When I announced that I had been accepted into the faculty of law, Mother left the food on the fire and the wash in the washtub and ran to kiss me. Come here, child, let me kiss you, is what she said. It was a formal kiss, first on my forehead, then on my cheeks, accompanied by a stream of wishes and tears, memories and aspirations. Manolis proudly told her about my scholarship, and our mother said, Oh my, I have to sit down, and collapsed into a chair. With the money from my scholarship she bought Evgnosia a new overcoat, and we decided to make a few repairs to the house that we’d been putting off. We did that as a matter of course: in our house everything was common property, and we certainly weren’t going to make an exception for money.
I wore Evgnosia’s hand-me-downs all through my university days, I never had new clothes. That was fair, if you ask me. They’d taken care of me for years, and now it was my turn to give back. They’d spoiled me since I was a girl. I was twenty, and Mother still boiled an egg for me each day so I’d have energy to study. She would chase me down in the yard and make me eat it.
My last class of the day ended at eight. By eight-thirty I had to be home. I would walk with a fellow classmate named Crete — what a ridiculous name, I can’t imagine how any mother would let her child be baptized Crete. At any rate, her family had money, so Crete could have taken the tram home if she’d wanted, she didn’t have to walk. The first time I ever saw real English pounds was at her house, tossed on top of the piano.
None of my classmates liked her, but Kyriakos, first in our class, was particularly hostile.
— Violeta, he would ask, why do you go around with her? She’s at university just for fun, to have something to talk to her girlfriends about between dances. She and her kind will be ordering you around soon enough. We’re studying so we can work for them one day. Open your eyes.
I had no interest in comparing myself to Crete. My mother had taught me never to compare myself to anyone. My mother, the poor, Pontic, refugee widow, who knew how to dress even if she didn’t have money for new clothes, who thought her children were better than anyone else in the world. She passed that on to us, too, with her praise and her chiding. It was a deeply rooted belief, something that went without saying. She didn’t shout it from the rooftops. She kept both feet on the ground and prevailed in difficult situations. When bad times brought other people to their knees, we dug in our heels and clenched our teeth. We went as far as we could, to the edge of the cliff.
My mother. Harsh and forgiving at the same time. She’d be the first to point out our weaknesses, but she turned into a wild dog if anyone else dared hint at some flaw in her children. There was no job she couldn’t do, no burden she couldn’t bear, no silence she wouldn’t impose if circumstances called for it. She blew wind into our sails. She never touched our souls with dirty hands. She gloried in us from afar and prayed for the best. She believed we could take the moon down from the sky if we wanted. She didn’t care if no one else agreed.
So Kyriakos could say what he liked about us ending up part of the suit-wearing proletariat. Degree or no degree, he would say, we’re all the same, the same millstone grinds us all down. Kyriakos could say plenty more along those lines, particularly when he got riled up. He mocked Crete, called her a marquise, sneered at her coiffed hair, at the way she pronounced legal phrases, with a calm distaste, as if they felt dirty in her mouth. Kyriakos was smarter than any of us. The law professors were always talking about the country kid who had come down from his village to study in the city and was at his books night and day.
The professors were charmed by his passion, but even more by the precision of his language, by his sound judgment and fine rhetoric. The students who came in second and third, right behind him, claimed that his brilliant wordplay in the lecture hall only showed that he was a godless sophist. His teachers, who valued such rhetorical sleights-of-hand, thought it demonstrated his admirably wide base of knowledge.
Kyriakos did well in school, and after graduating, too. Soon enough he had become one of Crete’s kind, full of irony and witticisms. He bought an apartment in town for his parents and brought them down from the village. His mother stopped wearing her headscarf and robe. She blessed the marriage of her only son to Crete’s cousin Sofoula, a girl with a considerable dowry and ambitions for a wedding in the Metropolitan Church.
The day I went to find him, the newspapers were on the war path, and the whole city hummed with news of the murder. I made an appointment through the secretary at his office, a young woman who sat anxiously typing carbon-paper triplicates. Kyriakos welcomed me with a rehearsed smile.
He explained to me that it was impossible. Things weren’t as simple as they seemed.
— Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.
— What’s that supposed to mean? I lashed out.
Kyriakos made a gesture with his hand. To him the conversation was pointless.
— He already confessed. The only thing anyone can do, perhaps, is to save your mother. Violeta, this is not a time for emotion. One and one make two. Open your eyes.
— Look at you, Kyriakos Lolos, a boy from the village, valedictorian of our class in 1937, the young man who gathered up crumbs from lunch and saved them for dinner, who studied by the light of borrowed candles, who used to say that guilt is the creation of circumstance. Look what’s become of you. My brother is innocent. I know it and you know it, too.
— Violeta, you’re not being logical.
— Logic isn’t always the best advisor. Aren’t you the one who used to say that? That the hegemony of logic is responsible for some of the most fundamental misunderstandings?
— I wish I could help, Violeta. But your brother’s case has already been tried.
— It’s been tried outside the courts. That’s what you’re telling me.
Kyriakos didn’t breathe another word. It was hard even for him to say to my face what anyone with eyes in his head could see.
KYRIA MARIA GRIS, MOTHER OF MANOLIS
It was dark as tar, rainy weather.
When they burst into my house to turn the place upside-down, I had just lain down with my feet propped against the wall. My feet were swollen something awful, my knees had been killing me since morning. I heard footsteps and knew. I ran to the door. I didn’t care about the pain or anything.
A mother’s curse never fails.
May a bereaved mother never cross your path, the old women in Trabzon used to say. She’ll burn up your joy, poison your day.
Those men weren’t men, they were mules. Pigs.
— Hey! Don’t you have mothers of your own? I shouted, but they’d come there to get a job done.
Which is to say, not even a troop of janissaries could have stopped them, much less pleading and tears.
They turned the whole house upside-down. They even searched the lamp in front of my icons. They pawed the girls’ nightgowns, flipped through our books, read all our papers. They found the one about Savvas.
— One son a hero, the other a traitor, they said.
Evgnosia put her hand over my mouth.
— Don’t say a thing, Mother. Our silence will protect Manolis.
But there was no way of hushing Violeta. She couldn’t abide injustice. Her head had swelled at the university, she’d read the laws. She knew right from wrong, not the way we learn it at home, but how it’s written in books.
— You have no right, you have no proof, she shouted in their faces.