The Wildcat Behind Glass, page 1
PRAISE FOR
The Wildcat Behind Glass
★ “Zei’s tale sensitively chronicles both rising political tensions and general patterns of life on a Greek island in the mid-1930s, when the country was under the dictatorship of Gen. Ioannis Metaxas, as seen through the eyes of 7-year-old Melia.… There’s something genuinely childlike about the way Melia goes from initially caring far more about the pleasures of rambling along the rocky shoreline with friends than the half-heard conversations of worried grown-ups to a sharp awareness of the growing, pervasive tensions in her world and its ideological causes. Her journey invites modern young readers to see potential parallels in their own times.”
Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“This is a book I wish I’d read as a kid, but even for a woman approaching old age, it is wonderful! The story is imaginative and daring and will call to that part of every reader that wants to be more courageous, adventurous, and kind.”
Deborah Ellis, author of The Breadwinner
“An extraordinary child’s-eye view of a pivotal and terrifying time. Melia’s voice is honest, funny, and heartbreaking as she tries to make sense of the nonsensical events in her world. Richly layered and lush with metaphor, this new translation of Alki Zei’s The Wildcat Behind Glass is a gift to today’s readers.”
Kate Albus, author of A Place to Hang the Moon
“Although set in the 1930s, The Wildcat Behind Glass is a timeless story of a family struggling to remain free and true to themselves while their country is being ripped by fascism. Alternately funny, tragic, and poignant, this tale is deeply moving. Not to be missed.”
Anne Blankman, author of The Blackbird Girls, winner of the National Jewish Book Award
“Alki Zei successfully combines humor—the bumbling policemen as they tail the children up the mountainside—with the chilling image of books being burned in the town square, including Grandfather’s beloved ‘ancients’ and Myrto’s changing character as she is slowly indoctrinated with fascist beliefs. The author skillfully weaves a story of everyday events set against a backdrop of the changing political situation in Greece, a land where democracy originated but is now slowly being eroded.”
A.R., Greek News Agenda
“The Wildcat Behind Glass is that magical sort of novel that will likely live on forever.… It’s also a novel of incredible importance. Though set on the other side of the world almost a century in the past, its messages about the dangers of fascism and the power of storytelling are perhaps needed now more than ever.”
J. Kasper Kramer, author of The Story That Cannot Be Told
“I found myself smiling while reading about Melia and her sister Myrto’s idyllic summer on a small Greek island, then gripping the pages as the repressive regime starts closing in on them and their family. Alki Zei’s story, as told through Karen Emmerich’s seamless translation, is both a cautionary tale of the insidious nature of fascism as well as a poignant celebration of love, family, and freedom.”
Julie Lee, author of Brother’s Keeper
“A fierce and moving tale that contemplates the power of humanity under inhuman regimes. With wonder and delight, The Wildcat Behind Glass reminds us why we fight for those we love. Karen Emmerich’s expert translation and Zei’s smart writing make this tale accessible for both the young and old. I loved this story—the wildcat must have had its blue eye open when I picked this book up.”
Jade Song, author of Chlorine
Also by Alki Zei
A Child from Nowhere
Granddad the Liar
Achilles’ Fiancée
Uncle Plato
Tina’s Web
Near the Rail Tracks
The Mauve Umbrella
Petros’ War
ALKI ZEI
THE
WILDCAT
BEHIND
GLASS
Translated from the Greek by
Karen Emmerich
RESTLESS BOOKS
NEW YORK • AMHERST
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents herein are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1963 Alki Zei
Translation copyright © 2024 Karen Emmerich
First published as Το Καπλάνι της Βιτρίνας by Themelio Publications, Athens, 1963
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Restless Books and the R colophon are registered trademarks of Restless Books, Inc.
First Restless Books hardcover edition May 2024
Hardcover ISBN: 9781632063649
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023945738
This publication was supported by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports and the Hellenic Foundation for Culture within the framework of the GreekLit programme.
This book is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Cover illustration and design by Harshad Marathe
Text design by Tetragon, London
Printed in the United States
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RESTLESS BOKS
NEW YORK • AMHERST
www.restlessbooks.org
Contents
A Note for Curious Readers
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
Boring Sundays; Icarus; Multiplication Tables
CHAPTER TWO
Thursdays; the Wildcat; the Bishop; Mr. Amstradam Pikipikiram
CHAPTER THREE
Big News; Leaving for the Country; Towers, Cellars, and Shanties
CHAPTER FOUR
Our Misery; Stamatina; Nikos is Coming; Three Sad Stories
CHAPTER FIVE
Strange Things; Our Cat’s New Name; A Traitor Among Us
CHAPTER SIX
Theseus’s Sails; Dictatorship; the Secret of the Windmill with the Broken Blade
PART II
CHAPTER SEVEN
Owls and Kings; Wrecks and Bothers
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ms. Angeliki’s Corner Store; Bank Savings Day
CHAPTER NINE
Harmful Books; Myrto’s Sprained Neck; the Silliest Silliness of All
CHAPTER TEN
They Killed the Wildcat; Another Sad Story; Myrto’s Mission
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Canary and Spain; Stars and Crabs; If I’d Been Born a Writer
A Note for Curious Readers
The Wildcat Behind Glass takes place on an island in Greece in 1936. While the story itself is fiction, it was inspired by the author’s childhood and describes what it was like to live through the rise of fascism in Europe during that time, including a dictatorship in Greece.
