Lambda is for Laothalassa

Nick Papandreou

When we first moved to Greece, my father’s mother, who lived with us, took on the task of improving our Greek. To grow into who we were, my grandmother said, meant learning Greek. She gave us Greek books to read but above all she insisted we learn to write Greek “beautifully.” She was determined, on this at least, not to let her grandchildren get away with the sloppy American writing habits acquired in the California public school system. “An elegant writing style,” she said in her precise formal Greek “is a necessity in today’s world.”

So began the calligraphy lessons. Once a week I sat at her small ebony-colored desk — she always made sure my shoulders were upright and that when I leaned forward I did so without bending my back — and then she would place in front of me some fresh, creamy-smelling sheets of paper, an inkwell, and a stylus with removable nibs. For these occasions she wore not her ornate ruffled blouse and stylish chapeau but some loose equivalent of an older woman’s workclothes: a long gray woolen skirt that reached her ankles with two enormous sets of buttons running its length and a simple white blouse.

We began with the Greek alphabet. She showed me how to ornament each letter with its own particular curlicue and wisp, adding tails, lengthening stalks, thickening stems and thinning curves by twisting and turning the nib of the stylus. I learned to taper downstrokes and add flourishes to upward strokes — descenders and ascenders she called them; she made me concentrate on initial and terminal letters so that I could lend them “grace and freedom,” and she showed me how to connect two letters with a smooth ligature. She corrected me if I didn’t hold the pen properly because it wasn’t enough that the letters look beautiful but that I look good while engaged in the act of writing. If someone should come in while I was writing they should notice the elegant way I held the pen, angled back like a reed bending in the wind, not sticking crassly up in the air like the mast of a ship. She showed me how to dip the nib into ink and turn it slightly so it wouldn’t drip on the creamy white sheet, to check for the watermark on the paper and to imagine a horizontal line running through each word. While she taught me the art of calligraphy she also taught me about each letter’s “soul,” as she put it, its psyche.

I learned that each letter has its own personality. The letter lambda ( λ ) has two legs which dangle beneath the word. A properly drawn lambda is a wonderful thing, a lovely trigonometer; think of lambda like a little man leaning back so that you draw the first leg slightly shorter than the second. Lambda’s embarrassed to be such a beautiful letter which is why we draw its head slightly bowed and why it keeps its hands in its pockets. If you lift lambda by its head and shake it like a bell the sound drops out of it — ul ul ul. I could see myself as a lambda, hands in pockets, head down.

The letter beta (β) was pregnant twelve months of the year; pie (π) was a square block of a letter shaped like a house; only something as solid as that could shelter the equation for the area of the circle, a shape which so intrigued the ancient Greeks. Psi (ψ) was like Poseidon’s trident, clearly a masculine letter, one that could be used to spear fish. Open your mouth for capital omega (Ω) feel it, the large drawn out ooh sound versus its taut breathless brother o-micron that looked like your mouth when you pronounced it. There was the delicate delta (ä) and the cantankerous eta (η). The small gamma (γ) was a scissors while its capitalized version resembled a hangman’s post (Λ). Epsilon (ε) was a very vulnerable letter, a letter to feel sorry for because of its open half-circles but a great addition that any word would be proud to have in its repertoire because epsilon looked so beautiful. Words with too many epsilon’s I felt sorry for because they seemed steeped in vulnerability, like the word eleos which meant mercy. N was a sophisticated letter, naturally written tall, linear and elegant; it stands strong while joining what can never meet — two parallels. Capital theta (Θ) you had nothing to worry about, a self-sufficient letter, a closed circle with a dash in the middle, never lonely. Words with theta’s seemed as independent as a military garrison.

Once I had learned the individual letters I practiced writing sentences by copying selected passages from the Bible. My notebook was soon filled with quotes like “Judgments are prepared for scorners and stripes for the back of fools,” or “A foolish son is the calamity of his father.” She corrected me with admonitions in French. “Ce n’est pas comme ça,” or “Mais non!” After a few weeks of biblical instruction she opened a book of poetry by Cavafy. My task was to copy the poems. While I followed Cavafy’s stanzas she would pause to tell me how polite he had been to her when they had met in Alexandria, a true gentleman who worked in an office of the Bureau of Irrigation Works by day and wrote poetry by night. As I wrote she recited the poem as if in front an audience and when she was done there would be a satisfied stillness in the room that my imagination filled with applause. “They don’t make poets like him anymore,” she would say and shut the book.

She taught me that Greek words might be funny. Fallen leaves make a sousouro, she said, when the wind rushes through them. Politicians who are full of themselves are pompodis. A car that’s falling apart is a saravalaki. Tzitziki is the Greek word for cicada, a word that sounds like the insect’s call. Some words were invented to sound like things. The word laothalassa literally meant a sea of people, an orgiastic multitude. The open alpha’s were like the crash of waves against the shore; in lao the mouth went from the open alpha to the rounded omicron and pronouncing it required disciplined effort, the energy of a crowd itself.

On her dresser, next to the fans which she used on hot days, my grandmother kept three icons of saints and behind that, a crucifix with Christ’s nearly nude body arched in that peculiar pose of pain and deliverance. Pictures of her Polish father hung from the wall, a man with a fierce beard, a monocle and an erect bearing. She told me he fought the Russians in Lithuania, was exiled to Siberia, escaped and joined some old communards in Paris, trained in the Garibaldi school for rebels in Italy before joining the Greeks liberate Ioannina from the Turks in 1871. There was also a large picture of my grandfather and my grandmother when they were young. It was only after weeks had gone by and I had stared at the pictures countless times that I suddenly realized that my grandfather and she had once lived under the same roof, inhabited the same bed and eaten their breakfast together.

“Why don’t you live with Pappou any more?” I asked her one day while copying out “The God Abandons Anthony.”

“We’re divorced,” she replied and then pointed to the next stanza so I couldn’t ask any more. Divorced since 1927 my mother told me, a period which belonged to the paleolithic age for me, a remote world of model T-Fords and women with veils and people who walked too fast — like in the silent movies of that era. So it was with some excitement that I told her that Pappou would be visiting us for lunch one day.

When she heard the news she opened her anthology of poems. Yet rather than start reciting she deposited the book on her lap and from the window of her bedroom stared at slices of bark which hung from the trunks of the birch trees like empty shirt sleeves. After a long silence she began the lesson but for the duration of the hour, hunched over her small desk, she barely paid attention to my writing and didn’t guide me. Free of her vocal correctives and that solid grip over my fingers — though over seventy she sometimes squeezed my fingers so hard against the ink pen that when she lifted her hand the place where my finger touched the pen was red, with a small depression — my writing degenerated into child-like scribbles, losing all traces of the adult-like beauty I thought was mine. My alpha’s were so small the open hole was filled with ink and my gamma’s barely crossed below the line. At some point she lifted her hand and scrutinized my sloppy oeuvre. I expected to hear her cries of “Mais non!” but instead she patted my head absent-mindedly and said it was too hot a day for such hard work. We would continue tomorrow, she said, and stood to gather up the utensils.

The following day when I showed up for my lesson she was sitting on her bed reading a letter. Hanging from the closet handle was a dark blue dress and beneath that were three pairs of shoes. Her open jewelry box held a mass of necklaces, thin and tiny, tangled up with each other. Her hearing aid sat on the writing table so and because she had her back to me, she couldn’t know I had entered the room. When I stood close I saw from over her shoulder the date at the top right corner of the letter. December 6, 1910. The words were larger than hers and swerved sideways, as if written in a rush, but nonetheless preserved the calligraphic principals she had taught me. This was a man’s writing. Though I was tempted to read on I was also embarrassed to cheat. When we played cards I knew it was ridiculously easy to cheat on her, but precisely for that reason I didn’t. I walked in front of her and stood there. When she saw me she immediately brought the letter close to her chest then returned it to a wooden box which held similar letters of super thin onion skin paper. She told me she didn’t remember that we’d put off yesterday’s session for today but soon enough we were bending over her desk. She held my hand with her coarse fingers. Her attention to my efforts was so slight that soon I was drawing alpha’s big as a cat’s head.

“What’s this?” she said, pointing to a cat’s head.

“But you’re leading me,” I replied, “it’s not my fault.” She said nothing. “Yiayia, we can do our lessons afterward.”

“Afterward?”

“After Pappou.”

She stared at me is she hadn’t understood. Then she nodded her head. “Yes, yes. After Pappou.”

