Eleni (9 page)

Eleni’s cheeks became round again as she gathered wood, baked bread, planted the crops and carried water from the spring in the summer of 1937. Christos spent every day hunting or sitting in the coffeehouses. Within weeks of their return Eleni knew that she was pregnant, but she hugged the secret to herself for a while, certain that the child conceived in Corfu would be a boy.

On March 17, 1938, Eleni sent for the midwife. Christos sat in the good chamber next to the kitchen, nervously clicking his worry beads and letting the girls turn out his pockets for the candies they knew were there.

When the midwife caught the baby in her apron, there was an anguished cry from Megali, who was crouched in the corner of the room. Another girl! Eleni began to sob. A son would have made her husband so grateful that he couldn’t refuse to take them all to America. Christos composed his face, took the child from the midwife and announced that the baby was beautiful and that he would name her Fotini for his dead mother.

Fotini’s birth was the first ripple in the happiness of that year. A worse shock was the arrival, two months later, of Christos’ partner, Nassios Economou, who had been left in charge of the business in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The Irish maids and Swedish cooks who worked in the silk-stocking suburbs of Worcester, in mansions built by tycoons of the industrial revolution, had always liked dealing with Christos because of his old-fashioned courtesy and the consistently high quality of his fruits and vegetables. But
after Christos agreed to take Nassios on, at the pleading of a relative, the dissolute young man set the kitchens abuzz. Christos was ashamed to tell his wife how often Nassios would return from collecting outstanding bills empty-handed, with a grin like a tomcat, saying he had collected in other currency. When Nassios occasionally brought a couple of women home to the Spartan flat the two men shared at 1 Ledge Street, near the produce market, Christos would succumb to temptation and then despise himself afterward. “Nothing but whores in America!” he ranted. “It’s no place to bring decent women!”

One morning at the coffeehouse in Lia a breathless urchin arrived and told Christos that Nassios Economou was in Babouri waiting for him to call. Christos was stunned. He found Nassios in Babouri, dressed like Al Capone, luxuriating in the attentions of his wife and son. Christos shouted questions, the words garbled in his anxiety. What had Nassios done with their gleaming blue GM Reo truck, the cornerstone of their business?

Nassios replied as if he had nothing on his conscience. He was tired of getting up at 5
A.M
. to go to the market, he said. He had heard that the Armenian proprietor of the greasy spoon near the railroad station, the “Terminal Lunch,” was ruined in a poker game. So Nassios had sold the vegetable truck to a Syrian for $1,200 and bought the diner for $200 cash.

“Running a restaurant is a proper job for a man,” Nassios said as he handed Christos $600—his half share of the business he had spent twenty-four years building. “When the war comes—and it’s coming for sure—the railroad station will be mobbed and that diner will make a fortune! I’ll pay you fifty dollars a week to cook for me now, and when the money starts coming in, I’ll make you a partner. Meanwhile, I thought I’d come over and share your vacation.”

Christos tasted the ashes of his life’s work and his head was spinning. He thought about killing his smirking ex-partner in front of his wife’s eyes, but knew deep down that he couldn’t slaughter a goat, much less a man. After a few glasses of Nassios’ whiskey, Christos’ unfailing optimism asserted itself. Perhaps Nassios was right, and the day of fruit peddler was over. It wouldn’t be bad to be a partner in a restaurant. In any case, it would liven things up in the village to have Nassios around.

For the remainder of the summer Christos and Nassios reigned over the coffeehouses of Lia and Babouri like a pair of sultans. The weather-beaten, manure-stained shepherds couldn’t get enough of Nassios’ lurid tales of American women or of the free drinks and appetizers that the two “Amerikani” vied in ordering. The villagers had already learned Christos’ stories by heart, how he had arrived in America with $27 in his pocket, and how by dint of hard work and Spartan living he had risen to owning a produce business “that brings in—how much do you think?”

They’d all wait, looking expectant.

“Ninety, ninety-five dollars a week!” he would shout triumphantly. “God bless America!”

•  •  •

“God bless America!” was the refrain that concluded every anecdote my father ever told me about his life. Not until I became an adult did I understand his complicated feelings for his adopted country and the reasons why he didn’t bring us there to join him. As a child it had seemed to me natural that my father lived in America and we lived in Lia. When, at the age of nine, I finally met him for the first time, I had come to the conclusion that he had abandoned us. Only later did I realize that given the times and his nature, it was the only thing he could do.

To every immigrant America was the promised land, where hard work was rewarded with gold. As my father labored sixteen hours a day at two jobs, however, he quickly learned that America was also filled with traps for the innocent and the unwary. He saw fellow Greek immigrants, released from the bonds of village morality and poverty, quickly ruined by women, alcohol and gambling, among them the two younger brothers he brought over as soon as he could raise their fares. By nature a Puritan, my father quickly sent his brothers back to Greece to save them.

When he married and had children, he decided that the United States was far too treacherous a place to raise a family, especially four daughters. Working long hours, he could not supervise them properly and his wife would be cut off from the support system of relatives and neighbors she had in Lia. In the village, wives and daughters knew exactly how to conduct themselves; the strict ethos permitted no lapses, but America was full of fallen women. Furthermore, his modest income allowed him to make his family the wealthiest in Lia, at the pinnacle of the social ladder, but if we ever came to Massachusetts, we would find ourselves children of a struggling vegetable peddler. Worse, we would see him treated with the scorn that rich Yankees displayed toward the immigrants who served them. Instead, when my father returned to Lia on his periodical sabbaticals, his wife and children considered him a sophisticated and successful American tycoon.

He loved passing long days of luxurious idleness in the
cafenions
, basking in the adulation of family and friends, but he also had become accustomed to the conveniences of America: fine clothes, weekly baths—and no relatives to answer to. That was the other side of the coin: my father had been seduced by American comforts and the bachelor life he created among other immigrant men in Worcester.

While he never became perfectly American, my father absorbed the country’s optimism and naïveté. Greek peasants at home were the opposite, profoundly suspicious of their neighbors, proud of their wiliness. They have a disparaging term for people like my father:
Amerikanaki
—“little American”—implying a wide-eyed innocent, eager to be duped. My father had come to America at seventeen and stayed away from the village too long. With time and distance, Greece began to take on a nostalgic aura of security and safety in his mind. He saw danger to his family among the industrial
smokestacks and noisy streets of Worcester, but he couldn’t imagine that his wife and children were in greater danger in the simple mountain village where he was born.

As the harvest season passed and the winter rains began, the roll of bills in the rubber band became alarmingly thin. Christos and Nassios knew it was time to give up their pleasant idleness and return to America. One morning in late October, Christos took out his suitcases and began to pack.

Nursing Fotini, Eleni watched him, realizing that she should have spoken before. She had been waiting for the right moment and now he was about to leave them behind again! She tried to prepare her speech, to convince him of the logic of her reasoning, and then, stammering in her eagerness, she blurted it all out. He had to take them back with him. It was too difficult to raise the girls alone! They needed their father. Hadn’t he always said that America was the finest country in the world? “I don’t want them to grow up here! I want them to have something better!” she concluded, her voice sounding shrill in her ears.

Christos looked at her as if he had never seen her before. “What’s the matter with your life?” he demanded. “Don’t you have the best life of any woman in this village?”

Eleni opened and shut her mouth, determined to stand her ground. “I don’t want us to be separated anymore!” she said. “I’m tired of raising the girls alone, not knowing if you’re alive or dead! I’ll get sick again!”

Her words hit home and made him strike out at her in anger because with his produce truck and his money gone, he knew there was no way he could give her what she wanted. “Don’t you know there’s a depression on in America!” he shouted. “People are starving! In America you pay for electricity, food, clothes! Here you live off the land. Haven’t I just bought you another field to farm? You need money in the bank before they let you bring a family into America! And it’s not a fit place for children, especially if the children are girls!”

He might as well have slapped her as reminded her of her failure. The shock of his words suddenly brought Christos clearly into focus for Eleni. For the first time she understood that he enjoyed having his family far away in Greece. He didn’t want to be burdened with the responsibility of their presence. He preferred returning now and then, hands full of gifts, to be admired by everyone.

As if he could see her disenchantment, Christos turned defensive. “I came because you were sick! I’ve spent everything on this trip. Look what’s left!”

He pulled out the much-handled roll of bills, now limp and pitifully small. Eleni stared in astonishment. “If that’s all you have, why were you spending like a pasha, keeping every good-for-nothing in these two villages in food and drink?”

At a loss, he replied, “They expect it of me! I’m an American!”

Eleni did not mention America again. The weight settled back on her shoulders. But she could not forget that she had seen, in a flash of insight, Christos’ vanity and his reluctance to take on responsibility. Like every village girl, she had married a stranger. But like every wife, she had finally seen through to her husband’s core.

As the leaves of the beech trees turned yellow, Christos and Nassios planned their departure. They would meet Mourtos the mule driver at the monastery of St. Athanassios, which lay halfway down the mountain between Lia and Babouri.

After midnight on November 17, 1938, Christos, Eleni and Olga set out for the monastery on foot, climbing quietly over the garden wall so that no one would hear them go. Nitsa had warned Christos that if he was seen, jealous villagers could throw black magic in his path and he would never return.

When Mourtos arrived with the mules, Christos threw an arm around his shoulders and whispered in his ear. Eleni overheard the words “Just enough for the ferry to Italy.” She noticed the fleeting look of contempt on the Turk’s face and the exaggerated friendliness in her husband’s manner.

Christos kissed her on both cheeks and said she must have courage; soon he would either send for her or come back to stay. She answered with a hint of defiance, “When we meet again, I want it to be on American soil.”

Christos ignored the remark, and contented himself with giving her some final words of moral advice. The girls’ reputations were her responsibility, he reminded her. The house and all their land were in her hands. He quoted once more his favorite maxim: “Honor is beyond price or measure. A woman has no greater treasure.”

Eleni listened silently to his advice, her fear growing at the thought that she was about to be left alone again with all the responsibility for the children in a world overshadowed by the threat of war. Then he kissed her again and was gone, mounting the lead mule with an agility surprising in a man of his bulk.

She was lonely and irrationally afraid, like a child who senses something terrible lurking in the darkness. She didn’t cry. She only waved at the departing figure of her husband.

As the mule approached the first bend in the road, Christos turned around in the saddle to look back. All he could see of Eleni were two white spots made by her apron and her face. It was the last time he would ever see her.

The exodus to the caves took place almost two years after the day Christos left Eleni, neither of them suspecting that there was a new life growing in Eleni’s womb. During that time the impending war that Nassios thought would be good for business had grown into a tidal wave which had already
inundated Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. Now it had spilled over the tops of the Mourgana mountains into Greece.

After two days of being crowded into the caves, the villagers grew short-tempered and food supplies ran out. Some women ventured down to their homes to make fresh bread, then returned with the news that the Italians had advanced no closer than the distant ridges of Plokista and the village of Povla, and seemed uninterested in crossing the foothills to scale the mountains.

Apprehensively, the villagers returned to their homes. Life settled into a tense normalcy, although Eleni left her treasures hidden in the oak tree, and the old men of the village who were not away on their annual working journeys or fighting in the army cleaned their hunting rifles.

A few days later a small patrol of Italian soldiers arrived in Lia, guided by local Chams, including Mourtos the mule driver. The Italians were polite to the terrified villagers as they searched their houses for weapons.

When the patrol was leaving the gate of the Gatzoyiannis house, Eleni pulled Mourtos aside and asked him for news of the war. The young Turk whom Christos called his friend turned on her with a look of triumphant hatred. “The Italians have promised to make all of Epiros, as far as Preveza, part of Albania, as Allah willed it,” he said. “Moslems will rule here as before. The Italians will be in Preveza tonight, and in Athens by the end of the month!”