by Nadia Marks
Later, when he returned to Cyprus for the summer, tormented about facing Sophia and the prospect of breaking her heart, it was to Katerina that he turned for guidance and it was Katerina who first sensed the change in him.
‘I can’t do it, Tante, how can I?’ he agonized, ‘I can’t go through with it for my own selfish reasons. I could still marry her and pretend nothing has changed.’
‘If you did that, you would ruin your life and hers,’ she told him. ‘We cannot deny who we are, Adonis mou, we are not able to choose. So long as you are sure this is what you want, you must be true to yourself.’
‘Is this what defines me, then? My sexuality? Is it not a sin? Am I not a hypocrite after all these years believing in the sanctity of marriage?’
‘You have love and goodness in your heart, my boy,’ she told him. ‘But we must love ourselves too. You can only do that by accepting who you are. Denying your nature would only cause harm to you and others.’ Katerina reached across and took him in her arms. ‘God is merciful, Adonis mou. He forgives, and you have done nothing that needs forgiveness – you are only being honest.’
His friend Stavros, it seemed, was the only one who did not forgive or accept Adonis’s honesty. The decision to come out and explain to his childhood friend about his nature was met with such contempt and rejection that it was to haunt Adonis for the rest of his life.
It was a particularly hot day in August and Adonis was home for the summer break from Athens. He had been procrastinating and agonizing about speaking to Stavros, feeling nervous about how to approach his confession. By then Stavros had met a girl he was going steady with, even if he still kept a roaming eye on what else was available; Adonis knew that his friend would always be a committed philanderer and an incorrigible womanizer. But their friendship went back a long time, he loved him and considered him as his closest friend; he didn’t want to pretend any longer. He asked to meet at the beach – a café would have been too busy with prying ears and the house was stifling hot; at the beach, they could walk and talk in peace.
Adonis was expecting that Stavros would react to what he had to tell him, but he had no way of knowing exactly how. Homosexuality in the 1980s was a taboo subject, especially in their small community where a man’s worth was measured by his sexual prowess and virility, yet nothing could have prepared Adonis for his friend’s reaction and for the look Stavros gave him that day. It was a look that screamed disgust, disdain and betrayal. It pierced his heart like a flick knife.
‘How could you?’ was the only thing that Stavros said, and when Adonis reached for his arm he pulled it away forcefully and, turning his back, walked away from him. That was the last time they spoke, and whenever Adonis remembered that look the pain in his heart returned.
ANITA
‘Now it is my turn to talk about Katerina, and not only her.’ Anita looked around at the three faces streaked with tears. ‘Our family history is long and complicated and my friendship with Katerina goes back a lifetime.’ Her voice faltered with emotion. ‘I have lived with this woman since I was eight years old and she was like an older sister to me, our lives tightly linked; we knew everything about each other. You, my children, know what she allowed you to see. She gave you her love, it’s true, and guidance, but there was so much more to Katerina.’
Anita reached for her glass of wine. ‘Life without her is unimaginable and I have feared this moment more times than I can admit, but now the time has come.’ She brought the glass to her lips and drank, hoping the alcohol’s effect would loosen her tongue further and release her repressed emotions.
After decades of silence, now it was time to reveal to them the past that had been hidden.
3
Cyprus, 1943
Olga Linser, Anita’s mother, a sophisticate divorcee with two young daughters, an elderly mother, and a textile business to run, took on Katerina as a maid in the winter of 1943.
On the day she went to collect the girl from her family, snow had been falling all night over the hills, and the journey to Katerina’s village in the Troodos Mountains was treacherous.
Olga left Larnaka on that December Sunday morning in her dashing red Triumph Gloria, in blazing sunshine, the roof opened to the blue sky and her hair left to the mercy of the winter breeze. A woman behind the wheel was a rare sight in Cyprus in those days and Olga caused many a tongue to wag with her outlandish cosmopolitan ways.
