Issuu

P A R T II I traveled that route many times in the next twenty-five years. Athens, I found, was changing and compared to other European countries which had suffered the same ordeals during World War II, the changes in Athens were overwhelming;

as an ancient city,

Athens had been spared the catastrophic effects from air raids which other capitals suffered. I even thought that the sun had lost some of its old Mediterranean brilliance. The air was dense; the city, once a sparkling metropolis, was gray and overbuilt. Sadly, the rural and mountain were neglected and production suffered; the population were fleeing to other lands and production suffered. Athens was quickly becoming a “modern” European capital; it joined the 20th century! It is my fault, I surmised, because I’ve been away so long I now feel like a foreigner, a stranger to my past. It was only logical that after the disastrous civil war which followed the liberation from Hitler’s hordes, Greece would join the rest of Europe in the post-war development frenzy. Through the years the haze became dense fog; at times it was difficult to breathe. The streets overbuilt were crammed with cars, buses and trucks moving at a snail’s pace, competing with the pedestrians for the few precious feet of cement or even the sidewalks which had virtually become parking lots! In my sadness, reality convinced me that the world couldn’t stop just to satisfy me or tourism. A stranger couldn’t believe or even guess the pre-war poverty, the narrow muddy streets, the small white-washed houses the cottages around Athens with their gardens and back porches; those were now replaced by fancy, modern multi-storied , balconied apartment houses; the green of trees and gardens became scarce. The simplicity and elegance of the ancient and the classical architecture were now replaced by a frenetic rush of over-building.

Fortunately, the monuments were still intact, though weather and smog worn. Their presence connected me with my childhood, brought back the memories that through the years had given me courage. Those memories kept the monuments alive, young; now I could see that time was taking its toll: Columns of thousands of years

old

structure began to deteriorate, the surfaces showed signs of erosion, what with the planes overhead and the cars filling the air with fumes! On the Akropolis Hill, the “ladies” as I used to call them, the Caryatids, were removed from their temple to the Museum on the Hill, and replaced by plastic ones; and even those had began to show erosion from the acid rain. The Parthenon, almost mutilated by the English Lord Elgin who had stolen ship loads almost two centuries ago, still stood like an old man braving planes and acid rain. I had seen those stolen “Elgin Marbles” in the Museum in London; I stayed in that room for hours two days crying for the crime, going from one broken statue to a column trying to communicate. Time, weather, even the acid rain had shown more respect that “man” did. In my anger, I neglected to see that the “marbles” were displayed in a modern large Museum stoa, respected and well taken care of. I knew enough to understand that “man’s” interest wasn’t always to ;promote art and the historic past of a country, or even to preserve the ancient treasures, but rather to promote shows that would attract customers! Production, profits, a current, modern way of living, took precedence. I spent sad hours in that Museum watching sadly at the remnants of an era of glory: our lost past! I remembered in my tender, innocent years telling my uncle that the Parthenon and the statues needed a roof because they would “melt under the rain”. Sometimes children have more sense!

Sometimes, traveling through the countryside, I was under the impression that I was in the desert as I saw whole towns deserted, shrunk. Larger towns expanded with new homes and industries, while fields, groves, vineyards olive trees and forests, whatever the fires didn’t destroy, were swallowed by what was called “industrial progress”. On the other hand, tourism, unproductive in itself, boosted the economy replacing the weak efforts for industrialization, something that could, perhaps have kept the young, restless hands home.

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One thing that Elena couldn’t understand and hadn’t foreseen was the migration to Greece of workers from other parts of the world. While the Greek workers were emigrating to Canada, Australia, Germany seeing their fortune, tens of thousands were taking their place in Greece entering the country from any part of its shores by any means, legally or illegally. They were fleeing poverty or avoiding political upheavals and their own country’s economic problems: Middle East and the Philippines, the Eastern Block, Asia and Africa poured into Greece hoping to eventually find a way to enter America. For Elena that was an enigma: Greeks were fleeing poverty and Asians and Europeans went to Greece to find their destiny often paying for the adventure with their lives. A new industry, mean and illegal had made its presence: those who brought the new would-be workers under cover of darkness to Greece, not the land itself but around it, (the passengers were never told about it) were sometimes drowning them in the Aegean Sea’s vicious storms

since the so called “boat” that carried them was but a makeshift structure that couldn’t last through the anger of the Aegean waters in tough weather. The passengers were not unloaded in legal ports in the mainland or the hundreds of Greek islands; they were abandoned on some shore of an unknown to them island or even country, to fend for themselves. The lucky ones were rescued by islanders, fishermen or the patrolling Marines, and taken care of. The country is surrounded by water and if one doesn’t drown, one can land somewhere.

“Undocumented Aliens” or illegal ones, settled in towns, cities

and the farm land in remote villages replacing the departed local hands who were building the industries of Europe. Those immigrants became a “historic first”; they learned the language, not an easy feat, and a trade or disappeared in distant valleys. Many just floundered in city streets begging or selling souvenirs. The land began to look and feel different especially with the demise of the socialist countries which instigated almost massive waves of immigrants undocumented which meant “illegal”, and had to find an easy access to enter the northern parts of the land from secret ravines, mountains and fields not watched by the frontier guards; many never made it because the frontier was also guarded by the Army and it wasn’t very rare to hear of some explosion from grenades which hadn’t detonated during the exercises of the day. Soon the land was ripe with drugs, black market babies, prostitution and arms as well as break-ins in remote houses, became the news of the day. Even the most honest refugees had to eat and feed their families but as it happens in any fleeing wave of humanity there are some evil souls. The mixture of races, ethnic variations, religions was due to be followed by a madness for profit which was transacted on sales of illegal items that could

trespass boundaries and armies. The government had to deal with congestion, unemployment, lack of housing, prostitution, child abuse, illegal drugs and arms. Greece was an open field, a true “democracy”: it held democratic elections –not at gun-point as before- and no political persecutions. The exile islands or imprisonment for political activities were a thing of the past to be dealt with by the future historians. Unfortunately, the word “democracy ” loses its true interpretation at times and to some immigrants, even some Greeks, it also meant “anything goes”! Everything is for sale: values, products, ethics, booze, prostitution, drugs, stealing, killing…That ‘everything’ though, included homelessness, unemployment, and small children working streets, airports and stations selling cigarettes or sex, wiping car windows during the Red traffic lights. No one forced them to attend school. The Gypsies, old residents of the land, had a tent to sleep in, Elena recalled as she saw the homeless multiplying, and beggar mothers with babies in their arms who had come to Greece for a better life. How much more miserable they were in their own country, she wondered.

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Alexandra Avenue was one of my most vivid memories; regardless of how many times we moved during my childhood, our home was always within walking proximity those early happy years and later, the sad, frightening memories of the war years. It was on Alexandra’s Avenue that I understood the expression ‘prisoner of war’ as I watched the captive bedraggled Italian soldiers drag their feet on the way to the prisoners’ camp they were kept in, and , towards the end of the war, Russian captives brought in by the Nazis

who were then controlling Greece . I remember my childish thoughts : if those men did not have a uniform on, which I could recognize, if they marched up the Avenue in their underwear , I would never be able to recognize their ethnic background, because both the Germans and my school teachers had convinced me that a Russian is something like a wild bear one keeps away from. And that bitter April of 1941, it was Hitler’s ‘victorious’ hordes goose-stepping up this Avenue ugly and frightening with their tanks. In my silliness, or fright I had thought then that all victories are followed by music and happy songs and those men looked angry. I was happy I think because had they displayed their pleasure at occupying my land with music and songs, I would have hated both they way I hated the Nazis. I tried ton forget prisons and war as I made my way up the Avenue in the shade of the palm trees; to concentrate on today’s reality, the Avenue that looked so cosmopolitan the Summer outdoor cinemas and the newest import the supermarkets. The six story building, a before the war closed-in cinema, was now a garage surrounded by new, modern buildings with balconies and huge pots of flowers. I couldn’t help recalling that the area was once considered the ‘outskirts ’ of Athens; population explosion had altered the then geographic boundaries beyond recognition and at times I had the impression that I was in another neighborhood but eventually I reached my old neighborhood and was elated to find very few changes. At least I recognized it fully! I was home! I stared at the soccer field that those years I thought it was endless because it was so bug

and I thought I could hear the

roar of the Sunday crowds, the cursing and hurrays, which I used like any other Greek kid.

