A Room in Athens

by Frances Karlen Santamaria

  Madame Kladaki arrived wearing her white coat, and the examining room doors were flung open. One by one the girls got on the table with its stirrups, and, badgered and coaxed by Miss Elleadou, they panted through their exercises. One after another they took three long breaths, then began to pant through closed lips, slowly increasing speed and intensity until a peak was reached (I pictured a bell-curve), and then they tapered off, slowing down to three final long breaths and a halt, while Miss Elleadou kept rhythm, goading them with a flapping, pudgy white hand.

  After a couple of lessons, watching the others go through their panting, I began—inadequately—to practice along with them. But from Miss Elleadou’s first six lessons, the only thing I had really learned was the absolute necessity for mother and baby to get as much oxygen as possible during the labor and birth. She said whenever we felt a labor contraction (pain was a forbidden word) we were to “do the breathing” or pant, and thus we would, we were told, feel no pain and supply all the oxygen needed. Each panting period, or bell-curve, was to last forty-five to sixty seconds (the length of a contraction, according to our teacher).

  It was tiring and hot, and the girls were sweating when they got off the table after the breathing practice. We were told to wait. We would be called back for a physical examination. When my turn came to get on the table for the examination, Miss Elleadou, Madame Kladaki, and her assistants crowded around to see my maternity clothes. I was wearing a blue, flowered cotton top and a pleated skirt with an elasticized front.

  “American?” they asked eagerly. They spoke in Greek, marveling, for they had apparently never seen maternity clothes before.

  “C’est merveilleux, Madame!”38 said Madame Kladaki, and the girls from the waiting room crowded in to see.

  “Something is not right with your blood pressure, Madame,” said Miss Elleadou as I got ready to leave. “Here is a prescription for your blood pressure. And you must go to this address to have a blood test. I will make a telephone call and you will see the doctor now and have your test. We need it for your Blood Papers, what type you are and how your blood he is doing.”

  “What is wrong with my blood pressure?” I asked, puzzled.

  She shrugged. “It is a little wrong. But take the medicine and you will be all right.”

  The obstetrician I had seen last week had pronounced my blood pressure perfect. During the months of travel we had had a number of odd experiences with doctors in several countries, and I was not ready to accept Miss Elleadou’s word as final. I decided to wait till I could talk to Arno before filling the prescription.

  “Don’t forget to take your medicine,” she said as I left.

  I walked three blocks, past the great Archeology Museum with its scattered debris of shattered columns and statues on the lawn like shards too numerous to catalog or store. We wanted to visit it someday soon. The streets were lined with small trees that bore an orange-like fruit. I found the address, rang a bell, and was sent upstairs by the porter. I was let in to a pleasant apartment. Flitting back and forth through the rooms was a thin little girl who looked about thirteen. She was sweeping the floor with the only kind of broom we had seen in Athens—a bundle of straws without a handle, the kind you see in illustrated copies of Grimm.39 (Our apartment came furnished with one, and I tried to sweep with it, but my hand grew sore and I felt worn out in a few minutes from the awkward, doubled-up position I had to take. I already knew from watching the life of our building as I could see it in the courtyard, or airshaft, that no family was without a maid, and it was the maid who used the broom. Later, the broom came to infuriate me, because I felt that if any middle-class woman had to do her own cleaning, she would demand a handle so she could work upright.) This little girl, with her skinny body, dark frock, long nose, and bad skin, was a peasant, perhaps just come from the islands. Like most servants, she lived with the family. A kind family might give a longtime servant a day off a week. But the maids, who cooked, washed, cleaned, and baby-sat, especially the young peasant girls, were given only one day off a month. I didn’t know this then; I knew only that the girl seemed terribly young and should have been in school, and that she was doing heavy work.

  She showed me into the living room. I had already seen one or two rooms like this one and was to see many more. The odd thing about it was that each piece of furniture, even the dining room table in the alcove, was covered in slipcovers. These were all of the same raucous floral print. Although the apartment was the home of two doctors, a couple who could afford a pleasant apartment and good furniture, the effect was that of a summer cottage full of porch furniture. People had to work much too hard and long for their homes and belongings to leave them open to wear and fading. They preferred, in most cases, to live in a forest of chintz that brought back my childhood sharply.

