Essay for collection entitled

THE GENIUS OF LANGUAGE

Pantheon Books

Version of March, 2003

Growing up bi-lingual meant growing up with two cultures, two opposing identities. The Greek language was, in the first case, the language of politics, meaning the speeches of my father and grandfather. “Greece to the Greeks,” my father cried out in the mid-nineteen-sixties while, in my grandfather’s more apophthegmatic or, in today’s parlance, sound-bite Greek, “The King reigns but the people rule.”

Greek then was their language and they had a famously firm hold on it. Theirs was the language of the humble men who gathered inside our kitchen during campaigns, of modern Athenians with razor-thin ties and dark suits, of women in black with absurdly thick fingers, much thicker and stronger than my mother’s or my half-Polish grandmother’s. These women believed it was their god-given birthright to stretch what little of my flesh they could grab hold of.

Yet it was my mother’s language – Margaret Esther Chant from Elmhurst, Chicago – that ultimately won my heart. When we moved to Greece from Berkeley in the early sixties so my father could enter politics, English automatically became my refuge, a way to protect my embryonic identity. In Richard the Second, Thomas Mowbray reacts to his banishment from England: “Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue”, he says, which is “so deep a maim.” Of course my tongue was not fully imprisoned, since along with an ample supply of books, English was the in-house language.

To this identity I clung tenaciously, chiefly through books. From the British books available in Greece I learned to say “bloody ‘ell” and “Blimey!” (which I was sure derived from a British rendition of Blame Me!) and dreamt about scones and cream and tea at five. American comic-books provided me with the proper expressions when beating up my younger brother Andy. My less than Homeric blows to his small chest were accompanied by rapturous cries of “zap!”, “pow!” and, for the execution, “kablooey!” I was always delighted to discover new words – especially slang. When an American teenager asked me where the toilet was so he could “take a leak,” I was bowled over. I imagined our bodies to be like badly built ships from which water leaked out. When an American family moved in next door – I learned later the father helped put mine in jail – I learned that “man” could be thrown into a sentence just about anywhere, and that “cool” meant, well cool, man.

Yet Greek was all around. The language brought with it all the attendant cultural sidebars – priests grilled alive by Turks, women who jumped off cliffs rather than be taken by the enemy, and the Bridge of Arta, which reminded me of the story of Sisyphus: the bridge would be fixed in the day but would collapse at night, and so a virgin was built into the bridge and this successfully reversed the trend. There was also the story of the World War Two collaborator who chopped and then sold partisans’ heads to the Germans like cabbage. When the war was over the man was caught, sliced lightly all over his skin with razor blades, then buried in a sand dune in Thessaly.

I couldn’t wait to tell my friends “back home” about the lamb we had for a pet, about the sheer steepness of the Isthmus of Corinth, about the shark I saw hanging by a hook on the island of Hydra, about the taste of souvlaki with pita and the caterpillars that hung in white sacks from the branches of pine trees. It took me a few years to realize we weren’t going back to Berkeley and that there really weren’t any friends “on the other side.” That realization however did little to lessen my need to tell someone about everything that was different in Greece. It took me years to realize that the perspective of those non-existent friends living in the States was in fact my own.

But I was most impressed by the enormous crowds that came to listen to my father and my grandfather and through which I learned and imitated a rhetorical speech-making Greek. “Greece of Christian Greeks catholically protestant,” my grandfather hurled at the dictators under house arrest. Even then, at the age of eleven, I marveled at how he squeezed three religions into one, active phrase. Other sayings of his joined the pantheon of national tradition: Many a people has deposed a king; never has a king deposed the people, or All freedoms are allowed save one: the freedom to banish freedom. The rhetorical expertise of both men added pressure on me to speak Greek better than the average, a pressure so daunting that, I now realize, I soon abandoned the effort and threw myself squarely into the camp of the possible.

I remember selecting from my parent’s library the thickest book I could find, presumably because the thickest book would provide me the greatest protection, which is how I ended up reading, at the age of nine, the sorry life of an architect written by someone with an unpronounceable first name, (Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead), but quickly strayed into the adventures of Biggles and the Blyton’s Secret Five, the Hardy Boys and every single Drew Sisters book I could secure from sister, Gayle-Sophia. I refused to call her Sophia and persisted in her nicely American Gayle, after the actress Gayle Storm that my parents had apparently taken a liking to in the fifties she was born. The rest of us had solidly Greek names, Nick, Andy, George.

It was my godfather, also a George, who got me thinking more about language. Why is a spoon called a spoon, he asked. That’s silly, I recall answering, because it’s a spoon! And that’s a fork, so it’s called a fork! I hadn’t yet realized that he was a fan of Magritte’s. I liked my godfather because he looked precisely the way a godfather should look: three-piece suits, a smart tie, a hat, a cane, a well-trimmed mustache, with an distinct air of aristocracy. Do you know what your name means? he asked me when we sat in the dining room in our home in Paleo Psychiko.

“My name means… well it means Nick!”

“But in it’s full version, he offered, what does it really mean?”

“You mean Nicholas?”

“Two words in there. Can you see them?”

“No.”

“Nike and Laos, victor of the people.”

“Cow!” (I didn’t know the whole expression yet). So Greek words really did have secrets!

I was off. I easily pried apart brother George’s first name: Geo for earth and “Orgy” for the verb plough – though I had to look orgy up. George was no more nor less than a farmer. Little Andy with his blonde hair and the black tuft sprouting out from the crown who actually spoke only Greek had a name that meant simply Man, like Oriana Fallaci’s book Un Uomo, about her Greek lover. Sophia however didn’t have a synthetic name and hers meant simply “wisdom.” Names like hers were less fun because there was no puzzle, no secret.

The baker’s wife – Euphony – was fair game. When my sister once came home with a loaf of bread I shouted: “You phony! I bet you didn’t buy it from Mrs.Good-Sound!”  Alexander meant literally Man-Repellent. Thinking I was ahead of the game, I challenged my mother (who was having a harder time with Greek than I was) by demanding she tell me a word I didn’t know, in any language, that. She threw out an easy one at first  — “sludge” I think it was, which I preceded to answer, then came a far more difficult one which I still remember to this day, amazed she knew such a long word. It was the word “eleemosynary.” I admitted defeat. Look it up, she advised. I discovered, to my delight, it had a Greek root – eleimosini, meaning the quality of being charitable or charitableness.

I began to look for English words which were in fact Greek – except that you would never think they were. I made a list of such words: For example the word Cemetery, (kimitirio) simply meant a sleeping place. The word Police, familiar the world over, derived from the word polis. The word zone or “area” was the Greek word for what we wore around our waist – a belt. My all-time favorite is a word you’d never think was Greek: disaster, meaning a bad alignment of the stars.

I started to drive the family nuts by finding words that either sounded awful or made a lot of noise when you said them loudly, since I had now become the most word-infected family member:

Dad stop making all that cacophony!

Mom, that souvlaki’s really gonna hurt my esophagus!

I can’t concentrate with all the sussurus from your newspaper!

Dad sometimes you are a pompous pop!

For a brash statement like that I could get popped myself, since my father, especially on his return from America was growing less and less beholden to American child psychologists and had reverted more and more to the traditional forms of control — Ottoman law – as we called it, applied sporadically but effectively with the help of a zoni (belt) to our behinds.

Once I had worked on first names (Cleanthes – bouquet, Calliope – Beautful-faced) there appeared a whole new treasure where I least expected it: Greek surnames. With my sister, we would translate surnames to see how dumb they sounded in English: Mister Kalovelonis was Mister Goodneedle, while Mister Kalambokis was his Royal Highness Mister Corn. Our all-time favorites were the derogatory surnames like Mrs Low-Butt and Mrs Fat-butt, the famous Buttley sisters, like my mother’s high-school heroines, the Andrew Sisters. (Or is that Andrews with an ess?)

The last name of one of my father’s deputies made no sense but was certainly fun to say, if you could spit it out without stuttering: Papapanayotou. Three pa’s in a row: try them apples on for size. Our surname, with it’s double papa (our great grandfather was a priest hence the Papa) was nothing compared to Mister Papapanayotou. My gleeful rendition of his name each day caused it to be repeated by nearly all the household for no real reason. “Oh dear Mister Papapanayotou,” my mother would exclaim for no reason.

When he showed up one night, my father made a big thing of introducing him to me, then did me the awesome favor of actually adding yet another “pah” to the train. For days I savored the delightful extra – Papa -pa!-panayotou. I don’t think the owner of the surname thought twice about this delicious distortion, but I treasured it for weeks and kept seeing my father’s slight grin as he machine-gunned the whole thing into the hallway – specifically for my pleasure. In a way I was being acknowledged as the family’s linguist.

During the dictatorship (1967-1974), with father in jail, we called on our American side of the family to visit us. One such member was a medal-studded Lieutenant-Colonel who had just returned from service in Vietnam. Walking around Athens with all six-foot five of him, in full military decoration, ignoring curfew, we were able finally to stand outside Averoff prison on Alexandras’ street where my father was being held. This was not only a thrill, a small act of revenge, but reinforced the sense that that distant country of English-speakers offered more protection than this one.

We moved to Sweden in 1968 –  after my father, with the help of President Johnson who was quoted as saying, in full Texan drawl – “let that dam sunuvabitch out” –  was amnestied by the dictators. That’s where I dipped briefly but excitedly into the Englishness of that language. For a twelve-year old loosed on Stockholm, besides the blatant and unheard of pix of full-breasted vix which hung on just about every newsstand in the city, I was transfixed by certain words, like those for Entrance and Exit – the blatancy of the infart and utfart strewn all over the place. Yet my favorite from that short sojourn (one dark winter) I quickly rooted out. Adolescence is nothing if not the delight of the scatological (Greek for “study of excrement” as opposed to eschatological, the theology of death or endings). The word for constipation in Swedish was ferstoppning, which meant exactly what it said, thank you.

We ended up in Canada in the last year of the decade, under the good graces of the then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who offered political asylum to my father if he wouldn’t overdo his criticism of America – a restraint my father was unable to follow.

