I sit down now, barely pulling the chair out so that the edge of the table presses against my ribs.
“Nestor got that cartridge,” my mother goes on, “from the partisans. Greeks who had gotten weapons from the Italians when they surrendered to the Germans.” She must notice the confusion on my face, because she breathes an irritated sigh. “It was complicated, Calliope. The Italians occupied. Then the Germans occupied. And the Italians who didn’t get caught hid in the hills and ended up helping the partisans.” She waits a moment, but I don’t say anything. “One day, after the Germans had taken over, we went to the camp where the Germans kept their Italian prisoners, and one of them called to us from behind the fence. I should have walked away right then. Everything would have been different if I had walked away and taken Nestor with me.”
She stops, fighting against a decades-old frustration. I can see her twitching slightly in her chair, as if she could pull her teenage body away from what became so obviously the wrong course. I reach across the table and touch her shoulder.
“Mamá, do you mean you wouldn’t have lost the farm?”
I don’t see how this is possible. But maybe I can offer some source of solace she has overlooked in all these years.
“No. Why would you say that?” She looks at me, and I can see her trying to piece together what exactly her sisters have told me. “This is worse than that. All these years, Nestor and I have had a much bigger worry than money and wealth. We had a darker sin on our conscience.”
I lean back against the chair, my mind scrambling to think of what she could possibly mean.
“We knew this soldier. Giorgio. He had befriended Nestor at the start of the war. Nestor went to talk to him. I gave in and I let him. Nestor gave him something to eat. The Germans were starving them. They were starving us all. In Athens, but even in Patras, people were dying on the streets.” She looks up at me sharply. “Do you understand that, Calliope? Can you imagine such a thing?”
I nod. I know she’s not telling me the whole story about Giorgio but I don’t want to disrupt her momentum. After a moment she starts up again.
“Nestor must have gone to the camp again without me, and Giorgio told him where the Italians were hiding with their weapons in the hills, and Nestor told Yannis and must have brought him there for the guns. Yannis had left us when we couldn’t pay him anymore, and we suspected he had joined the partisans. Probably on the communist side, but who cared as long as he was fighting the Germans. One day Nestor and I were the only ones home. Your aunts were out in the plateia and my father was at work. I don’t know where my mother was that day. Maybe none of this would have happened if she had been there. Two German soldiers came after Nestor, and they said they would kill him if he didn’t tell where Yannis was. They said Yannis had led a partisan group that had killed two Nazi soldiers the day before.”
“But how did they know about Nestor?”
“Maybe he boasted to someone, or maybe they saw him talking to someone. But they were right. He had been to the partisan camp. And they came after him to get to Yannis.” She takes a breath. “So I protected him.”
She stops and closes her eyes. I wait for a while, but she doesn’t move. I’m afraid that she will begin to cry.
“You protected Yannis?”
“No. I protected Nestor. I betrayed Yannis. That’s all, Calliope.”
“What do you mean? How did you betray him?”
My mother opens her eyes and looks at me with a sadness I have never seen.
“I’m only going to say this one last thing,” she says. “Yannis was found the next day hanging from a tree.”
We sit like that for a long time, and I discover a rhythm to the whir of the refrigerator. I pick at a tiny scratch in my chair, rubbing a fingertip over the spot where the scratch cuts across the edge of the seat. At some point, it occurs to me that my mother has forgotten I am in the room, even though I am just across the small white tabletop from her. I can’t imagine what she is thinking, but I know that I am struggling to see through a kaleidoscope of muddy shards of glass.
I picture her and Nestor in that high-ceilinged house. I picture soldiers in movie-version helmets and boots. I picture a body spinning slowly from a rope in a tree. And a young woman, my mother, standing somewhere, doing something. That is the part I can see the least clearly of all.
As I think about all this, what emerges for me is a sense of some perverted equilibrium, a distorted balance in which the life of a young boy and the life of a man must be weighed and judged. My mother protected Nestor, she says, and for that, or because of that act, Yannis was hanged. She gave the Germans what they wanted—or she convinced Nestor to—and she earned her own and her brother’s survival in return. She gave a greater value to the life of her brother. How can she blame herself for making that choice? That’s all, my mother said to me. Meaning that was all she did that day during the war? Or that is all she’s going to tell me now? Surely the act of protecting one’s brother from being killed can’t be dismissed with that’s all. It’s a heroic act. It’s the right thing to do. It is far from trivial. Am I being callous to absolve her and Nestor both?
But there is another balance too, between my mother and Nestor, the two of them sharing a sin that burdened them all their lives and that led them to argue even as Nestor was close to death. Besides my mother, only Nestor and those Germans knew what happened in the house on Korinthou Street. It’s not hard to imagine that my mother must have done something to distract the Germans from their vengeful course. My mind can’t even hold the thought that they enacted their vengeance on her all the same. Now that Nestor is dead, whatever happened to my mother that day is a burden she is carrying alone. She won’t even share it with me.
I draw my hand out from under the table and place it on my mother’s. She starts, sees me again, and draws her hand away. Another time, another day, she would have pulled it away more quickly. Another day, I would never have put mine on hers.
