The Lace Tablecloth

by Anastasia Gessa-Liveriadis

  ‘Come! Have a look,’ she said. ‘Look what a beautiful baby I’ve brought you. Look what a beautiful brother you’ll have to play with. Spit on him. Spit on him to save him from the evil eye. My golden baby! My beautiful boy!’

  ‘Yes,’ her father echoed her mother. ‘Really, we are very lucky to get such a beautiful boy.’

  Sleep took its time to come that night and it wasn’t restful. The light in the room and the unusual noises disturbed her. Every time she opened her eyes she’d see her mother and father fussing over the baby who was whining like a kitten. She felt aggrieved. How many times had her parents stayed up at night to take care of her? How many times did they treat her with such tenderness? Never. Because she was no good. She was only a girl!

  An unfamiliar female voice woke her up. She turned her head slightly to the side hoping they wouldn’t notice she was awake, and saw Babou Katina, the village midwife, attending to her mother.

  ‘No, you are not getting up,’ she was saying. ‘You are going nowhere! You’ve just given birth and you are not to leave the house for forty days.’

  ‘But who is going to do the work? Who is going to take care of them?’ her mother protested.

  ‘They can take care of themselves. They ‘re not exactly small children. And you’ve made them a boy, and what a boy! Look at him! It’s up to them to take care of you now for a few days. Where is tsoupra (the girl)? Where is Tasia? Is she still asleep? She is a big girl now. She must do the work. Where are you, Tasia? Come. Time to get up. There’s a lot of work to be done.’

  Tasia got up confused and scared. So, from now on she had to do all the work. But how? Where would she start? What should she do first? She had no idea.

  ‘There she is!’ exclaimed Babou as soon as she saw her. ‘Hurry up and get dressed! Fold up the bed covers!’ she commanded and, turning towards her mother, ‘You must teach your daughter to do the housework while she is young, to help you, to take care of the house. That’s what girls are for.’

  So, that’s what girls were for. Till then she hadn’t understood that. But that was how it must be. There was something wrong with girls because, come to think of it, she could recall the way the women waiting to fill up their pitchers at the water tap were talking when Vagelio gave birth.

  ‘Vagelio had another girl. The third!’ Eleni — close to twenty and still unmarried — had said.

  ‘Poor woman! It’s a shame! What is she going to do with three girls? How is she going to find husbands for them?’ commiserated Fani, a robust short woman, the mother of four boys.

  ‘I say, when they are small, girls are all right. The headache starts when they grow up. That’s when you have to watch them like a hawk because if they take a wrong step, you ‘re ruined,’ said Maria.

  These words had left their mark on Tasia. She knew she was still a very small girl, but treaded carefully to avoid any possibility of giving her parents a headache. But it became obvious to her that something must be missing in girls, or women in general.

  ‘All girls and all women are daft,’ she had heard Apistoli tell his friend. ‘What can you expect? God made man and then he made woman from man’s rib. That was God’s big mistake. Without woman, without Eve, men would still be living in Paradise. Eve was man’s downfall. Eve was the cause of everything bad in this world.’

  To Tasia, Eve was a hunchback, a shrivelled-up old woman, but every time Tasia happened ‘to meet her on the street’ she would stare at her with apprehension and wonder, unable to understand how she had managed to do all those bad things. Another thing that confused Tasia was John, Eve’s husband, whose name she thought ought to have been Adam rather than John.

  Time was passing by with Tasia unable to figure out how she felt about the baby. A speck of a thing and he had turned their world upside down. Nothing was the same as before. He whined day and night and kept them wide awake and busy. He was forever dirtying his nappies and vomiting all over them. Since he had arrived there was a strange smell in the house, and wet nappies and swaddling cloths hung everywhere to dry. Why did they keep him? Why didn’t they send him back where he came from? What did they want him for?

