My birth father was a Greek Cypriot.
I brought the globe to my desk and spun it around. There was Cyprus, a small island in the Mediterranean, south of Turkey and west of Syria and Lebanon.
Cyprus, I thought. How unexpected.
How cool.
I wondered if I might have some mysterious illness that only affected Greek Cypriots. Jewish folks suffer Tay-Sachs, black folks sickle-cell anemia. Perhaps on Cyprus—population about 1.4 million—they suffered something too.
I wrote a lawyer in Jacksonville, one of a few listed on Panos’s court documents. No response. So I called.
“Were you Panos’s lawyer?” I asked.
“No, I am the lawyer for one of the lawyers,” he said.
Oh Lord, I thought.
I told the lawyer I was a daughter Panos never knew of and wanted to contact the trustees or relatives to ask for medical history.
The lawyer was like “Suuuurrrrre!” and totally blew me off.
Dead end.
Then my extraordinary pal Nancy struck again.
You see, Nancy never forgets a friend. And is such a generous and helpful soul, she naturally assumes this in others. Which is to say, Nancy not only thought of a man we had both known twenty years ago, but thought nothing of asking for his help.
“Call George!” Nancy said.
George Sycallides. A fellow graduate student in the journalism program at the University of Florida. An international student from—I had forgotten!—Cyprus.
I found George, dusted off the little Greek I knew, and spoke to him on the phone.
“Yassou! Ti kanis? Man, George, have I got a story for you!”
George listened intently. “Really? Really?” he said over and over.
I asked for a favor: Could he contact the two trustees I believed were in Cyprus, Soulla Economidou and Stelios Iannou?
“Of course, Susan. Of course,” he said
I was hoping he would simply locate Soulla and Stelios and see if they spoke English. Then I would contact them.
George called back within days. Stelios was dead, George said, but Soulla was alive. She was Panos’s cousin. “I told her everything!” George said merrily.
Yes, George was telling Soulla about a nurse at the Mayo Clinic who had a baby girl . . . when Soulla broke in: “Panos has a daughter?”
“She would be thrilled to meet you!” George said.
Good old George. Talk about kicking open a door!
I sent an e-mail to Soulla, emphasizing my mysterious illness and that I sought only medical information. George gave me an address, and I sent pictures of my family. Close-ups, where Soulla could see features clearly.
Soulla opened one photo and was stunned.
Not a photo of me, but of my little cocoa-bean son with hazel eyes. The one who tans up like me, unlike my blue-eyed kids who burn like their dad.
My son Aubrey looked exactly like my birth father.
Three weeks later, on February 19, 2010, I received an e-mail from Soulla, via her daughter Alina in London.
“When George called me,” she wrote, “after a while I felt like it was Christmas and I had a present I never expected. You are so welcome. I have two daughters (Alina and Mania) and two granddaughters (Phaedra and Anastasia) and Avraam (my son-in-law). I have many photos of Panos. In one especially (he was about 6 years old) he looks exactly like you! The ears are absolutely identical! Can’t wait to see you.”
Alina assured me that “everything mum writes in her brief note to you is heartfelt from all of us here :-).”
Would it have happened without George? I don’t know.
But I can never thank him enough for his role.
In April 2010, I arrived in Cyprus. It was less than two months since I corresponded with Soulla. Less than five months since, through a court order, I had my adoption papers unsealed on health grounds and found out that Panos Kelalis was officially listed as my father. Less than eight months since I noticed the withering in my left hand.
No time to waste.
I wanted to know.
If this book is about the journeys I took because of my ALS, then this was the first. A journey into my birth father’s past and forward into his relatives’ present.
I previously described seeing a picture of Ellen for the first time as staring into the sun. My personal sun. A recognition so bright it blinded me.
Cyprus would too.
I had never considered finding my birth father. Never. Now a turn of fate, and here I was on an airplane, zipping across Europe on the edge of an Icelandic volcanic explosion. Traveling to meet a dozen people I didn’t know. To introduce myself, the illegitimate daughter of a dead man they had long admired. Writing my own life and rewriting his.