It was the neighborhood where I had learned my first bitter lessons of what Greece is and what makes a Greek, long before they got me in school. When the women pulled their chairs outside their doors in the hot Summer evenings, they shared their memories and we heard unless we headed for bed and that no one wanted to do. So we heard about the Asian Minor War of the early twenties and how the Greek population were forced out of their homes after the Greek Army tried in vain to retake the their land which the Turks had taken. In that neighborhood little had changed; the homes and gardens were the same except for a series of two storied buildings that looked like hospitals; they were build in the early thirties to house the survivors of the Asia Minor disaster . They were now deserted with gaping windows and the face of all of them pockmarked –souvenirs of cannon and machine gun memories of the civil war of 1945-48. I thought I could feel the pain of the wall themselves, their wounds still gaping, alone and empty leaning on one another ghosts of recent upheavals, haunting, writing their own history until a kind hand used a bulldozer and ender their misery. I walked past the sad remnants of the ‘killing’ era and stopped in front of the dark and now empty infamous Averoff prison, windows gaping still barred, yet, still ominous but now mute; no screams of tortures, I thought looking and remembering. They faced the hot sun. corpses long dead. What tragedies, thought, what infamous history behind those silent brick walls…executions…tears and pain. My legs were weak, I shouldn’t walk under the hot sun, my sweaty feet told me; I sat on the grass under a tree staring at the prison buildings, those sleeping giants whose secret I knew even when I was too young to understand most of it. The silence of those windows held no menace now, the structures of torture and death looked pathetic, like half-rotten ships ; the

old useless cells, corridors, offices wrecks spreading their crumbling walls and neglected barred yards beneath the serenity of the hot Attic sky. How can you justify your stinking presence, the palm trees, the large barbed-wired yards, I wanted to ask the dead crumbly walls, the decades of your satanic presence in our lives…I threw a nasty look at the spreading yellow walls and the black holes of the windows that now barred nothing and no one; history vindicated! I walked the weed filled paths touched the walls that had scarred my youth and my innocence with their terror leaving a pain that was never erased . Will I ever, I wondered, be able to let go of the memories of the pain inflicted on human beings, men, women, young and old, even children, some born and half-raised behind walls, to forget and forgive…The old buildings with their ghostly appearance had an aura of delirium, but I knew, I was the delirious one, otherwise why should I hear moans and murmurs…I thought I heard the rattling of chains and screams but deeply down I knew it was only the swish of the gigantic spruce tree and the pine forest behind the prison, if I chose to ignore the noxious, hurried presence of the traffic, the endless lines of cars, buses and trucks on the Avenue behind me. It never left me, I thought and the tears ran on my cheeks, the horror of the executions, the chambers of tortures…the nightmare never left me and it hurt even now when was faced with its carcass; like the ogre of the scary childhood fairytales, stories saturated with blood and pain. I raised myself off the hot grass. You can go to hell! I whispered to the sprouting greens… Two decades before, I spent a few hot noon hours inside the Coliseum in Rome and, like now, I let my imagination go wild; again and again I heard the clang of arms, screams and the ugly yelling of the Roman spectators, sounds of ancient times. It was only the cacophony of the street traffic around the Coliseum and of course the cacophony of the

immensely crowded circle of the Coliseum that finally brought me back to my senses as it did now twenty years later in front of the old prison on Alexandra’s Avenue. The sun was hot, yet I shivered as I walked the cobblestones on the path with the overgrown weeds on my way to the Avenue not looking back. I never, never, I thought, look back to see the pockmarked walls, reminders of deathly shells…not another barbed wire. I went to the bus stop and waited; the heat was very oppressive, it made me dizzy. I thought how wonderful it would be if all those useless structures of hate and those that housed the Asian Minor refugees were to be built as a University or a park where children would climb on the swings and on see-saws and monkey bars and slides…Perhaps, I thought, their laughter would erase the memories and chase away the ghosts away. “Taxi, lady?” I came to and opened the door closer to the sidewalk. How did he know that I needed that comfort right then and there…Finally I closed my eyes after I gave him the name of the hotel and leaned back relaxed in the sanity of the late seventies burying for ever, I hoped, the memories of the forties under the ruins I had just seen.

{Some years later I found out that my wishful thinking did not materialize. Instead of a park, or the Dental School of the University, or even a Theater, a hospital, the City Council had voted to dismantle the structures and build a series of cement buildings to be used as Court Houses. I never went back there during my consequent visits to Greece. Some habits, I thought, are hard to break!}

The islands were breathtaking as they floated in the Aegean Sea but upon landing she became at once sad and disappointed perhaps the only one in the crowds of tourists that surrounded her. She found that even the out-of-the-way islands, hardly noticed on the map, had unexpectedly and rapidly been developed into playgrounds and sprouted almost overnight to lure tourism. Even some rocky, neglected and out of the way isles, now sporting modern facilities, electricity, casinos, now catered to the international set; tourism brought financial affluence and with it more gambling and drugs, new to the Greek culture but profitable. They paid a stiff price for that economic affluence: mindless building, pollution, over-fishing and neglect began slowing to take their toll: the decline and destruction of the undersea treasure. Bow and then stories of maimed dolphins reached the press and she could foresee disaster. Those who cared protested but at the end business is business, ‘we need the tourists’. Pollution and overbuilding had become the menace of the modern world Does it matter? Elena thought sadly; the bottom of the sea may die but the country enjoys economic affluence, mountains burn through the summer but we need and to build on. And then? How do we breathe, raise crops, exist….through cement? She had no answer. Why can’t I enjoy my vacation, she wondered realizing that she was trying to be a martyr for a cause that didn’t bother too many except those who made it their life’s ambition to ‘save the sea’ and ‘save the land.’ She rented a little room and stayed a few days hoping to find the shore happier than her bleak thoughts. But the shore was no better,

it had become the garbage collector of the hotels, the vast blue of the Aegean had fooled her.