  The doctor came out—a pleasant, cultured woman in her late thirties. She said she had borne both her children at Madame Kladaki’s clinic and that she had suffered absolutely no pain. It was a miracle; Madame Kladaki was remarkable. She went into her office and returned to the living room with a needle and syringe. As she went to find the right vein she laid the needle down on the coffee table, the point touching the wooden top, then picked it up and plunged it into my arm.

  “You will have a boy, Madame,” she said. “Your belly is straight out like a nose.”

  Arno winced when I told him about the visit. “On the coffee table?” he asked for the second time. “Like a nose? No, don’t get that prescription filled yet, wait to see if the blood pressure is all right next time. I’m beginning not to trust anyone.”

  “Do you realize,” I said, “this is the fourth time I’ve heard that I’m going to have a boy because I’m ‘straight out’? I heard it from my stepmother in Cleveland, a chambermaid in Paris, a crone in Yugoslavia, and now a Greek doctor. The belief among women seems to be that if your face looks the same and you go front instead of sideways, you’re going to have a son.”

  “Here’s hoping,” he said. “I guess culture is really strong—I’m finding I do definitely want a boy first.”

  As for the notorious Blood Papers, they remained mysterious. I never saw them nor heard of them again. I never learned what, if anything, was wrong with my pressure or how, indeed, my blood “he was doing.”

  There were many grocery stores in Kolonaki, where we lived. Lambs would be hung in one window and the others stacked high with American canned goods. Inside, there were vats of olives and huge cheeses, smoked meats and sausages, barrels of spices and rice. There were usually several black-eyed men—smiling, yet hostile—working the store, helping you find each item or bringing it to you. There was no such thing as self-service, and I struggled to make myself understood. Except for the lambs, all meat was kept in a cooler in a back room and had to be asked for. As it was not on display, I could not point to a cut (almost all of which were unfamiliar) and so learn what it was called. When I tried to buy meat for the first time it took almost half an hour, until I finally made it clear to the young man behind the counter that I wanted ground meat. By that time we were both sweating from our intense effort to communicate, and it was with triumph that he disappeared into the cooler. He returned with a long, flat piece of beef, loosely rolled. As he unrolled it, a white slug about an inch long squirmed out to see the light.

  “Ahgh!” I said, trying to keep my voice pleasant. The clerk looked up, startled. “Look!” I pointed to the white worm.

  The man stared at me, in some subtle way making me feel ashamed for my outburst. He casually picked up the worm between forefinger and thumb and flung it away, and I could almost hear him say, “It’s so small—why it bothers you?”

  He threw the meat into the marble-covered grinder (everything was marble in Athens) and flipped a switch. I stood at the counter, miserable. How could we eat it? Why didn’t I say no? If this happened in the best neighborhoods, what was it like in the rest of town? In the open market? Feeling ill I took the packages, paid for my groceries, and picke
d up my shopping bag. As I left, I felt I was being talked about. The pregnant Americana, the foreigner who did her own shopping and carried her own packages, instead of leaving that work to a maid. As I turned, the butcher ducked his head in a little bow and gave me a particularly ingratiating smile. I felt uncomfortable as I walked the block home. I realized that the incident had played on my desire as an American not to seem “snobbish.” A Greek probably would never have accepted the meat. Perhaps, if they were talking about me now, they were wondering—and rightly so—why the Americana was such a dodo.

  Our apartment was on the first floor of one of the low white buildings. It had a small living room, bedroom, and kitchen. The only handsome part of the apartment was the bathroom, which was fairly large and completely lined with marble—bathtub, walls, and floor. The living room window, through which filtered a sunless half-light, looked out on the airshaft; across and around the shaft, which was about thirty feet in diameter, we could follow the back-porch life of laundresses and maids. We heard loud voices, singing, shouting, fights. The singing was often pleasant, except for the voice of one maid several stories above. She loved to sing. She sang enthusiastically for hours at a time in a tuneless braying lilt. We dubbed her the “Singing Athenian Mop” and shut our window on her exuberance.

