Memory-of by Angelos Sakkis Leafing through an old book about a dictatorship in the Caribbean, written in Greece more than a year before the hated dictatorship there came to pass—the book sounding an utterly unheeded alarm—he spots a passage side-barred and underneath a comment in his late father’s hand “apofasizomen kai diatassomen,” the catchphrase of the odious ringleader meaning “We decide and decree”. Apart from any feelings stirred by those words, what catches him by surprise, in retrospect, is a memory of the smell of his father’s hands coming to him in stream-of-thought kind of way on looking at the writing, can almost see the hand holding the pencil, most often just a pencil stub, keeping accounts in the familiar longhand, and he remembers smells of the old grocery store; unraveling the strands no more in actual sense, but as a memory-of stale olive oil, cheese, nasty “trinal” all mixed with hand sweat, pungent touloumotyri, tarama and olive brine salamoura, the dry whiffs of burlap sack, damp sawdust on the tile floor in rainy weather the stifling darkness of the basement at the other store.
2014 | VOICES
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