*

Saturday morning, the day of my grandfather’s arrival, the house was on the move. Elvira had prepared a large meal of rice, chicken and bechamel sauce. My mother had promised us a double allowance if we cleaned up our rooms by twelve noon. My grandmother’s door was shut all morning and except for the sound of water rushing through the faucet of the washroom, there was nothing to indicate that she had even woken up for the morning. She never took breakfast anyway, but today no one had seen her.

Yet when we heard the rumble of cars outside our home and the small cavalcade of cop cars and motorcycles, her door opened and she stepped outside. She was dressed like she was going to a soiree. A dark veil hid her face and her sleek blue skirt reached down to her ankles. With those fingers whose strength I had come to know well she clutched a small silver purse from which hung beads. She asked me to help her down the stairs and she followed me, placing one hand on my shoulder. I took each step like a kid, with care, joining one foot to the other before venturing down the next step.

When I reached the main floor I saw my grandfather in the hallway. His maroon tie was decorated with white palm fronds that looked sort of like the skeleton of a fish. When he saw me he opened his arms to receive me but then his hands dropped to his sides. A cloud crossed his face, the smile vanished, and he turned instead to greet Lydia, Jason and Hector. My grandmother squeezed my shoulder hard, involuntarily I think, then released me and I heard her steps fading behind me. I ran to my grandfather and let him lift me into the air. When he put me down I raced toward the kitchen but she wasn’t there. I knocked on the bathroom door, once twice, turned the handle but it was locked. She didn’t join us for lunch and nobody said anything when Elvira took her plate away. That brief meeting in the hallway was the last time my grandparents ever saw each other.

*

Our next lesson she asked me to read to her from something called “The Secrets of the Swamp,” by Penelope Delta. Six hundred and forty pages of action-packed story about the exploits of a boy living on the border of Greece and Bulgaria during the war of 1905. Turning to page one I read this:

The sun, setting, reddened the snow-covered peaks of Olympus, goldened the waterholes left by yesterday’s rain in muddy plains which stretched forever, ashen, ugly, deserted.

“Ah yes,” my grandmother said, nodding her head. “Northern Greece.” She wore a woolen vest and was knitting something. While I read I could hear the needles click against each other. Her glasses were perched on her nose so she could look up at me and down at her progress without a problem. She looked more grandmotherly than ever, nothing like the stylish lady she had dressed into for my grandfather. The only thing missing was a rocking chair. I read a few more paragraphs.

“Penelope wanted to write a book in simple Greek,” my grandmother began, “and she did it. We were friends of hers, your grandfather and I.” It seemed hard to believe that anybody could know someone whose name was on the cover of our school book but I didn’t doubt my grandmother in anything. Whatever she said was the truth. “Your grandfather wanted Greek to be understood by all people. He knew the language well, that one did.”

“Like in the letters?”

“Which letters?”

“The ones in your black box.”

“I know you saw me reading them,” she said. I nodded my head guiltily. “Come early tomorrow,” she said.

Next day I found her sitting on her bed, a mass of crinkled onion skin pages around her. Some were folded in half, some were small like from a notepad, others big as two sheets together. Rather than gather them up and stuff them into the box like last time, she asked me to sit on the chair.

“One day,” she said, “you will learn to cherish the shape of words. One day you will write love letters and you will win any woman’s heart with the sheer neatness and power of your writing style.”

She handed me the letter. “The first time I saw your grandfather,” she said, “he was being held by gendarmes, who were taking him to jail. Years later, on one of our anniversaries, he wrote me this.”

Just like today, my Lydia, in 1907, remember, I was being taken in for the inquiry for the student troubles and I saw you on the steps of the Law School, with your white chapeau. We hadn’t yet confessed. I blushed, you blushed, and these bright blushes lit my prison cell. And ever since then I have waited for you, just as I waited — how could I not? — for your letter in jail; what absolute relief to have received even one letter from you. Were you real? Were you false? Inside the prison I asked this question many times without being able to answer it.

The writing was like hers; imaginary horizontal lines that appeared between each neat sentence; the smooth rightward tilt of letters, the curlicues for capitals, the upturned deltas and long tails that dipped beneath the imaginary horizontals.

She showed me a picture of the two of them together. In her eyes there is a sadness as if she knows one day she will be in a bedroom, alone, showing this picture to her grandson.

But she didn’t let me see any more letters. “You’re too young,” was her excuse. A few months later she told me that my calligraphy was passable and that I could practice on my own. We were both sad that I wouldn’t be joining her afternoons. The following year she took my youngest brother under her tutelage and taught him some of the surprises of the Greek alphabet. But once, when we compared notes, I asked him about the sturdy lambdas and the vulnerable epsilons. He thought I was crazy. My grandmother didn’t teach him that part.

*

On a cold day in the suburb of King City, north of Toronto, while kids sharpened their skates and slapped hockey sticks against pucks and snowmobiles roared in the distance, we sat in front of the television and changed channels in the hope of finding news of my grandfather’s funeral. We didn’t know if they were going to show anything. My grandmother had been crossing herself ever since we learned of his death. Her face looked worn but in her eyes rather than sadness I saw a small bright light.

Then, on the six o’clock news, for a full minute, we saw footage of the crowd surrounding the coffin. A close-up showed my mother in a black scarf and sunglasses, my older brother and my sister — they had been given special permission to enter the country — who were being pushed by the crowd practically onto the hearse. Behind the Canadian commentator’s words we could hear a roar and the slogan, “Old Man of Democracy, Rise Up and See Us! Rise Up Old Man!” An aerial shot showed hundreds of thousands walking slowly behind the funeral car. The crowds flooded into the First Cemetery of Athens and were backed up past Hadrian’s Arch, reaching as far as the Greek Parliament. Then the news flash was over and we sat there in silence.

My grandmother spoke first. Even in his last moments, she said, he managed to gather a real laothalassa. Her voice sounded harsh. It was the first hint I got of the real reason behind their separation. Politics. Not that I should have been surprised. She was the one who had told me that politics was the death of the family.

Once he was gone she seemed eager to talk about him. She started to sing songs that he had sung to woo her, usually German songs, but some in French. She told us about Leipzig and Berlin before the first World War and about the first time they held hands behind his father’s church in Patras and how he stole from her a breathless kiss inside the belfry. She told us how my grandfather had carried her through the streets of Chios one night, searching for a doctor, knocking on every door, shouting in the streets, until finally a mid-wife appeared to help with the baby and how my father was born in the middle of a garden, under a fig tree. Every year that went by, she said, every year that she grew older brought her that much closer to her husband.

*

We buried her in the same cemetery as my grandfather, though at quite a distance from each other. Her letters she left to us. For years I couldn’t look at them. But one day as I read them, I recalled that brief moment in our home when their gaze met each other, the day she dressed in case he had changed his mind and wanted to speak to her.

January, 1909

I want to be the wind in your hair, the teardrop of your eye, the breath of your mouth, the smile of your lips, the tip of your tongue. I love you, I will love you, I have loved you.

March, 1910

So what if it was insane to meet on Tuesday next to the church; we quenched our thirst. My hungry lips, my burning heart, cooled. Joy doesn’t walk streets, you must chase after it, beneath the table, before the theater, in the drop of sunlight on your cheek.

When she taught me how to write, when I blew on the creamy sheet to dry the ink and pressed down hard with the blotter she saw my grandfather in his military uniform drying one the words he’d written for her over half a century ago:

August, 1924

From the moment of our parting in the trolley your eyes live inside me, follow me everywhere. I left, my heart is wax, I return to you, my Lydia. I open the window to my office and let in a whirlwind of pain. Let’s close the windows, the door, the voices of the world, let’s be alone, alone. You and I.

Receive my soul.

In one letter, when they are no longer living together, he asks her for a divorce. It’s not that he doesn’t love her, he wrote, it’s that their marriage holds him back. Unlike the earlier ones, this one is free of his lazy rightward tilt; instead the words are upright and run across the page at neat right angles, perfectly horizontal, perhaps his most exquisite calligraphic effort. He wrote that his life required exhaustion in battle, whether in victory or in defeat. He was born when a crowd gathered in a square and died when it died. This passion, he said, he could share with nobody. He told her nothing of the famous theater actress who, along with four trunks of clothes and two poodles, would move in with him days after the divorce.

Growing up in Canada at the height of the Vietnam War I had the chance to be part of a world that will probably never occur again, at least not in this or the next century. I’m not talking about the anti-war rallies in Toronto organized by the Quakers or the radical student groups, nor the protests in front of the American consulate nor even the intensity of the arguments in school with those who believed America was right to bomb Vietnam. I’m talking about being part of something that most people watched on television or only read about in the news: a commune.