I couldn’t get my head around it, much less my heart. I needed someone with me to pinch me, to witness the unreal and tell me it was true. That person, as always, was Nancy.
A public relations pro, Nancy would have made a fine journalist. She remembers things so precisely. Every detail. Every foible. Each time she tells a story, it’s loaded with minutiae most people forget.
You know those cars outfitted with 360-degree cameras that drive around mapping streets for Google?
It’s like Nancy does that in her head.
Nancy journaled while we were in Cyprus. The puff of air freshener at the doctor’s office, the off-color joke of a cousin—she noted it all.
She kept me grounded and focused on the details: the purple flowers that never wilted, dead or alive. The seasoning on the souvlaki. The tang of salt in the dry Mediterranean air.
I was overwhelmed when meeting Panos’s family. Nancy carried the conversations for me, spoke when I was too moved to speak, brought presents that I had not thought to bring.
She helped me see the beauty of Cyprus. Warm. Fresh and sunny like the Mediterranean of our dreams, with terraced buildings and rocky outcroppings. A dry tropical oasis, unlike the lush mugginess of Florida.
But cultivated. Orange trees. Palms. Bougainvillea. The handiwork of a dozen cultures over a thousand years that had made this island home.
A crossroads. “A lifeboat for the Middle East,” as Soulla’s son-in-law Avraam described it to me. An old place. A place to dig and dig and always find something new.
Thank heavens for George. He set up the whole trip and sent us a daily schedule in advance. He made appointments to meet Soulla and other relatives. Told us exactly where to go, and when, and offered his house as a home base.
“Welcome Nancy and Suzin,” read a sign when we arrived, a high-hanging banner made by his eight-year-old son Stelios.
George’s home was outside the Cypriot capital, Nicosia, a contemporary white abode in the middle of a golden wheat field. For me, those are the colors of the Cyprus: white and gold. Like the sun.
And blue, like the Mediterranean. So many shades of blue.
We had a fish dinner, straight from the sea, and wine. George was, as he joked in one of our first e-mail exchanges, “still the dashing, bright, handsome male you knew at UF but with less hair due to . . . maturity reasons.” We talked into the night with him and his wife Yioula, drinking wine long after the fish was finished.
After dinner, George brought out an extensive family tree of Panos’s relatives. He had included everyone he could find. It was six sheets of paper, taped together. He rattled off the names of the people he had spoken with, telling me details. The tree listed more than sixty people, but that night it seemed like six hundred.
Including me.
There I was, on a short branch in the splay of Greek names like Petrides, Georgiades, Michaelides. My plain-Jane name, “Susan Spencer,” among the -ides and -ios and -is.
I was overjoyed.
But that night, I turned the family tree over in my mind. Wondering. Was I
really one of them?
Panos had no descendants or immediate family . . . except me. But as is common in Greek culture, he had been close with his aunts and uncles and cousins. And the person he had perhaps been closest with, from childhood onward, was his cousin Soulla.
Soulla had been kind to me over e-mail, referring to me as the unexpected gift. But I couldn’t help but wonder, would she like the gift as much when she opened it? What would she think when she actually met me?
Would I live up to the legacy of my birth father?
The next day we drove into the heart of Nicosia, a city of contrasts. An ancient walled area, near high-rise buildings. Crisp Mediterranean architecture in hills miles from the sea. A European feel with strong Middle Eastern influences. Sleepy but alive, crowded but compact, familiar but comfortably foreign.
Soulla’s apartment was in a modern building on a busy street. I smiled when I saw the name: Attikus Street. Wesley’s first name is Atticus.
We took a private elevator to her floor. George, who had visited her already, said it opened right into her apartment.
Soulla was a widow. Her husband might have been elected president of Cyprus, her children told us, if he had not died. I had worn black, out of courtesy for her status, halfway expecting a four-foot-nine stooped babushka clad in mourning black from head-to-toe.