“Why did he want you to tell me?” I ask the question without even realizing.
She looks right at me.
“I don’t know.”
I see something hardening in my mother’s face and I decide I need to leave right away, so that I can preserve the slightly softer image of her in my mind. I ask her if I’ll see her at the church for Forgiveness Sunday or for Clean Monday lunch, and I’m pleased that she says yes for both.
“Demetra’s been working hard on her kite,” I say.
I shrug my jacket on and give my mother a kiss on each cheek before heading out into the hall. She closes the door softly behind me while I wait for the elevator.
Out in the street, I can hear the insistent thumping of the bass from the loudspeakers that ring Plateia Georgiou. It’s the final Carnival parade, and it feels as if it belongs to another world. I have no desire to seek out the revelry, and I don’t trust myself to go back to Aliki’s yet, lest I say something to reveal what my mother has just told me. And this is one thing I am certain of: This last piece of information from my mother’s past I will not pass on to anyone else.
Something makes me decide to try my luck again with the old family house. It seems the right thing to do, to fold the reality of my days here in Patras into the new history of my mother’s life. The closer I get to the center of the city, the more clearly I can hear the parade music, a cacophony of amplified samba, whistles, and an echoing voice booming from a microphone. I reach the house on Korinthou and stand there, gazing at the double entrance door at the top of that short flight of steps. There are lights on now, blazing out from bare windows. I imagine the house on the last night of the Bourbouli in 1942, with light filtering through thick curtains and people arriving in splendid gowns slightly out of current fashion. I walk up the steps and press a buzzer. A woman’s voice answers after a moment.
“I’m wondering if I could ask you a favor,” I begin, but the intercom clicks off.
I try three more with similar results. One woman think
s I am a gypsy begging for cash. Finally I hear a voice I think I recognize.
“Remember me?” I say. “You let me in last week to look around. My family used to live here.”
“The American?”
“Yes.”
The buzzer sounds and I push the heavy door open. I am in the foyer again, and the bulb is still burned out. Except for the street light coming through the windows on either side of the door, the space is in deep shadow. It would be easy to go down to the basement now, as I did that other day, which seems like a lifetime ago. The door to the stairs is just there, across the foyer. But on that earlier visit, I was looking for the site of an innocent childhood game. Instead, I learned that even a shared experience can splinter into conflicting memories.
I hear footsteps on the stairs and make out Undershirt Man, now wearing blue jeans and a sweater the same bright red as my shirt. A large yellow and orange flower is pinned to his chest like a clown’s brooch.
“All right,” he says, not unkindly. “What do you want now?”
I suspect he will think I am crazy, but it is Carnival, and he is dressed for it, so perhaps it will be all right.
“Could you let me go up on the roof?”
“What?”
“I’d really like to see the roof. That’s all.”
“You planning to jump? Because I want no part in your suicide.”
I assure him that is not my plan. “It’s a family thing. Something I need to see.”
“You Greek Americans and your heritage,” he mutters. “The door’s over there. Just watch the laundry up there. You mess it up, you’ll have to wash it.”
He leads me as far as the door but stays behind as I walk up the stairs. I emerge from the little hut as if from the conning tower of a submarine, and I do feel as if I have surfaced from a deep immersion—in my mother’s guilt and sadness, in my own age-old mistakes. I feel the breeze on my face, diminished to a soft caress, and look up at the sky. There is too much glow from the city now, but I imagine that the night my mother stood waiting for Giorgio, the sky must have been dripping with gems of light. I walk to the edge, where there is a low wall, and I look down at the street. Across from me is the building of the old concert hall, now lit up with a long vertical sign announcing classes in English and German. Two young women are sitting on the steps smoking, and through the propped-open door I can see a brightly lit patch of linoleum.
It seems reasonable now for a young woman of my mother’s disposition and with my mother’s dreams to come to this roof and feel she had the world at her feet. And it seems reasonable for her to keep from me the truth of what happened on that roof—an event that could have been simply an embarrassment within the family, even a humiliation, but that the war and its way of playing with consequences turned into a tragic loss. Most of all, I see now that her sense of a shared shame over what took place when the Germans found her and her brother alone must have colored everything she did with Nestor from that day onward. It doesn’t matter that I don’t quite understand her shame. What matters is that I understand, a little bit, that she felt it. Her departure with my father in 1959 now seems less like a reluctant acquiescence and more like a necessary escape. His Americanness must have been a balm to a woman whose life had taken a bad turn just when the idea of being Greek was at its most fraught. How much worse it must have been, too, when the marriage began to fracture.
I see now why Nestor wanted me to know all this, why he wanted my mother to tell me. He couldn’t reveal the truth outright without betraying the sister he was bound to in an allegiance of guilt. But he could set the conditions so that that sister might relent and tell her daughter that she had suffered. By stripping away her masks and fabrications, Nestor gave me a way to understand my mother’s story, to understand her.
I think again of what my mother said about the occupation, how it turns innocents into guilty souls and makes the honest cheat. But she left something out. The war gave my mother reasons to feel ashamed, but it gave her honor too. Honor in loving her brother, honor in keeping to herself a secret that might have won her a measure of sympathetic peace. I wish she had told me sooner. And I wish I had wanted to ask.