I’d met a couple of draft-dodgers while working for Sam Stokes when I was recovering from my accident and once I also bumped into them in the IGA. A small American flag graced the back of one T-shirt and a peace sign the other. Everybody in the store stared at them and didn’t say a word until they left. Mrs. Greunock, the pharmacist, shook her head while her husband laughed and said that it was all right for people not to want to fight in a war half way around the world.

Roncali wanted nothing to do with hippies and communes. “Afraid of war,” he said. “Besides, mothers let their kids watch ‘em pee and fathers walk around naked and let me tell you, a naked man’s an ugly thing.”

“Hippies don’t like the world as it is,” I said. “They want a better world. You got a problem with that?”

“Sure do. I like the world as it is and I’m not afraid of war. Wouldn’t want to change that and you can call me a conservative until Bobby Orr grows old and dies.”

I think Roncali’s attitude reinforced my determination to visit the commune and when we came upon it one day while chasing a Buckeye butterfly behind Nederson’s orchard, we stood and stared in awe, as if we’d suddenly come upon an exotic world, a backwoods Xanadu. Not that there was anything mystical about what we were staring at: There, at the bottom of Hammock Valley, was an old barn with a grain silo and next to it a yellow VW bus with a large red peace sign painted on its side. Long-haired men and women and even a few kids came and went. This was the commune.

Roncali, not one to be intimidated or to reveal awe, said we’d be crazy to venture any closer. As soon as you enter a commune, he told me, they tie you to a chair, put needles inside you and teach you about communism. “They’re what you call proto-anarchists.”

“Proto my dick, Roncali.” Roncali had been sleeping with the dictionary in a valiant effort to improve his chances of also sleeping with Cheryl Sommers, a girl who wore long flowing skirts and used even longer flowing words. Alone, I tramped down Hammock Hill.

The entrance was nothing more than two brightly painted barrels at each side of a dirt path and someone had written WELL on one barrel and COME on the other. A small half-naked child raced in my direction, chased by a long-haired woman who grabbed the child, lifted it high into the air and glanced at me.

Suddenly a man wearing bell-bottom jeans, with long hair, a headband and a T-Shirt with the words AAW Boston Mobe was standing in front of me.

He seemed to be scrutinizing me, then he suddenly leaned over and hugged me. He smelled of the outdoors and of tobacco or something. I pulled away, thinking of Roncali’s words. “Nice of you to show up,” he said and let go. He spoke clearly, in a real every day voice. “Name’s Jay.” I liked the accent, open, loose, American. Some long-haired men struggled with a thick tractor axle. “Hey, don’t drop it!” He shook his head. “This here’s the Farm,” he told me, “the den of sin, the harem of loose women, the center of psychedelic ecstasy. Right?” He laughed. At a picnic table next to a small pond, two women and some children were peeling carrots and potatoes. Behind them, a man sat cross-legged with his back against the trunk of a maple tree, hands in the air. “That’s Jonas,” Jay said, following my gaze. “He’s Canadian. Nothing to do with the draft. Joined us last year. Believes in the Baghwama Jiree.”

Indian sounding names didn’t attract me. I’d seen similar types on Yonge Street, head shaved, hands up in the air, chanting mantras, and I always stayed away from them.

“What’s that mean?” I pointed to the words on his T-shirt.

“MOBE? Mobilization. The rest means Artists Against the War.”

“I’m against the war,” I offered.

“Smart kid.”

“I have a friend who isn’t.”

“Wonder what your friend would say if they sent him to Vietnam, with orders to kill.” He pronounced ‘nam’ like ‘lamb.’ In Canada it was more like ‘mom.’ “Cluster bombs, grenades, bombs that spot you from where you last took a piss. Legs flying at your face. Holes in your stomach like the open door of a washing machine.” As he led me to the barn I memorized his words to repeat them to Roncali.

“Where you from? Strange accent.”

I told him I was born in California but, I added, slightly embarrassed, I grew up in Greece and that we now lived around here.

“Far out,” he said and that was that. Not for Jay the endless questioning about one’s past. He tapped the barn’s wood exterior with his knuckles. “Worked on this baby for upwards of a year. It’s our community hotel with thirteen bedrooms. Toilets are of the outdoor variety, if you get my gist.” He pointed to a wooden outhouse at one end, surrounded by bushes.

“Who can join the commune?”

“Anyone,” he said. “Even you.”

A shiver ran down my back.

“Do you share all your belongings?” The wind fluttered the leaves of a large maple.

“Don’t believe everything you hear about us, Alex. Just hang loose and soak it all up.” The pond shimmered in the sun. A woman in cut-off jeans and a halter top washed clothes on one of those washboards I’d only seen in Little House on the Prairie.

We went through a screen door that banged when he let it go and I found myself inside an enormous kitchen. Rafters soared above; ladles, large spoons, mugs, pots, pans, and other kitchen implements hung from a wooden rectangle that itself hung from the rafters with chains and hooks. Three long-haired women sat around a large oak table that could easily sit twenty.

He spoke to the women. They smiled. One had a wide face with cartloads of freckles; another one was thickset, wore shorts and revealed hairy legs and unshaven armpits. The third had long brown hair and such a smooth face that I wanted to reach out and touch the skin. She wore a sleeveless T-shirt and loose baggy pants that ballooned around her thighs.

She stood up, grabbed my shoulders and kissed me hard on each cheek. I squirmed.  “I’m Sintra.”

“I’ll leave you in their hands, Alex,” he said. “Have some lunch. It’s on us.” He banged the screen door when he left.

The woman who’d kissed me, Sintra, told me to sit down. The chairs didn’t match — tall short, skinny and squat, old and new. She ladled out some soup – broccoli – carved a chunk of bread and plied it with thick butter. A girl came in. She couldn’t have been much older than me. She wore jeans that were frayed at the cuffs, Jesus sandals, a red headband that flowed down her back like a pony tail and a loose blouse that reached her knees.

I wasn’t hungry but I ate the soup without taking my eyes off her. The girl was peeling a carrot.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“Alex,” I said. “What’s yours?”

“Melissa.” She had a soft voice and an even softer American accent. Her nose – an item I’d never given much thought to – was perfect. “We all have a philosophy here on the farm. Want to hear mine?”

I nodded.

“There’ll be nobody like you ever again. So make the most of every molecule you’ve got.” She moved away and continued cleaning carrots with a sharp knife. “What’s your philosophy?” The shavings fell neatly into a paper bag at her feet. I could already feel the crunch of carrot in my mouth.

“Mine? I believe in helping others. Like the poor. The sick.”

“Yeah? That’s pretty good. And money?” She offered me a carrot which I chomped into with unnecessary vehemence.

“Money?”

“Do you believe in money?”

The way she scrunched up her face I knew pretty well what she thought of money.

“How can anyone believe in that?”

She sighed. “I thought only people on the farm thought like me. I don’t go to school any more you know. Teachers visit us each morning from Saint Thomas. There’s five of us kids. I learn everything there is to know.”

“Wow! No school?”

“Yeah,” she said, already bored by the subject. She popped a carrot into her mouth and handed me another one. I hated carrots. I took two. She told me about Harold who was presently in a clinic in Aurora, recovering from some unspecified illness. “He once stood in the middle of the field with the vacuum cleaner and shouted at the stars,” she told me. “Woke us all up. He wanted to suck them down and pin them on his wall.”

Jay was her “commune” father but Sintra was her real mother. Jay knew lots of stuff. “Like he told us that the world has just created something called a Unimate. A robot. It’s a welding robot and it looks like a praying mantis. He says it’s the world’s perfect worker. It never tires, never sweats, never complains, and never misses work. And never talks.”

“That’s no good.”

“That’s the stuff the world is making.”

“The world made you,” I blurted out suddenly. She stared at me with her green eyes. She seemed truly surprised.

We sat on these tall wooden stools on the porch while the men went about chopping up some wood. Someone was fussing with the VW. He waved at us. I waved back.

Melissa asked me about school, about other girls her age. She only had one friend and she didn’t see her much cause she lived in The World.

“Do you do drugs?” I asked her.

“Drugs? Me? No way. Not everybody does drugs. The police visit us once a week and check in on everything. Besides, Jay says that we didn’t escape American jail to end up in a Canadian one. Next year he says we’re going to return to normal life. Get full-time jobs. Is your school okay? I’ve been away two years now, ever since we left Massachusetts.”

