by Lena Manta
I turned over in the bed. I had managed for so many years to bury the memories deep inside me. Melpo’s visit and our journey into the past had brought forth echoes from my own history—I was in fact the great-granddaughter of that other Smaragda, who had loved and been betrayed, and who had found herself beside a man who, I was sure, had never loved her.
A particular memory crashed over my mind: That afternoon . . . I must have been about five. My mother had left me at an upstairs neighbor’s apartment. Anna was her friend, the daughter of refugees. She had spent her whole life in Wuppertal, from the time her parents had arrived to find work. The two women were close, which they hid from my father, Renos, who didn’t like my mother spending time with anyone. I remembered Anna helping my mother treat her wounds and bruises; Anna would always disappear from the house just before the torturer came home.
I didn’t know where my mother had gone that day, but I stayed with Anna, who had no children, and we had a lovely time laughing and playing with her little dog. When my mother came to pick me up from Anna’s apartment, she sat down with me on the staircase, and there she told me about the baby that would come to our house in a few months.
“And what will it be, Mama?” I asked her, full of happiness. “A girl or a boy?”
“We don’t know that yet, sweetheart. But whatever it is, we’ll love it and look after it, won’t we?”
“I’ll be a big sister!” My chest swelled with pride.
As soon as we went into the house, I saw her smile disappear. My father was there, waiting. She let go of my hand and pushed me gently toward my room.
“Go play, darling, and close the door. You father and I have to talk.”
Numbly, I obeyed. It wasn’t long before I heard her pleading voice: “Don’t hit me, I’m expecting a baby! Renos, please! Stop!”
I hid under the bed and covered my ears with my hands. There was an awful noise and then a piercing cry. I rushed out of my hiding place and saw my mother on the floor in a pool of blood, my father looming above her. Then I heard banging on the door; it was Anna, but she was too late. I ran to open the door and fell into her arms, shouting, “My mother’s dead!”
The woman took me in her arms, and despite her shock, she spoke to me calmly.
“It’s nothing, sweetheart. Your mother tripped. She fell and hurt herself. Run upstairs and play with my dog while I help her.”
She released me gently, and I slowly climbed the stairs. Normally, she wouldn’t have sent me alone, but I understood that, at that moment, Anna’s worry was for her friend. I heard her shouting at Renos.
“A nice job you’ve done! You’ve just killed your child. Call an ambulance! Quickly, Renos! She’ll die of a hemorrhage!”
My mother didn’t die. She spent a few days in the hospital, while I stayed with Anna, and then she came home, but she was very pale. It wasn’t the last time I witnessed these sorts of events. My mother had three more miscarriages, all caused by beatings from the brute she had married. And each time, he appeared to be repentant and calm afterward, but soon enough something would happen, and it would start again.
I turned over once more. I had begun to sweat, so I got up and took a bath in the hopes it would help me sleep. The cool water was a great comfort. I went down to the kitchen and drank some milk. There was no way I could escape Tiger when it came to food, especially milk. I filled his saucer and watched as he lapped it up.
I opened the kitchen window to let in the cool night air and drive away the nasty smell that had returned. For many years, that smell was my nightmare—a dirty breath of stale beer. It seemed to cling to the walls, the furniture, my clothes. I looked around, afraid he was there, but I knew it was impossible. A headstone, back in Germany, was all that remained to remind me that another wretched abuser had once walked through this world.
Renos worked in a factory in Wuppertal, and all day, he didn’t touch a drop. The Germans didn’t fool around when it came to work, and he was proud of what he did, cutting components for tools. Monotonous work, but dangerous. A moment of distraction and the monstrous press could cut off his hand.
His parents had left Greece shortly after the end of the war. There was nothing left for them in their homeland, but they hoped that their son would manage to return one day, rich, and live in the land they came from. Naturally, they were deceived. As soon as they set foot in Germany, they started working in the factories. Renos’s father worked in the factory where Renos himself later found a job, and his mother worked in a textile mill. Germany needed workers to rebuild it after it was leveled by the Allies. At first, the family lived in an apartment with three other couples and their children. Cramped living conditions combined with hard work broke not only their bodies but also their souls. Young Renos, together with the other immigrant children, was looked after by an elderly German woman for a small sum. Unfortunately, what none of the parents knew was that this dada hated children. Beatings and abuse on a daily basis, hunger and threats that kept the children from telling. Until the bad thing happened. Because of her great passion for drinking, the woman didn’t notice that the two oldest boys had found a box of matches. Her little house went up in flames. The woman herself was burned alive with the two boys, and another youngster died of smoke inhalation. Everything was revealed, and a new woman was found to care for Renos, but it was too late by then. His hard, brutish character had already been formed.