Strangely enough, or perhaps not so strangely, my real home, the one I thought as my real home was for many years the country of Canada. And Canadians – well they spoke pretty much like we did but to my great delight, not exactly. When I played basketball the referee might shout “Eeyoot of Boonds!” for “Out of Bounds!” Objects were “yea high,” highways had “soft shoulders,” and a decent-sized snowplow weighed “two ton” without the pluralizing ess. You could talk like you were a hardware employee showing a customer the goods and get away with it: “Well there, you’ve got your Phillips Screw and your five inch dead bolt…” The wonderful possessive your gave you instant ownership over all such male objects. There was also a machine called a “snowblower” which besides snow, would churn out pebbles, animals and, in at least one James Bond film, a couple of bad humans. Snowmobiles raced across the snow at night in the vast white space – an upgraded version of Dr Zhivago.

Going to school in rural Ontario I learned that the business end of a scythe was called a snath, that Viceroy butterflies look like Monarchs but don’t have the same flight pattern and that Lord Strathcona drove the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway on November 7, 1885. Swamps were called muskegs, a frozen pond thundered when you walked on it, trapped air bubbles looked like crystal balls, a hockey puck traveled up to a hundred miles an hour, a solid slapshot was as satisfying as any slam dunk, and contrary to popular wisdom, when it got really cold it didn’t snow.

Driving along Route 13 in King City one cold afternoon, we passed the small kimitirio with its snow-laden crosses sticking up like frozen spinning jacks. I turned to my mother. “Mom, when I die, this is where I want to be buried.” Not in Berkeley, not in Greece, not in Sweden but here, in King City, Ontario. I had never seen her cry before because of something I said.

It was in Canada I first heard a third but instantly recognizable language, one which I sort of knew without ever having learned it. It was the language of the English spoken by first-generation Greeks, what the community of bi-culturals like me now informally calls Gringlish.

Gringlish usually takes English verbs or even nouns and pops them directly into the sentence: Will you park the car becomes, in Gringlish, “Tha kanis park to caro?” How many blocks away do you live becomes “Posa blockya makria?”

I dislike the word Gringlish because it sounds like a combination of two evil heroes– Grendel and the Grinch. I prefer a word of my own invention, which is perhaps derogatory but more to the point: Dinerese. In the Greek diners across Route One along the East Coast, in Chicago or in Florida, beginning with perhaps the most famous Greek eatery in Astoria, the Neptune Diner, (nested neatly beneath the Triboro Bridge), you can still hear this language.

“The Greek people,” a phrase much liked and much used by my father, in Dinerese becomes “the Greek peep.” Greeks love the peep. Peeps of the world unite. Long live the peep. Fast-speaking Greeks dismiss the distance between words. Like a hut kupukuffee? No, you sumunabeets? (son of a…)

My favorite interchange occurred while in college, when a Greek-Greek who had learned English only from his law books and who worked part-time at a Greek pizza place in New Haven encountered a true-blood American. The conversation went something like this, best as I can recall:

Ordered a double cheese ‘zah, half-pep, half anch.

I am sorry. What was that?’

Half-pep half-anch, man. The full spread.

I’m sorry. I don’t speak colloquial

You don’t speak what?

Slang. That’s it. I don’t speak slang.

Who’s speaking slang? I’m speaking English.

Do you mock me, sir? Do you deride me?

C’mon man! I just want my ‘zah!

You think you’re in your home you can talk like this?

Man this ain’t no home, this is Athenian effing Pizza last time I looked. Which planet you from?

Planet is the ancient Greek word for wanderer, sir. I know precisely my origins sir, from Arta, in Western Greece, sir, where they once built the bridge.

Sheesh! Get back on that ship and return to wherever…!

Strangely enough, the Greek I had learned as a kid in the “home” country, was a passport into restaurants, brought sudden connections in with others who’s surnames began with Papa or ended with opoulos, and afforded me instant, no-questions-asked entry into a distinctly raunchy world of night-clubs owned or run by Greeks, places called Mykonos, Zorba’s, or Towson Pizza. Wherever I traveled in America, I was sure to pop into a Greek restaurant or diner where I take temporary refuge from the strangeness of the world.

The burden of the Greek language continued to weigh on me even during my college years. I was now called upon to represent my father who was climbing the steps to the palace of power as chief opposition leader back in Greece, hell-bent on bringing “change.” At caucuses and fund-raisers in hard-core Greek-American communities I would blithely reel off the party’s triple objectives: “National Independence,” “Popular Rule”, and “Socialist Transformation.”

One particular location to which I was obliged to return to time and again was Crystal Palace in Astoria, Queens. The Crystal Palace was the prime location for thousands of Greek-American events over the past two to three decades: political rallies, wedding receptions, dances, baptisms, a Coppolian ethnic-American setting of sheer kitsch. Much later I realized that there once existed a real Crystal Palace, built over a hundred and fifty years ago in England, “the crystal edifice that can never be destroyed” as Dostoyevsky puts in the Underground Man. Though I am no longer enmeshed in that particular strain of ethnic America called Astoria (and though Astoria has now lost much of its Greekness), back then I culled a small bit of satisfaction from my secret knowledge of this indirect link to the Russian writer.

.***

By the age of twenty-nine I acquired yet another language. A Ph.D. in economics taught me everything there was to know about transcendental logarithmic cost functions, variance covariance matrices and three stage least squares estimators. Except for my first years in Greece, I hadn’t really spent much there, besides summers and election campaigns. With studies completed my deferment expired and in the mid eighties I returned for my military service, exactly a week after defending my doctorate in one of those movie-perfect ivy league campuses. I could have relied on my American citizenship to avoid military service altogether, but such an act would have been highly unpatriotic and second, I actually liked the idea of wearing a uniform and carrying a gun and not reading yet another economics article. There was also this: I imagined bumping into an officer who had arrested my father the night of the coup, the same one who had pointed a machine gun at my face. The thought excited me. I am sorry to report that such a meeting never occurred and that the extreme right-wing officers saluted me as I did them. There was also the added weight that my father was not only prime minister, but minister of defense. Their former enemy was no their boss.

That’s how I found myself on the island of Lemnos, in Northern Greece, inducted into the Greek Air Force. The island, the home of Poseidon, was honed of jagged volcanic rock that jutted up into the sky like broken teeth. The old women living inland looked like ghosts from the medieval age and would draw their when strangers like me passed by. Lobster, perch, bream and octopus were as plentiful as fresh bread and olive oil, and just as cheap. Thanks to Melina Mercouri, Minister of Culture, the old Venetian castle in the main town was lit up at night and from the tiny window of my barracks, it seemed to float in the sky like a fantastical spaceship.

The barracks themselves were full of raw eighteen year olds who spoke with distinct regional accents. I immediately felt like an intruder, a jokester, a false twin who would soon be discovered to be an American pretending to be the Prime Minister’s son. As the son of the highly nationalistic leader, I was supposed to be the automatic expert on all matters Greek, to know the Heroes of the Revolution, to know which minister served what post and what year, and worst of all, to make no grammatical mistakes on all the documents for which, as chief accountant for the base, I was now responsible.

Yet for all the pressure, there was one tremendous benefit for a word-infected person like me: Army slang. Greek army slang.  “With someone else’s ass it’s easy to pretend your gay,” I heard one soldier say after the commander ordered him to clean the latrines for a second time. Another soldier who stubbed his toe shouted in the middle of the night: “Screw the donkey that ate Christ’s palm fronds on the road to Nazareth!” If you dropped your rifle you would most likely think of God and shout “Screw the Virgin Mary’s Ear!” This was a reference to Immaculate Conception. I recalled hearing somewhere that certain Fathers of the Church once held that such a conception had occurred via the good Mary’s auricular orifice.

Not that the soldiers had no sense of their ancient heritage. For the changing of the guard our passwords were as follows:

Halt! Who goes!

Hercules!

Achilles!

Patroclus!

These were things the Turks, the enemy about fifty kilometers away, were supposed to have no idea about and would never answer properly.

My greatest fear at the time was to be called up in front of the thousand or so soldiers before lights out to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Because of all the back and forth between countries, I had missed the teaching of it in either language and for the life of me couldn’t remember it. Each night, standing in line with the rest of the soldiers, the commander would call out a name at random and ask the specified “grunt” to come recite the prayer. While waiting for the name to be called, I would try to remember the prayer, filling in the empty Greek parts with what I remembered in English, then translating it back into Greek. But this was a puzzle not done under pressure, next to a thousand breathing bodies. Fortunately the stars were not once in disorder. My name was never called.

***

All this was a rich linguistic pillow in which to sleep at night. When I finally decided to write, in English of course, I realized that the friction of the two languages which had caused my such anxiety had great value. I could convert the trivial cliché of one language into the metaphorically rich of the other. A clever person is an “eagle’s talon,” a tall man is a “Cypress-lad,” a piano is “tooth-mattress,” the earth is an “ant-sphere,” a boy’s erect penis is a “fakir’s flute.” “Never scowl at the lowest steps,” a saying goes, “since you need them to get to the palace.”

I discovered rhyming couplets from the island of Crete which I tried to translate:

Others shrivel up from the times, the wars and years

but me, I shrivel up with the pains and the fears.

The wind beats my clothes and the sun eats my knives

and a small little love eats up my insides

There was gold then in them thar  hills. “I can hear the smell,” a village woman once told me when the wind brought with it bits of the sea. I was shocked by the confounding of  the senses. She had just expressed what philosophers call “synaesthesia”, where one sense “leaks into” the other. (Ah, there’s that unexpected four letter word coming back at me). I came across a more literary example of a synesthete in Nabokov’s autobiography Speak Memory in which he tells of seeing colors when he hears the alphabet pronounced – a trait he refers to as “colored hearing” oraudition colorée in French which, I guess, sounds more sophisticated.