I stayed for lunch. I was introduced to them all – Sintra, Big John, Merriac, Nathan, Wanda and the others. We ate chicken, chunks of home-made bread, and had strawberries and whipped cream for desert. Harold said some strange prayer against the war in Vietnam.

Melissa gave me a long kiss on the mouth in front of the others, then tucked a small daffodil behind my ear.

“You ever want to come and really soak up the Farm,” Jay told me at the entrance, “you’re welcome. See if this is for you.”

*

I went again the following Saturday, the same day that Harold was released from the clinic. Jay drove him down  from Aurora in the old VW bus and when he arrived everybody was waiting for him. They kissed him, hugged him, mussed up his hair. One of the men, Merriac, who had a beard that covered most of his face and thick hairy arms, gave him a strong hug and Harold squealed like a child. Jay brought him over to me.

“This here’s Alex. Hates the war.”

“That’s the magic ingredient, my man,” he said and shook my hand. His long hair was fine like a girl’s and he looked both old and young at the same time, like those drawings that switch from ugly to beautiful, depending on your perspective. His arms were thin and wiry, lines carved his cheeks and yellow and purple bruises colored the inside of his arms. “You’ll like it here. I’ll make sure of that.” His blue eyes were bright and darted around. “Did I tell you all I baptized the nurse? Two parts saline solution and two parts alcohol.” He laughed.

Sintra led us on a “celebration walk.” This meant we held hands in front of the pond and then followed Teecup the Turtle for about fifty minutes. Teecup walked a total of three hundred yards, around a tree, under a bush, munched grass and looked back at us more than once, turning its ancient head with bored curiosity. This was how we honored Harold’s return.

*

Each weekend I visited the commune and helped with the chores, cleaning up the kitchen which seemed always full of dishes, woodwork, tractor maintenance and in August we got to the corn husking. With Melissa we made a rack for corn on the cob. It was nothing more than a series of spikes that ran along an upright piece of timber and nailed one end of the corn into the spikes. When the rack was full of corn cobs it looked like some huge bumpy yellow cucumber. Some of the men made a concrete walk from the barn to the chicken coop so that when it rained our shoes wouldn’t get weighed down with mud. We also made a device for extracting honey from beeswax, a box with a glass over it and a dripping pan inside. Fill the box with honeycombs, tilt it towards the sun and watch the honey pour through the dripping pan. We made scoops from tin cans, cloth-covered boxes from grocery boxes.

We caught frogs and let them go, listened to Harold read Walt Whitman and Alan Ginzberg. We baptized two stray sheep in the pond: the little one we called Draft Card and the larger one Affidavit. Affidavit nearly drowned. When we tried to catch a porcupine Melissa cut her finger. We spoke to the sky, the trees, the sun, and to each other. During the all-denominational informal prayer sessions, Melissa and I held hands.

It took me two days to come down from LSD. To keep my eyes from wandering and my mind from hallucinating I read the Anarchist’s Cookbook from page to page, including the fine print. Melissa stroked my head and kissed my neck and we did just about everything else there was to do. Melissa had hard breasts, a slim waist and she liked to wrap her legs around me so that when I was on top of her I could barely move. Sintra told us that love-making was part of life on the commune, like collecting eggs and shitting. No, there weren’t multiple partners. Melissa was all mine and I was all hers. After Francine being with Melissa seemed natural, easy, and above all guilt-free.

I grew my hair long, wore head bands and painted peace signs on the hip pockets of my jeans. With Melissa I went to marches against the war in Toronto. We piled into this old VW and bombed down Yonge Street while singing.

Jay was the undisputed leader of the Farm. He practiced martial arts in front of the forest each morning. The muscles of his back jumped like tiny fish when he moved. His movements were so smooth and slow that a deer once stood about five feet away from him, munching on something. Only when he jumped into the air, legs and arms out at forty-five degree angles and shouted some Korean angst-ridding word did the deer race away like live buckshot was vying for a place on its hide.

But if Jay was the mind, Harold was the heart. When Sintra cried he held her in his arms. When Merriac complained that his back hurt, Harold would massage his hairy shoulders through the night. He performed a “love ceremony” for me and Melissa. This meant we stood in the pond one frosty November morning and shivered as the water touched our crotches. We wore these skimpy home-made robes over our naked bodies while he touched our heads and sang something weird and said stuff like “Let their be union and harmony among these two poor souls. Let them forever be joined.” He draped our shoulders with an American flag where instead of the fifty stars were fifty Maple leaves.

One day he’d wear shiny red pants from a circus clown he’d met in Toronto, another day a long purple sari and sometimes even nightgowns. For all his gallivanting, he tried to be useful. For a while he was convinced that pets could be put to productive use. He attached four small soapy sponges to a squirrel’s feet and tried to make it walk on the pile of dirty dishes that collected in the sink each day. The squirrel tried to race away and kept slipping because it’s claws couldn’t dig into anything and it scampered into the bush, never to be seen again. But my favorite was when we tried to make a small tread mill for dogs to walk on and draw water.

“A good-sized dog,” Harold read from some farm manual, “can easily earn his living in an arrangement of this kind.” It was lucky there were no dogs on the farm that expressed an explicit desire to earn their living in such a fashion.

Once though, Harold overdid it. I found him lying unconscious under a tree outside the farm. There was something obscene about the way his T-Shirt rode up his chest, the way his bones showed, even the languid way his hand hovered above the rim of his jeans. I shouted his name. I shook him. Yellow froth came from his mouth. “Harold, are you all right?” My voice seemed muffled by the trees behind us, sucked up by the thick forest. With the tail of my shirt I wiped his sweating face. I pressed two fingers against his neck. The flesh yielded almost too easily, although what did I know about the yield levels of human flesh? I searched for his pulse, daintily at first, afraid to touch a person so intimately – I was barely intimate with my own hum and drum of life, my own heartbeat – and then pushed harder and harder, expecting to sense a movement, some sort of steady rhythm. Nothing. I pressed my fingers somewhere else against his neck and suddenly there it was, a sliver of a beat, like small wings fluttering.

“Wigwam,” I heard him say, “jimjam.” I ran back and got Jay.

When Jay appeared he sat down, put Harold’s head on his lap and started to rub his neck. He told me to massage his bare feet. I rubbed hard, like I was starting a fire through friction alone. Bits of dried skin and dark dirt fell to the earth in tiny black pellets.

Jay worked on Harold’s shoulders and arms, kneading the muscles with his own strong hands.  “Harold’s got a knack for sucking up the bad. This time it was bad LSD. Bad sticks to him like glue. But because he takes it all himself, there’s none left for us. He’s our talisman, our good luck charm. He’s the one that got us over the border, faked out the customs people; he’s the one that knows when it’s time to move to another farm, knows whether a farmer’s a good or a bad person, just one look and he knows, it’s something he does. Without him we’d be long gone. He’s like our father and our mother, Alex, and that’s not commune talk I’m giving you.”

Harold opened his eyes and squinted.

“Jay?” Harold tried to sit up. “Jay, I’m fucked up real bad.”

“Did you have dreams?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you dream of?”

Harold closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“Do I have to?”

“You know it does you good.”

“I was barefoot. You were cutting my hair while I was sitting on a chair, and each separate strand was a different color. The floor glowed with hundreds of bright colors.” His eyes focused on me. “Who are you?”

We helped him to his feet. He staggered to a maple tree, leaned against it and threw up. It sounded like a toilet bowl gargling. After that I stopped with the LSD and the acid and the speed and the meth and just about everything except grass.

*

Roncali continued to refuse to enter the Farm and said I was stupid to be working for free when I could earn three bucks twenty in construction, but finally agreed to join me and Melissa in the afternoons when we would leave the commune and walk into the forests and take notes of the countryside. He too was inspired by Melissa and the both of us called upon all our hard-earned chasing skills to search for rare visitors by which to impress Melissa, to find pale creatures with red blotches hovering in the air, crenellated eyespots on wings, and all nature of Greater and Lesser Fritillaries.

I told Roncali and Melissa that I dreamed of attaching my name to some undiscovered species, if not a butterfly, than at least an unknown type of beetle. Though I knew nothing of Nabokov, I did know that scientists earned fame in this manner. We invented some new species.

Coleoptera Melissus was a beetle that looked like a tank, with yellow stripes and a white mandible whose hind legs, when ground up and sprinkled over hamburger, were known to reduce cholesterol and generally decrease the risk of a heart attack.