I stood in the kitchen, irritated with myself. What did I want with all that now? Why bother looking so far back? There was no excuse for the harm that man did. He was always a lost cause, breaking his parents’ hearts. They sent him back to Greece to some relatives, hoping it might help. Their naivete came from nostalgia and love for the homeland they had been forced to leave, which took on mythical dimensions as the years passed. For them, Greece was the best medicine, capable of curing any sick soul. And there, tragically, Renos met my mother. How and why they married, I never found out. I only knew that their marriage raised a storm of objection, mostly from my mother’s father, the man who’d owned the house in which I now stood. Was my mother so in love with Renos that she refused to listen? That question had always tormented me. What did she see in this brute that made her follow him to a strange country where she didn’t know the language and was far from relatives and friends? In any case, I was sure that he never loved her. Of course, he didn’t marry her for a dowry, since her father disowned her. Then why?
I left Tiger satisfied and washing himself in the kitchen, closed the window, turned off the lights, and went back to bed. Melpo had promised she’d come in the morning, and I still had a lot to learn about the family I was descended from. I punched my pillow to make it smoother and settled down to count small white sheep.
Despite my late night, I came down to the kitchen a little after eight the next morning. Inspired by Melpo’s elegance, I’d taken some care putting myself together. Karim smiled, but his eyes X-rayed me.
“You had a bad night, madam?” he asked, putting a cup of coffee in front of me.
“I’ve had worse.”
“The other madam? Did she leave late?”
“Late enough. She’ll be back today, Karim, and she’ll stay with us for lunch.”
“OK, madam, I make food from my country.”
I looked at him and smiled. After finishing my coffee, I was about to get up from the table, but his expression stopped me.
“What?” I asked, looking for my cigarettes.
“Madam won’t get up from place if first she doesn’t eat! No cigarette before she eats.”
This was our daily argument. Karim wouldn’t let me put a cigarette in my mouth if I didn’t first drink the fresh-squeezed juice he’d made me and eat every bite of the food he’d prepared. I obeyed, and when I began to eat, I realized I was very hungry after all.
The doorbell rang exactly at eleven o’clock. I had begun to get irritable with waiting. To pass the time, I had helped Karim wash the vegetables he was going to cook,
I’d dusted the small office, and I’d even made my bed. I greeted my aunt, who came in with a smile on her lips. We sat on the couch side by side, and she examined me with a kind look.
“Your eyes are red,” she observed. “Did you sleep badly or cry?”
“It’s been years since I cried, Melpo,” I confessed without meaning to. This woman had a curious effect on me.
“That’s terrible! Tears are medicine, my girl. They defuse a crisis that our mind can’t handle. That’s why men suffer more from heart attacks. Because they think they’re not allowed to cry. The poor things try to keep everything inside, and the pain sits in their heart until it bursts like a balloon. Why haven’t you cried, sweetheart? Has your life been so good that you felt no need for tears?”
My smile was so bitter that Melpo remained thoughtful for a while. Then she took my hand.
“I told you so much about your great-grandmother and brushed right past the first question I should have asked. What happened to your mother? How did you lose her? I’ve heard about an accident.”
“The accident was marrying my father.”
“She wasn’t happy with him?”
“No.”
A monosyllabic answer, the bitterness filling my mouth with poison. Melpo got up and went to the window. A soft breeze stirred the curtain.
Without turning toward me, she asked, “Then why did she marry him? Why did she sacrifice everything for his sake?”
“Didn’t she tell you?”
“No. When I turned fifteen, I was diagnosed with a serious illness. Something in my blood—a rare type of leukemia. The doctors in Greece had given up, but my father heard about a doctor in Switzerland who was performing miracles with a similar illness. He sent me there with my mother and visited whenever he could. I spent two years there, two difficult and painful years, and when I returned, the world had been turned upside down. Your mother had already married and been kicked out of the house. Aunt Chrysafenia had been killed, together with her son, my cousin. Grandma Smaragda had died from a broken heart, and Grandfather Fotis had suffered a stroke. They put him in a rehabilitation center, but he didn’t last long. The whole family had scattered to the four winds. I was lost, as if I’d entered a parallel universe. My father didn’t want to see anyone, except for Uncle Pericles—your grandfather—not even the rest of his children.”
“How strange . . . You, who managed to even learn about my great-grandmother, couldn’t find out about what happened so recently?” she asked with justifiable curiosity.
“My girl, you learn as much as others want you to learn. Besides, don’t forget how young I was and what I’d recovered from. For years, they treated me like a porcelain doll. It’s amazing they didn’t manage to turn me into a cantankerous brat. I had to fight hard for permission to study; they didn’t even want to send me to the university, and it was there, in my final year, that I met my husband. When Paschalis came to ask for my hand, they treated him like a child molester! I was twenty-six when we married, but I think my parents still hadn’t accepted the idea that someone was taking their little girl away. It was as if time had stopped in 1971, when I became ill.”
Melpo’s eyes had become sad.
“Won’t you tell me something about you? About your mother?”
“It’s not easy, Melpo,” I replied. “I’ve tried for so many years to bury the memories inside me. My father was a violent and bad man. My mother was a martyr.”
“And the accident we heard about?”
“There was no accident. They said she killed herself, but she would never have done that. She would never leave me in his hands, abandon me without help, like prey to his devilish soul!”