***

My Greek grandmother, Sophia Mineiko Papandreou, half-Greek and half-Polish, offered me a name of someone she once knew, a little girl named Eulaliah. The prefix ef, meaning good, is joined with the word lalia, meaning speech. It sounded the name of a Faulkner character. I did actually meet a Eulalia, on the island of Syros, with its Catholic and Orthodox churches competing for space in the crowded architecture of the city. I was presenting my first book A Crowded Heart, written in English but translated into Greek. A white-haired actor who was known for his Oedipus had been chosen to read a section from my book. His training caused him to shout paragraphs at the top of his voice, drag vowels, exaggerate questions, accentuate the full stops with anger, and turn a lowly bit of dialogue into high drama. Once the applause subsided, an applause which rivaled his efforts, he took a seat next to me. While others continued to speak about my book – the mayor, a deputy from my father’s party, a high-school teacher with two books of poetry under his belt, and god knows how many others, he struck up a loud conversation with me –  as if we weren’t sitting in full view of the public. I kept hunching down in the hope that this obvious body language would induce him to lower his voice but to no avail. Suddenly he squeezed my thigh excitedly. “See that girl there, over there, with the dark hair and those eyes? You see her? She once had a speech impediment but I corrected it with four years of lessons in orthophony(proper enunciation). Take one guess what her name is.” That’s how I met the only Eulaliah I have ever known. I even got the chance to sign her name in my book – which I did with a calligraphic flourish. She was indeed a tall, dark-haired beauty and she did indeed speak with perfect diction, the way a Eulaliah should, but nope I never saw her again.

Lalia in Greek means voice or language or tongue.  In the Swedish the word for Speak is Tala. Tala svensk? In Danish Lalle is a drunken person’s babble. When I started to learn some Spanish I thought I heard an echo of Lalia in Habla with that la at the end of it. From a Brazilian acquaintance I heard Fala for talk. Think Parler. Or parlance.

One summer, back in Greece between college years, I visited the pine-filled island of Skiathos. A fisherman took me to his favorite beach – Lalaria. Why is it called Lalaria I asked? He had an answer – when doesn’t a Greek?  “You see those rocks there?” He pointed to large round stones like ostrich eggs that formed the beach. “When the sea hits those stones they talk. La la. Close your eyes and listen.”

I think all members of my family have been partly wounded by language: Brother George, in the words of his detractors, “is our first Minister of Foreign Affairs who actually speaks a secondlanguage – Greek.” My mother doesn’t “do” television interviews because she is worried she will place a feminine pronoun to a masculine noun and this, after leading the Greek woman’s movement for decades. My sister has escaped to Canada and her little son now speaks fluent “Canadian.” For a long time, my younger brother Andreas prepared his economics classes at the university down to the last word, so that he didn’t make any grammatical mistakes. My father, burdened with the suspicion that he was too American after twenty years in the States, commanded both languages fluently. Ironically enough he was perhaps the only member who never worried that the “mistake bird” of language would sit on his shoulder.

I now treasure the full-time split. English acts as a passport into unexplored territory, the terrain of my fictional Greece, the Greece of my memory, the Greece of my childhood.

Rosa, I have a confession to make. That’s why I’m talking to you, why I’m holding your picture, the one from Henry’s thirteenth birthday party. Today I broke my promise. Today I told Henry. Let me explain.

Remember when we first came to see our property in King City? Yes, you’ve heard this part before, but let me tell it again, don’t talk back. You read me the sign on Jane street — you knew some English: Population 1,000, Growing with Canada. “A country still growing,” you said, shaking your head and laughing. I laughed too, though I didn’t really understand. You’re smarter than me, I admit. You stared at the empty land the government sold to us for two hundred dollars, pointed your finger at it and said, “Mario, here we build a home.” I was so happy that I ran into the land doing cartwheels and back flips, ignoring the thistles and milkweed. When I returned my face and legs were scratched, remember?

“Mario, you are crazy,” you said, “this is Canada now. You must never reveal your past. You don’t want to be sent back, do you?” I listened to you, when did I not? Maybe it would have been better for both of us if I hadn’t. Maybe I would have been kinder to you all these years, maybe the strength of my hands would have exhausted itself in the tight grip of another funambulista like myself. I bite my hand for every time I hit you.

So I became a Canadian. I learned the right size ring-dog to attach to a chain, the allowable tension for two-inch cabling, the cracking heat of cinder-blocks and the minimum air pressure for an earth mover’s tire. I waded into swamps and tied chains to trees, I dug gullies for pipes along Highway 401 and stood next to the heat of fresh asphalt in the midday sun. I came across a dusty moth big enough to smother my face in its clothy wings.

I had accidents that could only happen here: a buzzsaw flew out of my hand and sliced some flesh from my arm; our lawnmower tipped over and shaved off half a finger. You know it well.

I never once let on I was an acrobat, that I knew how to kip, spin and fly through the air, hang from up high and land on the strongman’s shoulders after doing two somersaults. All these years I fought the urge to break into a handstand during lunch time or balance myself on a tall branch or leap off the back of a truck with a full body flip, pick up my equipment and walk away as if nothing happened. I was the Paisano. I accepted this, just as you accepted other things, wasn’t that the way? You must have  known I longed for the ache in my knees from hanging on the trapeze, the pounding in my head when I dove in the air like a bird, that I needed to feel my legs hurt from the good pain of exercise and not the bad pain of work, I wanted to feel my calves bulging, watch the muscles beneath my thighs arch like dolphins, listen to the long applause of a crowd. Forget that, you said this is Canada.

Ah. This is Canada, a blessed country. You can tangle your fingers in strands of grass and tear off the top layer of earth like lifting a wig from a head. In twenty-four hours it’s grown back. I cleared acres and acres of thistle, tore up and replanted trees, transformed an angry swamp into a serene golf course. I gave this land shape, I subdued it. When I drive along the Fifteenth Concession or Jane Street I’m in the company of trees I’ve planted. Grass is green because of me. But I don’t know how to help Henry grow into a man. For this, I need you.

*

One night I had to go searching for him. I found him playing on the small pond at King’s Cross Estates. The kids park their parents’ expensive cars to light up the pond, engines running, high beams shining against their hockey shirts. These are nearly men that Henry plays against. I watched for a while. They threw him to the ice, they slashed the stick from his hands, pushed him off the pond and into the snow where he sprawled forward on his skates, trying to keep his balance, hands waving like a windmill. Why did you buy him the equipment? I see the ice skates which cost me two weeks of work for that Milanese Natale, who values only the strength in my legs and the width of my back, and I wonder how you ever convinced me to give you the money. You had your ways, Rosa, you had your ways. Now he’s bought himself the shoulder pads. He has the knobby-fingered gloves, the hard plastic helmet, and now the bulky shoulder pads. This isn’t a sport, this is a costume party.

Yesterday, on the way home, I hit him again. I’d already slapped his face when I walked straight out onto the pond to get him, you know me. Someone said something about eye-ties and Mussolini but I ignored that, I’m not that crazy. Eye-ties, you see? Henry will always be an Italian, never a Canadian. When we came home I tried to make it up to him. I wrapped black electrical tape around his hockey stick. “This stick,” I told him, “she has more cracks in it than the  Sistine Chapel.”

“Yeah, and she’s that old, too,” he replied, shaking his long brown hair the way he does when talks back. Welts rose up on his face. “At school they think we’re poor.”

They think we’re poor because his hockey stick is cracked. I told him I went to school barefoot, shared schoolbooks with my three brothers, wrote on both sides of the paper with a pencil no bigger than a bean, and wore the same pair of pants for the whole year.

“Yeah, well this is Canada, dad!” he shouted before I’d finished. I slapped him. “I hate soccer!” he shouted, “I hate Italy! I hate you!”

I wish you were here to tell him stories. About Giacomo Sorcanera beating Marietta because the newborn baby had blues eyes like his brother’s or about Filomena Sapone who suckled her five-year old in the village square. Words would pour out of your mouth even though the asthma tired you, your eyes would burn, your breath would shorten but you’d keep talking.

You were my Sicily, Rosa.

From you Henry learned about Niccolo Ciccavo, who went to jail four times, each time earning greater respect, about the Candeloro family who sold their land to send their only son, Luigi, to Rome to become a doctor and how Luigi lost all the money in a single Scopone game; Verdone Perrili who promised to wait until his mother died to get married but died before she did; Battista Lo Posto, the village philosopher with five different kinds of sleeplessness; Giacinto Barleta who when the Russians put a man into space, dug a small hole in his father’s grave and shouted him the news. Now you’re gone. Sicily is gone.

Sometimes he crawls into my bed and calls your name. I cannot have him sleeping on your side Rosa, I cannot bear another heart beating next to mine, so I kick him out. I am not a good father. Was I good husband? Didn’t I make you happy? Remember when you hit me over the head with the Virgin’s Meditations book? “You’re right, Rosa,” was all I said. You weren’t afraid of me, even after everything. Henry’s eyes are large and brown like yours, with long eyelashes that I’ve never seen on a boy.

My English is worse. I don’t watch television because of the empty sofa. Sometimes Henry has to remind me to do the shopping. I’m no good in the supermarket which has so many things. I always choose the wrong thing, so I bring Henry along because he knows what to buy and how much. He’s smart when he wants to be..

*

I hope you will understand me now Rosa when I tell you how it all happened. Yesterday me and the new boy from Alberta cleared an area of forest to make way for a radio antenna. That Albertan, he’s muscular, a true Canadian, he’s something to behold, with a lithe waist, a haughty demeanor and broad, confident shoulders. In a circus he’d be the strongman.

We walked deep into the forest, until we reached a tall oak tree with a red ribbon tied to it. Yellow fungus grew on trunks like bloated tongues; an army of ants trooped along the frayed edge of a decaying log. I inhaled the dusky odor of the leaves and damp forest. Suddenly I grabbed hold of a branch and swung up the trunk. I started to rise higher and higher, reaching, angling, clawing, like climbing the metal rungs of the trapeze post, remember? Leaves brushed against my face, my hands grew red from clenching the coarse wood, the dank wetness of the tree closed in on me like a blanket. I climbed until I could no longer hear the Albertan shouting at me to come down. Up there the darkness gave way to a sun big as Canada. Trees covered the land in a haze of green. I reached the crown of the tree and it swayed from my weight. I wanted to do something crazy Rosa. I wondered how many somersaults it would take to fall to the ground, I wondered if I could leap across to the neighboring tree with a one-and-a half gainer or if my hands would slip when I reached the branch. Then I heard something and looked up.

