The Lace Tablecloth

by Anastasia Gessa-Liveriadis

  On the day of her departure she had problems controlling a persistent voice inside her, telling her to leave home alone and early enough to be at the intersection on time. George was bound to be there, waiting for her, because that was how these things happened. She only had to find an excuse to leave before her father came home, because she wanted to be alone. She didn’t want him to come with her to the top of the hill as usual, and certainly not see her talking to a stranger. No one ought to see her in the company of a stranger.

  Time moved very slowly as she roamed around all morning, restless and unsettled. To fill in time she gathered all the copper utensils tarnished from the fire — saucepans, gumia, and cauldrons — and began rubbing them earnestly with a wet rag dipped in ash, till they were clean and shiny. She rinsed them and arranged them in their storage place but time didn’t seem to be moving.

  The morning sun strolled up the hill very slowly, while the shadows waited impatiently to grow shorter. Tasia went to the water tap and filled up all the water containers. Then she cleaned the house and the yard thoroughly, and waited anxiously till the sun took its downward journey. She quickly explained to her mother she had to leave early, farewelled her, loaded her saddlebag on her shoulder and took off, almost running as if being chased. Her only wish at that stage was not to meet her father because she wouldn’t know how to explain her haste.

  She walked very fast, almost running, and arrived at the intersection far too early. As George wasn’t there, she sat at the side of the road to wait for him. The slight trembling throughout her body wasn’t because she had the slightest doubt. Her only concern was how to explain to anyone who happened to pass what she was doing sitting there. It would be even worse if someone offered to keep her company while waiting. In such a case she’d be forced to get up and go, without being able to explain to George the reason for her absence. To avoid any gossip and tittle-tattle of spiteful tongues, nobody should see her talk to him. No. No one should see her. If she saw anybody coming her way, she’d run and hide between the tall wheat stalks.

  The time was passing and she started to feel uneasy. A small cloud now smudged the clear blue sky. It was moving fast, chased by the winds in the upper strata. Soon many more clouds arrived, playing and chasing each other. But in their game they must have got carried away for they became angry and blackened the sun. They began to lash the atmosphere with thunderbolts while their electricity made Tasia’s hair stand on end. A few fine drops of rain fell on her exposed arms. It smelt of wet soil. The summer downpour came suddenly, but lasted only a few minutes as the winds in the upper strata chased away the clouds. A perfect rainbow arched over the town of Ptolemais in the distance. The earth steamed and droplets of water shone on the tips of the leaves.

  Tasia wiped her face with the back of her hand and thought of getting up. But why? To do what? She had to wait. She could do nothing else but wait! Till when? Till the end of her life, if need be!

  She became aware of praying to almighty God and got angry for being such a hypocrite. It was her strong conviction that if you do something noble in order to get something back, its moral value was neutralised. In any case, she had serious doubts about the existence of God, particularly the God she had learnt about at school and in church. She didn’t doubt the existence of a higher, spiritual and constructive power, but not a God who created woman from the rib of Adam as an afterthought, a God that expelled his children from paradise because of Eve, that debited each newborn with the primordial sin committed by Adam and Eve. She found these notions unjust and demeaning to all women. In addition, she didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of a God you had to cajole, to adulate or even bribe in order to respond to your plea. After all, as the father of all, he ought to be loving, just, generous and magnanimous. That was the type of God she was ready to embrace — not a God who favoured only those who recognised him: those who begged, bowed and crawled on their knees to him and who built mighty churches to glorify him or made fancy and expensive offerings. She felt these expressions of devotion humiliated and reduced God to the level of the most malevolent, ambitious and conceited human being.

  Tasia had spent all of her almost seventeen years in a world full of fear and deprivation: first, under the German occupation, with its terrifying consequences, including a lack of the most basic survival needs and, before the battered country could get onto its feet, plagued by the most horrific and incomprehensible civil war. Since a very young child Tasia had been exposed to death and destruction and she had learnt to accept the idea she may not live to see another day. She had lived all her life in insecurity, doubt and confusion.

  She knew the human mind had the ability to take you from where you were and transfer you to places, real or imaginary, current or past, project you to the future, to space, to the stars and the moon.

  The incredible ideas and achievements of ancient Greece, about which she was taught at school, had broadened her thinking. They had also left her with enormous ontological questions about life and death, about means and ends, about oppression and exploitation, about justice and freedom. Tasia wondered how she would have understood the world if she were, for example, an insect. What would the world be like to the eyes of a spider? Would the spider be aware of its own existence? Would it have a conscious appreciation of the beauty of the flowers, of the moon and the sun? And the ant, that tiny living thing she’d been watching run just now, loaded with a leaf five times its size: what did the ant know about life and the world — about its own life? Did the ant know about good and bad, about just and unjust, about feelings and regrets, and of its unavoidable demise? If it didn’t know, how much more fortunate it was than she who was lost and spinning over a void, uncertain as to what to do and which way to go.