  If she caught herself thinking that way Tasia would feel remorseful and ashamed. Naturally, she didn’t want anything bad to happen to the baby. She loved him and was always running to help her mother take care of him. She would take him in her arms, rock him and rub his back to make him burp. At times her heart would burst with genuine love and tenderness, particularly when the baby responded to her with toothless smiles and cooing.

  The christening three months later took place, not in the church but in their own backyard. The church boy brought the font and filled it with warm water. A table covered by a blanket stood nearby. The baby’s godparents were Takis and Christina, friends of her father from Ptolemais. The godfather held the baby in his arms while the priest chanted and shook his censer, filling the air with incense. After a while Yiayia Vayia, Aunty Antigone, Babou Katina the midwife, and Christina, Takis’ wife, took the crying baby to the table to undress it and return it to the godfather.

  Tasia’s mother was nowhere to be seen, as demanded by custom. Tasia waited impatiently through the priest’s chanting and watched as he lifted up the baby and encouraged Takis to smear oil over the baby’s body. Finally, the priest immersed the screaming baby three times into the waterfont, and asked the godfather for the baby’s name. That’s what Tasia was waiting for. She was eager to find out so as to be able to tell her mother the baby’s name.

  ‘His name is Kostantine! His name is Kostas!’ she shouted to her mother who waited patiently indoors.

  ‘Kostas! Kostas!’ her mother cried, wiping a tear from her eyes. ‘That was the name of your grandfather, my father.’

  But Tasia had never met any of her grandparents and was left wondering where they were and what they looked like.

  ‘There, take this tray out to pass around the sweets. That’s a good girl,’ her mother said, before going to collect her screaming baby.

  As the weather improved, Tasia took it upon herself to fetch water from the communal water tap some hundred and fifty metres away. She had to make several trips with her two small pitchers in order to fill up all the water containers in the house. First, she would fill up the big cauldron and the tin cans in the oven hut where her mother kneaded and baked the bread every Saturday. The bread lasted them for the whole week. When the containers in the oven hut were full it was time to fill the large pitchers arranged against the left wall of the entrance hall: a medium-sized room containing all their household implements like pots and pans, tools used for weaving and processing the sheep’s wool, some hanging from nails on the wall and others stored on shelves.

  Arranged on narrow and low in-built ledges across the left and right wall of the entrance hall were many tin and ceramic containers. Some were big water pitchers and water cans. One large tin can stored the cooked meat from the slaughtered pig the previous Christmas. The cooked meat was kept fresh and juicy by the solidified pork fat covering it. Another tin was full of feta cheese; another stored olives. Ceramic jugs housed pickles, dry beans, chickpeas, lentils, peas and other home-made dry foodstuffs like trachana, petura, couscous, bulgur and others.

  Her father’s pride and joy was the large wine barrel under the staircase. Every autumn it was filled with freshly squeezed grape juice and left to ferment and mature to wine, ensuring the year’s supply. The flour was stored in a large wooden box, and the wheat and the corn in two larger boxes. The entrance had a double door with one of its panels permanently closed. Hanging from nails on this panel were some old overcoats and, thrown on the floor — in an untidy fashion — were several wooden clogs and some worn-out shoes and rubber boots.

  The house occupied a corner block in the middle of the town opposite the village square. It was taller than the house next door.

  On the street side it had only one window high up in the middle of the front wall, creating the impression of being mass
ive. In reality it was very small, with only two rooms and an entrance hall. There was a big room on the ground floor and a small room up in the loft with a twisting staircase leading to it. Hanging from the wooden balustrade of the staircase and the loft were strings of onions, garlic, peppers and other items, making the entrance hall fragrant and colourful. It was difficult to find anything superfluous in the house, with the exception of the mysterious lace tablecloth in the right-hand drawer of the big cupboard.

  In the summer, Tasia’s bedroom was the loft which contained the bare minimum: a small trestle bed next to the window, a mattress made of sackcloth and filled with maize leaves, a small wooden table and a stool. Her bedcovers were a stack of folded woven blankets at the end of the bed. Tasia’s few knitted undergarments, her knickers and her socks were kept in a small wooden fruit-case lined with a piece of newspaper, and pushed under the bed. Her dress and jacket were hanging from two nails behind the door.