‘I just love you, chérie,’ Christian, Olga’s French lover said as he manoeuvred himself into the low passenger seat. She’d asked him along for company but also because she knew that she might need help as the drive could prove to be rather challenging.
‘You are the woman for me, madame,’ Christian said and kissed her on the lips. ‘Je t’adore!’
‘Like you adore all your women,’ she laughed and kissed him back.
‘Yes … but you, my raven-haired beauty, are one of a kind!’
Olga was indeed one hell of a woman. A beautiful, strong matriarch who had learned early in life that men are good for a romantic encounter and not much else, especially when it came to being reliable. Her own marital experience had been disastrous. She always maintained that apart from introducing her to the wonders of sexual pleasure, Ivan, her husband, had been pretty useless. She did give him credit for being partly responsible for creating her two daughters, but there it stopped.
Christian Lamont, the cultural attaché to the French consulate, was her latest beau. She enjoyed his company, for as long as it lasted, as well as his intellect and his lovemaking. He was a good match for the sophisticated, educated and thoroughly modern Olga.
‘Shall we stop for lunch on the way?’ Christian asked, as she put the car into gear.
‘There is a picnic hamper in the boot,’ she replied. ‘We’ll stop before we start the climb. We’ll find a field and sit under an olive tree. It’s glorious this time of year, everything is so fresh and green!’
But by lunchtime, the dark clouds had started to gather and rain looked imminent. Stopping the car by the side of the road near a meadow, they pulled the roof over their heads and had their picnic in the front seat under a warm blanket.
‘This is more romantic than sitting in a field,’ Christian said, as Olga poured him a steaming cup of coffee with a dash of brandy from a silver flask. Predicting that the weather could suddenly change, Olga had come prepared. She knew of the island’s sharp fluctuations in temperature during the winter. Within its 3,500 square miles, dramatic landscape variations from sea and flat plains to mountains nearly 2,000 metres high caused sudden fluxes.
A keen swimmer, even in winter, Olga was often seen plunging into the cold waters of the Larnaka seashore and then jumping into her car with a crowd of friends and driving to the snow.
‘Oh, how I wish we could ski,’ she would complain. ‘There’s plenty of snow up here but civilization hasn’t reached us yet.’
Born on Cyprus, Olga adored the island and its landscape, but in comparison to metropolitan Western Europe it was still primitive. Her early years were pampered and spoilt, the only child of an Austrian father and an Italian mother, she travelled to both countries from an early age. Olga’s Viennese grandparents were both scientists who had made Cyprus their home at the end of the nineteenth century in order to study the rare flora of the island. Europe was as familiar to Olga as the wild mountains of Cyprus and she was at home in both of them.
She was doted upon by her rich daddy, and Olga adored him back. The connection was less strong with her mother, whose strict Catholicism clashed with her daughter’s hedonism. Olga wanted to enjoy life, live it to the full and not be troubled by her mother’s ethics about guilt and sinfulness. This was the twentieth century! In Europe, the flapper girls were all the rage and luckily for her, her father was on her side.
The drive through the Alpine forest up to the village, with its hairpin bends and sheer drops, was hair-raising even for an experienced driver like Olga. Although she had made the trip often it w
as usually in better weather, and she made sure she had a man with her willing to take the wheel if the going became too demanding. Christian was always a keen travel companion.
Luckily it had long stopped snowing and visibility was good; the landscape looked like a winter fairyland. It thrilled Olga to see the snow-covered trees; she adored the forest, which reminded her of the Austrian Alps where she had gone many times with her papa.
‘Can you take over now, chéri?’ she asked Christian, coming to a halt after a particularly harrowing bend. ‘If I carry on driving I’ll probably kill us both,’ she joked and pulled hard on the handbrake. ‘Driving and looking out of the window are incompatible.’ She laughingly settled into the passenger seat to spend the rest of the journey feasting her eyes and inhaling the cold, fragrant air.