CHAPTER

Reluctantly, Elena boarded the ferry boat one morning to her island, her past. She felt shaken as she did the first time she boarded that ferry to bury her mother’s ashes. Once again memories overwhelmed; it was the place where she had known the ‘enemy’, terror, bombs; she had learned the destructive force and agony of war, fear, hunger, young people, men, women hanging from trees. And she had known love! Young, innocent love. Leaning against the rail on the boat she took in the far shores, breathed the salty air and tried to forget the past and wash away sad and unpleasant events. She wished! She couldn’t forget her previous trip past visit to the island when she tried to visit her father’s grave when she discovered that not only her father’s memory had been erased but so was his grave. The disastrous earthquake of the fifties and human neglect had taken its toll. She would remember for ever

that Sunday in August when ferry boats came and went

one after the other bringing in tourists, visitors and those seeking a miracle, a cure from the local Saint, known for his miracles. She managed to find a cab because she was going a

different road than that of the pilgrims and as the car climbed the hills on its way to the mountain she enjoyed the clear blue sky as the morning mists receded and floated on the horizon leaving the pine and spruce hillsides cry The crystal clear and the sea far below sparkling blue. The young taxi driver watched the curves and sudden sharp turns carefully as she had done when in those forgotten days she climbed the road whenever they were able to secure a horse. She now recognized the hillsides and groves where she had walked so many years ago when the countries of Europe were trying to exterminate one another. She asked the driver to stop at one

point that she knew well she stopped the taxi and got

out; she stood at the edge of the road and tried to identify the hillside above them, to connect her memories with the surroundings once so familiar. Now everything seemed changed and the only familiar element was the endlessness of the Ionian Sea stretching all the way to join the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Her surroundings were unfamiliar to her, or had she forgotten, she wondered: the red tiled roofs and smoking chimneys of white-washed houses and unknown paved roads climbing up to the mountains and down to the port, the newly built church…a village she couldn’t remember being there; instead, the whole hillside was a huge grove of cherry trees and vineyards whose fruits were famous and exportable. She had been there once as a child, she remembered, with her father. It wasn’t a small, humble village anymore. It was a small, modern town with electric poles and TV antennas. “Beautiful!” She murmured . The driver turned around with a question formed in his raised eyebrows. “All gone,” he said sadly lighting a cigarette. “Gone? Who, where?” Elena asked. “They’re here” The driver pointed at the valley below them.

“Those,” He said, “there. The homes that you see were built by those who left, for their parents. “Everybody went to Athens, then? “Athens, Africa, Australia, Canada, Germany….name it, wherever there is some industrial awakening.” “Do they ever return, let us say for a visit to check on the parents or their property?” “Oh, yes, they return from time to time, like you, now…tourists. But some fee that they find peace here and stay on.” “We have become a nation of tourists, I’m afraid,” Elena said sadly. “Yes, sometimes they return to find a grave…like you…Shall we go on?” He stepped down from the rock, threw away his cigarette and started the taxi. “Yes, let’s”, Elena said, her mouth dry with a bitter, sour taste. Soon after, they reached the village. She recognized the general store and the entrance, the only road of the village. The store was closed for the noon siesta. She asked the driver to stop; his house was right there. Elena walked the short distance to the cemetery as she remembered it. She looked at every house on the left side to recognize her father’s home but there was nothing remotely similar to what she remembered, everything was up-to-date, even the TV antennas and she wondered how the waves could reach them through that very high mountain.. “The church isn’t there anymore,” the driver shouted after her as he parked his car. “It’s been rebuilt a few hundred feet below, we passed it. Same name though, St. Nicholas.”

“Yes, I was told ”; she wanted to tell him that the dead don’t move but she let it go. She entered the ancient iron door that made an awful noise and went toward the East side where she remembered her father’s grave had been; she was immediately disoriented, lost. Six graves all looking alike; she looked at each one carefully. No name plate, they had been torn, she could see that, the iron bars were peeling everything else was falling apart and a variety of garbage covered the ground within the graves that once housed beautiful plants. Around her all graves were made of marble that shone in the sun and they were cared for, all but the six that must have been ancient. It had been about 43 years, she tried reasoning, not even relatives exist anymore. So now, what? She murmured, which one? She remembered that she walked about ten long steps from the church’s side door, but where exactly was the church she couldn’t fathom, only graves covered the ground, big, marble, luxurious graves. She wondered for a few minutes what could have happened to the graves that existed there before luxury hit the people of the village but other things around her bothered her more. The old graves were in shambles in their anonymity: coke bottles, plastic trash, bags and old newspapers were rotting inside the old graves but there were flowers in the marble graves. She felt tears running down her cheeks but she didn’t know if they were for her father or the garbage, or the deep pain she was feeling that moment… The sun was halfway of his daily voyage and lit the village on the east side of the mountain; it was frightening. A mass of deserted blackened stones, a picture from a Dicken’s story. Ugly, blackened leftover stones that were once the homes of a village, remnants of a massive fire and the earthquake.. No sign of life, nothing green, just death! She had heard of a village that was deserted; her own village was deserted, too, but for other reason, that of economics; most of the people, she heard, had emigrated to Australia.

She knew that in a few years that, too, will be a victim of the ravages of time and it will look like the one above them, deserted, falling apart. She had seen whole villages like that in Ireland. The squeak of the rotting cemetery door brought her to. The driver had come to fetch her; one look and he knew she was in shock. “I can’t find my father’s grave,” she whispered in tears. “ All six are alike. Maybe someone in the village remembers…” “Don’t bother,” he said gently, “those in the village who are still alive can’t even recognize your family’s name; your uncle’s grandchildren are all in Australia except the last girl who married someone in Athens. “You are still here,” she told him as they made their way to the exit.” You are young but you stayed; didn’t you want riches, too? Is the taxi business so lucrative?” “I’m not in the taxi business; I do that only during the summer since my family is here. I live in Athens, I attend the Polytechnic, and no, I don’t like to leave my country!” He emphasized the last word as if he felt insulted, Elena thought. “So, there is still hope, then”, she said as in a joke. “Engineering?” “City planning. No,” he stopped and faced her; “I really mean it” Elena believed it . She turned to face him seriously. “There is hope then. You know sometimes I get a feeling that the day will come that I will not fine one Greek in Greece.” “I’ll be here!” “Remember! Building means taking over land; fields, forests…wild life…” “Don’t be so negative, lady, when one builds with a sense of need and not of profit, many things can be achieved that would prove necessary.” Elena entered the taxi and sat on

the front seat and he started the car. “Don’t forget,” he reminded her, “forests are protected by law, I hope it lasts.” Elena shrank in her seat deep in thought an a sense of irretrievable loss. She had lost her father for the second time; she felt that time was a traitor, she had been torn in two, the then part and the now and nothing, no one can unite them, the chaos was permanent. She closed her eyes. For a while she looked at the dry fields and olive trees as they rushed past, then without any warning, she was someplace else, it was the Village, she was among people of all races and colors, people she didn’t know, but the voice behind her was very familiar….

{“Elena”,

Leonid called as we walked, tripped and pushed our

way through hurrying throngs on Christopher Street trying to locate his favorite café somewhere on Bleeker Street and get there in one piece. The Village was his favorite place, the café unforgettable only he couldn’t remember exactly where it was. I had tried to remind him that thirty years was an awful long time for Greenwich Village to await for his return. Ithaca, I told him, is an island, stable; it waited for Ulysses, the Village changes daily, buildings, business, fashions, interests. I held on to him and pulled him after me; he had grown a bit feeble and it worried me . “Elena,” he shouted again as if it mattered that he would have my attention. “We have gone through a century of the most incredible, astounding

miracles in science, Arts and the rest…” Now what…I could hardly hear him, let alone understand him as the loud crowds surrounded us. He was being redundant but I couldn’t tell him or answer him because my voice would be lost. We kept pushing and for a few moments he stopped me while, leaning on his cane he allowed space for two colorful young men, hair dyed green and purple to go through, guitars on their backs. I noticed Leonid’s eyes wander questioning, his lips moved but I couldn’t hear him. He either awaits for an answer, I thought, or he’s getting hard of hearing. Or maybe, I am hard of hearing! “Elena”, he was shouting,” you’ve been rambling again, I can’t hear you, what’s your point…” What point, I didn’t even open my mouth, I have nothing to tell him. With him, I thought, there must always be a point some philosophical discussion in the midst of that squeezing, pushing humanity. I noticed an empty table on the sidewalk being sponged and I made for it before someone took it, pulling protesting Leonid behind me. “We can’t keep searching all evening,” I told him and pushed a chair under him. “Maybe the café you’re looking for isn’t here any more; this is as good an any…” “So, what’s your point?” was his answer as he looked at the menu. I had forgotten what we were talking about before we got involved with the crowds. But he was the one who was talking. “You were telling me about the century’s accomplishments…again!” I said and laughed. He remembered and said: “Oh, I see, I was the one, he said resigned.”