  As she sat there thinking, it occurred to her she wasn’t a single person. Inside her a number of voices were rising above others, arguing and confusing her. At some level the idea of death and non-existence terrified her, while another part of her was totally unconcerned, and a third part was ready to welcome death as saviour and liberator.

  There were times when she felt strong and resilient and simultaneously scared at the sight of her own shadow. She felt capable and at the same time hopeless, cruel and compassionate, pure in thought and then wicked. Was it possible that all these contrasting characters coexisted inside her: the good and the bad, the fine and the ugly, the divine and the evil? How did all these dissonant characters manage to find a place inside her?

  A noise in the wheat field opposite alarmed her and made her jump to her feet. She didn’t think it was a person because, even after the brief shower that made the earth steamy under the hot sun, visibility was clear for miles around. A sudden movement from inside the wheat soon revealed a feral cat licking its whiskers. It stopped on the road, looked all around and, totally unconcerned, re-entered slothfully the same field.

  It was time to get up and continue. The sun had only a short distance to go. The melancholy pale light of the evening was spreading. Her right leg was numb and tingling. She loaded her saddlebag on her shoulder, its unbearable weight cutting the flesh on her shoulder. She began to walk as fast as her feet could go, keeping her head bent to the ground. She stopped several times to look back, thinking she could hear steps following her.

  Monday and Tuesday came and went with no sign of George. She expected to see him come to school to visit his teachers as he had said and, for this reason, she kept passing in front of the teachers’ office with a pounding heart, trying to look inside. Before returning to class for the next lesson she would walk around, repeatedly going close to the wire fence to look down the road, expecting to see him. She was sure he’d come, not only to see his teachers but also to have the opportunity to see her again.

  Tasia knew she was pretty. She could see it in her small hand-held mirror every morning as she fixed her hair. She could see her reflection in the windows of the shops as she passed, when she was sure no one was watching. Many people told her she was p
retty: friends and sometimes, strangers.

  ‘What a beautiful girl!’ she heard a lady say to her companion as soon as they had passed her. And after school, when she was passing with her schoolmates in front of the cafenion, she knew that at least some of the teasing and the whistling of the young men was for her.

  And then there was someone who, late at night, would start singing at the corner of her road ‘πήγα στις μάγισσες να βρω τα μαγιοβότανα που κάνουν τις καρδιές ν’ αλλάζουν γνώμη …’(I went to a sorceress to ask for her brew, that makes a woman’s heart change its ways) and, as he was nearing her window, he would stay still for a short time singing ‘αν ήμουνα θεός, αν ήμουνα θεός θα σου έδινα καρδιά να μ’ αγαπούσες …’ (if I were God I would have given you a heart to love me).

  She enjoyed the serenade and was flattered, but didn’t feel inclined to identify him.

  After all, she couldn’t brag about her looks, as they were nature’s gift to her and not a result of her own efforts. Some told her she had the prettiest eyes in the whole universe, the tiniest waist. But nobody expressed admiration for her brain, her discipline, her knowledge, the result of her own hard work. It was assumed all women were the same, pursuing the same goal, that is, to find themselves a man to marry. For everything was done for the men. Men had the lot. Women had nothing. But Tasia wasn’t like other women. She was different. That’s why George had noticed her. Beyond her looks, George was the only man who had recognised and valued her spirit and intellect. Only men like George had this type of insight …

  The end of the school year came and Tasia spent a miserable summer in the village. The agressive guerrilla situation was now subsiding, as several army units had settled in the province, diligently patrolling the surrounding areas. The guerrillas had left the nearby villages; the people breathed a sigh of relief. Many families who had left, seeking the security of larger cities, returned to plough and sow their neglected land and rebuild their destroyed houses before the coming of winter. But their needs were enormous and state help was meagre. Most of the farmers had lost their plough animals, mules, donkeys, buffaloes, and their carts. Most were left with no seeds to sow their fields to secure next year’s harvesting. Tasia’s parents couldn’t get paid work at other people’s farms. They had great difficulty making ends meet. Surviving was a constant battle and their worry was deeply ingrained on their faces.

  Tasia however, was living in a world of her own, withdrawn and divorced from every-day reality. She was an impartial observer, looking down on people as if from some other planet. While she lived among her own people, she was distant and silent, like a lifeless statue. She tried to escape from her gloom and inertia but couldn’t. Early in the evenings she found refuge in her dark room as she sat full of ennui by her open window and looked at the people on the street below. Women went to the water tap to fetch water. Children brought their animals to drink at the trough.

  With slow, tired gait, one by one the men went to the cafenion at the back of the square opposite her window, most with a lighted cigarette on their lips and a komboloy (Greek beads) in their hands. They would stop at a table to watch some men playing cards or tavli, till they’d find their own playing compan-ions and settle on another table. Now and then, carried away by the flow of the game, the volume of their voices would increase and reach up to her.

  The dimly lit grocer shop opposite with the almost empty shelves had very few customers who most likely went there to chat rather than shop.