Unlike democracy, in which citizens get to choose their leaders in elections and have a say in the way a country is run, fascism is a system of government in which people aren’t allowed to choose their leaders or express themselves freely. Fascist governments typically seek to control the lives of their people, often including how they are allowed to work and live, what they learn at school, and even what they should believe. Fascism also requires that they be loyal to their leaders and their country above all else. At the time when this novel takes place, many countries in Europe suffered under fascist leaders, including Adolf Hitler in Germany, General Francisco Franco in Spain, and General Ioannis Metaxas in Greece. In reading the novel, you may find references to other people and things you may not be familiar with—perhaps the ancient philosopher Plato, or the pro-democracy (but also nationalist and expansionist) political leader Eleftherios Venizelos. You can certainly research these names and terms if you’d like to learn more, but I also hope that the story will sweep you up even if you don’t know everything there is to know about its historical context.
In this book you will also meet many ordinary people working to resist dictatorship and to fight for democracy, even when it puts them in danger. Alki Zei, the book’s author, was herself someone who fought for justice throughout her life—in part by writing books like this one for young readers like you. The Wildcat Behind Glass was her first novel. It was published in Greece as Το καπλάνι της βιτρίνας in 1963, while she was living in Moscow as a political refugee. Zei spent many years of her adult life abroad because of her political views; she was also arrested and exiled within Greece during the Greek Civil War (an experience similar to that of the exiles housed in Nolis’s shanty in this book). Zei and her family were finally able to return to Greece in 1974, and she lived there until her death in 2020 at the age of ninety-six.
KAREN EMMERICH
PART
I
CHAPTER ONE
Boring Sundays; Icarus; Multiplication Tables
WINTER Sundays are the most boring days of all. I’d like to know if kids all over the world are as bored as me and Myrto. Especially in the afternoon, since it gets dark so early, we never have any idea what to do with ourselves. All day long we’ve played, fought, made up, read our books—I’m reading David Copperfield and Myrto is reading Jack—and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing left to do.
On Sundays Mother and Father go to play cards at Mr. Pericles’s house. He’s the director of the bank where Father works. Aunt Despina, Grandfather’s sister, goes out to visit friends, and Stamatina, the servant, has her day
Grandfather shuts himself up in his study with his “ancients”—that’s what my sister Myrto and I call his books, because they’re all written in ancient Greek. Myrto and I go to the glassed-in porch and stare out at the sea. When there’s a storm the waves crash against the rocks, splashing droplets onto the windows, and when they roll down the glass they look just like tears. That’s when we think up our saddest stories of all. That Father dies, Mother gets remarried, and our stepfather is even crueler than David Copperfield’s. Or Grandfather is a poor beggar, and we have to wear rags and go out with him into the cold, begging from door to door for something to eat. We always give titles to the stories we make up, as if they’re actual fairy tales.
That particular Sunday, we were so utterly and completely bored that when I suggested we play “Grandfather the Beggar,” Myrto snapped back that it was our stupidest story ever. We sat sulking for a while, then each of us chose a pane of glass and said whoever’s had the most droplets run down it was the winner. But I kept winning, so Myrto said it was the dumbest game we’d ever played.
“Why don’t we make up a story about the wildcat?”
I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. I froze.
“Shame on you, that’s all I can say!” Myrto shot back. “Are you so conceited you think you can make up stories about the wildcat?”
Maybe she was right. After all, the only one who knows how to tell stories about the stuffed wildcat in the glass case down in the parlor is our cousin Nikos. He lives in Athens and is studying chemistry at the university. Nikos spends every summer with us on the island, at our house in the country.
Though actually, Aunt Despina tells a story, too, about how her husband killed the wildcat because it was swimming over from Turkey and eating up all the sheep on the island—but that’s a story for grownups, there isn’t a single kid around who believes it. Nikos knows an amazing story about the wildcat, a story that never ends, that just keeps going, summer after summer.
By now it was very dark. You couldn’t see the sea at all, or the waves. Every so often we’d hear a paff! and suddenly the windows would stream with tears. There wasn’t a soul outside in the street. On winter Sundays I could almost have believed that our island was completely deserted, that everyone had gone off someplace far away and all that was left was the big sun porch sailing on a frothy sea, with the two of us inside.
“Shame on you,” Myrto said again.
