The Daughter (3 page)

Mother never ever used make-up. Before that afternoon not once. And never since. Only one other time they smeared
lampblack
all over her face when they publicly humiliated her right after Liberation it was. Last year at the funeral, as they were lowering her into the ground. I dropped my lipstick into her casket beside her. Just to do it my way, for once.

Mlle Salome was the impresario’s sister-in-law, I think I mentioned. ‘Artistes’ we called them, but they were fine people all the same. We are the Tiritomba family, Mlle Salome liked to declare with a simper. She had a sister, Adrianna, widow of a certain Karakapitsalas. An actor, he was, her late husband, and together the two of them toured the provinces with their troupe. What a life! He was the one who discovered my, shall we say, theatrical talents. Come October 28th, the day the war 
started, they just happened to be performing in Rampartville. The impresario enlisted then and there. But no sooner did he get to the front than he bit the dust: stray bullet. That’s what they told Adrianna to console her. But the truth is a mule kicked him in the head and he died on the spot. The troupe broke up. Some troupe! I mean, they were mostly relatives. Whenever one of their leading ladies would dump them in the middle of the tour to marry some guy in some small town or to work in some whorehouse along the way, which was pretty often, they had to fill in the role themselves: mostly it was Mlle Salome who took over the role, besides, she could play the mandolin. One time, in Arta I think it was, and Adrianna was still weak from childbirth. Anyway, there she was, playing the role of Tosca. But she was still nursing the kid so they had to change the title to
Tosca, indomitable mother
.

So I nip over to Miss Salome’s place and she’s delighted to lend me the lipstick. Fortunately it was wintertime and she had it in the house. In summertime she kept it in the ice box at the coffee house down the street to keep it from melting. Mlle Salome taught me the trick, bless her heart. When I became an actress in a road company I’d butter up the coffee-house owner in this village or that so he’d look after my cosmetics: by then they had fridges, not ice boxes. Even today I always keep my
lipstick
in the fridge.

Anyway, I get the lipstick from Mlle Salome and take it to Mother. By now I’m really curious. She puts on some lipstick, the short hair really did wonders for her but she didn’t realize it. Then she puts on her coat. Back soon, she says, be patient. And sure enough, she came right back with a determined look in her eye. Listen to me, she says, there’ll be a gentleman
coming
any minute now. You go out and play in the yard, and in about a half hour I’ll call you. If it rains wait in the outhouse or the church. And she filled the washbasin with water and got out a clean towel. 

We went outside and picked some buds from Mrs Kanello’s rose bushes, peeled off the outer leaves and ate them thinking how it wouldn’t be long before summertime and we could eat the buds from the grapevine, they’re really delicious: rosebuds are too sweet. And we hid behind the garden wall, because the man we saw going into our house was not some Greek
gentleman
it was Alfio the Italian from the Carabineria. Mlle Salome was hanging out laundry on her balcony. God help us, she says. Look at this Adrianna, come quick! Adrianna appears and Mlle Salome shouts at us, Hey kids, they’re searching your house, but her sister says, Shut up Salome, don’t go judging people, and shoves her back into the house.

We were getting impatient and so hungry even the rosebuds didn’t help, so we went into the church. Not long after that we saw Alfio go by, then Mother called us Come on in kids, and we went back to the house.

Mother slides the washbasin full of rinsing water under her bed and tells me to set the table. And she puts out bread –
paniota
it was – and margarine and a big can of squid. We said grace and ate so much there were still crumbs left over. Then Sotiris gets up from the table, throws down his napkin and says to Ma, You’re a whore. Ma didn’t say a word but I stood up, I was ready to scratch his eyes out. I smacked him, then he opened the door and walked out. Twenty-eight years later I ran in to him in Piraeus. He didn’t say a word. Never saw him since. Mother never saw him again; never even tried.

Anyway, I cleaned off the table that night and we slept as sweet as can be, with full stomachs, and you know something? From then on Fanis and I slept better, just the two of us, instead of three in the same bed. Before we went to sleep I say, Ma you want me to empty the water? No, she says, I’ll look after it. And she thanked me. From that evening on I always spoke to her in the polite form, until the day she died. And today, when I visit her on All Souls’ Day, I speak to her in the polite form. 

Before bedtime I returned the lipstick to Mlle Salome, washed the dishes and shook out the tablecloth. But the crumbs I kept, and scattered them underneath the bed where my pullet was buried. That night I got up on the sly and helped myself to more bread and margarine.