Lepidopterus Alexus was a humongous butterfly with orange and blue wings that could carry messages from South America to Kansas and Nevada; it ate small insects but was known to hover about the heads of angelic looking girls like Melissa.

Agrion Maculatum de Roncaliensis was a completely new species of black-winged damsel fly that used to live with the bison in the American west and was thought extinct, until Henry Roncali, after great personal sacrifice, discovered the last known nest in a bush along the Colorado river.

Melissocomai lampyridae was a female firefly with the unique ability to light up a whole room and had been attached to chandeliers and small dimly lit bathrooms during the pioneering days of the West.

Magnificent Roncalius or Saurus Magentis was not an insect but instead a large and useless lizard with rainbow coloring across. It’s strong tongue served like a pogo stick and it bounced at great heights and traveled great distances. It detested females of the human species, and made a honking noise whenever it saw any.

To show off, Roncali and I once caught a large Swallowtail. Roncali gripped its thorax and squeezed hard to produce temporary paralysis. When the butterfly grew still we offered it, palms up, to Melissa.

She shook her head. “Undo what you did,” she whispered. “Take the spell off and let it fly away.”

“It’s too late,” I said. Roncali looked at his catch, embarrassed. He laid the butterfly on a flower and we walked away. Like me, he too was in love with Melissa.

After that we stopped collecting butterflies.

This was the world Melissa and Roncali and I created for each other. We would wander in and out of the woods, sometimes sitting beneath a tree for hours, listening to the sound of some small wood animal rustling along the forest floor; or maybe a squirrel clawing its way up a tree; we would test our abilities to smell, a quality, I believed, that was a must for all wannabe entomologists. I collected leaves from different trees and with my eyes closed, tried to guess their names from their feel. I got Melissa to draw leaves and needles and color them and then drop the simulated leaves into a wastepaper basket. Roncali would pick one out at random and then Melissa and I would guess the species. We grew good enough to distinguish the needles of a balsam fir from those of a grand fir.

In here, in these backwoods of that part of Canada known as King City Ontario, the three of us would walk through unexplored tufts of green, stare at the thick black dirt full of living creatures, buzzing, droning things — giant bumblebees and tiny flies, crawling jumping bouncing beetles. All these seemed miraculously joined to the long-haired, toiling, drug-taking hippies. It was a wonder that these disparate elements coexisted so harmoniously not only in the commune but in my very own soul.

*

The last week of August was also my last week before school. Jay decided that we needed a vacation. He drew up the week’s schedule and we followed it religiously:

• August 20-24: snake dance, karate, self-defense training, learn to float in the pond.
• Saturday, morning of August 26:  workshops on drug problems, underground communication, live free guerrilla theater.
• August 26. Afternoon: Drive to Lake Ontario in the VW bus – meet other like-minded people to sing, BBQ, swim, make love. Sleep in sleeping bags.
• Sunday, August 27, dawn: On the shores of Lake Ontario perform poetry and take part in other religious ceremonies.
• August 27, afternoon: Nomination of Affidavit the sheep for incoming commune president.
• August 28: March on the US Embassy where we will levitate the building and exorcise it of evil spirits.
• Monday night, August 28: Drive back to the Farm. Make corn on the cob and in general engage in a healthy, all-round rumble.

With August gone and the celebrations over, I had to return to school. In class each day I thought of Melissa and how she studied on her own. I tried to come afternoons but the walk was long and I barely had time for my homework. But Saturdays I’d show bright and early and Melissa and I would walk around, hand-in-hand. I would tell her what I was learning and she would tell me what she was reading. We traded books. We read Ayn Rand’s We and Thomas More’s Utopia and every other book on communal societies we could find. That September was one of the coldest on record. Jay forbade chopping down any trees. “Trees are our friends.”

But communes are not meant to be. The police descended on the farm during the week. They didn’t find any drugs but Harold landed in jail because he punched an officer and told them they were “organs totalitarian of the state.” Farmer Eccles, an otherwise peace-loving man, showed up the very same week to tell Jay that rent would henceforth be doubled.

In front of the barn Jay told us that we could put up a fight in the courts and probably hang another year, but that the good folks of Ontario were no longer as tolerant. The winds were a-changin’ he said. Besides, the way things were going, they could barely last another week, let alone a whole winter. The communal pot contained five hundred dollars and thirty eight cents. With fourteen people to feed and Eccles to pay, no matter how many strawberries they sold and how many part-time jobs they picked up, no matter how many supermarkets Big-John bagged for, it just wasn’t going to do it. Kids got sick, he said, men wanted their beer; women had to take hot showers. Last winter they’d nearly frozen to death and which was why they were down to half their original number. It was time, Jay said, for the Big Move. “It’s time, I’m afraid,” Jay said, looking at us, “for the World.”

“Be realistic!” Big-John shouted, “Demand the impossible!”

“Fuck the pigs!” Melissa said and lifted a lean fist to the air. But the rest of us were quiet.

I don’t know why or how a man changes his mind, but he does. Just like that. Jay wanted the commune over and done with. The women hugged themselves. The men hugged themselves. Sintra, Melissa’s mother, looked particularly sad, stiff and silent, a dry puppet leaning against the wall. She told us she’d have to do acid every day now, after this downer. Harold tried to make everybody happy but we could all see how sad he was.

I was surprised that nobody really disagreed. Maybe they all knew they were living in a dream and that dreams cost money. I didn’t know.

After Jay’s speech we built a fire next to the pond and the women brought out the hot-dogs. Big John pushed Harold into the pond and soon Merriac and Nathan joined in. We raced out to break them up and soon all of us were in this huge mudfight, right on the edge of the pond. Melissa took her T-shirt off and everybody stared at her hard nipples. We sat around an enormous bonfire until the sun came up.

Soon everybody had real jobs. Big-John hired himself out to the construction companies that were building roads right through the forest. Sintra found a job in the Newmarket hospital as a cleaning lady. Harold drove groceries until someone complained about his clothes – one day he’d wear a second-hand Tuxedo, another he’d wear his clown outfit. I think it was also his permanently dilated pupils, the sweet smell of hashish that surrounded him and his extreme gentleness that scared the good people of King City. He found some sort of job in Toronto with the Quakers and helped them publish their literature. Melissa wrote articles for this journal called Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.

The ones working in Toronto had to sleep in shelters down-town and like me would show up only on weekends. The commune was falling apart.

Then the President of the United States amnestied all draft dodgers. The whole lot of them moved back to the States.

I kept the little box we’d made for melting honey. I sent my rarest butterfly to Melissa by mail – a Buckeye, in a small frame. Cruel maybe, but beautiful. I wrote to her everyday. She wrote back. This lasted for about six months. Then it was down to one letter a year. Then I lost contact with her.

*

All that and everything else occurred a long time ago. Now I’m pushing forty. Me and Roncali still don’t “believe” in money, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Probably because neither one of us makes enough to believe in it. We’re not vegetarians, we don’t wear our hair long and we don’t do drugs, but once in a while we might, if they come our way, like at a party at someone’s house. When long hair came back into style we were both surprised but didn’t lengthen ours.

I took a degree in science from the University of Toronto and I’m now the King City Secondary biology teacher. I live in an old farmhouse on the other side of town. Sometimes I take students to the old farm – what’s left of it – and we look around for animal life: insects like beetles, dragon flies, spider flies, armadillo-like insects that roll up when you touch them and anything else that crawls. I teach them the names of butterflies. We collect flowers and leaves from trees.

It’s not the same thing of course.

The roof has caved in and two of its sides have been torn down for firewood. On the remaining sides the paint has faded to a greyish red. One student once found a ladle in the dirt and held it up gleefully like it was an archaeological artifact.

One year the students painted peace signs. The sixties were all the rage again. Another year the students painted a MAKE LOVE NOT WAR slogan. Some kid with talent did a decent portrait of Martin Luther King. That was in the mid-eighties when the students had re-discovered Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple and King Crimson and gotten it into their heads that the “sixties” wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

Usually, after our catch-and-tell insect spree I sit them next to the pond and we munch on sandwiches and take in the sun. That’s when I tell them about the things I believe. I tell them about sharing, about love, about nature, about friendship. Once I even told the class about an angel named Melissa.

I tell them about how we all followed a turtle around the place for approximately five hours. They laugh. I tell them about how to separate honey from the wax. About how there was a time when the outside world didn’t exist.