A large bird flew in slow circular movements as if it had all the time in the world. It coasted in the air, soaring round and round, graceful in its solitude. A single, faint flap of its sizable wings was enough keep it aloft. It seemed charmed.

“Eh, paisano Tarzano!” The Albertan was shouting. I started to climb down. The taste of bark was still strong in my mouth and my face stung from the leaves. When I reached the bottom I felt light. The bird had lifted something heavy from inside me, Rosa. And what I did next, I couldn’t help. I did a flip. Right in front of the Albertan. And then two more. He asked me where I learned to do that.

“In Sicily,” I told him. But that wasn’t how they found out about my past. I told the police myself. No wait, don’t protest. Listen.

*

When I returned from work that day the circus was still inside me. I took off my steel-toed construction boots, the jeans with the thick red-checkered lining you bought for me at the IGA, ungreased my hands and naked, a thick-legged, hard-butted beast, rummaged through the attic for my old uniform. I found the leotard and sweatshirt, the one that says “Il Grande Roncali” on the back. I hunched my body to slip into the straps and I straightened up gently to make sure the material didn’t rip. The stitches yielded up a smell of sweat from a hundred ancient performances. The uniform snuck into my crotch and suffocated my thighs, but the old thing held. Not a perfect fit but still a fit.

Remember when you pointed to the telephone wires along the roads and said “We’re in Canada now, you see Mario, every house has a telephone?” When I stared at the wires all I could think of was walking across them. When we had just arrived such a feat would have been easy to perform. My muscles were less bulky and my balance was as sensitive as a gyroscope. How many mornings had I stared at them from the bedroom window?

I went outside and sat beneath the post. I looked at the knots running up it. After all those years in the forest, I can read a tree, even a naked one like the post, I can imagine the branches full with life, I can picture the serrated edges of the leaves, the veins on each leaf. I was already a third of the way along the post before I realized what I was doing. I was climbing up like a caterpillar, using the ghosts of the knots as meager footholds, my arms and legs working in automatic union like they should. I didn’t care anymore, Rosa, do you understand? I didn’t care who found out. Halfway up I stopped for a breather. The plastic cones that held the three separate telephone lines taut looked like small white birds. I climbed some more.

Finally I was up. The tip of the telephone pole across the street rose above the wires like a mast. There was no safety net below. Foolishly, as if I were still the young acrobat, I stood. A gust of wind caused me to careen forward, and for a moment I imagined the ground rushing up to my face, the bright September sky and trees tumbling around me. But I didn’t fall. Arms spinning in the air like propellers, one leg unhinged, the other slipping, I crouched into myself, hugged my knees and instantly regained the blessed center of my personal gravity. It’s one thing to climb up a living birch and know that you might pass through soft wet leaves and branches, and at the end, land on a fat floor of humus; it’s another to be standing in the wind atop a skinny telephone pole with nothing but three invisible wires between me and the hard earth. Fifteen years Rosa, fifteen. I am allowed a little fear, no?

I saw the top of our A-frame, the chimneys rising from the King’s Cross Estates, and the cypresses around the small cemetery where we buried you and I remembered the smell of clove in your mouth when I kissed you for the last time. I stared at the post across the street and then I imagined the next post, lost somewhere in the trees; I imagined a whole fleet of them stretching clear across Canada, connecting King City to Vancouver. The idea that a massive grid of posts and wires connected the vast empty spaces of Canada would make you happy, Rosa, you who loved the telephone.

That’s how my courage returned. Bastardi! I shouted. Come to Canada, come to King City, come see the construction worker walk across the sky, you, Schwartz and your cows, you, Currans and your eleven carrot-headed children, you, Natales, and everybody who ever thought I was just a paisano, come see me now, come see Il Grande Roncali. And you know what? They did.

First came the Hobson boy. Next, three of the Curran girls showed up, pedaling their bicycles furiously toward me, their dresses ballooning in the air, their fiercely braided hair bouncing like rope around their shoulders. And Schwartz too, driving his Gravely along the side of the road, knees sticking out like a grasshopper.

“Roncali,” he said, twisting his head up, “what in the devil are you doing there dressed like that?” I don’t think he ever turned his head up so high in his life, I could almost hear the folds of flesh in his neck creak.

Lights flashed. The Mounties — a carload of them — halted behind Hobson’s pick-up. From above they all looked the same, the same shiny shaved faces, brown hats, tight-fitting shirts and riding pants with a black stripe down the seam, the kind of pants Il Duce himself like to wear, remember? One of them returned spoke through the megaphone attached to the squad car’s roof. Officer Fred Colson. Don’t you love those Canadian names? Roy Farquahar, Richard Eckersely, Brian McDougall; what about real names, like Giacobbe Losurdo, Antonio Ranocchia, Baldovino Sciarappa, names that fill your mouth when you say them, names that are alive, warm, names that reveal a story. Henry Roncali!

“This is Officer Colson. Would you please return to the ground?”

He said this as if he was asking for more milk in his coffee. In Sicily if a man climbed a telephone post, children would shout, the priest would perform a blessing, the old women would cross themselves, maybe the carabinieri would shoot a rifle into the air, and afterwards, afterwards the whole village would have earned still one more story to tell its children and grandchildren.

Then I heard Henry’s voice. He was scared, his voice was accusing, insistent.

With one foot on the post and one on the wire, head over my shoulder, I turned slowly to show him my sweatshirt and the name across the back. “Do you think I was born wearing construction boots?” I shouted. He stared with those eyes of his, of yours, the long lashes, the carbon eyebrows, the dark complexion. “This is better than counting the stitches on a goalie’s face, eh?”

After that, which direction was there for me but straight ahead? I extended my arms and stepped with both feet onto the wire. It sagged One of the Curran girls brought her hands to her eyes.Dio Bon! A small wave coursed through the wire, bounced off the post and I bent my knees to absorb the returning hump. This is something I have never done before, walk across a sagging highwire. When I reached the middle I think I was down a foot and I was swaying in a slight horizontal arc. I used all the muscles in my tremulous legs to stop the swaying. I imagined a heavy weight dangling from my waist, holding the symmetry of my body dead center. Step by wobbly step I proceeded to cross the wire. The wire dipped again but I didn’t hesitate, I had mastered the peculiar physics of a loose highwire. So I walked across the sky just as the sun was coming down. It was like the ending of an Italian movie, Rosa. I don’t remember if they applauded when I reached the other side. I didn’t care. I came down, caterpillar fashion. Henry was staring at me with a strange expression on his face, as if he didn’t recognize me.

Officer Colson said simply, “You’re under arrest,” and then asked me to get into the squad car. For disturbing traffic and endangering citizens. What traffic? What citizens? They would have paid for me to do it over again.

I told them everything. I told them that I worked for Mussolini and that the Duce himself used to come watch me perform. That I had pictures of us together. Colson said he didn’t care about my past, do you hear that? And all this time we thought we were hiding a great secret from them.

They asked about the bruises on the boy’s face. I told them it was only a slap. “There’s a slap and there’s a slap,” Officer Colson answered, when he set me free the next morning. He thinks he’s pretty smart with that slap and slap business. This is Canada, Rosa where they can tell a father how to raise his child. Henry stayed with the O’Haras for the night.

It was Barney O’Hara who told Henry about Mussolini. He told him Mussolini was a fascist. He’s right. But what could I tell him? That I was one too? That Benito used to be my hero and the hero of so many others in our village? I showed him the picture, the one where I’m in my uniform, surrounded by carabinieri and soldiers and Il Duce who is shaking hands with me, his chest full of medals. On the back of the picture it said: “Il Grande Roncali e Il Duce.”

“You mean Mussolini,” Henry said, “Is that why you used to hit mom so much?” I wanted to tell him that my grandfather Giancarlo had marked his first wide on her face because she once burned his food and that my father had locked me up in the attic for two days without water because I took the Virgin’s name in vain, but I didn’t. Instead I tore the picture up. We made a bonfire behind the house and burned some things. There was one book with a thick cover that wouldn’t burn, the pages were so glossy. Then, when it caught, the pages turned and one by one. Pictures of our expedition to Ethiopia, soldiers marching through water with their rifles above their heads, drawings of maps, sketches of battle plans. Henry stared while it burned. The pages curled and turned to ash. Then I burned something else, I hope you will forgive me. I took all your clothes, the dresses, the shoes, all your things that stared at me in the closet every morning — they were no longer you, they were empty. Henry didn’t say a word.

Later, when the last embers glowed, he said now that he knew I was an acrobat to show him how to do a kip. Did I have a choice? With palms flat on the ground and elbows back I kipped up and went into a somersault. The first time he tried a kip he fell; the third time, with a little help from me, he made it. He learns fast. He has balance, it’s hereditary.

I told him how I gather all my strength into my legs, Rosa; how I feel my calves and thighs grow tight as a cord. I have legs like the Colossus of Rhodes. At my peak I could rise to a meter and twenty centimeters above ground.

I explained to him the art of the full-body somersault.

The trick is the take-off and the landing. All the horizontal power of the run must be converted into upward motion, I run as hard as I can and then — mmmph! — I hit an invisible wall and lift up into the air with so much strength I think I’ll keep going on forever. This I call the Right Angle of Triumph.

After the run and the lift into the air, I am upside down. The ground is close and threatening with its unforgiving hardness. My feet point to the skies, my hair hangs down and my head is heavy. I turn like a satellite in space, slowly, slowly, and then I come up and meet the earth. If it’s done perfectly I am already standing, standing straight, Rosa, a man.

And here was great old Piraeus. Ships lined up along the quay like an apartment complex with high rises and low-rises and chimney stacks scattered here and there. Men pushed carts in front of departing ferry boats, in case passengers hungered for sugar cane, almonds, cashews, pistachios, dried apricots. Islanders with overflowing families arrived with dreams stuffed into their overflowing suitcases. Women carried bags with kataifi and baklava to sweeten their sudden appearance at the door of unsuspecting relatives. Men just off the ships walked into small polypoleiaand wondered what sort of jobs were available. Some walked right up to the gates of the Hercules Cement Company or the Bodosaki shipyards or the Mobil Oil refineries and asked for work. It was 1960 and all of Greece was on the move.