From that day on we were never hungry again. Signor Alfio started feeling more at home, and Ma didn’t have to put us out before he came any more. When he came visiting right after sundown twice a week he brought us a little of everything: olive oil – not much, mind you – and sugar included: he liked a cup of coffee afterwards. He would come in and wish us all a good evening and we would greet him politely, then I’d say to Fanis, Let’s go outside and play and out we went. One day we had to play in the rain because the church was locked up tight. Mrs Kanello was just coming home – she had an umbrella – and she says to us, What are you poor kiddies doing outside in the rain? you’ll catch your death. Shame, you bring shame on our
neighbourhood
, shouts Aphrodite’s mother from across the street. What did she ever do anyway besides crocheting lace for her precious Aphrodite’s dowry? Before the war all she ever did was sit there on the stoop and crochet by the light of the street lamp just to save on electricity. Now was the Occupation and the blackout and she’s still at it: you can’t teach an old dog new tricks I say. Where was I? So Mrs Kanello goes up to our front door and calls out, Asimina, your kids are safe at my place. Then she turns to us and says, Come on my little lambs, and we
huddle
under the umbrella and she takes us to her place, a
two-storey
house it was. She gives us sage tea to drink, with dried figs for sweetening. We drink the tea then we eat the figs. All the while Mrs Kanello is looking out the window: finally she says. You can go home now, off you go.

One day Mrs Kanello comes up to me in the street and says Child, from now on you show your Ma more respect; take no notice of the neighbours. 

Mrs Kanello was in the Resistance and everybody knew it. But even if she was, she still got on just fine with our family, always had a cheery good morning for us kids. She was a
gorgeous
women with curly hair like the goddesses from the museum at Olympia where they took us on a school trip before the war. Only she wore pins in her hair, big thick hairpins made of bone, and I don’t remember seeing any goddesses with
hairpins
, I noticed them because my mother’s were made of metal, more like wire.

Mrs Kanello was tall and built like a man, and when she went by you could feel the earth shake. She worked as a telephone operator at the Three Ts, which is what we called the phone company back then. And today, even though she’s over seventy, she walks like an amazon, now there was a woman for you, even though she doesn’t have any of my, shall we say, femininity. Before the war, in the evenings, she and her sister used to sit on the front stop and croon ‘Those eyes of yours’, or maybe ‘Don’t shed your tears, it was just a wild fling …’ Every evening they’d sing but they never seemed to get any better: still, they were honest girls, even if they couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. But when the Occupation started, the singing stopped. Her sister disappeared. Went off to the mountains to be with her fiancé people said.

Nowadays Mrs Kanello can sing to her heart’s content. Mind you, I don’t approve of her songs politics-wise, I mean to say. She’s still living there in Rampartville, but her children are in Athens. So when she comes to pay them a visit, she drops by to see me too. There I’ll be, in the kitchen brewing coffee and I overhear her singing to herself, just as off-key as ever, but I don’t mention it because she’s kind of sensitive, always thought she was some big deal as a singer. Her kids grew up just fine though; why she’s even got a married daughter living in Europe, but she never took on airs, socially speaking. A good-looking woman, widowed, with a pension, which she got strictly on her 
own; one look at her from behind and you’d swear she was my age, that’s what I say to make her feel good. Got the idea from this psychiatrist after the time I had a fit on stage; since then it’s tough to find work with a reputable company. Anyway, my director takes me to this psychiatrist, you can bet your life it’s on my health insurance card. Don’t you worry, dear, the doctor says, go on a pension and take a long rest. And say nice things about people. Saying nice things about people is the best
medicine
. You artists are always saying nasty things about people, especially you actors, that’s why you’re all so unhappy.

After that it takes more than a little fit or two to faze me. I don’t even stick my head out the window any more, just close it and wait, what’s there to worry about? It’s just a fit, it’ll soon be over and done with; five or six hours and it’ll be finished. Why, I even bite into a hand towel so nobody can hear me, learned that trick at the movies. That’s why I say nice things about Mrs Kanello’s waistline and her appearance too, and besides she’s a fine lady, with a fine pension.

She married before the war, fine looking man, and a hard worker too. They had four children, one after the other, but come the Occupation there she was, stuck with the little tykes and a husband who couldn’t work any more. The way I hear it, he opened the window one night around midnight and, all of a sudden, he was bewitched, wham, right in the eyes, may even have been the evil eye; people are always jealous of good looks and happiness. Anyway, from then on the poor man suffered some kind of phobia, never left the house again; imagine, barely thirty years old. A fine, handsome man, for sure. He helped out with the housework, looked after the kids while his wife was working at the TTT, even learned how to repair shoes; he fixed ours for free! Only you didn’t dare ask him to stick his nose
outside
. He got as far as the balcony maybe twice, after Liberation. Finally, thirty-four years later he left the house with honour and dignity, his own kids carrying him in an open casket. They held 
the funeral at the town cathedral – Mrs Kanello spared no expense. She used to work double shifts at the TTT, then line up for the public soup kitchen, bring home the boiled wheat in her lunch bucket, feed the kids, do the laundry and next
morning
off she’d go to work at seven o’clock sharp.

On Sundays, she and Mlle Salome used to scour the
countryside
for food to steal. Aphrodite tagged along too, coughing: that was while she could still get around. Pieces of fruit from garden fences, or vegetables from garden plots, you name it, they grabbed whatever they could lay their hands on. It was a scary business. Let me tell you; the peasants had illegal guns and they’d start shooting at the drop of a hat, before you even set foot on their land. Anyway, one time they came across a grazing cow. Hey, there’s one they missed, says Mrs Kanello and she lies down right smack under the cow’s udder and milks it into her mouth, then she gets up and holds the cow while Mlle Salome and Aphrodite take their turn at the tit. After that
incident
she always carried this little bottle around with her, but she never ran into a stray cow again.

One thing we never could figure out was how come they were always toting bags or baskets full of vegetables on those country outings of theirs. Later we found out the baskets were filled with hand grenades. They were really secret messengers all along – Mrs Kanello was the leader – and the grenades were for the partisans. Who would ever suspect a couple of half-starved women? And Aphrodite was only seventeen at the time. Mlle Salome even brought along her mandolin, they made like they were going for an outing in the country, downright batty they looked. The grenades they handed over to Thanassis, a retarded kid about my age, the schoolmaster’s son from a village name of Vounaxos.

Half the TTT was occupied by the Italians. In the meantime, Mrs Kanello managed to pick up a few words of Italian, learned it from a Teach Yourself book – what a gal! – the better to
eavesdrop
 
on the Occupying Powers. She wrote everything down on scraps of paper she dropped off at the public urinals. That was another scandal, a woman hanging around in the men’s urinals, a lot of people were whispering about immoral behaviour. In fact one old fellow gets all confused one day and asks her, What are you doing here, you virago? But she fires right back at him, Come on, old man, button up, you ain’t got much to show there.

All that I found out later; I heard they even gave her a medal, when the Republic came in. But still, people say that on account of her lousy Italian she passed on mistaken information and they blew up the wrong bridge, but they were probably saying that out of jealousy; people were jealous of her because she was a linguist. Anyway, back then, every so often some peasant or another would come by the TTT during work hours and drop off a basket of potatoes or mustard greens. From your
Godmother
he’d say. The rumour was that Mrs Kanello had a lover. Only my mother didn’t believe it and took her side (Signor Alfio was visiting her regularly back then). Mrs Kanello a lover? Can’t be: she’s an honest woman. Finally Mrs Kanello finds out and says to Ma, Shut up Asimina and let ’em talk. I sure as hell don’t want ’em thinking I’m doing anything else. Because she was one patriotic lady, let me tell you. The baskets were crammed full of grenades, bullets and all kinds of ammunition hiding there under the potatoes. And she’d go strutting by – can you imagine, she had to be crazy! – in front of the Carabineria just as proud as you please carrying those food baskets of hers; after all, it was right on the way to her house. Had to rest every so often, too; those baskets weighed a ton. The Italians at the Carabineria knew her; half of them worked with her at the TTT in fact. So one fine day, one of them comes up to her when she sets down the basket right next to the sentry post in order to catch her breath and the sentry says, Signora, let me give you a hand. She was pregnant again, by the way. That’s very nice of you, she says, and together the two of them lug the basketful of 
ammunition all the way to her door. Mangiare, eh? says the
Italian
(that’s how they say ‘eat’). What am I supposed to do with four and a half bambini to feed? she says. Talk about a dingbat!