This year a student asked me if I missed the commune. I don’t miss the commune, I told him. It’s gone and over. But I miss the time and space that allowed a commune to exist, do you understand. I miss the world that made the commune, the world that made Melissa and Roncali and me and people like Jay and Harold.

I’m almost always sad when I come back from the outing. My wife, Francine (we met years later and decided to marry) is good to me. She understands – so she says. She’s not too jealous. There are moments that catch me completely unprepared, moments when I miss Melissa so much I have to hide from my wife, I have to leave the house or pretend there’s dust in my eyes.

If I can, I rush to a telephone and call Roncali. He’s easy to find because he’s a high-paid telephone technician for Bell Canada, wears those belts, climbs the poles, drives a van. We don’t say a thing, mind you, we might talk ice hockey scores and weather predictions, Canadian talk, but underneath when I call him up – even it it’s in the middle of the night – well he knows what I’m saying even if I’m not actually saying it.

Sometimes, and this sounds strange, I miss myself – that little inconsequential guy who rubbed someone’s bare feet without a second thought and who decided to be part of a commune — on weekends at least — just because it seemed the greatest thing. I certainly can’t imagine living like that today, just like I can’t imagine myself getting into fights about the Vietnam war or joining a protest. Maybe it’s my age, maybe I’m just coming up with excuses to hang back and lay low, but today’s protests seem overly-organized, as if they’ve been appropriated by professionals. There’s a word I haven’t used in a long time: appropriate, as in to take, to own, to possess.

The graduating class of 1985 bought me a present: two little sheep made of stone. They painted the words Draft Card and Affidavit on their sides. I use them as paperweights and sometimes put them in my palm. Dam but these two foolish stones make me sad.

Only a few days ago I got a letter from Melissa. I didn’t open it for hours, just held it up and stared at it. Finally I tore it open. She’s a nurse in Boston. She’s been married and divorced and married and divorced and has two kids. One of them’s named Alex. After me, she wrote. Sometimes, she says, when she sees kids wearing headbands, pretending to be hippies, or when she sees a protest march in front of City Hall or when they play those shows about the sixties on television she says she feels a deep throbbing pain in her chest and can’t help but cry.

Jay, Harold and Sintra, she wrote, live in Pyramid Lake, Nevada. Harold’s stopped the drugs years ago but he’s still skinny, like Mick Jagger. He works part-time in a gas-station somewhere in Reno and people come to watch him because he’s always wearing something different, like a hat with a dead cobra around the top or a vest made of a grey material that he claims is made from an elephant’s foreskin. He must be pushing sixty. Sintra is a short-order cook in a night-club. Jay works as a camp leader for weekend trekkers.

Maybe one day Roncali and I and Francine will swing by and pick up Melissa and her kids in Boston, then drive down to Nevada. Maybe we’ll do a reunion thing. Get everybody to pow-wow on Pyramid Lake. Chase a turtle. Roast marshmallows.

I’ll unfurl the slightly tattered flag with maple leaves instead of stars, the one I’ve saved all these years in an old chest. I’ll throw it over our shoulders and we’ll huddle in front of a fire.

Harold can take our picture while I hug Melissa and Roncali. After the picture is done I know one thing. I won’t let them go. And then I’ll just keep hugging and hugging and hugging. That’s what I’ll do.

Atalanti’s mother made the mistake of telling her neighbor about its lovely shape and soon the whole village of Vamvaku knew that her daughter’s mop was beautiful and budding and wonderfully small. Add to that a seventeen year old girl with thick hair, black eyes, light skin, and skirts cinched tight to her waist and you had all the makings for war. With no father to defend her (he was kicked in the head by a donkey one cold winter and froze to death) men started showing up at her doorstep like birds at a raisin patch.

Her heavy-set half-uncle whose chest hair sprouted up past his neckline asked for her help in collecting tomatoes, a job that required much bending over while Kyrantzis, the pipe-smoking caravan driver, dropped by to offer her a small Venetian doll and a free ride on his best horse – he would sit behind her for good measure. Keris, the accountant, known for his surly moods and even surlier hands, returned a table knife he’d borrowed what, over two years ago? and while Atalanti’s mother offered him a glass of cold water, kept glancing this way and that in the hope of spying the girl herself.

Atalanti couldn’t stay inside her home nor could her mother protect her at all hours. She kept close to the other women when she went to the well for water and tended the sheep within earshot of her home, and if she did occasionally find herself alone she was alert and ready to race back at the slightest provocation. But like sickness and love, men strike at unlikely moments and in unlikely ways.

One afternoon when the breeze rushed through the bamboo shoots and the afternoon light cascaded over the terraced hills of Erymanthos, Atalanti made her way up to the Church of the Virgin – built on the ruins of the ancient temple of Aphrodite – to collect tinderwood. She chose an olive tree so overgrown it resembled an escaped convict, and, with the help of a small axe, she began to chop away at its tangled fuss of branches, singing in a voice fresh as the dawn:

Sorry dear tree

but some of you’s for me (chop)

sorry dear olive

but you’ll still be solid (chop)

She couldn’t have known that at that very moment, inside the dark musty church, a man with eyebrows thick enough to hold a fistful of pebbles was on his knees before the icon of the Virgin (known as the Pharmakolytria in this part of the Peloponnesus) praying for a wife and a baby boy, not necessarily in that order. “Deliver unto me,” he said, “a shovel, a stick, a shiny white goat-bone, and keep away the mop, the cleaner, the broom and the moan.” Rhyming was endemic to these villages.

Pressing his cheek to the surface of the icon he suddenly saw, through a slit in the stone wall, an axe rise into the sky like god’s command. He rushed out into the wizard sun to find Atalanti on her toes, breasts lifted, a slight redness coloring her cheeks and a tuft of black hair peeking out from below her white scarf.

For her part Atalanti sensed the determined forward thrust to his step and crouched instinctively, held up her axe and suddenly the two of them were circling each other, animals sniffing. Fast as a thought, she assessed his looks: the kindness in his cherry-dark eyes meant that his rough hands would be gentle. When he came close enough to smell – a mixture of earth and sweat and something else – she decided to let go of the axe. To her surprise, he picked it up and attacked the olive tree – whip whap whock the axe flew through the air – and branches piled up around them like tresses at a ball. Inside this circle of silver-green he pressed his lips against hers, wrapped one arm around her waist while with the other he squeezed her breasts. In the gentle flutter of leaves Atalanti thought she could hear the goddess Aphrodite wishing her well.

When she returned home, she sat next to the fireplace, tugged at her disheveled hair and tried to clear away the doubts that now crowded her mind. Finally she told her mother that she’d been “assaulted” by an unknown man, most likely from Kastania, the neighboring village.

Her mother stroked her face, kissed her forehead, asked her gently if she had any bruises and when she saw her daughter was fine told her there was little time to lose: “Metal sticks best when it’s hot.” It was just after nightfall when mother and daughter, Kyrantzis, False Father Joacheim and Dimitri the Sleepwalker rode into the neighboring village of Kastania, horses clopping loudly on the cobblestone.

Between the clanging of bells (Kyrantzis’ job) the explosion of muskets (that would be Joacheim), the barking of the dogs (gratis) and the presence of a tall, lithe girl in a white linen dress with petals of jasmine sprinkled through her hair, the whole village gathered quickly and, truth be told, eagerly. A boy scampered up the large oak tree and from that lofty perch dropped grapes on the mortals below.

Atalanti’s mother put both hands on her hips, looked at the villagers and wondered aloud if a certain man had the philotimo to show up. A murmur went through the crowd. They hoped their fellow villager would do them right. All men over sixteen lined up along the square while Atalanti walked by, an officer inspecting the troops. She passed him twice without indicating it, glad to see his hands tremble. In his pajamas, tousled hair and bleary eyes she wanted to spare him embarrassment, but not completely. Finally, after the third inspection, he took a step forward.

“My name is Isidoro.” His voice was hoarse. “I am the son of Haris and Efterpi. I apologize for my behavior.” He cleared his throat. “I was swayed by this woman’s angelic beauty – what man could resist.” The villagers remained silent. Though they were relieved the man had stepped forward on his own, it was not enough.

Like the streams of Erymanthos that can run only downhill, so was there only one available course for Isidoro to take. “I will be back,” he said, then bowed his head, turned on his heels like a soldier and went home. He hadn’t expected that a single urge, played out in the bright afternoon sun could lead to this, but they had given him no choice. While he was getting dressed, Atalanti’s indefatigable mother took his parents to one side and promised them two hectares of land, three embroidered vests and a year’s supply of eggs. Isidoro returned smelling of lemon cologne, dressed in a baggy black suit and a bright red tie. The villagers applauded, clapped him on the back and even Atalanti, who had had her doubts, now yielded to the joy of the moment.

The ceremonies were performed in the village square by a priest whose protests about the hour and the location were silenced by Isidoro himself. As honorary guests from Vamvaku, Joacheim and Dimitri the sleepwalker were allowed to lead the hymnals, but their voices were so hoarse and cracked that many believed Atalanti’s mother had chosen them as punishment for their native son’s wayward ways. After the wedding the villagers sang this:

Star walks with star

like the sun and the moon

like this bride with her groom

Perhaps because having two powerful women on your side cancels the potency of each – the Virgin Pharmakolytria on the one hand and the Goddess Aphrodite on the other – Atalanti was unable to give birth to a boy, a shovel, only to mops. The first girl was fair-skinned with a long straight nose like her mother’s and a questioning look on her face as if she couldn’t quite make out why so many adults were hovering in the skies above. Her existence was treated as a necessary sin, to commit once and then to move on to better things. Isidoro adopted an expression of knowing sadness and lifted his arms into the air as if to say “what can you do?” and then got down to the pleasurable business of making another one.

The second daughter, a tsoupi with curly hair and a strange smile, required more drastic measures than merely sighs and hands lifted into the air. Prompted by insults to his manhood, Isidoro retrieved a thick cord from his shop and when he came home, asked Atalanti to show him her bare back.

“Do you really want to scar me?” Atalanti asked as she unbuttoned her shirt and exposed her swollen breasts.

“They’re already talking,” he said by way of explanation, though he couldn’t keep his eyes off her breasts. “If I don’t punish you, they’ll say I’m not trying hard enough for a boy.”

“Yes, but do you yourself want to cause me pain?”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Yeah, I can see your concern,” she said, and spat at his feet.

Staring at the insolent spittle Isidoro seemed to consider his options.

“Whip me, but once and lightly,” Atalanti offered.

She cupped her breasts and turned. Isidoro paced the room, letting the whip drag along the stone floor, then lifted the whip and brought it down as hard as he could, not once but twice and once again, possessed by a sudden fury. Atalanti cried out in surprise, then without wasting another moment picked up the nearest stool and crashed it down on her husband’s back. With tears of rage she wrenched the whip from his hands, lashed him once on his legs and then whipped the kitchen, sending glasses, dishes and all free-standing objects to the floor. Isidoro huddled in a corner, hands up for protection. “What kind of woman have I married?” Atalanti resembled her ancient namesake who defeated all men – save one – in war and sport. When she was done she threw the whip at Isidoro’s feet, the evil coil’s energy spent.

The following day some of the men came to Isidoro’s shop to congratulate him and offer him their solidarity in the difficult task of taming his wife. They’d heard her cries and knew he’d shown little mercy. “Serves her right for giving you two daughters,” Kyrantzis told him. They pressed for details. “I gave her a full course of Ottoman justice,” he said and they laughed and told him he was an okay guy. Isidoro returned home eager to tell Atalanti that he had been redeemed but she refused to talk and sat half-naked on the edge of the bed, holding a baby girl in each arm. Yellow pus oozed down her back.

*

Though she didn’t like her in the least, for her third child Atalanti decided it was time to call in Fat-Mary, the mid-wife. She was one of those women whose features between the ages of twenty-five and fifty remain more or less the same, with only a few extra pleats on her cheeks to show the years. She had brought over thirty babies into this world, seen three mothers die in labor, knew how to cut umbilical cord with her teeth and how to tie it with a twig and sprinkle it with coffee grinds and ashes to stanch the flow.

“Is Isidoro strong?” Fat Mary had to collect the requisite medical information.

“Strong as the night.”

“Is he like a pick, an axe, or a shovel?”

“Anchor, I’d say.” Isidoro’s thing was splayed, Atalanti continued, it dangled to the right when he walked and widened at the top like an anchor so that when he withdrew sometimes it would hurt.

A lovely hurt, I’m sure, Fat-Mary sighed. “And his juices? Are they adequate?” Sometimes Isidoro filled her mop with wads, but other times there was barely a trickle. Fat-Mary nodded.

Armed with the requisite data, the male-birthing project went into full swing. After each monthly cleansing Atalanti drank the fruit of krataiogono, the power pollen, brought a rabbit’s foot between her legs and rubbed her breasts with fresh goat-bones. Once a month Isidoro ate testicles (ram or goat) and frequently sucked on pomegranate, drank boiled snake-horn, and inhaled sneezeweed. He once dipped his erect shovel in rabbit blood. He always lay facing southwards when he was with Atalanti. She ate cumquats for the boy’s intelligence and avoided lettuce so he wouldn’t be airheaded. Besides the herbs, Atalanti prayed to the Virgin of Preklan, the Virgin of Kordasi and the Virgin of Aradia, to St. John of the Castle and to Saint Bodiless the Angel.

When Atalanti was with child again, Isidoro bought her a jade necklace with a fine silver chain. Fat-Mary decorated the bedroom with cyclamen from the woods and hung up the waxen charms of bells and flutes in the bedroom, along with crucifixes and the haemostati, the figurine that stanched excessive blood flow.

Isidoro’s bronzeware shop was busy not only with repairs of broken scythes, bent plows and snapped combs, but with his songs:

The mansion’s pillar will soon arrive;

no need of dowry or of bribe

two balls of gold hang ‘neath each stride.

When the pains came, Fat-Mary gave Atalanti some herbs to speed up the birth. As for the sex of the child, that was now in god’s hands.

“It’s a difficult one,” she said.

“Liberaaation!” Atalanti cried. “Sweet Virgin, I’ll make forty candles for you and bring them on my knees!” Finally, at the exact moment, expert that she was, Fat-Mary reached deep inside and pulled the baby out with shrieking force. She cut the umbilical cord four fingers up from Atalanti’s stomach, rinsed the baby in luke-warm salt-water which had been boiled with myrrh and rosemary, and put the umbilical cord aside to be used as a charm. Instead of bells between the baby’s legs, there was only a rivulet.

Having heard the baby’s cries, Isidoro came charging in from outside. Fat-Mary was swaddling the baby when Atalanti, wits about her, wedged one of the wax charms from the icon ledge between the child’s legs. Through the thick layers of cloth, the baby now had the proper proportions of a proper shovel.

“What is it? What?” Isidoro’s face was red.

“A boy,” Atalanti said, “can’t you see?” She pointed to the bulge beneath the wrappings.

“My Nicholas! I knew it!” He kissed the baby there, kissed Fat-Mary on her forehead, squeezed his wife’s breasts for good luck, then raced off to the coffee-house and bought drinks for all comers.

Fat-Mary fed the baby’s afterbirth to Poko, their sheepdog. When she returned she put her hands on her hips. “Now what?”

“Let him have his moment. I’ll worry about what to do when I have to.”

For two days Isidoro was kind to his wife, two days that proved to Atalanti she had chosen her husband well. But on the third day Douni the shepherd asked Isidoro how large his baby’s shovel was and that very afternoon he insisted on unswaddling the baby to check for himself. Atalanti avoided looking him in the eye and clutched at her necklace. The scars on her back buzzed with pain. She told Isidoro to leave the house while she prepared the baby for him. Then she bolted the door.

“Come to the window, Isidoro,” she shouted. “A miracle has occurred.” She held the baby up, naked, in front of the window. Isidoro saw the rivulet between the baby’s legs.

“What have you done!”

“You loved the baby when you thought it was a boy. It’s still the same baby.”

Isidoro roared and knocked his head against the wall, then like Achilles mourning for the death of his beloved Patroclus, he clawed the ground for soot and dirt, poured it over his head and sullied his face. “I’ve married a witch!” He spat out a pebble which had fallen from his eyebrow into his mouth. Then he started chopping down their oldest olive tree and when the tree was on it side, he shot Poko, his sheepdog, the same one that had eaten the baby’s placenta. He broke down the door and slapped Atalanti hard across the face, sending her to the floor.

“Wait,” she said, eyes flashing, “you can do better than that!” She retrieved the whip from beneath the sink and gave it to him. “Go ahead. Whip me, and then whip the baby. Maybe you can scare the girl out of it.”

He spat, then mounted his horse, rode through the neighboring villages swearing and whipping his animal, and finally took to the hills. For weeks he was nowhere to be seen. One of the shepherds thought they saw him skulking behind Aphrodite’s temple, but wasn’t certain.

