They paid her no heed at all. They asked their questions, I answered. They made me write a paper and sign it. I told them I never went to school, I might make mistakes, Violeta was the one in our house who had studied.
— Don’t worry, ma’am, said a young man standing off to one side, just write the words and don’t worry about that.
When they asked me to come with them, that’s when my legs started hurting again. In all the commotion I’d forgotten the pain. My mother was right when she used to say, you can bear any pain if you have other worries on your mind.
I’m bearing, Mother. I’m bearing.
And troubled years came full of tears
since the barbarians came, and took my son
and killed my race, and smashed and burned.
With fire and axes they took our souls away.
We never had anything to do with the police, we aren’t communists. We believe in Christ. Later on, at the trial, they said all kinds of things. They said we collaborated with the Reds. My boy joined the Party, it’s true. He needed work. Do you think he had many offers to choose from? But they kicked him out, they figured out fast enough that he wasn’t one of them. I tried to cheer him up, told him it was better to keep his distance. He would find another job, he was good at whatever he tried. When anyone called, he ran to help.
I’d had my dream. I never dream anything significant, I fall in bed like a log and sleep like a log until morning. But two days before my name day, all my dead came to see me in my sleep. They crowded in on all sides. My dead babies wrapped in blankets, fresh out of my belly, with the eyes of the very old. Eyes that know life is an uphill battle. My mother, young, with a braid in her hair and a kerchief, in her best dress and an embroidered apron. My father in his burial clothes. My mother-in-law with the tin basin, the one I washed her feet in, and her wedding coins sewn to the chest of her dress. My husband Stathis with those thick eyebrows of his, and the mole on his forehead. Savvas with a starched white shirt hanging out of his pants. Tuck that in, boy, I shouted. He was so thin, with cheeks as yellow as kaseri cheese. All around were cousins and neighbors, nephews and distant uncles. They all stood there in a crowd, none of them said a word, all you could hear was an mmmmmmm, something like church, or a song.
— Why aren’t you talking? I asked them right to their faces. Say something! If you’ve gone to the trouble of rising from the earth to visit me, you can’t have all come here tonight for anything good.
I woke with them still on my mind.
I counted them and remembered them one by one, twenty-seven in all, more than the house could fit, if they’d actually come. I was angry with Savvas. The rest had been buried for years, they’d forgotten and been forgotten, I rarely mentioned them in my prayers — except for my mother, of course — but Savvas was everywhere I turned. His photograph, framed in the sitting room. My blessed child, there at every turn. I was standing in front of that photograph, ready to give him a piece of my mind, when Evgnosia called to me.
— Mother, come quick! The lamp broke.
The oil had spilled all over the good tablecloth, the embroidered one, which we used to decorate the table. Evgnosia crossed herself.
— Don’t worry, Mother, I’ll put some warm water and soap on it.
She scrubbed it and got the stain out. But a faint shadow remained. Evgnosia put a bottle on top so we could still enjoy the embroidery. Right there, on our good tablecloth, was where they had me write that statement. My letters wouldn’t lie flat, my hand trembled, and of course there was the cross-stitching underneath. Evgnosia made sure ink from the pen didn’t leak onto the cloth. The poor thing was afraid another stain would ruin the piece altogether. Those were the kinds of worries we had. Back then. Before the sky fell on our heads.
Kyrios Tzitzilis wanted to be done with the case, he didn’t like that we were causing him trouble. He smiled when I came in.
— Your Manolis is a good boy, Kyra-Maria, but too quiet. He’s not saying what we want him to.
— What is it you want him to say? I asked.
— We want him to tell us about the communists, about his friends. To admit what he’s done, so we can all go home.
What had he done? That was the trouble: they wouldn’t tell me, no matter how many times I swore in the name of the Virgin Mary and her holy son that my Manolis had no truck with communists, that we were godly people, Greeks of the greater Greece, refugees chased down from the Pontus, but Greeks to the marrow of our bones.
— Fine, fine, Tzitzilis nodded, and kept asking what he’d already asked.
When he saw me rubbing my legs, since it was hot outside and they had swollen something awful, Get up, kyra, he ordered, you’re going to climb the stairs.
A Turk might have cut my legs off right there, but he wouldn’t have put me through that torture.
Forty-three stairs, up and down.
Again. And again. All day.
My lyre can sing and sing and cry
it lets out rivers of tears
and sings of the child away at war
of the unfair, unjust fight
with a heart on fire and rivers of blood.
I didn’t care about the pain. Pain you can bear. You keep saying, now I’ll surely die, but it keeps getting worse and you keep on living.
When your fate has been written, even God abandons you.
O Virgin Mary, who saw your son on the cross, you understand. You understand but say nothing. You won’t come down from your throne to save a body. Your eyes may fill with tears, but you offer no shelter.
They opened the door at the bottom of the stairs and I saw my child lying in blood. As if dead, tossed on the cement floor.
— You have no God, I shouted at them, no mother gave birth to you. May you live with my curse, and die unmourned and unforgiven. May you see all I’ve seen and worse.
I dragged my foot down the stairs, I grabbed the left one, which hurt more, between both hands and pulled. My foot caught on the railing and I tumbled down the stairs, my knees were bruised but what did I care, it was just flesh, flesh and bone, and mine, not my child’s, I could tear myself to shreds and never care, as long as I got to where he was.
— Don’t worry, ma’am, a tall young man said politely, stepping between us. The best doctors will take care of your Manolis. He fell down the stairs, like you.
He waved his hand and they closed the door, closed it before I could see him from up close. And they paid no heed to my pleading, all the tears in the world couldn’t reach their hearts. They stood there in front of the door, men with no ears and no eyes. They knew no pity.
The young man came over, put his hands under my arms and held me up.
— Come, ma’am, and sign the paper. For Manolis’s sake.
THROUGH OTHER EYES
When they brought Gris before the district attorney to sign his confession, he couldn’t even hold a pen. He kept sliding down on the chair. A policeman wrapped his hand around Gris’s fingers and helped with the signature, to speed things along.
In that policeman’s opinion, the American marshals, the Greek military officers, the government ministers, and the guys from Security all owed a moment of silence to the young man who had withstood all he’d withstood for so many days, and had even dared to raise his voice. He’d spoken back to the Minister of Justice, who had made a special trip up from Athens in a hurry — always in a hurry — to close the case, telling Gris that if he would just confess, he would be offering the greatest of services to the government. The country would honor and respect him, his name would go down in history as one of the great benefactors of the nation. At first Gris just stood in his corner like a whipped dog, but in the end he couldn’t hold back: