Cassette 1

Side 1

Now let me see, how do I turn this thing on? Oh. Maybe it is on. There’s a red light, anyway, a little fiery eye in this dark kitchen. I guess I speak into this bit—hello, hello in there. One-two-three-four. I’m just going to rewind and play that back to make sure I’m doing it right, seeing as how all machines are out to humiliate me. Technology means putting a cassette into a recorder and that’s it for me, no comments, please. Okay, everything’s okay, though I would never guess that’s how I must sound to others, old and croaky, like a geriatric frog.

Well, then, where to begin? My name’s Aliki and I’m the last professional lamenter in this village of ours in the northeast of Greece. That’s right, a composer of dirge-poems, called mirologia, chanted at wakes and such. Well, actually, I don’t really compose them. I seem to fall into a kind of state and they really compose themselves and just pour through me like a long sigh. Maybe they’re not even poems, more like chants. It’s an old village custom, one long practiced by crones like me, though, as I say, I’m the last in these parts. And the dead I chant about, well, they seem to linger around me whether I like it or not—you’ll see what I mean. The dead never seem to finish with us, or is it we who never finish with them?

When someone from one of the old families dies around here, the relatives ask me to lament. It’s not exactly grieving they want, just the marking of a life. The lament can be grand or small and not necessarily sad. The family wants to feel they’ve honored the dead in the traditional way before they trundle the body off to the church with that new, young priest, Father Yerasimos. Of course the younger families skip me and go straight to him and I bear them no ill will. I’m here for those who need me and in return they give me whatever they have on hand—a few eggs, olives, cheese, a day-old loaf of bread. Some are more generous than others, but I accept what’s offered and don’t complain. No one has much cash these days, thanks to the blunders and outright thievery of our governments these last years, not to mention those moralistic neighbors to the north. Well, I don’t need much; time has made me small. That’s what the years do—shrink you down by plucking away those you love one by one and eventually even your memories of them. In the end, there’s a lot less of you.

I dress only in black, once the custom for widows and crones. It’s still my custom. My head scarf too is black and when I go out, I draw the corner of it across my nose and mouth to hide my bad teeth. I look like a storybook witch. The girl I was on the day the Germans executed my father wouldn’t recognize the crone I’ve become.

Speaking of my father, I saw him again this morning standing in my back garden. He fished a cigarette out of the shirt pocket next to the blackened bullet holes in his chest and lit up. There wasn’t much point in telling him that smoking is bad for him as he’s been dead for more than fifty years. So there he was, saying again between puffs that things over there were not much different from here. Of course I’m not sure I believe in an over there, but when the dead turn up, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt.

We stand around all the time talking politics, he said. Everyone speaks at once, interrupting and yelling, and nobody agrees on anything. It’s just like life.

It was back in ’43 that the Germans executed him along with two other village men. Made them stand next to the stone wall under the plane tree in the plateia and shot them down, just like that. It’s still there, that wall; I think of him every time I pass it.

There isn’t even a decent kafeneion here for a good cup of coffee. We’re trying to circulate a petition about it, but no one can agree on the wording. And there’s nobody to give it to. Doesn’t seem to be anyone in charge.

“But what about the saints,” I always ask, “or the Holy Family?”

We’ve never seen any of them. But there’s probably a bureaucracy full of incompetents somewhere. He took another drag on his cigarette, leaned back and blew a perfect smoke ring. Also just like life.

That was no surprise. Who can believe in all those sour faces in church icons? When we were wasting away back in the forties, they hadn’t helped us at all. So what were they for?

He paused and then said, Go back to sleep, my child.

“But I’m awake, standing here on the back steps watching you smoke your lungs out.”

Oh, well, he said. Sleeping, waking—what’s the difference? Then he was gone.

There is this about the dead: they’re so light. They slip in and out of our world with no effort whatsoever. By contrast, we seem heavy, dragging our lives along behind us like an old sack of stones.