“And you were asking me what my point was…what point?” “Well, isn’t it logical to assume that by now, after all those accomplishments, the progress, we should be more compassionate….the to I say now? I nodded but the waited was taking our order and hurried inside into the buzzing café. “Look around you,” I said, “this is ‘progress and civilized life’…I feel sorry for us.” Leonid looked around him at the crowds rather absentmindedly, nodded sadly and said as if for his own ears only: “Old! We are getting old!” “ That’s not what I meant,” I said, “We, people, human beings, have become greedier than ever and in the name of God, country, science, democracy…name it, we have become plunderers.” “You forgot ‘profit’” he mumbled and smiled. “That, too! That, foremost. Let me finish my thoughts, I’ll be brief.” He pushed a piece of the eclair the waiter had brought him into my mouth and I pushed it away gently; he wanted no more discussions. “No, thank you,” I said, “Cholesterol…listen. I ask you: Why do we insist on going on. How? Do we expect the human race to change? Do you anticipate one, just one, day without war somewhere, hunger, injustice, brutality? What’s left for the human race, what remains?” “Consider this,” he said placing his coffee cup on the saucer… “Our century, a sequence of events…” he was rambling again. His usually somber face became suddenly playful, like a child’s, his eyes smiling.

“Finish your coffee, Leonid, your wife is waiting for us, it’s getting late.” He gave me his briefcase with the copies we had made at the New York University’s Library, took his cane and straightened himself; he was tired but he had to find the waiter and pay so I don’t get him first…

“You asked me ‘what remains’, Elena” he said panting as we started for home…. “Hope, only hope, Elena! He limbed his way across the crowded street to wait for a taxi. He didn’t wait for my hand to steady him. He turned to me. “As long as the sun comes up every morning we must hope, we have to go on.” For a while I could see the old Leonid as he straightened his body, looked at me and said: “I’m looking forward to celebrate the end of the century and welcome the new one with the hope that it brings peace.” Leonid left us before the new millenium arrived; he took his unanswered questions with him. His music is still alive to me.}

I heard the brakes and came to; for a few seconds I looked around me confused; who are those people with all that baggage, no guitars, just yelling, languages and accents, and the taxi driver opening my door smiling. “ You took a nice nap,” he said. That was no nap,

I thought; it was a nightmare. I walked to my hotel nearby. The next morning I visited my mother’s grave and took the next ferryboat to Piraeus promising myself that when I come back, another vacation, another year, I’ll go around Kefalonia, my precious island and let the land and the sea, the shore and the forests go through my veins once again. Perhaps that would be my catharsis.

CHAPTER

MEMORIES

Human beings possess the extraordinary gift of forgetfulness; but that, half of the world’s population will end up insane. This wonderful brain of ours is forever collecting pictures, sounds, smells like a sensitive, perfect computer and stores each second, each minute, every occurrence in the depths of its own niche to recall it when and if needed. Some are never seen or heard of; those are the memories in the garbage can; others play some role in some future date vital or unimportant, benign or satanic or totally achromatic. Still, memories, rather insidiously to a large degree, affects the development of the human character of an adult and that’s when the ‘trauma’ shows up if most of what we choose to remember have been detrimental to our growth and maturity. Lucky those who is the process of maturing have buried those for good! How else could I explain the total absence of any memory of my being rescued from a child molester at the age of 6? At the advice of an adult family friend I had put it away in the back of my brain for sixty years

and it accidentally came to me one evening while I was writing, recalling that part of my life…It just gushed out of my scull like a sad fairytale, exactly as it happened, as I had carefully

lodged it in the deepest recesses of my brain. I didn’t take that memory kindly I

couldn’t sleep for a week , I was in shock. I so wished to see my rescuer again but he had died years ago in Greece. I forgot that because he told me to forget, yet, there were many things happening around me at the time and a have a perfect memory of them. It happened at the same time when the king of England had visited our port and I remember the color of his eyes and bathing suit. At that age, 6 or 7 I observed and judged and kept quiet as an adult and except for my friend, a little girl slightly older my brother and my cousins I can’t remember other children around me. My mother told me once that I was never a child but I remember what I wished to keep in my thoughts. Some years later, during World War II When I returned to the island I had more sense I suppose and looked around me in the small village, noticed life as it really was; the ‘then’ children, now teenagers, and the current children were taking their goats to pasture, milking them,; they loaded hay, harvested grapes and picked olives in the Fall. They participated in the life of the village while I stood by as an observer. It was then I realized that in the first years in Greece I was suffering from ‘cultural shock’; it was the language, the immersion into a foreign environment vastly different from what I had known in America.

In those first years

while trying to make believe that I ‘belonged’ I had used a defense mechanism and as I look back at it, I recognize instances when I thought that it was vitally important that I use that defense to protect myself by seeing only what I thought was vitally important to me, my safety and my sanity. I withdrew inside myself while trying to understand many things happening around me, without getting anywhere, like the English king, or the onset of a

Dictatorship, or people starving to death. Somehow I got the impression that everything that happened around me had to do with me and I had to be aware of everything without being able to understand its meaning or if in some way I was either connected with it or responsible or '‘guilty'’. My thought, during the moments I was lost, was “if only my father was here.” Even today I look at the old, faded photographs, black/white and spotted through age and I see me, a little girl in black, unsmiling, lips turned ready for tears and dark, dark eyes sad and full of fear and wonder. In every picture I hold on to my little brother (always in his famous Navy suit) in a protective way like a mother, ready to cry, like me. Little did I know that just a few years later I would need protection as the roles were reversed

and

he realized that his fists, a lethal weapon, can be used on me even without provocation; he had understood early that our society allowed him as a male to behave in a way that I couldn’t and get away with it.

Those childhood memories are appreciated by most of us, especially when we get much older and we realize that we don’t have much chance for too many memories. Not all memories are happy we just try to hold on the happy events of our short lives. I tried to let go of the sad memories of my childhood and youth. I realized early enough that memories are just that and they can’t harm us any more; like the war! People suffered much, much more and we are left with bitterness as we remember not with nostalgia as we would remembering friends, or, let’s say, the first kiss. But someone who experience the horror and witnessed his country blasted to bits by an A-bomb, can he really put that out of his mind?