  Our bedroom, on street level, looked out on Karneadou, a street typical of the entire neighborhood: the white buildings, one new, one going up across from us, red “for rent” signs on the doors, many brass plaques on doorways giving names of doctors, architects, lawyers. The porters sat outside their buildings—peasants who were getting free rent and a chance to have their children grow up in a neighborhood whose ways would rub off on them, boosting them into the middle class. There were always a few men standing near cars wiping them off with dusters. On the corner was a laundry with special prices for Americans (double those for Greeks), a dry cleaner, the grocery, milk store, and a hardware store.

  Our porters were a couple. The man was slight, dimwitted; his head appeared to be somewhat pointed and he always dressed in a dark-blue pinstripe suit; he wore spectacles and had the usual several gold teeth. He seemed nice enough on his frequent rounds to fix fuses or check the water meter. His wife—we called her Quasimodo40—was the real power. She was a heavyset woman, aging badly, with light, no-color hair and a thrust-out lower jaw and hanging lip; there were gaps in her teeth. She had the loudest voice of all the gallery of airshaft speakers, and she was always yelling at someone in angry Greek. Quasimodo’s penetrating, harsh voice and her ugly presence wove a coarse net around us. She was either standing outside our bedroom window shouting at someone on the street, or arguing with a laundress in the shaft where she swept several times a day. Holding that bundle of straw she lurched around the courtyard at the bottom of the shaft, doubled-up, cursing.

  Quasimodo of our Athenian days…When I passed her sitting in the hallway, as she was supposed to do for several hours each day but rarely did, I said hello. She gave the curtest of nods and looked away sullenly. Later, as we got to know a few people, Greeks who had lived in England or the United States, and other Americans, we learned the rather bitter lesson that Americans who live in Europe sooner or later learn—that we made our porters uncomfortable when we greeted them as equals, and that instead of welcoming our friendliness they looked on us with contempt for speaking to those beneath us. After a while, I stopped saying hello to Quasimodo and nodded. After that, I stopped nodding and soon was walking past her as though she didn’t exist. Altogether, when this happened she seemed much happier. If that word could stretch to fit Quasimodo in any way.

  But it wasn’t just Quasimodo who seemed joyless and heavy. As we moved among the Greeks we were finding every cliché back home (especially since the Greek fever had hit the States after the film Never on Sunday)41 was turning out untrue. The Greeks, or at least the Athenians, as we watched them on the streets and in shops, seemed a sour, sullen people, especially the men; the older they got, the more they seemed to sour. They walked along the streets, hands behind their backs fingering their amber “worry beads,”42 looking as if they had to belch and couldn’t.

  “Our ooterous, he is now exercising. We most to help him. We breathe like this”: Miss Elleadou reared back and began to draw in air quickly through flared nostrils, like a stocky mastiff sniffing the wind. After I had repeated this with some self-consciousness, Miss Elleadou said, “We most make arrangements, Madame, for your childbirth.” She looked at Arno. “Would you care to be present?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. We have a motion picture to show you of a birth. Sometime soon.”

  We later found out she had asked him because he was an American. None of the Greek men were expected to be present.

  She took me through the rooms and showed me a single, a double, and one room with three beds, quoted prices and asked where I’d like to be. There were six beds in all in the little clinic. Right now there was one lone infant in the combination nursery-and-delivery room and one girl alone in the largest room. I had no desire to be alone if there was anyone else around. “I’ll take the three-bed room.”

  She took my blood pressure. “Perfect. Just right. Madame, did you take your medicine?”

  “Er—no, but I have it at home.”

  “Good,” she nodded approval. “You may take it or not, as you wish.” She shrugged, “It is not important.” I walked out, puzzled. On the way downstairs we saw a young woman in early pregnancy being helped to a car. She walked like one who suffered and a crowd gathered to watch and sigh sympathetically.

