They examined Eleni, then consulted in the musical accents Corfiots had acquired under years of Venetian rule. They asked about the prescriptions of the provincial doctors, shook their heads, and finally announced that Eleni had something called enterocolitis. Having a name for it made her feel better.

  “There’s nothing seriously wrong with her,” said the taller of the two doctors. “High-protein diet. Let her eat and drink what she wants. Give her some chicken to start.” He wrote out some prescriptions, pocketed several of Christos’ traveler’s checks and concluded, “She’ll get well.”

  Flushed with triumph, Christos rushed out and returned with a waiter bearing three whole cooked chickens. Eleni did her best to eat, and before the day was over, she had managed to walk from the bed to a chair on the balcony, where she watched as all of Corfu seemed to pass below. Unmarried youths and maidens eyed one another, and carriages rattled by, drawn by horses in flowered straw hats. Gypsies entertained the crowd with monkeys and dancing bears. Peddlers of pistachio nuts, Turkish delight and multicolored syrups chanted their wares. At the edge of the water, a molten sheet of copper in the setting sun, fishermen mended their nets.

  Corfu began to glow in Eleni’s eyes with the supernatural brilliance visible to someone recovering from a long illness. Christos and Eleni sat every day in the great Esplanade, only steps from their hotel, eating colored ices and listening to musicians in starched uniforms singing Italian cantatas on the bandstand. When she was stronger, Christos led her through the maze of streets to the great, echoing Church of St. Spyridon, where she stood before the jeweled silver casket with the saint’s mummified body. Every year St. Spyridon’s corpse was said to wear out a pair of slippers performing miracles. Half the boys in Corfu were named for him. Eleni lit a candle and prayed for a boy.

  Christos bought her first European-style dress and when the blood returned to her cheeks, they hired a carriage and took an outing to the seashore. Once outside the town, rolling between the turquoise sea and the silver-green olive groves, Eleni drew strength from the air, heavy with the scents of heather, gorse, lavender and thyme. There were orange and lemon trees, wild orchids, sea gulls and flocks of turtledoves wherever she looked. The stucco houses of the villages were washed in vibrating pastels: pink, orange, mauve, turquoise and yellow. They visited the famous beach of Paleocastritsa and the thirteenth-century monastery on the cliffs above, and ate squid and lobster next to the sea.

  On the way back, the heat of the sun and the wine they had drunk made Eleni feel dizzy. The driver stopped in one of the tiny villages before a hut washed in a brilliant robin’s-egg blue and overgrown with purple bougainvillaea. A young woman came out in a white kerchief and offered the strangers glasses of cold water and apricots warm from the tree.

  It was during those sun-drenched, fragrant days in Corfu that Eleni understood what had made her ill. It hadn’t been the evil eye. She needed to break free of Lia, where everything—the people, the mud, the mountains—was etched in grays, blacks and browns. Corfu showed her the rainbow that lay beyond her own mountains. She regretted giving in to her mother’s demand that she stay behind, and longed to see the colors of America. Free of the prison of the village, with her husband beside her, she would never be ill again.

  Christos was gratified with his success in curing his wife. He felt like a newlywed walking at her side, and if she so much as slowed her pace to admire something in a shop window, he bought it. Christos carried his American money in his breast pocket in a big roll, secured with a rubber band, and he liked watching the shopowners’ eyes bulge when he began peeling off the bills. Anyone could tell by his clothes and his manner that he was not a Greek but an American, he knew—and a big shot, at that.

  They nearly argued when Christos decided to buy Eleni a gleaming brass bed. Eleni raised her chin. No one in the village slept in a bed and she was too old to begin after sleeping on the floor for thirty years.

  Christos explained to her, as to a child. Sleeping on the floor was a filthy village custom. Every “high class” person slept in a bed. Seeing how much it meant to him, Eleni bowed her head, and the gleaming monstrosity, to the delight of the Armenian shopkeeper, was paid for and disassembled to be loaded on the caïque.

  Eleni’s two eldest daughters still remember how shocked they were, summoned out of the house by the bells of Mourtos’ mules, to find their mother, who had left an invalid, coming up the path, riding side by side with their father, both singing at the top of their voices, like two drunken gypsies at a wedding. They had never heard their mother sing before.

  Eleni’s cheeks became round again as she gathered wood, baked bread, planted the crops and carried water from the spring in the summer of 1937. Christos spent every day hunting or sitting in the coffeehouses. Within weeks of their return Eleni knew that she was pregnant, but she hugged the secret to herself for a while, certain that the child conceived in Corfu would be a boy.