Some memories I treasure, whatever I enjoyed then and hold on to them before I lose them to senility. I count and try to salvage whatever happiness was in my destiny to experience because they are pitifully few. Now, at lifeâ€™s voyage end, I relax and remember as if Iâ€™ll carry my impressions of other lands when I finally arrive to my last port. I also sleep more hoping that upon awakening I would not be faced with unpleasant surprises. It is known that older people become grouchy, strange; I hope that doesnâ€™t happen to me; as I see it, whatever was negative in my youth is still negative in my old age, except, of course, arteriosclerosis creeping upon me, forgetfulness or insomnia; not that I was a normal sleeper to begin with, neither can I blame age for forgetting things. I was always like that as my children are nice enough to remind me. For that I I blame the heavy wheel that struck my head in early childhood. In the turbulent, provocative and adventurous era my age group has grown I was enriched by a wealth of experiences as well as friends, but also grief.. I had some victories, small ones, those that during adolescence form our future character and attitudes. For instance: since I faced and managed to survive a World War, I consider it a talent to be able to distinguish the military uniforms of the various countries who, as enemies, they honored us by conquering and enslaving Greece. I thought then, and I still do, that they all look alike, enemy or ally, and thus I avoid the thought that all military excursions have some merit. Somehow, offenders or defenders have the same message: death! Death by war! Destructive not only for people but for the earth itself, the soil, the water, the weather, everything that keeps us on earth.. Those thoughts I developed in my early, painful years and they were revelations, that became part of my thinking and character. An abuse, whether personal or national, any force, affects the entire humanity.

On the positive side of my memories: My mother looking at me as if trying to remember a lost thought whether good or bad she couldn’t say, a memory that had escaped but could occasionally be brought back if needed. Her kind green eyes piercing me rather indifferently, she would say: ‘…you’re really your father’s daughter!” As a youngster I couldn’t understand it but I was always happy to hear that and I didn’t bother interpreting it. It stayed in my mind as the kindest, most rewarding compliment and as I grew older and learned to appreciate my mother’s gentleness and the undying love she always carried for my father, and for that I was always gratetful!

P A R T 111

As a little girl I had the impression that the world consisted of children and old people. Parents didn’t count as members of the world! The adult population was added much later adding the third dimension: the adults that somehow sneaked into my world , rather bothersome with their demands: parents, older friends, teachers except for priests whose rose was somehow at a distance from the domestic pattern. When at my teens I began to associate more with the adults, I recognized the fact that these old people had always been there; they had always been old, too! It took me a long time to set my mind straight. My teachers were old, the parents were old, the priests were old, and to the we the younger people, (I hadn’t heard the word ‘generation yet) we owed total respect and submission to their demands! Gradually, I shed the childish concept and faced reality; it was high time, too, some of my friends were getting married when I thought that marriage was for older

people, and then I dawned on me that no one wanted to marry me maybe because I wasn’t a good housekeeper or didn’t know how to cook or I had declared too many times that children were brats and I would not be caught dead with one of them, I mean-God forbidGive birth to one! Yet, I had a few fights with a very good friend, Aliki, a young girl in our extended group, another one who wouldn’t think of marriage for the simple reason that she wanted to marry rich and to have to work and go to school like the rest of us. I thought she was joking; She was pretty and had a lot of beautiful, curly, blond hair and I’m sure many boys were after hair and not after me, I was too plain. But she insisted on a rich husband and a maid, Fifth Avenue shopping and trips abroad! The young men in her crowd wondered where she came from and who put those ideas in her head; she wasn’t paying much attention to her studies. Aliki ’s father lived in Brooklyn and had sent his wife and daughter to Greece where they barely survived the war alone and without means of support. Like us, they were repatriated after the war and no one waiting at the pier. In Brooklyn, they found the apartment ransacked and the father gone; not even the police knew anything about him. Rumors had it that

he was a gambler, lost his fish store and owed money to

the Mafia who finally got him. Mafia was a strange word that we didn’t understand and in the beginning I thought it was another woman because Mafia sounded female. Eventually, Aliki married an American; he was older but rich enough for her because his garage was working well. They lived in Tennessee and when the first baby arrived her mother went to live with them. We heard from her from time to time; everything was going well for Aliki. Then she stopped writing to tell us all the exciting news; we couldn’t get her on the phone but a friend brought us the awful news which he heard on the radio and eventually seeped into the Greek Press. Aliki was young and pretty; her heart demanded

love and she found it in her husband’s young mechanic. Someone told the husband; he surprised them in a Motel in the outskirts of the town and shot them both. Somehow, the husband was justified and went home. The mother took the child and returned to her old apartment in Washington Heights, in New York City. Aliki had paid with her life for her dreams! “Very expensive luxuries” a friend murmured as he sipped his coffee at the Automat. “Love and Money? That’s a fairytale!” “I’m a pragmatist” she had told me once. “ I went without, now I want everything and I’ll get it. You, on the other hand,” she pointed at me with her finger, “are an incurable romantic, an idealist…you and the others.” She spread her arms as if she wished to include the entire college crowd. “Believe me, when need comes in through the door, love flies out the window;” She must have heard or read it somewhere, we all thought, the adage was too bright for her. Looking back after a lifetime, I wonder who was bright and who was dumb. Aliki died trying, how about the rest of us? Some of us kept up after College either by letters, greeting cards or the telephone if within the state. Many times there was bad news: a couple split somewhere ‘temporarily’, someone had died or was divorced or was fighting in the courts for the custody of her or his children. The word ‘divorce’ at the time had an ominous sound and it shocked the Greek Community because the Church had said that no one should split those who were blessed into a marriage, happy or not! For the Americans, we decided, divorce was some solution to a bad situation, an American madness; for the Greeks, it was an anathema!

THE LAST HALF OF THE CENTURY

In the fifties and the sixties, the Greek-American community who resided downtown in Manhattan where the jobs were, especially the fur market, began slowly the move northward until Washington Heights became a thriving Greek-American community complete with Greek Church, Greek school and good business. It was in the seventies and all too sudden, when word reached that community that across the East River in Queens was building up as another thriving community complete with churches, gardens, schools and business. And there began a massive exodus that made the Americans look with wonder at those trucks that crossed the small bridge to reach the island across. Astoria, was the city where Mr. And Mrs. Astor, millionaires, fur business, had their luxurious villa. In the last twenty years of the century Astoria was considered the biggest Greek city outside of Salonica in Greece; it flourished there in peace, amid business, cultural progress, churches and schools away from fear and noise, the big city and crime, though It was a stronghold of both Italian and Greek crime syndicates among the peaceful, hard working immigrants of both countries. Hardly anyone paid attention to the air traffic nearby at LaGuardia Airport which gradually became a maddening affair. At the end of the Century

like all illusions, that, too, had to dissipate because newer and

more affluent communities beckoned further out in the island with

their rich churches and

schools, beautiful restaurants, coffee houses and successful business of all kinds. It was a pattern recognize all over America, a unique sociological aftermath! One community moves, another takes its place with their own language. traditions, culture and diversity.

When one examines the changes in a neighborhood, new business, new language, new religion, one can recognize in the new residents the trend what was, what is, what will be. The new immigrants, China, East Europe, Middle East it is a subject for thought if the trend will ever stop, if the globe is fully inhabited. It isn’t need for space or curiosity that drive the humanity to massive moves. It is fearsome to thing that half the humanity are hungry and thousands of children in Africa die daily because of lack of food. At the end of the affluent 20th century, people are starving to death lacking a mere piece of bread… What logic, what law, what religion can ever cure human greed when of part of the world is practically throwing away the piece of bread which could keep a child alive somewhere? Where is the answer. In my sleepless nights the thought offers no solace!