  The unfaltering fire of youth was pulling young men and girls out to stroll in the main street beneath Tasia’s window. She knew all of them. Some were her neighbours and some her classmates from primary school. Most of the girls were married already and had had their first baby. Marika down there for example, held her baby boy on her right hip and bent her body, as she tried to balance against the weight of her full pitcher she was lifting with her other hand. And Cathy, who was promenading down there with her girlfriends was a year younger than Tasia, married and pregnant. Tasia wondered what life was like for those girls. Would she have liked to be in their place?

  She could not decide if the destiny of each human being was determined at the moment of birth or not. But she was certain the place one was born and the conditions under which one grew were fundamental to the course of one’s life. So, as her family circumstances were unique, her life was all muddled and unpredictable: she was different from all other girls and very lonely. Her parents were also unsure about many things and swayed this way and that. She had no close relatives to support and guide her: no grandparents, aunties, uncles and grown-up siblings or cousins. Her brother was almost six years younger than her, and her only adult relatives were her parents, both of them lost in a world of their own, different and inaccessible to the other. Tasia’s mother, the Pontisa, had often experienced the disapproval of all the local women and had withdrawn further into herself, becoming even more remote and sullen especially since Aunt Antigone had passed away from tuberculosis.

  In reality, if there had been grandparents, uncles or aunties in her life, things would have been different. They would have set her on a direction. If her father had been like all other fathers, his main concern would have been to find the right man for her to marry, although that was very difficult these days. Most of the village’s young men had left for the cities or joined the guerrillas, leaving only very few eligible men around: no one special and all with inflated opinions about themselves. They expected to get the best-looking girl with the most substantial dowry: so many goats, so many sheep, so many mules and so many acres of land.

  If you were a father what could you do? Leave your daughter a spinster and the cruel joke of the whole village? If the girl and the boy liked or hated each other that was irrelevant. Feelings had nothing to do with marriage and everyday living.

  If a girl — God forbid — got pregnant her father would do anything to have her married as quickly as possible in an attempt to safeguard the family’s reputation. After marriage the girl could do whatever she pleased. Not that any young bride could do anything disreputable, as she would be living under the supervision of her in-laws.

  Tasia had heard of new young brides and their families blaming the groom for failing to make her pregnant within a reasonable amount of time, and the other way around. The message was crystal clear: the purpose of each human being was to get married and produce children. You were born, you gave birth and you died. That was it! Why then was Tasia so different from everybody else, aspiring to something beyond these expectations?

  But let’s say that her father had wanted to find a man for her to marry. Who could he find: Christo, the shepherd, or Petro, the village buffoon? Of course, there was also John whose father took him out of school to work the land and transport things on his mules from place to place. But they also expected to get big dowries and were after big, sturdy girls able to work hard and produce many children.

  The best aspiration for a parent of a girl nearing fifteen was to find a good man for her to marry. And the younger they married, the better. After all that’s what their mothers and grandmothers did ever since time immemorial. One generation followed another, each girl stepping in her mother’s footsteps and looking at life through her mother’s eyes.

  Tasia could appreciate the reason her situation was completely different. Her mother had been uprooted as a young child and grew up with untold hardships without parents. She had no mother to teach her the ways of the world, no mother’s footsteps to follow. That’s why the local customs and traditions had not become an integral part of her mother’s being. On the other hand, maybe she had deliberately chosen not to follow the traditions, not even remember them, to avoid her own painful childhood memories. Perhaps, that was why she filled every second of her life with work, trying to keep her mind occupied and keep buried the tyrannical memories deeply imprinted in her melancholy eyes. Tasia’s m
other lived a life full of sacrifices, self-denials and deprivations, her whole being given to the welfare of her family, as if her life had no independent worth.

  It would have been a real blessing if all these thoughts had passed through Tasia’s mind in a calm and logical fashion. But that wasn’t possible. Her thoughts were all mixed up, neutralising or negating each other and increasing her gloom. Amidst all this confusion, the image of George came back to haunt her, appearing so vividly in her mind that she looked out the window many times convinced he would be standing there.

  On the first day of the new school year, Tasia’s last, the mournful toll of the bell of Holy Trinity was announcing the funeral of Chrisoula, a twenty year-old-girl. She had died suddenly from kidney failure. Chrisoula was an exceptional girl. Every mother wished her daughters to resemble her. She was very popular and people spoke highly of her. She had finished high school two years previously. Her intelligence and her beauty had become legendary. The first time Tasia had heard about Chrisoula was at the water tap.

  ‘I wish my daughters would be as good as Chrisoula’s little finger,’ Roula was saying.

  ‘What a girl! She got top marks in everything again. Left the boys miles behind and still running,’ Katina agreed.

  ‘And she is so sweet and humble. “How are you Mrs Maria?” she always asks when she sees me, and always with a smile,’ added Maria.

  ‘Yes, she’s humble even though she has everything: wealth, family name, beauty, refinement. That’s the best role model for our daughters,’ Katina continued.

  ‘It’s her aristocratic breeding. Her grandparents came from Konstantinoupoli before the pogrom. They brought all their wealth with them and are known and respected throughout Greece,’ explained Anna.