  Tasia had heard her mother saying that what made her housework a bit easier was the small outside oven hut. The body of the vaulted oven and the chimney were built on the outside with its opening on the back wall inside the hut, opposite the door. Ledges built along the left and right walls provided seating and were also used as workbenches for her mother to do the kneading and washing. A big cauldron on a tripod close to the oven door was used to warm up water for their Saturday bathing.

  Everything was programmed with minute precision for utmost economy. On Friday night, Tasia’s mother would prepare the leaven and sift enough flour to make one week’s bread. On Saturday morning, after kneading bread she’d light the oven to create extra heat for the dough to rise. When the oven was ready she’d collect the embers with a shovel and place them under the cauldron to heat the water.

  Busy and sweaty she would dash out to hang up the washing, stretching it over the fence or on shrubs to dry. In bad weather she’d put it on big metal trays in the empty, but still hot, oven to dry. In summer, when the big open fire was no longer used, Tasia’s mother did the cooking in the outside oven hut, over a small especially built fireplace.

  From what Tasia could surmise listening to the women talking to their friends after their pots were filled at the communal water tap, life was different in the olden days.

  ‘Just look at us! We have become all mixed up. There are people from God knows where. It’s really bad,’ complained Dora, the fat lady with the red face.

  ‘I agree with you. These days you’re scared to cross the river. With all those refugees, all the Pontians. What sort of people are they? Where do they come from?’ Yanna said, her gold front tooth shining between her lips.

  ‘And did you hear how they talk? Fla, fla, fla, you have no idea what they’re saying,’ interjected Effy, who had a dark and hairy birth mark on the left side of her upper lip.

  ‘And if you dare go close to their neighbourhood the stink that’ll hit you will churn your stomach up and make you want to vomit,’ added Dora.

  ‘Their colour is enough to make you shiver. They’re all black and yellow like ghosts. But it’s no wonder. They all suffer from consumption,’ said Yanna.

  ‘Best to keep away from these miserable people. Where did they come from? Why did they bring them here? We were fine before they came. We all knew each other. Now, the way things are, you have no idea who’s standing next to you,’ said Fani, wiping the snot off her daughter’s face with the corner of her apron.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I always used to like everybody: the Blachs, the Bulgarians. We’ve always lived happily together. But, with those Pontians! What can I say? I look at them and I feel sick. They make me want to vomit,’ contributed Dora.

  Tasia would listen to these comments, trying not to cry, because she knew that her mother was a Pontian. Some women spoke about the Pontians as if they were no better than animals, as if everybody else was far superior to them. Comments like these would leave Tasia angry and confused as she didn’t know what to believe.

  Beyond the expressed distaste for the Pontians, and all the other ‘miserable refugees’ as Dora called them, some women whispered about some other rogues in society. They were the tagmatasphalites (the German collaborators): paid murderers with guns in their hands and the freedom to do as they pleased. They were feared because they were not accountable to anyone. They could kill, steal and confiscate people’s harvest. And what was even worse: they operated in secrecy. No one knew who was a tagmatasphalitis. For example, when the decomposing body of Yiannis was found one day in the forest two weeks after his disappearance, some said the tagmatasphalites had butchered him because he was spying for the guerrillas, the resistance fighters. Others said the guerrillas slaughtered him because he was spying for the Germans. Now, who can make sense of that!

  The truth was people were scared. They were afraid to leave their houses, attend to their fields, plough and harvest, and take care of their gardens and animals. That’s why Tasia felt a sense of panic every time her father left the house, particularly on Wednesdays when he went to the market in Ptolemais. She was up and down the stairs several times looking out the window, and couldn’t settle until he was back.