CHAPTER

Digging Up My Ghosts The killing in Viet Nam was over, and the veterans made it home slowly, some in stretchers, others walking, limping and thousands carted away in boxes; a heavy price to pay for the greed and insanity of the powerful. The evaluation of that madness is left for history to deal with. The governments involved congratulated themselves for the ‘victory’! But there were no parades; the Peace movement was too powerful and it would be disturbing especially for those who lost so much, the children they would never see again; whether we thought ourselves winners or losers, there was plenty of mourning. But the demonstrations eventually petered out. Sixty-seven million dead during World War II, hundreds of thousands American youth killed or maimed in

Viet Nam; they fell for “God and Country”, we were told, “they perished protecting for democracy’s safekeeping. Because already the ‘fear the enemy’ had been working for years and those who never returned, they really had to save us. Eventually, the American forces, our youth, our tanks, arms and planes had to evacuate Viet Nam leaving it a country divided and scorched. England had been doing it for ages and we, too, had done it in Korea. History will account for the outcome as usual with its unique, if dubious, ‘intelligent’ maneuvering. One disaster brings another sooner or later in this tottering globe; the Viet Nam peace was settled; a new war began without the army, the navy and tanks: a war against drugs, a disaster that proliferated in Viet Nam and was slowing swallowing the youth of the land. This is a war that never signed any peace agreement, a skirmish never won, a habit never conquered. We will bleed for a long time from that ongoing battle. Then we got involved in various bloody or bloodless adventures, skirmishes which we Initiated; we, the supermen, ready to save something or other; overnight surprises, disasters, Granada, Panama; this last city we invaded one night with the excuse that if we get rid of its Noriega, its leader, drugs wouldn’t find their way into our country! The tragedy is that our government expected us to swallow this inanity ; how can we, when the new government We installed didn’t stop the drugs coming; in fact, they multiplied and hundreds of Panamanians died in the process of us saving them and we still don’t know Noriega’s whereabouts! We couldn’t part with the century without saving someone else in some part of the globe. Our young people were sent to save another part of this insane world in an adventure ,“Operation Freedom”, where we tested our newest and very effective, sophisticated means of extermination showing the world our ‘might’! It was named “the Gulf War” in the year of our Lord 1991. I wondered at the time, how come we never heard of a war against starvation, let’s say in Africa, something named “Operation Bread”! It’s rally too simple to accept that what is

going on in the world is merely a strife between good and evil; our world could have been a true Eden if the ‘good’ and not the evil prevailed. How can we convince the whole world that ‘that’s the way the world is’. At age five I had more sense than believing that. I remember trying to convince my father to change the words of a song he was singing to me remembering his fighting days in World War I when he insisted on saying : “ Over There, Over There” twice and I thought he should say first ‘over here’ since we re here ‘here’ and then say ‘over there’! I couldn’t make him understand my point (all for the best!) ( It was a blessing that at the time I wasn’t aware of the existence of lofty historical monuments, the Pyramids, the Coloseum in Rome, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Parthenon and other ancient sites. Like all children lacking knowledge of war and its games, I would get paranoid worrying about those, too; it was enough worrying about other ‘everyday’ things and problems those that I could see and touch, the ones which were ‘real’!

Ghosts Life is going on. Friends come and go, the sun rises and sets, seasons change, natural disasters destroy and man builds (or bomb at will) oceans rage and floods and storms take millions of lives alongside the eternal disaster that or hunger. My children are gone to continue the process of life and here I am still digging up memories those half erased, distorted and always resurrected ghosts as if I can stand apart from historical significance. At times, I want to believe that I have tried to do what I thought was necessary in my lifetime and that I wasn’t harmful. The old woman in the mirror scares me, she makes me ask the painful question, like did I really expect to make a dent with the protests and the demonstrations, the signature collecting, the leaflets and struggles? I wish I could ask this woman in the mirror if she really was so naïve as to expect to see the new millennium with Peace standing on our doorstep holding a placat “Love for Everyone”! A day dawning in our nation without drugs, violence,

warring and a homeless, hopeless humanity around the world, while the frenetic dash for profits is doing very well! How many thousands of miles have I walked, ridden, flown? I have come to the conclusion that we walk, drive, fly, run from the moment we are conscious that we exist, in order to escape death. Luckily, we choose to overlook the fact that life is a one-way road leading to our demise; some people know or, somehow, they feel their end and, whether they accept it or not, they seem ready to go! This amazes me. I, too, am tired, disappointed; I feel cheated and I still can’t figure out where those years of my life went…they flew fast, almost past me so that I get the impression that I wasted most of them yet, I can’t say that I am ready to go. I can joke about it like saying “…what will happen to the world if I’m not here to oversee it.” As if the world doesn’t have enough egomaniacs. All kidding aside, there is more pressure than that, I carry far too much baggage from that past of mine. My heart is heavy, my soul saturated and I need to shed all that, to make a clean break, to free myself and leave this world with a clean slate; only then I may (or may not!) decide that the time has come and I’m ready. This is my reasoning; death may be using a different calendar than mine and I will not rush his decision or try to free myself from whatever it is that keeps me nailed here, because ”it ain’t over until it’s over” as they say.

When I was twenty

I thought that the 20th century would never make it to a close even

galloping fast at a dizzying speed; it has been hard for me trying either to stay alive or catch up with the present-let alone with tomorrow- and to connect it with the past. Even if I lived two lives I could not achieve all my utopian endeavors; because whenever I thought I had conquered the ‘time’ distance something serious will enter my life to push me back and by the time I understand and/or accept that ‘something’, another awakening or madness, technological, ecological,. Sociopolitical, proves me wrong. The world may forget Heraklitos, Demokritos, Archimides, Aristotle and can vaguely bring to mind Da Vinci, Galileo, Michaelangelo and the

more recent Morse, Pasteur, Curie;’ technology has won over sentimentalism; the atomic power, Einstein, Gates and computers to name a few, at least those that I know but don’t fully understand. I wonder if I am unwilling to accept progress, or stupid compared to some electronic geniouses. My four-grade students could work miracles with the computers. Humanity, or the trend of our everyday lives, or competition, maybe science in general have almost erased the last shreds of romance in our lives. I’m afraid that a generation from now young people would make love through www.com or whatever voiceless, ageless, faceless person strikes their fancy. And to think that I shiver when I hear the cold voice on the phone ”press this button if you want…” and then, “press that button if…” you can spend hours pressing buttons until another mechanized voice sends me to another button or I begin from number one again to hear the same messages repeated. This is the ‘generation gap’, not the one we were told we had when we were young; because we now are at the threshold of the 21st century and once this generation crosses centuries that unsurpassable mountain, they won’t turn their heads to look back, they are gone because even if they did, the ‘mountain’ hides us; yet, it protects us from ‘landslides’ and ice-slides and mud-slides which would probably take us to the incomprehensible world of next century or even an alien tomorrow!