From a distance, I can hear a marching band’s music separating itself from the general din and getting louder. Just as it was during my mother’s childhood, the house is on the parade route, except that now this is the end of the route, far from the more lively commercial section of the city. Back then my mother would have stood on the balconies with Nestor and the aunts, tossing candy down onto the passing floats. Now, as the parade approaches, I hear doors opening below and, when I lean out, I see people coming out onto their steps, cheering and blowing on whistles and horns.
The parade appears, led by dancers in white harlequin leotards with jester’s hats of multicolored velvet. The first float is of the Carnival figure himself, a smiling clown face with big ears and a turned-up nose. The spectators jump into the parade, dancing along with it and then running back to their starting points to jump in again. They carry on this way for nearly half an hour as the parade goes by, letting the revelry sweep them along for a bit and then going back to start over. I like this idea. I like the idea of starting over—the way these people do it again and again and again, celebrating the dance and the renewal.
I take a last look around and head down the stairs. I meet Undershirt Man at the door, where he and a group of others are watching the last float disappear down the street. I thank him and start the walk home.
20
Clio
October 1943
Clio leaned against the kitchen’s marble sink, watching her mother cut thin slices from a flat loaf of brown bread. Urania was wearing one of Irini’s aprons, the strings coming all the way around and tying in the front. The apron was one of many Irini had left behind when they had let her go the previous summer. Over the year since then, Clio had marked the effects of the occupation on her mother’s once plump torso, as the apron strings wrapped farther and farther around her mother’s frame.
Clio took the slice of bread Urania handed her and spread it with just a little margarine. She ate standing up, chewing small bites so as not to gag on the dry bread.
“Where’s mine?” Nestor said, coming into the room. Urania handed him a slice, saying nothing. He held it up for Clio, but she slid the knife and the jar of margarine over to him.
“Go easy,” she said.
He coated the bread thickly, folded it in half, and wrapped it in his handkerchief.
“Nestor,” Urania said. “Eat.”
“I’m not hungry right now,” he said, stuffing the piece into his pocket.
How could he not be hungry? Clio was always hungry, always aware of a tingling in her stomach, aware of a strange freshness in her mouth that came, she supposed, from all that wasted saliva. They had enough food. But only enough. And it was tasteless and boring and sat in your stomach for hours after you ate it, as if to tease you with a false satiety. Sugar made of beets; bread without yeast; and every now and then a stringy piece of chicken from some bird that had spent the war running from the Italians. Just weeks ago, the Italians had surrendered and the Germans had taken over. And the Germans made sure their officers’ club was stocked with all the wine, vegetables, and fluffy white bread that Patras had to offer, while the Greeks starved.
“Where’s your father?” Urania asked Nestor.
“On his way out.”
“Wait,” she said. “Clio, take this to him.”
Clio grabbed the hunk of bread her mother ripped from the loaf and ran out to the foyer, where her father was just draping a scarf around his neck. She was about to speak to him but paused, watching as he gazed briefly at himself in the walnut mirror. His mustache had grayed, and his once-confident posture had become a stoop, as if he were always ducking beneath a beam. She watched now as he drew his shoulders back and raised his chin, his neck tendons stretching. He turned from the mirror, buttoning his coat.
“
Babá,” she called. “Here.” She placed the bread in his hand and held it there. He looked at her for a moment and then kissed her on the forehead.
He picked up his briefcase and stepped out the front door, closing it crisply behind him. But Clio knew that once he descended the stairs and reached the street, his shoulders would resume their stoop. She wondered when he would eat the bread her mother had given him. He would be ashamed to eat it on the street, with the risk of passing beggars who had had nothing to eat for days. And he would be too proud to eat at work, preferring hunger over the disclosure of his family’s now-modest means. Clio pictured her father stuffing the bread furtively into his mouth as he returned home, famished, in the evening darkness.
After the Italians had commandeered the farm and the Notaris raisin business, they had installed one of their own as manager of the warehouse: Marinelli, the beneficiary of the war’s almost farcical way of overturning fates. But they had soon realized that Marinelli was just a baker and knew nothing about managing a warehouse. They brought Notaris in to serve as Marinelli’s employee. Every day, Notaris went to the warehouse he had once operated from a walnut desk in a secluded office and paced the aisles of crates, ensuring that Notaris raisins were loaded efficiently onto ships bound for Brindisi and trains stocking the Wehrmacht’s supply stores in Athens. At home, he never spoke about his work, but once, months ago, he had come into the kitchen and set a small canvas sack onto the pine table in the center. They had all stared at it. NOTAPHΣ was stamped on the side, and it bore the sweet grassy smell of raisins.
“A gift from Marinelli,” her father had said.
Clio’s mother had put the sack on a high shelf. Nestor would occasionally remember it and beg for some raisins, but no one ever brought the sack down.
Clio heard Thalia’s and Sophia’s laughter above her. The girls emerged from their room and started down the stairs, only to hush suddenly when they saw their older sister in the foyer. They wore their hair in identical bobs now, Sophia’s sleek and Thalia’s still crazed with curls.
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