Atalanti realized that her plan had backfired. What had possessed her? “Wait until the furies that possess Isidoro depart for another soul,” Fat-Mary suggested, “then show that you are weak and that you need him.”

But one thing Atalanti couldn’t do was pretend to be weak. So she got herself sick by eating mushrooms that made her throw-up and kept her awake at night until she brought on the twin evils of fever and delirium. When Fat-Mary and her mother tried to make her well, she handed them her three babies and showed them the door. If she wanted to get sick, sick she’d get.

One warm summer night when the cicadas gave out their chicka-chicka call and the nightmoths swooped in front of the lights like wild bats and the ghioni birds hooted their lonely call, Atalanti crawled out her bedroom window and fell to the ground like a moth that’s flown close to a fire. She lay there for hours, collecting her strength. When the moon had risen to its zenith she got up, and hunched and bent, dragged herself past old Salaha’s shed, past the stone sheep pens, over the crenellated earth and the tiered land and finally reached the church of the Pharmakolytria in front of which she kneeled. She held her necklace up and squeezed it. “Me for a boy,” she whispered, “next time take me and give my husband a boy.”

She was distracted by a familiar hoarse voice. She turned her head towards the ruins of Aphrodite’s temple and saw Isidoro standing next to the olive tree where they had first met.

“Atalanti,” he whispered, holding up a candle, “why didn’t you come sooner?” He held the candle up to her face. Her lips were chapped, her neckbones looked like they were piercing her skin and her cheeks were carved with thin lines. He kissed the eyes, lips, and neck, then stopped when he saw blood flowing between her fingers.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said, “I promise. Now let go of the necklace.” Only when tears fell from his face and wetted her hands did she release it. He raced away, dipped his shirt in cool stream water, then drained it over her dry lips and dabbed her hot forehead.

They returned home, separating from each other only when they entered the village so she could take her proper place behind him before the curious citizens of Vamvaku who talked about nothing else than Atalanti’s treachery and Isidoro’s revenge. That she was barely able to stand on her feet already gave some of them a measure of satisfaction.

Her cries that day could be heard all the way to the church of the Virgin and beyond. The whip, the men said, he’s taken the whip to her again. Some of the women said those calls to Christ the Savior and God the Pantocrator could only be the result of a stiff olive branch applied liberally to her nether parts, while still others claimed with confidence that Isidoro was doing it the traditional way, using the wide honest hands with which he came into this world.

But we know otherwise. He whipped the wall while she shouted loud as she could, as if in pain. We also know that the fourth child was baptised Aphrodite (the priest protetested that this was not a Christian name) and their last child was named Mary — no protest.

Jimmy made a living renting his stomach to anyone willing to shell out that extra dollar. He’d wait at the BP station off exit thirteen with a sign: “Rent-a-table: $3.00.” Families going for their picnic were his main customers. They’d pick him up, drive to the Pine Barrens and he’d bulk along best as he could, trailing behind, and catch up to them when they decided to stop. He’d make a clearing in the dirt, lie down, then spread a tablecloth he carried in his coat over his mountainous stomach. The family would get out the food, ketchup and mustard, cokes and root beers. Dollar extra for lying longer than the half-hour. He was good for hills with up to forty percent inclines.

Kids sometimes hung cutlery from his ears.

Back from a picnic run, Jimmy strode into the third floor apartment and lay down in front of the sofa, where his buddy Jake was already sitting, waiting to smoke his cigarette. Jake liked to smoke with his feet up, and automatically stretched his legs on Jimmy’s stomach, soon as the two hundred plus pounds went horizontal.

“Jimmy,” Jake said, exhaling two white streams through his nose, “you’re a goddam land whale.” Jimmy didn’t say nothing. Being a whale was the source of both their livelihoods.

Jake finished his cigarette. “Won’t be needing no ottoman for a few.” He got up, went to the toilet and shut the door behind his words.

From a lying position, Jimmy read the Trenton Times. Read it from front to back, ads, classifieds, world weather reports, Afghanistan, Iraq.

“Jimmy?” Jake’s voice sounded strangely pained from inside the bathroom. “I need me a favor.”

“I’m listening.” He was staring at a picture of a little girl with a head wound.

“Forget it,” Jake said. “I changed my mind.”

Jimmy looked up at the ceiling. A few cobwebs were growing in one corner. Somebody would have to do something about that one day.

“Jimmy? Listen. Okay. What I need, what I really need is for someone to scratch my goddam butt, deep like and hard. I got some kind of real honest-to-goodness pain around there.”

Jimmy rose to his elbows. Had he heard right? “That’s downright un-American, Jake.”

“Forget I ever mentioned it!” Jimmy could hear the toilet-paper unwind. “Look, why don’t you go out and get us a six-pack with the money you made off your stomach.”

By the time Jake had washed up – it took a while because the toilet paper felt like thumbtacks against his inflamed skin – Jimmy was back with a case of Buds.

But he wasn’t alone. Next to him stood a short, well-built middle-aged man with Asian eyes and two legs thick as potatoes.

“Who’s this?” Jake asked Jimmy.

“Tran.”

“And? He lost?” The man’s eyes darted from Jimmy to Jake and then to the only bit of furniture in the room, the couch.

“I was asking the guy at the counter if he sold those wooden hands you use to scratch where your hands can’t reach, right? Tran overheard me. Said he scratches backs for a dollar.”

“A dollar?” Jake shook his head. “Some kind of living.”

“One dahla, one back. Two dahla, two back.”

“You tell old Tran just what I want to scratch?” Jake stared hard at his friend.

Jimmy rubbed his stomach the way he did when he was happy. “Nope. Figure you better tell him, since you’re the one directly concerned.”

***

Jimmy lay down. It took a little balancing at first, but he had these sort of indentations in the fatness of his flesh which could hold two bottles at a time, one leaning against the other.  It’s why they always drank in multiples of two.

Beers at the ready, Jake dropped his pants down to his ankles and lay face forward on the couch. The springs creaked. The couch smelled. Jimmy balanced six bottles on his wide stomach. Tran washed his hands in the sink, then got down to work, glancing with curiosity at the man lying in front of the couch, four Buds sticking up. Americans were always surprising you. For this assignment, he’d demanded of the man an increase.  Two dahla.

He started with Jake’s thighs, rubbing them back and forth, dabbing a little oil on the skin, then he worked on Jake’s spine, and finally ran his fingers around the rim, without however going any deeper.

“Goddam it!” This was Jake. “Goddam it! Vietnam you are worth your salt! Now use those silly little manicured nails of yours!”

Tran dug in, hard. Redness everywhere. Looked like some sort of allergy. Looked like a bomb crater inside his thick flesh, all ragged and exploded. Big, thick, well-fed American butt. Tran thought maybe he should have charged him three dollars.

“Can you believe it  Jimmy?” Jake’s voice was slightly muffled because he was talking into the couch. From his vantage point lying with his back on the floor, Jimmy could only see Tran’s thick legs and the back of his arms.

“Believe what.”

“That a Vietnamese would scratch my butt. Maybe in ten years an Iraqi will be scratching yours.”

Tran spoke. “Some places in the world, with a single dollah you can give life to a whole family for five days.”

“I been reading about that recently,” Jimmy said.

“I think maybe with Tran,” Jake said, twisting his face away from the couch, cheek squashing into his eye, “we can like, do business.” Jimmy felt a burp coming. He cupped the bottles, and let go a deep one. They bounced a little. “You listening Jimmy? Tran you listening too? Here’s how it goes. Jimmy gets money for doing his table thing, right? Tran gets money to scratch people in difficult places, and I’ll do the hard part, the public relations. Table And Scratch will be the name of our corporation. Book our customers. Rich customers. Poor customers. Maybe even Arabs. The good ones.”

Jake twisted his head far up as he could.

“You lookin’ like a hungry snake, Jake,” Jimmy said and tried not to laugh at the unintended rhyme. The bottles rattled.

“Yo, Tran! We’ll all be rich as Bill Gates!”

Tran’s eyes were strangely bright.

All three of them were quiet for a few.

When he was done, Tran washed his hands, took two grimy dollars from Jimmy, then walked quickly out of the apartment. Jimmy and Jake polished off the remaining beers, then promptly fell asleep. Jimmy lay on his back, stomach up, holding a bottle in each hand. Jake slept face down on the couch, holding a stray spring so it wouldn’t dig into his ribs.