Then Soulla opened the door, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.
“Hi! Hello! I have been excited all day!” she said.
We stepped into her apartment, a wide open, light-filled space, with stained glass lamps and antiques, built-in display cases full of tidy collections, and artwork, including her daughter Alina’s icon paintings, framed in a zinging electric blue.
The home of an aristocrat, yet perfectly comfortable.
Just like Soulla.
We sat outside on her terrace. I studied the lines of the buildings around us, a jumble of apartments with hills beyond. Soulla studied my face. Subtly. Searching for Panos. Torn between maintaining a polite gaze and staring.
She ordered souvlaki from a local restaurant. It was delivered with a bright salad of tomatoes and cukes. (We should have this in America. Where is the souvlaki delivery van?) We ate and talked all evening.
Soulla is an affluent, educated, tiny woman, maybe a hundred pounds after a large meal. Her English was perfect, her conversation effortless. She exuded warmth and thoughtfulness, as natural as any woman on the street, not a stroke of makeup or whit of snobby air despite her upper-class status.
It was apparent, immediately and often, that she had loved and admired Panos, her older cousin. Loved how Panos was tenderhearted with patients. How he was always loyal and kind. How he adored her children.
Soulla talks with her hands, her gestures revealing as much as her words. She has one where she says, “It was . . . ,” and drifts off, shaking her hand, shrugging her shoulders, closing her eyes, and inhaling deeply, signaling something divine.
“To know he had a daughter . . . ,” she said, and gestured just so.
She explained their devastation when Panos died suddenly in 2002. He had flown back to Cyprus for the birth of Soulla’s first granddaughter. He felt ill after the flight, and went to bed. He never woke up.
Soulla said my sudden appearance in their lives was like a piece of him returned. A gift. “Like Christmas,” she said again, gesturing just so.
Soulla showed me pictures of Panos. There he was sitting in a café in Italy, in his twenties, his profile just like mine. There he was as a child, his wingnut ears and eyes exactly like Aubrey’s.
He was fearless.
That’s what Soulla kept saying. Panos was fearless.
He would help anyone. Go anywhere. Face any challenge.
Months later, Panos’s best friend Robert Abdalian would tell me how Panos would swim way into the ocean, out of sight of the shore. Bob used the same word: fearless.
I took the word into my soul. Fearless was in my genes.
After a while, Soulla’s daughter Mania came by. She lived in the same building. A mother like me, with two girls I would meet later, Anastasia—pronounced the elegant Greek way, AH na-sta-SI-ah—and Phaedra.
Another hour, and Mania’s husband, Avraam—the operator, as I always thought of him—arrived with a bottle of wine.
Avraam was quiet the first few days, but after that, he was nonstop. He later told me my sudden appearance panicked him. He wondered if he too might have a daughter he didn’t know about. “From college, you know.”
As I said, an operator.
Avraam is a business engineer. Here’s how he explains this in his e-mail signature line: “BUSINESS ENGINEERING involves industrial & environmental management, innovation management, entrepreneurship, marketing engineering, services management, operational research, econometrics, global strategy and leadership, management science, business administration, finance, economics, mathematics, social science (ethics and law).”
And as Avraam will unabashedly tell you, he’s an expert in each subject.
He brought the electric car to Cyprus, he told me. I ordered a Red Bull one day in front of him. “I brought Red Bull to Cyprus!” he said.
Like them all, Avraam adored Panos. “He had an unbelievable rationality,” Avraam told me that first evening. “He was no BOOL-sheeter.”
He poured the last of the wine, went for another bottle. Soulla kept showing me pictures, talking about Panos. As the wine went around, the talk cycled into Greek. Despite a childhood of Saturdays spent with Ms. Karadaras pinching my ears, I couldn’t understand a word. It sounded like Russians speaking Italian to me.
And yet I felt at home.
Eventually, Soulla would show me a fifty-something-year-old family photo, maybe twenty people, including Panos’s parents, aunts, and uncles. I got out my reporter’s notebook and asked her to name each person.
Something -ios. Some-other-person -ides.
“And who is this gentleman?” I asked, pointing to a swarthy, stocky figure in black.
“That would be your grandmother,” Soulla said.
Grandmother Julia, Soulla explained, had been blessed with brains, not looks. She had been a mustachioed woman. So much so, according to Alina, she had scared the grandchildren.
We laughed and laughed about this, Soulla included.
It was perfect. Levity and gravity, at the same time.
The next morning, Soulla took me to meet the doctor, a friend, who had pronounced Panos dead. There had been no autopsy, but the doctor assured me Panos had no neurological problems that would explain my withered hand. He had died of something vascular—likely an aneurysm—after the long flight, the doctor opined.
Phew! I thought. Still no sign of hereditary ALS.
Soulla confirmed it: no known genetic problems in her family.
In fact, she and Panos had a hundred-year-old cousin. Xenon, the centenarian, was in excellent health. A doctor himself, he had helped Panos with his career. Soula arranged for Nancy, George, and me to meet him.
Cousin Nadia accompanied us. Nadia is similar to Soulla: tiny, tasteful, in her sixties. But Nadia is a spitfire, prone to off-color jokes. A professional interpreter of Greek, Italian, and English, she once had a chance to translate during a visit by the pope. She declined. “I never really liked the man,” she said.
It was a short climb up stairs to Xenon’s apartment—something that bothered us when we found out that Xenon was in a wheelchair and hadn’t been able to leave the apartment for years.
Xenon met us in his living room. He had a blue blazer on over his pajamas. His hearing aid stuck out of its breast pocket.
His much younger wife, Irini (only in her eighties), joined us.
Xenon had been Cyprus’s minister of health. He told us how he had worked with Lord Mountbatten, eradicating malaria. How both his sons were doctors. How he had
practiced medicine around the world.
In his youth, he had typhoid. Typhoid! Xenon was in the middle of that story when Irini, his silent wife, finally barked, “SHE WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT PANOS!”
“He can tell stories till tomorrow,” Irini said, shaking her head.
This got Nancy, Nadia, and me giggling.
Undeterred, Xenon went on. “Before the war . . . ” he started.
And George politely broke in: “WHICH WAR?”
He shouted, of course, because Xenon couldn’t hear. Which made Nancy, Nadia, and me giggle harder. George looked horrified.
Nadia asked if Irini had pictures of Panos. The two disappeared to another room and returned with scads of framed photos.
“Of her boys, the doctors!” Nadia said, rolling her eyes.
Laugh. Smile. It was a delightful afternoon, even if I didn’t learn much about my birth father. Except for one precious, ethereal detail.
As we left, I leaned and gave Xenon a kiss on each cheek, the Cypriot custom.
“Ah!” the old man said, smiling. “You kiss like Panos.”
I have always loved Greek food—stuffed grape leaves, sharp feta cheese, ink-black olives steeped in rosemary and garlic.
In Cyprus, I discovered the best way to eat: at a mezze. A word from the Arabic meaning “to share,” a mezze was a variety of courses, shared by all at the table, common throughout the Middle East. A reminder that a meal is more than food.
Early in the trip, we shared a seafood mezze courtesy of the spitfire Nadia. It included every type of shellfish, roe, octopus, and urchin, filleted fishes large and small, served on white plates upon white linen. Delight.
Near the end, in a small tavern with russet walls and deep brown tables, we shared an unforgettable meat mezze with Soulla’s extended family. It was Soulla’s gift, though she was a vegetarian herself.
First came quail eggs and marinated artichokes, sauteed mushrooms, warm pita with hummus and spicy caponata.
Then course after course of meats: souvlaki, roasted chicken, pork in all varieties, followed by lamb in a mint-reduction sauce. Spinach pie. Moussaka with a toasted top of savory custard. Couscous with broth. Vegetables.
Until I Say Good-Bye Page 14