Oh, now wait, what’s that clicking noise? Maybe if I push this button? Really, I hope we’re not going to be plagued with stops and starts. This recorder and these cassettes were left here by a Greek-American scholar who came to see me a few months ago. An earnest young woman from an American university, doing research on rural lament practices, or so she said.

You see, when you’re the last of a line of just about anything, people will come to study you as if you’re a donkey that can salute the flag. How do you feel about it, they want to know. At my age there’s so much to feel about, one way or another. It’s a mystery to me how one chunk of memory gets stuck to another from years earlier and finally adds up to something different from the last time you remembered it.

Anyway, this scholar, an ethnographer, she called herself, was a pretty little thing, though her blond hair looked as if she’d taken an eggbeater to it and then glued it all in place. She had these tiny glasses that she had to push up her little bit of a nose as she talked about recording all my laments. She asked questions about a lamenter’s otherness and something called the poetics of social commentary. What could I say? I just looked at her while she ran on about high voicing versus low voicing and a lot of other things I’ve never heard of. We were sitting in the kitchen—as I am now—and out the window I could see my neighbor, old Stavros, pitchforking hay into his donkey cart. A breeze blew the hay every which way, but what landed in the cart looked a lot like my visitor’s hair. I could see that my silence was making her uneasy; I was probably not turning out to be the kind of subject she’d been looking for, poor little thing. She kept patting her head as if to make sure it was still perched on her tiny neck, then pushing her glasses up her nose again.

“As we know, death is the passage from the inside to the outside,” she said. Her Greek was good even with that flat American accent, though I had no idea what she was talking about. Seeing my blank expression, she asked, “Wouldn’t you say?”

“I’ve never thought about it,” I said. “Is it something about yourself or your family you’re trying to tell me? Do you need my services? For this you’ve come so far?”

No, no, she said, flustered, it was just her area of study, Mediterranean ethnography. She was trying to get established, publish some original field research. She’d already interviewed some lamenters who mostly wail and weep, as she said, and others who sing or call out the deeds of the dead person. But she hadn’t talked to anyone about dirge-poems.

“Has anyone else interviewed you?” she asked.

“Not unless you count those TV people who came all the way from Athens. And then there was that newspaperman from Thessaloniki. But no one from a university, not ’til now.”

She seemed relieved and said she wanted me to lament into this gadget she had, a thing she held in her hands and worked with her thumbs. It seemed to give her a lot of trouble because, she said, our village was tucked down in this valley on the other side of the mountain. Though she was interested in the fact that isolation has kept our ways mostly unchanged, we seemed to be too remote for her gadget.

We’re not remote here, I told her. Remote is always somewhere else, a place where you’re not. And I don’t know why anyone would carry around something to aggravate them the way that thing did her.

“And I can’t just turn laments on and off,” I said, “like the kitchen tap.”

“Oh, yes, of course. I’m sorry—I did think of that. I was hoping you’d record yourself when you’re in, well, the right frame of mind.”

I didn’t want to go into it, but in fact my neighbor and old childhood friend, Zephyra, was (and still is) moving toward her end in her house just along the road. Poor thing, what a thin little life she’s had. There will be lamenting enough in a while.

Then the scholar reached into her briefcase as she said that she’d thought our remoteness might be a problem so she’d also brought this battery-operated recorder and cassettes that she’d leave with me. I didn’t say I’d use them and I didn’t say I wouldn’t. She’d traveled a long way to find me, after all, so I thanked her for coming and gave her a jar of our good village honey as I sent her on her way, saying she should visit again sometime soon. We may have lost our wits, but we still have our manners. She said she’d be in touch.

And really, that was it. She hasn’t returned and it’s been months, so who knows if she will? Not many people find their way to our village even once, not to mention twice. Her recorder and blank cassettes have been sitting here and sometimes I think they’re whispering to me, Tell me how you feel.