CHAPTER

Here We Go Again! I had missed Vivian’s cheery voice on the phone and when it rang this chilly morning so early, I felt that she had guessed my thoughts. In the beginning I thought I detected a humorous trend and I really could use some cheery thoughts!; she was telling me about the snowfall and I took it

that it had snowed in Baltimore and she loved it because she loves snow. I should have known better! It wasn’t the Baltimore snow she was talking about, it was Cosovo snow and that city is thousands of miles away, and we know that Spring comes late in the Baltic countries, come to think of it, it’s overdue here, too...Vivian knew that I would be watching the news, she just wanted to unload her anguish as if mine wasn’t enough! “…is this world ever to find a way to live in peace?” Her voice was teary. “Why?” My voice sounded heavily sarcastic even to my own ears, just one word, “why”, one lousy question for which I expected no sane answer. “Think of what will happen to our economy if there are no conflicts in the world…if we can’t run to ‘save’ another democracy!” The sarcasm of my comment tired me. “Vivian, think of what will happen without our humanitarian efforts.” I guess I shocked her…Oh, God, I thought, I don’t want to discuss it and Vivian wanted to know what we are going to do in New York about the United Nations, demonstrations, Peace committees, and, frankly, I didn’t have enough brain power to even think about it at the moment. “It sounds like Viet Nam all over,” Vivian said sadly, perhaps shocked because I didn’t give her any hope of protests or some action. She began to complain which is something I can’t take today, so I slammed the phone as if the war in Cosovo was all her fault. Her call left me feeling old and spiritless, as if the whole thing was my doing. And I am afraid for my children, and hers, too, they are old enough and gone their ways and I’m beginning to worry about their future. I looked around me; the apartment looked strange, unfamiliar with the sunlight filtering through the drapes. I had to get out; I got dressed and left, I decided to go somewhere quiet and have breakfast where no news flash could reach me. Somehow, even the impersonal, commercial street was friendless. Rushing taxis, buses and mothers taking their children to school, their clothing bearing the ethnic peculiarity of their origin, characteristic of the ethnic diversity of our little town. As I sipped my coffee reading the paper I thought how far we are from Cosovo and bombs, and the madness of the military world. The children taken to school nearby could never think that at that moment some children were torn to pieces on the way to school in a far away

land. And here I am drinking coffee, the trains rattles downtown beating the morning traffic, and planes fly overhead minutes away from landing at the LaGuardia Airport. They were noisy but peaceful, splitting time in minute intervals. How I wish that every aircraft in the sky, any country’s sky, would carry a cargo of human beings going somewhere and baggage; that no bombs would ever be dropped on this earth. Sadly, I realized that this thought has been the theme of my life: praying for the eternal destruction of all instruments of war, and the restoration of peaceful existence. By the time I got home the Avenue was empty of the morning madness of taxis, buses, and schoolbuses, and I felt that it was a little bit too quiet but the sun was shining and the planes flying and the shops were open and waiting for customers. A war is a war and it shouldn’t interfere with business; people have to eat and get dressed and go to the laundermat because Cosovo was too far away to stop life all over the world. With those stupid thoughts I got home.

Elena looked at the mute phone and wondered if it rang while she was out; she had slammed it with real venom as if it was the phone, the messenger, at fault. She was still angry but more frustrated because of her own reaction; thinking more rationally now, she realized that her almost violent gesture was not only unnecessary, but unproductive, too. Who was she trying to punish, Vivian, herself, the anonymous armies trying to destroy a country in the name of peace? She went to the T. V. but changed her mind; she had heard enough, she concluded sitting on the sofa holding her aching head and waiting, hoping for Vivian to call even though she knew that she had offended her friend and perhaps she won’t talk to her again. Wars, after all, weren’t her doing, she, too, was upset, she needed a friendly voice; she needed to release her frustration and share her anguish. Elena knew as well as Vivian what was going on; she was l aware of what the ‘powers that be’ were capable of doing without warning to make their point more succinct; it was that Vivian

had taken her aback at her weakest moment. The “bellicose” forces, Vivian had said! Vivian, the poet who would use her fancy mode of parlance to describe things even under duress. But the Poet’s voice brimming with bitter sarcasm, was like opening up an old would that refused to heal. Frustrated and sad, she gave up and went to the phone. Vivian expected her call, she remembered her friend’s previous call just a couple of days before. “Cosovo?” Elena was taken by surprise; “what is that?” Her mind raced frantically scanning continents, oceans, oh, yes, God, not there! “You mean that little dot in Yugoslavia?” She asked. “Serbia, Elena, Serbia! Get in today’s reality/” “Excuse me; it’s the school’s fault, in my time the country was called something else…and we did what?…I see…we are protecting them with missiles. How else can we protect them Vivian? Unless we drop the Bomb and they’ll be protected in two seconds for ever…Vivian, wake up Vivian…” Vivian didn’t answer she could hear Elena’s sobs, tears were running down her cheeks, too. “Forgive me for being a pragmatist but history has taught us plenty. We protect a country to paralyze it into “thankful” submission; we try our newest weapons, some food and leave the country in aphasia, and, unfortunately, not so grateful. What follows usually is either a dictatorship full of gratitude for our sacrifices, or a country divided, usually into two different political systems where soon enough a civil war will erupt. Remember the Gulf War? Vivian, are you there?” “Yes, I’m listening, same story all over again…frankly I’m tired…” “Remember reading about World War I, gas masks, World War II, A-Bomb…Vivian… Vivian…hallo, oh, I lost her…” Now she remembered that it was she, not Vivian who had slammed the phone because her mind was flooded with Korea, Viet Nam, Panama, the Gulf, the South American countries. Now Vivian, probably overwhelmed, got even. She had slammed the phone! She lied

down trying to get some sleep though it was still morning and sunlight filled the room. She closed her eyes.

I must talk to her, apologize, Elena thought later but didn’t move. When I begin to talk I don’t shut up to let someone else speak, too. It’s being alone too much, she tried to justify her rancor. Ever since she left the classroom, the world, filled up to then with youngsters, became a void; and she had thought of doing so many things in her retirement...Here we go again… Hitler ‘protected’ us in the 40’s, we ‘protected Korea, Viet—Nam, Kwait in the Gulf War and ten years later and one million children dead due to lack of food and medicines we are still blockading the country so the kids don’t get proper medical care, but Sadat is doing fine in spite of the missiles we blast them with occasionally just to keep them on their toes and to remind them that we are still ‘protecting’ them…Tired of her pessimism she sighed and looked at the phone as if by looking at it Vivian would get a mental message and call her. It’s funny, she thought with a wry smile, it seems that our war products don’t kill and don’t maim, they just ‘warn’ and scare those bad leaders across the world, those whom we, apologetically, have named ‘third world’ making one think and question who and when has separated this globe in thirds…It took years for the rest of the world to accept –not to ‘discover’ as politely regarded-that out various arms and means of destruction had killed and irrevocably maimed not only the so-called enemy, but our young men as well. The logic was that we cannot achieve global leadership and expected to bring peace and democracy without sacrifices; after all, we are the planet’s hope for salvation. Her head was throbbing. Except for the hum of the refrigerator, she was surrounded by silence in a vacuum. The television stared at her with dark humor, she thought, and intention; I need a few blank minutes in utopia, she thought, an illusion of peace…the thought jolted her brain, she wanted to accept that the new adventure was simply an exaggerated story, another one of those little adventures where many people died and more suffered; a story to be called in time the ‘Cosovo’ adventure’ ! After all, we read the papers….there is one of those in some part

of the world almost every day, little wars popping up[ for almost no reason at all…Oh, but there is a reason; it was what her wise mother used to say, that the big fish eats the smaller one! We used to think of wars as major conflicts, international wars or local, she thought. But a war is a war because it’s not only a front when enemies face each other; it’s causes, brutalities, starvation, children getting slaughtered, the civilization taking steps backwards… World War I, World War II, she thought…between those two we had peace we were told. When? Where? She took a deep breath and looked at the phone again; the instrument looked back at her in its insensitive neutrality. I’ve lived too long, she thought lying on the sofa with time empty surrounding her and even her stomach in neutral position as if that, too, abandoned her. I’m tired of the constant conflict. How come we, the world doesn’t get up one morning and shout “We don’t want any more!” We continue to lea learn history and geography in school thinking brave, glamorous thoughts; no one tells us that those subjects were not written in ink but in blood! Et, we go through the books, watch our grades as if killing is a sport like all sports something going to a soccer game a find a chance to kill someone especially if the player or the referee did something we didn’t approve… With some much beauty around us how can we think of bloody fields, ruins and poisoned air and water, Elena wondered as she drifted off to sleep.