  “You know,” I said to Arno, “I’ve just realized that we’ve never seen a pregnant woman on the street before except for me—and what do you make of the medicine I can take or not?”

  It was Sunday in mid-October. We had been in Athens almost three full weeks. On Saturday, the last of Miss Elleadou’s lessons had been finished. We had bought a blanket and two sheets, some pots, a sugar bowl, a few knives and forks. For the time being, the apartment was “furnished.” I had the skimpy layette ready. After all the hotels it was marvelous to be settled, even in such meager surroundings. Arno had worked hard all week on an article for the Nation on the arts in Yugoslavia. Now, the afternoon was bright. Well-off Athenians, dressed in their fine clothes, paraded the streets of Kolonaki carrying Sunday-gifts of flowers and pastries and candy to hosts and hostesses. My time was getting near and if we were going to go to Piraeus, today was the day to go.

  Last year in New York, we had stayed up half the night to watch the sailors shuffle in a slow dance, their handkerchiefs twisted in their hands, at the Greek clubs on Eighth Avenue; we had dreamed of the city of Piraeus, the Port of Athens—if anything could sound more exciting. It invited to my mind images of white ships and sparkling sea, History, ancient buildings, galleys, togas, Melina Mercouri43—a crazy mixture of old and new. I pictured the unknown city under a blinding sun or in the softness of evening, heard lapping of waves. We had also been told it was a wild port town where you could hear the “real” bouzouki music.44 We knew the music in the New York clubs was not the real stuff, but weak and watered-down.

  So we got in the small, dusty, blue, two-horsepower Citroën that had taken us thousands of miles crisscrossing Europe, drove in the terrifying Athenian traffic to Omonia Square, and then out of town. On the way out of Athens, I looked back and saw the Acropolis for the first time since the day we’d met Vasilios. It sat atop a purplish ledge, as though riding the crest of a giant wave. It was white in the distance; its columns, in obvious ruin, looked almost lacy with age, yet stark.

  Away from the white apartment buildings, we found ourselves in a flat, desolate area of warehouses and shabby streets, occasional tough-looking neighborhood cafés.

  We had gotten too late a start, and although the sky was still bright, the sun was going down when we drove through the bleak factory district at the outskirts of Piraeus.

  We walked around the harbor happily, eating souvlaki. Familie
s strolled, eating, calling to children. In the near distance were the masts of many small fishing boats; further out, the big ships lay at anchor. Large neon signs announced the names of shipping lines. Once again we were touching the great Mediterranean, again were in one of the myriad white cities which are her ports. We had touched her in North Africa, Spain, Italy, France, under the guise of “Adriatic” in Yugoslavia, and now “Aegean” here. Her magic bit us again. Just being on the shore gave me a feeling of contact with the rest of the world which I had been missing in Athens without realizing it.

  The Greeks we saw in Piraeus and the city itself reminded me more of the Greek communities in the States, perhaps because these people were working class—just as it is the working-class Italians we know best in America. We tried to find our way from the harbor into the heart of town. It was growing dark when we passed a big Orthodox church. Inside, there was laughter and shouting as a wedding party gathered.

  Suddenly, we heard music blaring from a speaker; it seemed to fill the town, and we walked faster, trying to find its source in the unfamiliar streets and squares. I’d already had my “lightening”—the shift of the baby’s position in preparation for birth—and I felt almost as light on my feet as before my pregnancy, so, holding hands, we ran.

  We went up a street, turned a corner. There was a large public square crammed with hundreds of people. In the very center were strings of lights and a stage crowded with whirling dancers. The music grew faster and faster as the dancers leaped, circled, and bobbed in their brilliant costumes. Then came music of a different part of Greece—different costumes and slower rhythms, men circling one another in dance like wary animals. Each dance was loudly applauded. Everyone was eating, holding up children, scrambling for what seats there were. We stood together, rapt; this was more like what we had come here for. Soon I began to notice people were staring at me, my clothes, especially my belly. A woman ahead saw me, tugged at her husband’s arm and he, in turn, stared. I instinctively moved even closer to Arno.