I could tell she just wanted us to be talking again, even if it was to argue. And I wanted an excuse to go over to where she was sitting, because it was dark and I was scared. Just then, we heard those magical, singsong words: PA VOU GA DE KE ZO NI …
It was Grandfather. Whenever he finishes reading for the day, he starts chanting in a strange language called Byzantine. If we want to show off in front of other kids, Myrto and I pretend to be speaking a foreign language. One of us says, PA VOU GA, and the other replies, DE KE ZO NI. When the kids ask, “Hey, what language is that?” we puff ourselves up like peacocks and say, “You mean you don’t understand? It’s Byzantine!”
Grandfather came to get us from the porch and took us into the dining room. He cracked some walnuts and gave them to us on a plate with honey. When Myrto asked for a third helping, Grandfather said:
“Myrto, which would you prefer, more walnuts, or a myth?”
“Walnuts, of course!” she answered. “You can’t eat a myth!”
Our grandfather is so strange! He’s not like other grandfathers. He’s very tall, and he walks with a thin reed instead of a cane, and he never hunches, not one bit. Everyone on the island calls him the Wise Man. He knows all of Homer by heart. And he never tells us fairy tales about dragons and kings, only myths about ancient gods and legends about heroes. Sometimes I think Grandfather is actually an ancient Greek, but I don’t dare tell anyone, not even Myrto, because she’d just say, “Baloney.”
“So what are the two of you going to do now?” Grandfather asked when we’d eaten our walnuts.
We didn’t respond, because we knew if we asked him to play bingo with us, he’d just say, “Why don’t I tell you a myth? You can play bingo with Stamatina.”
“Well then, I’ll tell you a myth,” Grandfather said, and started in on the story of Daedalus and Icarus. “Icarus put on the wings his father Daedalus had made him, and he started to fly as high as a bird. But he flew too high, almost as high as the sun, and the wax that was holding the feathers together started to melt. So he fell into the sea and drowned. And that’s why the waters where he fell are now called the Icarian Sea …”
Our island is in the Icarian Sea. How small it looks on the globe! Just the tiniest little speck. Then there are the other islands, and the rest of Greece, and all the other countries, too, tons and tons of them.
How wonderful it would be if you could stick two wings on your back and fly! You’d be sitting there on another boring Sunday, and you could say: Hmm, maybe I’ll just put on my wings and fly over to Japan or China or Africa, to see if the kids there are bored on Sundays, too. And to see if they jump rope and play jacks like us.
“Grandfather, do you think people will ever be able to fly?” I asked.
“Nonsense!” Myrto scoffed.
But then Grandfather stepped in: “Perhaps, in fifty or a hundred years, it may happen. Right now, it’s January 1936, so perhaps in January 1986 people will be flying close to the sun, like Icarus, but without their wings falling apart.”
“Really? But what good will it do us then?” Myrto asked. “We’ll be old ladies by then and won’t be able to fly anyhow.”
Grandfather scolded her for being selfish, because if everyone thought that way nothing would ever have been invented in the whole history of the world. The scientists would say, Why should we bother inventing this or that, since by the time our invention is perfected we’ll be old, or even dead?
“But I’ll have you know, little miss Myrto,” Grandfather rejoined, “that scientists don’t just think about themselves, they think about humanity. And after they’re gone, their names will live on.”
“I’d like to be an inventor,” Myrto said.
“If all inventors had as shaky a knowledge as you do of your multiplication tables,” Grandfather said sharply, “there would be no inventions at all.”
How could we have imagined that our Sunday would end so badly? Grandfather started quizzing Myrto on her seven times tables, and she kept getting mixed up, almost as if she was doing it on purpose. She even insisted that seven times eight was forty-six, and not fifty-six, like Grandfather said, and that made him angry.
“If you don’t learn your multiplication tables backwards and forwards, you’ll never get to go to school,” Grandfather admonished, then sent us off to bed.
I’m in second grade and Myrto is in fourth. But we don’t actually go to school, Grandfather teaches us at home. Each year we take our exams as “home-schooled pupils,” and move up to the next grade. The grownups don’t want us going to the public school, because Grandfather says there are so many kids in each class that half a year can go by without the teacher calling you up to the board. There’s also Mr. Karanasis’s private school right in our neighborhood, but Father says the tuition is too deep for our pockets.
When we were finally in our beds, Myrto said it was my fault that Grandfather scolded her about her times tables, since I was the one who asked if people would ever learn to fly. But how was I supposed to know that in order to fly, you need to know your times tables backwards and forwards, and that that would remind Grandfather to quiz Myrto?
Then again, could things ever really go well on a Sunday? If we went to school during the week, we’d like Sundays, because we’d get to stay home. Whereas now …
“Oh, I wish we could go to school!” I exclaimed.
But Myrto had the covers over her head and was pretending she couldn’t hear me. So I said, a bit louder:
“VE-HA? VE-SA?”