I began to tremble. I tried to control myself, to remember that I was no longer a child but a fully grown woman. Decades had passed; I had sunk and yet I still swam. Nothing worked. Pain overcame reason; wounds gaped, wide open again; I felt blood in my mouth and dug my nails into my palms.
Melpo took me in her arms and hugged me tightly. Her warmth was a lifesaver. Her hands stroked my hair, her lips gave me kisses of comfort. The trembling died down, and my body grew still. Holding one of my hands, she opened the album waiting on the little table in front of us. She picked up right where we had left off: the wedding of Smaragda and Fotis Ververis. Melpo spoke softly, as if she were telling a fairy tale.
“Your great-grandmother married, as I told you, in 1927. They set up house in Pera.”
CHAPTER 6
VERVERIS FAMILY
Constantinople, 1927
Smaragda had spent her life in the shadow of her older sisters, and also with the heavy burden of knowing her father wished for a boy that never arrived. And so, she was quite unprepared for the reception she received from her new family. Her husband worshipped her, and as he told her when they married, his love had begun many years before. Whenever his father was invited to the Kantardzis house, Fotis would beg so dramatically to go too that his alarmed father forbade it. Every Sunday, he would sit at the back of the church so he could watch Smaragda without anyone noticing, and when he had the good fortune to see her at some rare social gathering, he couldn’t sleep all night, his head full of new images of her.
Smaragda was shocked, but when she thought hard, she could remember a few occasions over the years when the boy stared at her in awe. Her second great surprise was the way her in-laws treated her. Her mother-in-law’s weakness for Smaragda mirrored Anargyros’s disappointment: she’d been unable to have more children, and secretly mourned the lack of a daughter. This beautiful, well-behaved daughter-in-law was the answer to Mrs. Ververis’s prayers.
The large private house in Pera became Smaragda’s paradise. Living with her husband’s parents didn’t bother her at all. At first, the place seemed enormous to her. The living and dining rooms were twice the size of those in her parents’ home, and she found the modern kitchen full of devices surreal. The beds on the upper floor were all four-posters, and intricately carved, like all the furniture. Part of the ground floor was reserved for her father-in-law and her husband’s medical clinic, which had a separate entrance so that the coming and going of patients didn’t interfere with the life of the household. The house was built on a sloping piece of land, which meant there was a mezzanine with rooms for the two servant women, as well as laundry and storerooms. It took Smaragda a week to discover and remember all the rooms in the house. And yet, just a month after her marriage, despite her young age, she had taken the reins as if she were a seasoned housewife, a fact that made her mother-in-law sing Kleoniki’s praises.
But Smaragda couldn’t fully accept her new life, couldn’t absorb all the new things she was learning. Nor could she get used to her husband’s adoration, which embarrassed her. Nights were especially difficult, when her loving husband lay down beside her, full of desire for his beautiful wife. What upset her was her confusion. Her heart still ached for Simeon, yet in her husband’s arms, she forgot him, and she didn’t want the things they did in bed to end. She couldn’t understand why, shortly before the wedding, her mother, Mrs. Marigo, and Paraskevi had tried to explain a woman’s duty and obligation in that arena. That she must be ready and obey her husband when he had “appetites.” Smaragda didn’t see it as a duty or an obligation. And if it hadn’t been for that Simeon-shaped ache in her heart, she would have been completely happy. She had accepted her marriage knowing that she would never love again like that first time. And at least she knew Fotis and liked him. The time she spent at her sister’s further persuaded her that, even without passion, a household could be stable and happy. Deep down, she still harbored anger toward the man who had given her up without a fight, despite all the things he had said. And yet, there were moments when she suffered from the great love she still had for him. One thought of the kiss they had exchanged in their single meeting made her heart beat loudly and her eyes fill with tears. She wondered if there was something wrong with her, if she had gone mad, but she concluded that the heart was one thing, the b
ody another. She simply needed to separate them in her mind. Not long after their wedding, as she blushed bright red, she told her husband she was expecting a child.
Nestor Ververis was born a little after New Year’s of 1928, giving his mother quite a difficult time. Her parents had come, and Smaragda’s room was transformed into a hospital. Her father-in-law and husband sent for not one but two gynecologists, as well as several midwives. At one point, despite her pain, Smaragda nearly burst into nervous laughter, looking at the crowd gathered around her head, listening to them give commands and exchange advice. It was almost dawn when she bought her son into the world.
The arrival of the new member of the family turned everything upside down all over again. Smaragda’s in-laws had lost their minds, and her husband wasn’t far behind. She was transformed from the princess she had been for them to a queen, and her every word was an order. They only had to suspect that she wished for something, and it was in her hands. They loaded her with gold jewelry, and Smaragda pretended not to see the name of the goldsmith’s shop on the box.
Two years later, a new sun lit their lives, and this time it was a rosy-cheeked girl with eyes like liquid gold and blond down on her head. They called her Chrysafenia, the name of Smaragda’s mother-in-law, but also because of her golden eyes.