What I feel is that time will only snatch away more of me before long. So finally I think I’m going to do some telling, but not only about lamenting. I’d like to unspool what’s happened in the order it once had and get back to that other time, a time of secrets. But it feels odd now, me sitting here talking about myself to myself. So here’s what I think I’ll do—I’m going to imagine you listening, my American scholar, though I know so little about you. Well, I’m sorry about those comments I made about your hair and such. I’d go back and erase them, but I’m not sure how to do that. So if you’ll forgive me, I’ll just move along, pretending you’re interested in my life and times, not just my laments. Well, you are, aren’t you? And of course you’re young so I don’t know how much you know about the war and what came after. I hear they don’t teach much history in your country, but can that be true? It’s hard to believe that here, where we can never get out from under our glorious past or stop measuring it against our much poorer present. Anyway, I’ll stitch in some facts here and there.

But I should also tell you that we may get interrupted from time to time because of my poor friend Zephyra. She’s held on longer than anyone expected, but she’s into her final days at last.

Oh, now the clicking of this machine has stopped. So, onward.

I was talking about those stolen squash, I think. Oh, no, I hadn’t even got to that. I’d better start further back. Well, it was 1943 and the Germans had been here for a while. The Italians had come through first, but then the Germans took over. My father always said that the fact they were in our village at all was probably some bureaucratic mistake. They were mostly in Athens and the islands but not much on the mainland, which was largely occupied by the Italians. Had a spelling error been made by a clerk who’d confused the village name with that of some more strategic place? The Germans certainly weren’t here for the charcoal our area produces. It’s made from the nearby grove of resinous pines, once owned by my grandfather. His son, my father, was the last charcoal maker in his line. It was difficult work. Being the last of a line seems to be a family trait. From the smoke in the smoldering process, his skin was walnut-dark and his clothes picked up the unmistakable smell of resin. The men in my family have always had that particular mixture of scents—a piney, smoky maleness.

But the charcoal making stopped during the war along with everything else. The Germans had taken our crops, our livestock, our olive oil to feed themselves. They even shot the larks out of the sky and roasted them. As a result, we had little to eat except for the greens we could dig up from the mountainside. So we had almost no energy or will. We moved in slow motion. Nearly four years they’d been here by then and I’d just turned fourteen.

The Italians had invaded first from the north, not so far from here, back in October of ’40. Some of our own village boys died there along the Albanian border, may the earth rest lightly on them, while trying to hold off the macaroni-eaters. And our troops did actually manage that for a few brave months, with the help of British, Australian and New Zealand troops. But by the following April, Hitler had come to Mussolini’s rescue and in the end the two of them divided us up like a pair of wolves devouring the same sheep. Our government and royal family fled to Cairo, leaving us to the wolves. We in areas that went to the Germans envied the other areas because we’d heard that the macaroni-eaters were not so bad. In fact, they were a bit like us, ignoring rules and regulations, always trying to wring a bit of pleasure from life, even in wartime. But the Germans, bah, they didn’t leave us so much as a loaf of bread.

At night we dreamed of food, of Paschal lamb roasted over charcoal, fragrant egg-lemon soup, sheep’s yogurt with thyme-flower honey, delicate little meatballs infused with mint and parsley. I was obsessed with thoughts of sweets; tortured by the vision of almond cookies dusted with powdered sugar.

With little energy, I did everything the way my father told me to, but slowly, slowly, never running or shouting. “Imagine you’re dancing on the last night of Carnival,” he said, “and each step must be just so. Don’t move without pausing first. Then be slow and careful.”

The day he died, I was stepping carefully down our main street on the way to my friend Takis’s house, past some German soldiers standing at attention near the stone wall in the plateia, just there by the old plane tree that was nearly dead from drought. A few villagers stood to one side, being held back by other soldiers, watching something and all talking at once. I threaded my way through them until I could see that my father was standing with two other men at the wall. Stepping as precisely as I could, I tried to walk over to him so he would see that I was doing as he’d asked. But one of the soldiers came over and pushed me back. It was then that I saw my father notice me. He looked aghast.