  Midst all this fear and confusion Tasia had started school, but she wasn’t sure how that happened. She could only remember trying to make some lines on a black slate with hard chalk. She tried to copy the lines the teacher had made on a big blackboard. It was fun to learn the names of these lines, to learn the alphabet. She would fill her slate writing the same letter again and again, then she’d spit on the slate, wipe it clean with the end of her sleeve, and start all over again.

  The teacher was the first the village had ever had, creating feelings of amusement, even suspicion in some people.

  ‘We don’t need schooling,’ some women at the water tap said.

  ‘Our children have no need to learn how to read and write. What’s wrong with us? We didn’t go to school but we’re all right, aren’t we?’ Fani tried to reassure herself.

  ‘I wish I was educated!’ lamented Effy. ‘I wouldn’t have to use a cross instead of my name. I will send my children to school. I want them to learn, to be educated.’

  ‘Well, I say, maybe school could be good for George,’ Fani butted in. ‘He’s a boy. He could leave home and go to the army. But for Marika? How is schooling going to help her? What Marika needs to know is how to keep house and be a good mother. You don’t have to go to school to know how to take care of the animals and work the land.’

  ‘What women need here is to be big, strong and hard-working. Women are incapable of learning, as my late father-in-law used to say. Their nature doesn’t allow them. The old people knew what they were talking about,’ Despina stated with authority.

  Such messages were very disturbing to Tasia who liked school and didn’t want to give it up. As her parents never expressed an opinion on the matter, she continued to attend, full of guilt and shame as if she were doing something really bad.

  The years followed one another amidst confusion, hunger and fear. Kostas had grown into a small person now and, her mother, sullen and silent as always, was struggling to take care of everything and everybody.

  Each year Tasia’s class was getting smaller as one after the other, the children stopped attending. In the final year there were only six boys and Tasia left. Her parents never said anything to her, in contrast to other parents. Maria’s mother for example, knew what she expected from her daughter, and never lost a chance to talk about it with great pride.

  ‘Every family has a duty to safeguard its reputation. That’s why we don’t let our daughter run around by herself and go to school. Never! When a girl matures you should never let her out of your sight. My daughter is never going to leave the house unchaperoned till the day she gets married.’

  In reality, Tasia wasn’t even half Maria’s size. She was a very small and skinny girl, and maybe that’s why her parents didn’t bother to stop her from going to school. But very soon maybe all this would be coming to an
end as the conclusion of the school year was approaching.

  Tasia looked forward to this day with apprehension but also relief she would no longer be ostracised. She knew that after graduation she’d have to behave like all the other girls in public: humble, demure with downcast eyes. Many a time she tried to prove the things she had learnt at school were going to be of benefit to her in her day-to-day life in the village.

  Besides reading, writing and arithmetic she had learnt about foreign places and history. She had felt her mind stretching and her heart filling with a longing to run away, to escape to some magical place, to get to know other peoples and other ways. But now all that had to stop. Very soon, all those fantasy trips to the stars, to the moon, to the unknown, trips that kindled her curiosity and filled her with awe would be replaced by the harsh reality of daily existence: working in the vegetable garden and the tobacco fields, keeping house and taking care of the animals. Her horizons would be restricted to the small piece of sky above, circumscribed by the tall peaks of the surrounding mountains.

  T

  he morning was dull and cloudy. A nippy wind rushed through the narrow streets penetrating deep into people’s bones. The smell of rain in the air was not enough to stop people pouring out into the streets as the church bells chimed passionately and joyfully, like the time of the resurrection. Tasia had never seen people so deliriously happy, so delighted. Some cried like small children; others danced, leapt into the air singing and laughing, throwing their crooks to the sky, hugging whoever happened to be near.

  That was it! The German occupation was over! The defeated enemy had left Greece. Poor wounded and penniless Greece would be in a position to feed and dress all her starving and tattered children. Greece — the beautiful slim lady with the long white tunic, the angelic wings and the garland of laurel leaves — would be in a position to regain her dignity and her past glory.