The village, when they reached it, was deserted and covered in clean, crisp snow; an eerie silence prevailed. No man or animal was in sight. The snow must have been falling for a long time and the only sign of life was smoke billowing from every chimney. They pulled up in the square outside the village kafeneon, the car tyres slashing through the virgin snow.
Behind the steamed-up windows they could see half a dozen incredulous faces peering out at them. Visitors rarely ventured so high up and almost never in the winter. The car alone was a rare sight to the inhabitants and the vision of Olga in a full-length white fur coat and hat caused a sharp intake of breath as she walked into the smoked-filled coffee shop. Abandoning their card game and backgammon the men sat back and stared at the intruders. In no time at all the news of their arrival had spread like a forest fire through the village.
‘Xeni …’ Foreigners, they whispered to each other and started gathering, men inside and women outside, to look with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion.
‘We are looking for the Costandi family,’ Olga addressed the proprietor, a stocky man sporting a lavish moustache. She pulled up a chair by the roaring log fire, removed her gloves and hat and shook her hair loose, ignoring the men staring at her.
‘Can you tell us where they live?’ Christian asked this time, in perfect Greek with his French accent, causing a burst of mocking laughter from the men.
‘They are over there by the church,’ the man replied, pointing across the street with his chin.
They found the house behind the village church, if you could call the two miserable rooms where seven people lived a house. Olga and Christian parked the car in the churchyard and walked round the back to knock on the door. A surly-looking man with unruly hair, wild eyes and an equally wild moustache opened the door to them.
‘Ne?’ Yes? he asked abruptly with a voice as surly as his expression.
‘Are you Yianni Costandi?’ Olga asked, wrapping her coat tight around her.
‘Ne!’ he barked again at them and opened the door wider. ‘Are you that town woman who’s come for Katerina?’
‘I am!’ Olga replied. ‘Can we come in, please? It’s very cold out here.’
The room they stepped into was apparently a bedroom, as well as a kitchen, sitting room and dining room. It smelled of damp. A woman was bent over a wood stove, feeding it with logs from a wicker basket. A small child whimpered at her feet while a girl in her early teens holding a baby stood next to her.
‘Kalosorisate, welcome,’ the girl said politely. ‘I am Katerina; this is my father and mother,’ she gestured with her head to the woman and man. Again the girl broke the silence. ‘Please sit,’ she said shyly, pointing to two wooden chairs, while the two adults stood mutely watching them. ‘We have been expecting you,’ she said again and walked to one of the beds lining the walls to put the baby down. Looking around, Olga counted four beds and a small cot in the room plus a table and chairs, a stone sink, a food locker hanging from the ceiling, a crockery cupboard, the wood stove used for cooking and warmth, and several sacks containing mostly grains and pulses.
Olga could feel the bitter cold biting her feet. Despite the fire, the room was freezing. Shivering, she wrapped her coat more tightly around her body. She looked at Christian standing motionless by the door.
‘I will make coffee,’ she heard the girl say as the baby on the floor started to cry. Glancing down at the child, Olga realized that the floor beneath her feet was bare trodden earth. Nothing covered the ground. No rug, or wood, or tiles, just naked brown hard undulating earth.
Later, she also discovered that the latrine was a hole in the earth in the back yard.
‘As we have agreed,’ Olga began, wanting to speed up the process and leave as soon as possible, ‘I have come to take Katerina to Larnaka to live with my family and work as our maid.’ She looked at the man, waiting for his response.
‘Yes, I agree,’ he finally spoke. ‘You will pay me ten pounds now and you will also pay Katerina 7 shillings a month which she will send to me.’
‘I will pay you what we have agreed,’ Olga said firmly, opening her handbag and taking out the money, ‘but what Katerina does with her own money is her business.’ She looked across at the girl who stood rooted to the spot, staring wide-eyed at her. Olga saw a flicker in her eyes. She wasn’t sure what it meant; it looked like a mixture of gratitude and fear. She got the strongest of feelings that Katerina was as desperate to get out of there as she herself was.