For the islanders the first thing they saw coming into port was the tall Niarchos building. Most of them had never seen anything over four stories and this building was at least twice as tall and three times as wide and many commented on whether Niarchos had really killed his wife or whether she had died on her own. From their holds the ships unloaded crates of tile from Italy, cars from Germany, radios from Minnesotta, bright orange tractors with fresh-smelling tires from Iowa, round metal drums of chemicals from Holland; and in exchange they took on wheat to North Africa, pieces of marble big as a truck to the mastercavers in Italy, crates of olives and olive oil, manganese, aluminum and aluminium, tin, phosphorus and limestone, and wads and wads of cotton to the ports of Rotterdam, Bristol, Southampton, the Hague and Hamburg.

Not everybody was arriving those years. Many were leaving. Sometimes a young boy, an adolescent, departed from his home in Piraeus with only a hundred drachmas in his pocket and six months later his parents would receive a telegram telling them he’d just docked in Shanghai or Havana or New York or Puerto del Fuego or Mozambique and that for the last half year he’d worked as a moutsos aboard the SS Orion or the SS Hercules and that he missed them and his sister and his friend Aris, and his parents, who’d suspected as much, because when they recalled their son’s mood in the weeks preceeding his departure they did detect a certain aloofness. Only then did they find, beneath his mattress, an Atlas with lines connecting cities across the seas, all of them radiating out like a great spoke, from the port of Piraeus. They knew that the captain’s of most ships weren’t averse to letting a young man test himself on the great oceans of the world, after all they knew what kind of men Greece needed and they knew the call of the sea because they too had answered that call years ago, before they became captains. Most on the ship believed such boys brought good luck, these boys who boarded with hope and a questing countenance that noticed everything, from the length of the masts to the balls of rope, from the links of the chains to the hum of the engines.This lent a little lustre and glamour to their jobs, the boys’ fawning awe and desperate fascination.

How many young men have clattered up the narrow slatted base of the sliding stairs and asked the captain for berth in exchange for kitchen duty, engine mate, or simply deck swabbing? And when the ropes are tossed off the metal stays, when the ship hoots and the chains rattle and the propellers churn and the great behemoth lumbers slowly out of the great port, taking a long while before the last ship is out of sight, past the stretch along the mainland, past Sounion, past the rocky and raw islands and then on down to the Suez canal or past the Rock of Gibraltar along the shores of Africa, docking for two nights at the Ivory Coast where the boy purchases a colorful shawl for his mother whom he has suddenly missed and three bagfuls of nuts for less than two drachmas or docking in the port of Liberia where everybody spoke English and had American names and spent dollars, or trading a pack of American cigarettes for a night with a woman in Santiago or clothes for a wooden carving from an old man in the port of Shanghai.

Andreas was one of those who came to Piraeus from the islands, with his parents and his three sisters, Ioulia, Varvara, and the eldest, Smaragdi who’d married Dimitris the policeman from the sixth precinct in Pireas. He himself had considered boarding a ship and busting butt out of here but since his older brother’s death of drowning — the best sponger in Hydra — Andreas wanted nothing to do with the sea. He was afraid of it. Spongers told of waves big as buildings crashing against the hull of ships and cracking the metal like it was made of clay; of monster sightings in the Gulf of Corinth and the Ionian Sea, stories of great beasts latching onto ships and tipping them over and then swallowing survivors like they were bits of bread like bait, ready for the taking. Pireaus was solid, the mainland, and there was no need for Andreas ever to board a ship or anything that floated again, anything that roiled and heaved and spilled you into the cold depths.

What he needed most he couldn’t have – something else, something he couldn’t quite define. Each time he thought he had it in his hands, like a soft ball of clay or a solid watermelon, that’s how certain he was that this aching inside was about to disappear, and then it would appear again, larger and more aching than ever. He was certain that this aching, this strange longing, which came usually at night when he stared out at the port and listened to the hoot of ships arriving or leaving, could be quenched and satisfied in the embrace of a woman and so convinced was he of this palliative that he often ended up in just such an embrace, only to find that the ache would return the following night, more insistent, calling him once more and then again he would leave his home in search of something he soon knew he would never find, but he couldn’t stop himself from searching.

It might hit him in the morning, when his head was clear. His job was to scrub the hulls of trawlers in the shipyards. Sometimes he’d be rubbing back and forth and the steady motion would bring another kind of motion to mind and he would push himself up against the hard hull as if he were reaching high up for a difficult spot and the need was so great that he would nearly faint and the pressure of his pelvis against the ship both soothed and excited him and there were times when he was certain he wouldn’t make it until the night. The curve of the hull, the feel of the wet shammy rag in his hand, the way the mussels stuck to the ship with such tenacity, the pile of open barnacles strewn at his feet, this for him were signs that man was born with woman’s open legs in their heads, inside the never-ending folds of the brain. Even those folds reminded him of a woman; somedays every fold, every curve and sinewy shape, everything that arched, turned and curled brought the idea of woman to his mind. Not a particular woman, but this other being, so different than him. He was sure that god had imprinted the idea of woman into man’s brain, like food. The days when the shammyrag felt full and swollen in his palm, when it felt he was holding a live object in his hand, that smelled of wet sea and felt like the softness of something slick, that’s when he began to see mountza everywhere, everywhere a woman’s mountza.

He blamed his sisters too. They slept in his room and it was wrong for women, even sisters, to lay in beds so close to a man. Only a few nights ago, while he lay sprawled on his hard bed, his mind dazed by two kilos of retsina and three hours of bouzouki, Varvara, the older sister, sighed and moaned as if Neptune himself had entered her dreams and when the moon rose and its beams searched out and discovered a direct line through the window, he saw the firm marble-colored flesh of her breasts heaving like the sea and he stilled a long cry of desire and shame by stuffing his mouth with his fist.

We are poor, Andreas thought. Poverty was god’s punishment to man. Poverty meant no shower, no kitchen, and no room for him to sleep in nor to bring a woman home. Poverty meant sleeping in the same small bedroom with his sisters, four saints, and a snail.

Why would anyone have made a decision to locate him on the corner of Drama and Aghiou Dimitriou, stuck between buildings, leaning like a cripple against the wall, one sock on one foot, the other in his hand, full of a longing that he himself couldn’t decipher.

He had grown however into one of the well known tough guys, better known as the ace of Pireas. Those who knew him knew he drank retsina instead of ouzo, sprinkled oregano on his goat cheese, spat on his shoes to keep them shiny and wore his shirt open to expose his mother’s crucifix.

After last night’s sortie, in the company of men hunched over like bent spoons as they danced, it was a wonder that he was up this fine Sunday morning, but up he was, making chortling noises in the water-filled sink, and, as if he hadn’t been carried to bed by his sisters because his own  motor had simply stopped running, as if his ears weren’t buzzing, he strolled out the front door just as an amber sun rose over Pireas. Still, he was so tired his face had already reached his feet.

The ace didn’t like getting drunk so often, but did he have any choice? Each night someone in the world went down that road, and he was doing his part, fulfilling the world-wide quota of Saturday night drunks. If it wasn’t him, it would be someone else.

He headed toward the harbor.

Soon enough, relief was in sight: behind a passing tram, behind an overturned boat, between massive ships and mounds of netting, the first glimpse of the sea, a sea which was sometimes silver-grey, sometimes dark deep blue or sometimes light as the heavens. A quickened step carried him over the traintracks and there, with the city of Pireas at his back, the sea, was once again his, glittering like crushed glass in the early morning light. Sitting on one of the bronzed stays, next to the custom house, he listened. There was something comforting in the rhythmic sound of water slapping against the wharf, in the sight of fishermen mending their nets, and in the rugged voices of the stevedores helping the large ships dock.

He hadn’t been sitting there for more than a half hour when he noticed a poster of Aliki Vouyouklaki, the kitten-like actress, plastered on the old custom building’s wall. Her short dress, her kid-like pony-tails, her white teeth and her smooth face instantly reminded him of Anna, Angelou’s daughter. Both the actress and Anna had this impish femininity, child-like innocence trapped inside a body made for sin.

Andreas had never been with a woman like Anna, you know, proper, educated, soft-spoken, well-dressed, hard-working. In Anna he believed he could quench this unfathomable longing for something that he couldn’t quite define. She’d just returned from boarding school that week and he’d seen her sitting primly on her porch with her legs together, a pyramid of beauty, exposing the fringed white lace of her slip. She was the perfect seven. Two knees, two palms, two perfect breasts. Plus one perfect forehead. In all of Pireas you wouldn’t find more than a handful of girls like her.

Suddenly he stood, pressed his cheek against Aliki’s face and closed his eyes. Ignoring the scrabbly surface pushing through the poster he drew in his breath. From the cusom station’s yard came a strong smell, full of colors, like a bouquet of wild flowers. That’s how Anna would smell.

The ace returned home at a fast pace, stopping only for a moment at Mouslopoulos’ aroma store. He waved to the Coffinas brothers who were banging nails into wood. Tsaka Tsouka had already passed by with his cart, he could tell from the sunflower seeds that children were spitting out.

He had known Anna for three years but the idea of something more permanent suddenly possessed a powerful logic. Anna gave off this bright yellow color, like a small sun. But her countenance, which seemed to him demure and calm by day, returned to him by night through the gashy haze of his sleep, her face now distorted by anxious desire, her eyes wanton and bright, her lips full and red. Perhaps he was confusing his many women with this single one.

A bird from Ramfos’ garden cried a strange warbling cry. As if this were a signal, the ace left the home and with a strong gait, heart pounding in his ears, crossed the street. The evenings sounds grew sharper; boys playing soccer shouted “Pass! Pass!” From somewhere behind the houses a man shouted that he would sharpen knives for half a drachma; in the distance, the deep blare of a ship, and from an open window came the scratchy voice of the old hash-smoking singer, Tsitsanis.

With that bright chipmunk called hope gnawing at his heart, he ran his fingers through his hair, skipped up the four steps to Anna’s home and banged on the door. The door unlocked with two turns.

“May I help you?” Anna’s father’s tall form filled the entrance. His face was pale and dry, with blotchy violet liver spots. His bony hand gripped the door, not quite opening all the way.

“I’d like to speak to Anna.” The ace pushed the door but the old man held it firmly in place.

“Speak to me.” He looked as tough as gnarled wood.

“Anna, please.”

“Anna please?” he repeated. “What is my daughter, something on a menu? Miss Angelou to you.”

The ace drew in his breath and looked down. The father’s shoes were spotlessly clean, the worn laces carefully tied.

“May I speak to Miss Angelou?”

“There’s only one reason a man like you asks to speak to my daughter. Am I right?”

Without hesitating, without thinking, he answered. “Yes.” What else could he say?

“Father, who is it?” His breath quickened. A girlish intonation, but also a woman’s full and confident voice. His hand rose automatically to touch the small bottle of perfume inside his jacket. He searched for her but saw only a painting of a ship caught between two gigantic white-topped waves.

“I have something for her,” The ace said, bringing out the small glass flask of perfume. He imagined Anna’s red-face, her bright eyes looking up at him expectantly, her golden-brown hair swept back to reveal her honest forehead, her skirt lifting above her knees, the sound of her stockings sifting as she came to greet him.

The old man exhaled.

“Look, when my daughter chased you around, she was only twelve and didn’t know any better. Back then I didn’t mind. Besides, back then you held out promise.” The man tried to close the door but the ace didn’t let him. “My daughter is not available,” he said. “She didn’t return from boarding school so she could end up with a man who drinks all night long. She’s not meant for an ace, let alone the ace of Tambouria.”

The bottle slipped from the ace’s fingers and landed on his foot. He stared at it and wondered how it got there. The father bent down to get it and when he straightened up, pressed it gently back into the ace’s hand.

“Look, no harm meant,” the father added, “it’s just that my daughter is special to me.”

“Zero plus zero makes zero,” The ace managed to say without shouting and then with a tremendous effort turned away sharply before Anna’s father had a chance to say anything more.

He stood in the street and looked up at the door which now seemed shut forever. He heard a loud crack, a sound loud as a gunshot. Shards of wet glass glittered next to his shoes. He’d hurled the bottle of perfume against the asphalt. The Leotsakou boys ran around him like excited puppies and pointed to the broken glass. One of them bent down to examine the broken bottle and the ace slapped his head. “Eh, get lost!” They ran off, one of them holding a large piece of the bottle in the air, a trophy.

He tramped into the run-down sections of Tambouria. The walls were still pocked from bullets from the Civil War. From somewhere nearby came muffled laughter and the austere notes of a bouzouki. He picked up his pace and reached the steps to the basement entrance, which was guarded by a knee-high gate. When he bent to walk down he recalled Anna’s father stooping for the perfume, he recalled the man’s neat polished shoes. He lifted his head and spat.

Through the low window the ace saw Maki and Kyr-Vassili at their usual table, their faces bright from drink. Already he felt better. Down the narrow stone steps he went. A pack of grizzled faces lifted their heads when he entered and nodded their heads. Cardsharps, gamblers, hashish smokers, singers, a few working aces like himself, they were all here. In one corner a large man exhaled two tusks of white smoke from his nostrils. Home at last.

“Eh, what’s the matter with you,” Kyr-Vassili said when he saw him come in. “You look different tonight. Pssst! Are you listening?”

“What’s the matter with me?” The ace sat down with them. “What’s the matter with you? When’s the last time any of you bums tasted fresh fruit? I mean real fresh?”

“Dried fig’s what I’ve been tasting.” Captain Yanni said. “Dried up old fig. Can’t afford anything else.”

“Better a dried fig than a Peloponnesian cucumber,” said Kyr-Vassili.

“I don’t like cucumber,” Captain Yanni said, “bitter stuff.”

“Maki loves cucumber,” Kyr-Vassili said and stared at a dirty-blonde haired youth. “I’ve seen him coming out of Achillia’s.”

“I heard that Achillia keeps butterfly wings in matchboxes,” Captain Yanni said.

“Yeah, and feathers above his doorway,” Kyr-Vassili added, raising his elbows and clucking like a chicken.

Captain Yanni sang, “Fag loves a fag, slut loves a slut, but Maki the stag will hunt any butt.”

The ace put money on the table and the waiter brought another bottle.

“I knocked on a proper woman’s door tonight,” he said after downing his third glass. “When the door opened and the father saw me, dressed in my good shirt,” he paused and poured another retsina, “he thought I’d come to ask him for her hand! Just because an ace knows how to dress they imagine all kinds of things. Me! Asking for a life sentence! Me, asking for a life of sweet talk, dinners with relatives, walks in the park, children… All I want is a good woman, the kind that shoot craps and fry their fish in garlic and beet sauce, the kind that won’t care if I curse.” They all shook their heads in sympathy. “The father was lucky he wasn’t any younger. I’d have ground his cheek against the asphalt and shown him an ant’s perspective of Psarron street.” The ace wiped his neck and sniffed his palm. The scent of perfume lingered there.

“An ace never votes for tyranny,” the Captain said.

“To the democracy of bachelors.” Kyr-Vassili lifted his glass.

“To Andreas,” Captain Yanni said. “May he never join the respectable classes.” They raised their glasses.

The ace drew some bills from his wallet, licked them, and with a light slap placed them on the foreheads of each of the musicians — a squat accordionist and a gaunt bouzouki player, who nodded their heads in thanks. The ace then stood in front of them, and head down, as if looking at the floor, arms extended, hunching low, began to dance. He gained speed, spun and filled the room with his body. He grabbed a glass, put it on the floor, sank to his knees, clenched the glass between his teeth, lifted his head back, emptied the contents into his mouth, and then flung the empty glass away with a toss of his head. The glass tumbled through the air, bounced off someone’s shoulder and landed on the floor without breaking. He grabbed another glass and threw it directly onto the floor. This one shattered instantly and shards ricocheted through the room, hitting the musicians’ feet. Satisfied, he sat down, ordered more wine and a replacement for the glasses while the boy swept away the damage.

The ace closed his eyes and listened to the man singing. The man had a voice that could bring an ache into every man’s heart. Rather than leave the ace in his solitude, Kyr-Vassili, started saying something about women and bachelorhood.

“I’ve had enough of all of you!” With a single swipe of his hand the ace cleared the table of its contents — bottles, glasses, plates, olives, toothpicks – and sent the whole thing to the floor. A man g stopped dancing. The ace glared at him. “C’mon,” he said, fists up, head erect, “you dance like a woman!” The man, dressed in a poor, shabby suit, shrugged, looked the other way and sat down.

The boy swept up the damage, like he did every night for men who got into these moods. The ace stood a while longer, grabbed a bottle from a passing tray, excused himself and left. He swayed so much climbing up the basement steps that he held onto the railing so he didn’t tumble.

Outside he slapped himself. There was no sting. He checked his pocketbook just in case he’d miscalculated and recounted the money he’d spent: musician’s foreheads, bottles of wine, perfume, and the new shirt he was wearing. Like all men leaving the bouzouki house, he was broke. Not even two hundred drachmas for Aphrodite or Brigitte, in whose wallowing embrace he would find some comfort.

In front of the Church of Aghia Triada he crossed himself, kissed his fingers and sat in the middle of the square to finish the bottle. Swishing the retsina around his mouth he finally let the liquid slide down his throat and leaned over to bring the cuff of his pants as close as he could to his nose, inhaling the smell of perfume that had spilled there. Wasn’t all of Tambouria animated by Anna’s spirit? These streets, this very square in which he now sat were hers. She too had grown up here. He never paid attention to her when she was just a knobby-kneed, hair-chewing girl with a crush on a slightly older man, never noticed her when she brought him a basketful of fruits and vegetables from her village each Sunday afternoon. A woman of her purity could possess all of Tambouria. Own it. He got to his feet and held the retsina bottle up.

“I, the ace of Tambouria,” he shouted, “now cede to you, Anna, all my rights!” He took a swig. “Do you here me out there? Anna, for you! All this!” He spread his arms. “From the church of Aghia Triada to the port of Pireas, from the Koffinas Brothers to the Arkadia Theater, this is now your domain!”

A window flew open. “Shut the hell up down there! Some of us have to work, you know!”

“Yeah?” the ace shouted back. “I’m at work right now!” He made the sign of the cross. “I christen you Anna, Queen of Tambouria,” he said, sprinkling the rest of the retsina in the air like a priest with his censer blessing his flock. Maybe she would be willing to share, fifty-fifty. He, the night-bound roamer and she, the daytime pearl. He sat down again.

Ah, what he would give for a woman, just a single a glance at one, his eyes fastening on her legs, the swell of breast, the shake of her head when she realized he was staring, the quickening of her steps, the huffy denial when he murmured something dirty. He cradled the empty bottle and rocked back and forth.

Finally he stood and headed up Macedonia Boulevard. Next to the California movie theater he came across a poster of Aliki Vouyouklaki like the one he’d seen this morning. “Anna,” he said “Anna.”

Bits of poster still clenched in his fists, he tumbled from wall to wall and continued to wander through a maze of narrow and dirty streets. Here the houses were so old that the balconies leaned downwards ready to collapse. There would be no Anna for him. Those were ridiculous dreams not brought on by him but by that strange ache that haunted him when he drank.

It was three in the morning when he knocked on Achillia’s door. The ace imagined Achillia bent over the back of a chair, pants around his ankles and hands curled around the chair’s feet, shouting and swearing as the ace took him with the force of a piston. He knocked again and heard the shuffle of slippers across the floor. He drew in his breath and waited for the door to open.

Nobody knew much about his past, except that he’d been on the losing side of the civil war. Something of his good looks still remained, but now they were haunted by a pale unhealthy skin, thin sallow cheeks and eyes that glared out from beneath a deep forehead. Those first days after his release from prison, Ramfos slept on a wooden bench in the port of Piraeus, beneath an old palm tree with thick scales of bark. One morning he was so hungry he tore off one of the scales and tried to eat it, like it was a sandwich. He spit it out and for the rest of the day his stomach ached. That night he scared away some cats and took from them two half-eaten fish heads. An old man named Kollias who had fought the Germans in both wars sat him down in the kitchen of his tavern and let him eat all he wanted. “The war’s over, even the Civil War,” Kollias said to the other men, who kept their gaze away from him Ramfos in case the police came by later to ask questions.

