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.