4
Yianni Costandi was a tyrant and a bully, and Katerina lived in constant fear of him. Her mother, a weak and feeble human being, had no power over her husband. The many beatings she had suffered at his hands broke any spirit she might have previously possessed, making her incapable of protecting her children.
Katerina felt pity for her mother, but mostly she felt anger and resentment.
Terrified as the girl was, she, unlike her mother, refused to yield to Yianni, thus infuriating him further with her fighting spirit.
‘I’ll teach the little mare to respect her father,’ he would hiss, spitting on the ground and unbuckling his belt. Katerina, unflinching, stood strong and took what he gave her. The reasons for the beatings were usually arbitrary.
‘I told you to fetch three pitchers of water from the well, not two,’ he had shouted at her the day Olga and Christian were due to arrive.
‘The snow is deep,’ she replied, standing tall in front of him, ‘and my hands were freezing. I couldn’t carry the three.’ He raised his hand to strike her and then he remembered the visitors and thought better of it. It wouldn’t do to be spoiling the goods; Katerina was now a commodity. When the message had come via an old relative that a rich town woman was looking for a girl as a maid, Yianni jumped at the chance.
‘These town bitches pay handsomely,’ he’d told his wife, ‘and I’ll have one less useless mouth to feed when she is gone.’
So what Olga saw in Katerina’s eyes the day she went to fetch her was nothing less than a plea for mercy, a wish to be released from her miserable existence. To her dying day, Katerina never ceased to feel grateful for the chance Olga gave her for a better life.
Living in the Linser household, run by women, with no man ruling and abusing them, was like a dream for the young maid. Life in a wealthy city house, with kind people, food and shelter, was more than she had hoped or wished for. It was another world, far from her poverty-stricken home and brutal father, pitiful mother and five young siblings to take care of. Katerina knew everything about looking after children and was willing to take on whatever duties were required of her. She was no stranger to hard work.
As head of the house Olga was strong but fair-minded and she was grateful to have Katerina’s help. She had a demanding textile business to manage alone, a house to run and two young daughters, and even with her mother’s support, and the assistance of Kyria Despo, who came daily to clean and cook, the task was difficult. The girls, Sonia and Anita, aged six and eight, were not much younger than Katerina, but the hardships she had endured had propelled her into a maturity much greater than her years; the two girls took to her like an older sister.
‘This is your home now
,’ Olga said when she brought her back to the house and opened the door into a room that would become Katerina’s own for many years to come. ‘I’m sure we will all get along very well.’
The room, like the entire house, was beyond anything the girl had ever imagined. A window opened on to the back garden, framing a lemon tree laden with lemons that would soon be ready for picking. At first glance it could have been mistaken for a painting. Larnaka by the coast in December was as mild and sunny as an early summer’s day in her village. The winter sun flooded in through the window and she nearly stepped on Oscar, the family cat curled up in a pool of light on the Turkish rug spread on the floor. After the harsh, bitterly cold mountain village that she had left behind, the room felt like a warm embrace.
A bed with a crocheted cream bedspread stood in one corner of the room, a chair and table with an electric side lamp on it in another corner – she was used to smoking oil lamps. A double-fronted carved oak wardrobe with a full-length mirror stood against the wall. Dropping her small bag containing her few belongings, she stared in disbelief. The room was almost as big as the entire miserable house she had called home until then. The realization that she would have a bed all to herself brought tears to the young girl’s eyes.
‘Eucharisto, kyria mou, thank you, my lady,’ she whispered, unable to say more lest she break down in tears.
That day when she first set foot in the Linser house, Katerina thought she had entered a palace, and Olga was the queen.
During the elementary years, Sonia and Anita were being educated largely at home with a tutor so Olga decided to include Katerina in some of the basic lessons, such as sums and reading.
‘She is a bright spark, this little peasant girl, and such a hard worker,’ Olga said to her mother Ernestina, taking an interest in expanding the girl’s horizons. ‘If she is to live with us it wouldn’t hurt to teach her a few things.’