Dressed in gray pants and a long-sleeve white shirt given to him by the prison priest, Ramfos took up residence in an empty lot located two blocks away from Kollias, at the intersection of Psarron and Macedonia Street. From bits of newspaper, chicken wire, cardboard and mud from the earth itself, he built a small hut. A large slice of corrugated aluminum from Kollias’ cousin served as a roof. For company he befriended two of the cats whose food he had stolen.

For gainful employment he helped the fishermen collect their nets early in the morning while the sun glinted off the sea. In return he received half a kilo of fish, which he cooked in Kollias’ kitchen. He soon became a native, like Mitsaftis the Lawyer who roamed the corridors of prisons and courts to pick up business, Pipi the Rebel, a ship’s captain with a university degree who served time for smuggling cigarettes and who now shined shoes for a living, and Paranga who lived inside an old boat at the edge of the port and collected bottle caps for a small company that would melt them down and turn them into knick-knacks. His nickname: Ramfos the Gimp – because of his pronounced limp.

While collecting nets or frying fish or sweeping up the dirt from inside his shack, he sometimes emitted a long low sound that arose from the vicinity of his chest, more like a glow of sound than a sound itself. For Ramfos the Gimp was once Ramfos the golden-tongue. His crystalline voice had given heart to dozens of men, a voice that rose above the clash of sabres, rifleshots, and men’s cries. For the bloody Easter of 1948 he sang mass for hundreds of bearded men who kneeled and crossed themselves in front of him in dignified respect. A partisan told Ramfos that one day people will gather in the Red Square to hear him sing.

Near the end, with defeat closing around them like rushing waters, partisans fled the borders in thousands but Ramfos stayed behind. Alone in the hills of Northern Greece, living off berries and nuts he’d learned to collect next to his bearded leader, he sang for Varvara, a legendary woman who, it was said, once led hundreds of poor Russians against the Germans. She wore brown boots, a long dark skirt, a military shirt and a red bandanna across her forehead. Ramfos was finally brought in by the gendarmerie. His next few years were a fog of beatings. He stopped talking to the criminals who smoked and the political prisoners who watched each other to see who would betray whom, but he did speak to his Varvara. There were mornings when the sun woke him and then she seemed to be living in his very cell. When he stood and stretched he knew she was watching him and when he paced about she was hovering at his shoulder and when the jailers beat his feet and head, she caressed his forehead and made his sleep in spite of the grinding pain that shook his body.

In one of those coincidences that fate likes to hold out for us to prove she’s still around in the twentieth century, it so happened that a year after Ramfos made his little hut in the empty lot, made his little life on the docks of Piraeus and avoided trouble at the precinct, the Kalafati family from Hydra moved into the building across from him. There were two daughters, one of whom was called Varvara.

She wore short dresses, chewed gum, and, by watching through the cracks inside his shack, he knew she had many gentleman callers. Dressed in a blue apron, she would leave in the morning at six-thirty for the Papastratos Cigarette factory and return at five, usually with a shopping bag or a Romantzo magazine under her arm. At night her voice carried across to his empty lot and he would lie down on the stone and rubble next to the half-crumbling wall and listen even as the stars filled the sky of Piraeus.

Now that he had discovered a living Varvara, he began to sing again, but not with his voice. The prison punishments had made this impossible – the wet rags of urine stuffed down his throat, the direct punches to his larynx (they knew he was a singer) and the burning cigarette butts they made him swallow to burn the throat on the way to the stomach. But the song appeared in many forms nevertheless: in the strong arch of his body when he extended his arm to the gulls that raced down to pick the scraps of fish from between his fingers; in the lessening of his limp, in the way he lingered in the tavern kitchen after dinner just to listen to the clink and clash of cutlery and the laughter of other men; in the simple fact that he suddenly discovered an ancient invention: the mirror, an invention which revealed a younger-looking man than he had ever seen before, a man in serious need of a haircut and a shave.

He discovered yet another invention: cologne, which he purchased for two and half drachmas from Stavros Mouslopoulos’s aromato-poieon. This he slapped on his face and neck whenever he had the opportunity to walk past Varvara’s home, which was often, just in case the winds and the gods sent his scent in her direction and made her think of him or at least made her wonder who was wearing such a sharp aroma.

But though he could do something about his appearance, there wasn’t much to hide the fact that he lived in an empty lot inside a dismal shack. He saw the hut through Varvara’s eyes — the dirty cement blocks for chairs, the cardboard box for a table, the smell of iodine that wafted in from outside, the two cats that slept next to the pail of water, the earthen floor with two ant mounds he had to dig at regularly to root out. Only a torn picture of his dead parents in their village made the hut anything more than a particular configuration of mud, wood, and cardboard. No, Varvara would never accept a man who lived in a place like this.

But the heart rarely listens to such logic, especially the heart of Ramfos who once sang from the mountaintops of Epirus and Thessaly to fighting men, who dreamed of the Varvara of his songs for six years in his cell.

Sunday mornings in church were the only time he got to see Varvara. He had bought himself a clean black suit and a tie and he would sit a few rows behind the Kalafati family, unable to take his eyes off Varvara. On Sundays she dressed in white, with white stockings, high-heeled shoes, and had her hair done up in a bun with a butterfly clip. Once he got close enough to see a stray wisp of hair curling around her ear lobe and shape of her ear, like a seashell.

From the cracks inside his shack Ramfos saw and heard many things: Varvara carrying groceries, Varvara’s laughter exploding in the night, Varvara reading the magazines Sunday afternoon on the porch, Varvara telling her brother to stop drinking, Varvara gossiping with her sister. His whole life became Varvara, as it had been for the last six years. And when the daily hum of work settled down and only the occasional hoot of a ship arriving from a distant port unsettled the night, he would stare at the stars through the holes in the shack.

One spring day when he had returned from tarring the trolley tracks in Paraskevaidou Square and was washing his head with a pail of water, he saw Varvara hanging out the wash. Her skirt lifted as she clipped T-shirts, pants, and underwear to the line. She took an extraordinarily long time to hang up the clothes and what, was she whistling a tune or just chewing gum? Before entering the house she stood at the top of the stairs, tossed her hair and looked over in his direction. The sun was behind her and he couldn’t be sure but he thought she smiled at him before she disappeared inside.

From that moment on Ramfos didn’t know what he was doing. His head hurt where they had clubbed him, his vision faded like when the pain was too great, but instead of going limp like inside the blank walls of the sixth precinct, he felt strong and determined.

Suddenly he plucked daisies from his land, and next thing he knew he was crossing Psarron Street, bouquet in hand. His speed caused his limp to vanish, so great was his forward momentum. Without a knock he pushed open the door. She sat alone in the kitchen, wearing a summery yellow dress. He handed her the flowers, went down on his knees, grabbed her hand, and pressed it to his mouth. It smelled of soap and made Ramfos dizzy. He swayed on his knees.

She didn’t pull her hand away but let his strangely warm lips press against her skin.

“I was once a communist,” Ramfos said, still on his knees, holding her hand with both of his, “but I was never a thief. I have no house and I live on the piece of land you see each morning.” He looked up at her. Her eyes fluttered, her face blushed, and she pulled her hand away. “I will love you until I die,” he added. He was surprised at how easily he had spoken, that the slight lisp (two of his teeth were missing) didn’t show, that his Greek was correct, and that his voice was loud and forceful.

“You have such a strange voice,” were the first words she spoke. “I hadn’t realized…”

“Yes, yes,” Ramfos replied, “but do you love me?”

“Do I love you?” She brought her hand to her face to hide a smile. “How can I?”

“You’re Varvara, that’s why, and Varvara loves me.”

“Look I know you were hurt in prison…I’m sorry, I…”

Ramfos was still on his knees and with some considerable pain got to his feet. “Will you go for a walk with me this Sunday?”

“A walk?”

“Yes, a promenade, so the men can see you’re mine, so all of Piraeus can know the news, that Varvara and Ramfos are soon to be joined in eternal union.” Beneath his brow Varvara could see the blaze of a man, though a quick glance at the rest of him seemed to argue against that.

“I’m so sorry,” Varvara said, looking into his eyes with what seemed to him honest sadness. “I can’t.”

“Because of my limp? Because of my poor home?”

“No,” she said quickly, touching his forehead with her hand, “because I’m already spoken for.”

“Of course! Of course! All those gentlemen callers, surely I should have thought one of them would get lucky.” He slapped his forehead and stood, bumping into the small black boudoir in the living room. “But it wasn’t me that came over here, it was the song, the song you know.”

“The song?” Varvara seemed perfectly calm, as if men came into her life like this every day.

“The song of Varvara.”

“Sing it for me.”

“I can’t. It’s a silly song really, it’s about a different Varvara, I’m sorry for bothering you. And besides, I haven’t sung in ten years. They wouldn’t let me you know.”

“Who wouldn’t. Oh, you mean the prison…”

“Yes, the prison, the prison, the prison!”

He walked backwards, his limp worse than usual. He nearly fell and for support he grabbed at the rug hanging from the wall, pulling it off the wall.

“What are you doing, you strange strange man?”

“I’m sorry,” he said and stepped on what felt like bread crumbs. He barely made it out the front door because now his limp really got in the way. He crossed the street without looking back, sensing her eyes on him and he hobbled in a horribly painful way, his body and his leg and his head bobbling up and down this way and that, and he imagined he looked like a small boat in a tempest, that’s what he was, no better than a small boat in a storm with waves crashing in on all sides and smothering him and suffocating him and how he wanted to be inside his hut and bury his face on a bed, if he had one.

He ducked his frame inside his low shack, sat awkwardly on the cinder blocks, his bad leg straight out – which throbbed around the bullet wound, pulsed with jagged sheering jolts of pain — and held his head. The flesh of his feet were crawlingly alive — where they had once beaten him with sand-filled socks — and his stomach heaved. He grasped the small cross hanging from his neck, the one his mother had given him before he went into the mountains to fight the Germans.