  On March 17, 1938, Eleni sent for the midwife. Christos sat in the good chamber next to the kitchen, nervously clicking his worry beads and letting the girls turn out his pockets for the candies they knew were there.

  When the midwife caught the baby in her apron, there was an anguished cry from Megali, who was crouched in the corner of the room. Another girl! Eleni began to sob. A son would have made her husband so grateful that he couldn’t refuse to take them all to America. Christos composed his face, took the child from the midwife and announced that the baby was beautiful and that he would name her Fotini for his dead mother.

  Fotini’s birth was the first ripple in the happiness of that year. A worse shock was the arrival, two months later, of Christos’ partner, Nassios Economou, who had been left in charge of the business in Worcester, Massachusetts.

  The Irish maids and Swedish cooks who worked in the silk-stocking suburbs of Worcester, in mansions built by tycoons of the industrial revolution, had always liked dealing with Christos because of his old-fashioned courtesy and the consistently high quality of his fruits and vegetables. But after Christos agreed to take Nassios on, at the pleading of a relative, the dissolute young man set the kitchens abuzz. Christos was ashamed to tell his wife how often Nassios would return from collecting outstanding bills empty-handed, with a grin like a tomcat, saying he had collected in other currency. When Nassios occasionally brought a couple of women home to the Spartan flat the two men shared at 1 Ledge Street, near the produce market, Christos would succumb to temptation and then despise himself afterward. “Nothing but whores in America!” he ranted. “It’s no place to bring decent women!”

  One morning at the coffeehouse in Lia a breathless urchin arrived and told Christos that Nassios Economou was in Babouri waiting for him to call. Christos was stunned. He found Nassios in Babouri, dressed like Al Capone, luxuriating in the attentions of his wife and son. Christos shouted questions, the words garbled in his anxiety. What had Nassios done with their gleaming blue GM Reo truck, the cornerstone of their business?

  Nassios replied as if he had nothing on his conscience. He was tired of getting up at 5 A.M. to go to the market, he said. He had heard that the Armenian proprietor of the greasy spoon near the railroad station, the “Terminal Lunch,” was ruined in a poker game. So Nassios had sold the vegetable truck to a Syrian for $1,200 and bought the diner for $200 cash.

  “Running a restaurant is a proper job for a man,” Nassios said as he handed Christos $600—his half share of the business he had spent twenty-four years building. “When the war comes—and it’s coming for sure—the railroad station will be mobbed and that diner will make a fortune! I’ll pay you fifty dollars a week to cook for me now, and when the money starts coming in, I’ll make you a partner. Meanwhile, I thought I’d come over and share your vacation.”

  Christos tasted the ashes of his life’s work and his head was spinning. He thought about kill
ing his smirking ex-partner in front of his wife’s eyes, but knew deep down that he couldn’t slaughter a goat, much less a man. After a few glasses of Nassios’ whiskey, Christos’ unfailing optimism asserted itself. Perhaps Nassios was right, and the day of fruit peddler was over. It wouldn’t be bad to be a partner in a restaurant. In any case, it would liven things up in the village to have Nassios around.

  For the remainder of the summer Christos and Nassios reigned over the coffeehouses of Lia and Babouri like a pair of sultans. The weather-beaten, manure-stained shepherds couldn’t get enough of Nassios’ lurid tales of American women or of the free drinks and appetizers that the two “Amerikani” vied in ordering. The villagers had already learned Christos’ stories by heart, how he had arrived in America with $27 in his pocket, and how by dint of hard work and Spartan living he had risen to owning a produce business “that brings in—how much do you think?”

  They’d all wait, looking expectant.

  “Ninety, ninety-five dollars a week!” he would shout triumphantly. “God bless America!”

  • • •

  “God bless America!” was the refrain that concluded every anecdote my father ever told me about his life. Not until I became an adult did I understand his complicated feelings for his adopted country and the reasons why he didn’t bring us there to join him. As a child it had seemed to me natural that my father lived in America and we lived in Lia. When, at the age of nine, I finally met him for the first time, I had come to the conclusion that he had abandoned us. Only later did I realize that given the times and his nature, it was the only thing he could do.

  To every immigrant America was the promised land, where hard work was rewarded with gold. As my father labored sixteen hours a day at two jobs, however, he quickly learned that America was also filled with traps for the innocent and the unwary. He saw fellow Greek immigrants, released from the bonds of village morality and poverty, quickly ruined by women, alcohol and gambling, among them the two younger brothers he brought over as soon as he could raise their fares. By nature a Puritan, my father quickly sent his brothers back to Greece to save them.