The shrill siren of an ambulance startled her awake. She took a deep breath and waited for silence. Soon, the echoes were swallowed by the distance. She wondered if she will ever get over the momentary agitation that ambulances’s and fire trucks’ sirens brought to her making her heart beat faster until she got control of her thoughts and feelings. She couldn’t help noticing that as she got older, instead of forgetting, she noise of the sirens affected her more to the point that she expected to hear blasts after a siren ‘s echo was too far to be heard. Forget it, she commanded her brain, give it a rest, are you going to follow me to the grave? She shook

Herself back to sanity, drew her body up and tucked her legs underneath her. Waiting for Vivian’s call, she realized that at the moment she needed the solace of a nurturing hug; she was missing the comfort of her mother’s arms in the days of her childhood’s fears; she was alone, she could die and no one would know for days, she reflected with sadness. Her children called every day because they knew that she was the one who wanted to live alone; she accepted that. I don’t mind being alone, she told them; even in a crowd I was alone. They knew! But, she thought, when I am with people I don’t mind feeling alone; it’s this kind of loneliness that affects me, when there is no one around physically. That accentuates my loneliness. When I lock the door for the night I feel sad, a little scared, the house becomes a lonely cell, empty of human presence. Her thoughts, highly irregular for her, shocked her, they made her realize that she was old and she didn’t need just the mirror to tell her. I have been fooling myself that I just was a person who needs to have quiet around her even among loud crowds. Elena never recognized the truth that the ‘crowds’ had to be impersonal, in other words, mute, so that she can be invigorated and inspired. And that was the reason that she was alone now that all her friends were scattered here and there and she didn’t keep up except for Vivian. What do I really need, she asked herself; another dictatorship so that we can start all over again? She smiled at her stupid thoughts; she hated to admit it, but she needed her children, she missed being close to them, listening to their problems, solving them! That’s it! A revelation! She hated herself that moment because she realized the truth. She wanted them close to her to bolster her ego. And love? She asked herself; she knew the answer, it was love that inspired many silly thoughts in her troubled mind. She hid her head under the pillow once again thinking that, the coming holidays intensified her feelings of being left alone in the world and the silence that surrounded her this evening. She shrank until she thought she had become a tiny homeless crab that needed an empty shell to crawl into until the worst is over and no echo from the past could reach her. With her head under the pillow, she remembered herself an insignificant something trying to hide

from the horror of sirens and airplanes, screams and anti-aircraft so the enemy’s bombs wouldn’t find her. Motionless, her eyes filled her brain, suddenly alerted, she remembered that summer night of 1944, an August night! The blasts, the ruins, the American bombs missing the German boats in the harbor, their target, just yards away from her home, missing everyone of them. They didn’t miss ou r homes, she thought, Ah, the errors the American pilots were making then…Errors she had not seen in the post war heroic, victorious Hollywood films . At the time she had laughed; did the people believe that war is just excitement and only the enemy really suffers? Her youthful anger made her laugh now almost 60 years later. But, she thought sadly, we are now repeating the show: death from the sky! Children crouching in caves, ruins and shelters hiding from more advanced weapons and shells now . Wouldn’t it be something , she thought, if all the small skirmishes and wars are just practice to train our forces to find their target? She took a long breath, called herself totally insane and thought that what she needed was either a cold shower or someone to smack her. She tried to calm herself, to see where she was; the war is away from here, she thought, as if she was facing a child, I must pretend that my memories are just a nightmare . She remembered her mother’s ‘philosophy’: there are no winners in a war, any war; losers and winners are both victims, ” she had said during the Viet-Nam adventure shaking her blond head sadly. Hearing that from her mother, an anti-war activist, anyway, itt had a profound effect in Elena, though many had expressed the thought through the ages. Her mother had said the same thing ever since Elena listened to her at 12, but Elena was affected by her history books and had never read that in those pages.

CHAPTER

Christmas – 2000 Many years ago I used to keep a diary under dire circumstances so I can remember and tell my children how I grew up and how children fared in such emergencies. Today I decided to begin a new diary instead of tiring my brain thin king, always thinking sad thoughts. Let them read it when I’m gone; what will they think, will they laugh, cry, keep the diary to tell their own children or burn it in the fire place on a cold evening as they do with the Sunday Times when they are through ( a bad habit!) Well, back to today, Christmas morning; everything is still; I’m the only one breathing in this empty calmness. It’s still dark outside but it’s a gentle grayness, not threatening , smooth, almost opaque. Some dark clouds scudding low over the city and the New York skyline sharp, geometrical buildings like so many knives thrust upward by a strong wind. The Hudson has the angry hue of an abused river following the little white waves in their travel. A few days ago it was the ice chunks, clear across, that had immobilized its flow, but now, free of ice, the River followed the tide brought in by southern winds north.. Out on the terrace I shivered in the sharp chill but I stood there trying to guess, rather than see in the haze the Atlantic Ocean whose presence I could smell, I thought, as I did so many years ago when a military boat brought me back with other Greek-Americans; I could still smell its moist , salty presence not far from here, but still hidden behind the monstrous buildings and spires. Down below, under our building the Cliffs lay desolate in their drab winter loneliness dripping the tears of the night rain. The rain has stopped and the pink horizon brings the message of the new day dawning. Christmas! Even the grayness of the monstrous buildings can’t stab me

this morning. These granite monsters never seemed so real, with substance as they do this Christmas morning; it’s something like a fairytale as if a giant has planted countless obstinate feet between the East and Hudson Rivers hugging the city, not allowing the strong winds to make their massive existence a little softer. Today I would like to think that those monsters are holding the clouds; maybe the clouds are resting on them; they are, after all, what the parting millennium is about: a sophisticated mass of stones, rocks, cement, soot and T. V. antennas and dishes and I, l.ike the wind,, drifting purposeless in my anonymity. Last night everything was different; I stood here, on the same spot protected from rain and wind and watched the rain in the darkness and the lights of the cars across the River. Suddenly I heard music but I couldn’t understand where it came from: I looked at the other balconies, windows on other floors, but the sweet sounds was in the air, everywhere, like a fluid gesture from the blinking lights, the colorful Xmas lights on windows and steeples and the light on the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps, I thought, there was a party in the building and I shared their happiness even momentarily, never to be grasped again. Perhaps it was only an illusion due to my alones. There are times like those few minutes when I’m in awe as I think the world evolves too fast and I can’t catch up with it; I listen to music that tells me very little but it’s ‘today’s efforts’ and I’m sure appreciated by most of the world because it follows us regardless of our murderous streak; I stop to listen and I’m thankful; for the elusive sounds. I think of the Museums, and I have been to many both here and in Europe since I retired, I read a lot that I missed when I was too busy and I realize that I fill my days and my thoughts trying to forget the past, like last night on the balcony shivering in the cold thinking all kinds of nonsense so I could forget those Christmas evenings I lived in a shelter or hiding under my blanket so I don’t hear the bombs and shells, shivering in fear and hungry even for a piece of bread! Christmasses of oppression, fear, hunger! I do try to bury those negative memories, to push them back into their graves where they belong; I nave tried to remember just happy holidays with my family and later with my children the lights, the presents, the children’s shrieks, songs, music…But other pictures interfere: today’s

world! Still a conflict somewhere, terror, guns, “…bombs bursting in the air…” The world is changing but it’s round and everything that goes round and round, returns. It’s a changing world but it stays the same and, God, I’m tired, I don’t want to hear any more!