So that’s what she thought of him, a strange strange man. But she had touched his forehead, hadn’t she? Ramfos squeezed one of the cats hard. Was she really spoken for? Why hadn’t he heard? Surely Mouslopoulos or Kollias would have known. But had he asked them?

A loud wail caused him to jump. The cat had raced out of the shack, but it wasn’t the cat that had made the sound. It was not a song but a cry, and the wail continued even as he walked, bent, around the shack. It was his own voice.

With every note the throbbing drained from his head, his stiff leg relaxed and the pain on his feet faded. He brought his hand to his mouth, embarrassed that Varvara would hear such a strange howling, but after a struggle he gave up and let his voice and the songs of the Partisans spread through his chest, pulsate through his limbs, rise up through his mouth like a balm. Let the policemen arrest him, he couldn’t stop singing, not now.

When Ramfos left, Varvara washed her hand with a thick loaf of green soap, and then, hovering over the mist from a boiling pot of lentil beans, she grew impatient for Ioulia and Andreas to return so she could tell them that the crazy Ramfos from across the way had proposed to her. She recalled his limp, the stutter when he spoke, his painful “I-I-I,” the slobbery kiss on her hand, the way he could barely stand after kneeling because of the leg, his terrible crashing sound when he fell inside the living room and felt insulted that such a clumsy, inexpert man had the gall to consider himself her equal, that he had the audacity to propose to her when so many other men waited for months and months before getting to that point. Still, she thought, there was something about that sallow face and those haunting eyes.

When Varvara heard the wailing voice, at first she thought that some passing car was playing the radio very loud, or that a fire-fighting ship had raced into the port of Piraeus to douse a ship’s flames. She was excited that two things might happen on the very same day. But the sound persisted and seemed so close that she looked outside her window. Ramfos was sitting on the sidewalk, his mouth open. His full powerful tenor penetrated the walls, flung open the cheap shutters, made the windows shiver, the silverware shake and the glass quiver.

Pipi the shoe-polisher stopped his shouts of “shoe shine!” and plopped his wooden board next to Ramfos. The two Kafasi brothers stopped their hammering and lifted their heads to listen, then raced over. Mister Vanakou and his three sons, all of whom had fought in the mountains and now worked long hours as construction workers, rushed over and listened with bright eyes. Maria Arvaniti looked both ways before leaving her house. A partisan from the mountains whose husband had been killed by the rightists and whose son had been born in the mountains during the Civil War, Maria covered her boy’s ears. She didn’t want him to hear such  songs, nor to learn about the Civil War. But soon she was overcome, her hands slipped from her son’s ears, and, in a trance, she walked outside and plunked herself down next to Ramfos, who continued to sing.

Simeon the Armenian came (he sold threads, chocolates, combs, kites and toys) and told his wife to shut the shop for the day because someone was singing about Armenia, his lost country. Stavraki Mouslopoulos locked his aroma store and when he arrived he wondered if a voice like that could be put into a bottle and sold as perfume; Vouyouka handed out fresh bread and the Kafasi brothers supplied chairs for the older ones who wanted to sit. Tsimbirlis who, after twenty years on the ships and the Oceans of the World had opened up a bird store, ran so fast in the direction of the wailing voice that he left the cages unlocked and the birds all escaped, except for the flamingo, two white pelicans, and Boufo the Eagle Owl. (Still, years later, a mynah bird or a sparrow hawk would appear on balconies or clotheslines and then people would remember Ramfos and his songs.) Even Dimitri the policeman, Varvara’s brother-in-law, knew why there had been a war against fellows like this one.

Ramfos stood for hours, until the sun began to set. In his rough callused fingers he held bits of yellow netting and tugged and tore at its hexagonal formations.

When Varvara appeared – followed closely by Ioulia her sister and Andreas her brother, Ramfos’ voice grew louder and more melodious, as if his chest were about to burst. Some policemen wandered through the crowd, muttered something, but soon they too were listening. It grew dark and still Ramfos sang. Ioulia wondered that the stars were unembarrassed to show themselves at night when here was something as beautiful as Ramfos songs. Andreas, Varvara’s brother, wondered that a man could be so unafraid to sing, unafraid to love.

For Varvara each note, each soft melody, each deep reverberation in her chest shook her. She was proud that the whole neighborhood knew he was singing his love for her. She regretted ever having promised herself to that other man but Ioulia told her not to be too sad because if she hadn’t promised herself to someone else they would never had had this voice.

Ramfos disappeared from the neighborhood for a week. When he appeared again his face was even thinner than before and his ribs seemed to poke through his worn white shirt, the gift from the prison priest. His hair was up in spikes and his eyes were dark from sleeplessness. But the ache inside him was still there. At work he recalled when he had sung mass for the partisans and “Yes sir, that boy is a hero, a blessed one,” and the other men clapping him on his head or touching his cheeks before going off to battle at a quick gallop and rubbing their good luck tokens on his hand, his body, his legs, trying to rub some of his good luck and take it with them and maybe they took it all away.

But like the small weeds that spring through the cracks in cement or the way even the most barren ground slowly grows over, first with small fauna and then wild grass, and poppies and fields of daisies and then a bush or a tree, so did the memory of Varvara across the street get covered up with the layers of new memories, except that whenever he had enough money to pay for a girl, he would ask them to wash their bodies with that thick olive soap that Varvara had washed her hands with that day he’d pressed it to his lips. You know which soap, the green bars that cost less than a drachma and are sold by the kilo at Mouslopoulos.

A week on Zakynthos

The night I arrived on the island of Zakynthos for Easter the Hale-Bopp comet was still visible, racing rapidly away from earth. Just the day before, I was told, great winds had carried sands from Northern Africa to Greece and the particles lent the nightsky an eerie yellow glow.

I stayed in the small mountain village of Aghious Pantes (All-Saints) about twenty kilometres inland. My hosts were farmers, an extended family complete with grandparents, parents and four children, aged three to twelve. The first morning (and every morning after that) I was woken by the rough cackle of cloistered chickens, the barking of hunting dogs and the occasional rifle shot. On this island of national poets, famous playwrights and heroic revolutionaries, Easter and hunting season had arrived at the same time.

The valley below the village was a palette of greens – the silver green of olive, the harsh green of cypress and the yellowy-green of weeping willow. The bountiful rains had given life to countless wildflowers and countless colors: daisies, bugles and all sorts of bristling thistles bent to the winds like god was blessing them.

The natural world seemed even more magical because of grandmother Aphroditi’s food. Her brick-oven saturated all meals with a wonderful burnt-wood flavour and at night when the stars joined our company, we sipped glass after glass of home-made retsina.

The youngest child, Marinos, quizzed all visiting relatives about their precise location in the family tree. Only once he knew that so-and-so was a third cousin twice removed or that this visitor was the second daughter of an aunt’s husband’s brother, then and then alone were we adults free to go one with our discussion.

Marinos called me Nikolaki as if he were the grown-up and I were the child. Once he had figured out my geneological chart (all grandparents gone, one parent surviving), he examined my head with care and wondered why, since my temples were greying, I wasn’t already dead. His grandfather — whose head was completely white — would live only if his hair turned black again.

For a few hundred drachmas I bought four blocks of fitoura – seminola fried in oil and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, something like fritters in the American south. In return for this meagre gift each child recited a poem for me – Aphroditi recited Solomos, Adamantini recited Kalvos, Marinos recited a poem that began “I’m a Greek,” and Ioannis, the eldest, sang the victory song for the Olympiakos basketball team.

We visited the family’s orange grove down in the valley. Using a long bamboo stick we sent the oranges to the ground and soon were wiping the blood-red juice from our hands and chins with blades of grass.

In the afternoon we drove a small tractor through the vineyards and tried our hand at clearing the grass with a scythe. The wild grass had grown unnaturally high from the unnatural rains and the piles of slack blades quickly reached our waists.

We came upon the remains of a mansion built back when Zakynthos had its counts, nobles, and serfs, all the accoutrements of the Italian state to which it had once belonged. The wall was of a faded clay colour. A window hung slovenly from rusted hinges and weeds pushed through cracks in the mortar. We collected giant lilies and purple-red vetches (awful name that, for such a lovely wildflower) and the girls made them into bouquets. Marinos made sure I didn’t step in any of the squat lumps of cow manure hidden inside the tall grass. The children ignored a sudden flight of ducks the way we ignore traffic. Back on the asphalt, scattered buckshot crunched beneath our feet.

While the two girls played patty-cake, Ioannis, Marinos’ twelve year old brother, listed some Zakynthean nicknames for me: Paparas, (oil-soaked bread), Katsikolos (goat-buttocks),Tzitzikas (cicada), Kontorasis (short-sighted), Klanieras (farter), Kapros (boar), and Memes (tits). On an island where over five hundred people might share the same surname, nicknames are the only way to avoid confusion. My host family’s nickname was Koloneos, taken from the name of the Italian gold coins which they had once owned in abundance.

Easter Friday the Bishop of Zakynthos blessed the four points of the horizon – a ceremony known as “Blessing the Universe.” That night we attended mass in the church of Aghious Pantes. A small wooden figure of Christ lay beneath glass, garlanded by lilies, and a vocally challenged choir boy outdid himself in the number of off-key notes he could belt out per hymnal.

Easter Sunday Marinos asked me if, when I died, I would wait for him at the “entrance.” He asked me why my father died last year. Was his hair grey? Had he lost his voice? When his grandfather thundered, “Marinos, enough!” Marinos clapped his hands and shouted: “Enough already, enough! No more talk of white hair and people who aren’t at the table!”

I left Zakynthos aboard the Ionis, carrying a jug of wine, four kilos of baby goat and a branch of rosemary to cook it with. It was twilight, the best time to see the comet, and I searched the skies for traces of its tail. Only with the help of the captain’s binoculars did the comet become visible, but just barely. As the mountains of Zakynthos grew darker and more distant, I sensed that a certain way of living was also fading fast.