“Go home, Aliki!” he shouted. “Go now!” And to one of the village women he shouted, “Chrysoula, take my daughter!”

I realized that the woman nearby, who’d pulled her apron up to her face and was weeping into it, was my friend Takis’s mother, Chrysoula. She let go her apron, grabbed my hand and started to lead me away, still weeping. But I looked back just as the German soldiers raised their rifles, which made sounds like toy guns: pop, pop, pop. My father’s cap flew off as he pitched over backward. Puffs of smoke flew up into the tree and its dry leaves rasped against each other.

At first it didn’t occur to me that he’d been killed. There’d been other executions in the village, I learned later, but my father had protected me from that knowledge. Happening upon this one by chance, I didn’t realize at first that my father’s fall was connected to the popping sound.

It had all begun with those squash that I mentioned before, secret squash. The fields had been stripped, but there was a gully below one of them, not quite visible unless you knew just where it was. So my father and the others were picking by night and hoarding the secret produce in a root cellar. From time to time we ate one and, oh, I can’t tell you what the taste of squash cooked golden was like in such times. Just that buttery smell. I can’t eat it at all now because the memory is too piercing. Well, anyway, someone had informed the German officer in charge of the area, Colonel Esterhaus. The life of a secret in the village is not long even today, and back then people were willing to debase themselves for the prospect of food.

Oh, I don’t even cry about it anymore. I’m like an old sponge left out in the sun, dry as cardboard. At the time, I couldn’t cry because I didn’t believe what everyone told me, that the dead, including my father, were truly gone and would never be seen again. I stopped arguing with adults about this and closed my mouth. When you don’t respond, people tend to leave you alone. I couldn’t bring myself to speak for months.

After my father’s burial, I was taken in by Chrysoula, the woman who’d tried to take me away from the execution. There was nowhere else for me. My mother had hated village life, my father told me, and ran off to Athens years earlier. I never knew more than that. He seldom mentioned his runaway wife and I had only faint memories of her. It was one of the mysteries of my childhood. She was my mother, after all—hadn’t she loved me enough to stay? After I lost her and then my father too, Chrysoula and Takis became my second family.

“Such a good man, your father,” Chrysoula would say, her eyes brimming. “We were all so fond of him.” Before the war Chrysoula had been a shapely woman with lively eyes much admired by the village men. But by the time I moved into her house, she’d become a shadow of herself inside her old dresses, which by then were several sizes too large. Her eyes, though, still held their light. “You’ll be here with Takis and me,” she said, “so it will seem that part of your father is here too.”

Takis didn’t care that I wouldn’t open my mouth to speak. He talked enough for both of us. The house was small so he and I had to share a room, even a bed. He was ten and both of us were too young to know much about what grown-ups did in bed. We played cards by candlelight at night on the floor or bed, slapping them down noisily. It was Takis who taught me how to cheat by sliding a card into my sleeve or under my bottom. Then he’d call me cheater or gangster. And we’d throw our cards in each other’s faces. It was the best part of the game. Finally, we’d topple over into bed saying good night to the gecko that lived in a crack in the wall.

Takis had nicknamed his own feet Mr. Shepherd and Mrs. Shepherd. He’d waggle them out of the thin blanket and make up conversations.

“I’ve lost the flock again, Mrs. Shepherd,” Takis would say in a deep voice, wiggling the toes of his right foot.

“Oh, dear, Mr. Shepherd,” he’d answer in a falsetto, wagging his left foot in a frenzy. “Was it the wolves this time?”

“Ate every last one. We’ll have nothing for Easter.”

“We could eat the baby.”

“Mrs. Shepherd!”

Chrysoula would stick her head in the door and tell us that was enough. She’d tuck us in, saying, “Keep each other warm, my little geese.”