Statue, page 11
Dimitra and Mihalis looked excited. “It sounds wonderful,” Mihalis said. “But can we be sure you will do what you say? How do we know you won’t cheat us? And how much will you pay our Babá and Yiayiá?”
One of the men held out a contract. “Read it carefully. Our lawyer will be involved. And your lawyer, too. We suggest you have one. We still need to get permission from other owners, however. Everything will be done fairly and legally. We will leave now and let you read this and think it over. You don’t have to sign yet.”
When the men left, the family sat there, stunned.
“I don’t know.” Toula shrugged.
“We are going to die anyway, Toula,” Spiros said. “And no one will be here at all to watch over the place. There will be no life at all. The houses will crumble and collapse. After some years, no one will remember that it even existed, that we even existed.”
Mihalis nodded. “This is a way to save the village. You can remain here for the next year, then move in with us.”
“Ah, we won’t live that long,” Spiros said.
“Who knows?” Toula smiled. “My mother lived to be 105. I might also. And you might live for years too.”
“With the money, you could fix up your houses yourselves, hire someone to come to work on them, or use taxis to take trips into Megalopolis to choose your groceries for yourselves.” Dimitra looked at her grandmother.
“Well, let us eat now. I started a lamb stew. Something special for us.” Toula rose from her chair and walked to the kitchen, followed by Dimitra. The stew smelled wonderful, and they all had a delicious meal together. It was sad to see Dimitra and Mihalis leave.
“Our life will change, Spiro. What should we do?”
“We really have no choice.”
“Yes, we have a choice. We have a duty to our ancestors, our heritage, our village,” Toula replied.
“But this will save the village.”
“No, it will turn it into a museum. A mausoleum. Honouring our ancestors as if there are no living spirits here. Inhabited by strangers.”
Toula and Spiros did not sign the papers. They remained silently in their homes when the rain came—punishment from God, Toula thought, for even considering betraying their village. The path between their houses became a river. Lefteris from Megalopolis called to say he couldn’t make it there to deliver food and asked if they needed anything desperately. Should they send a rescue team? Toula said they were fine. She had stored vegetables from the summer, cans of tomato sauce, and spaghetti. They would have plenty to eat. Spiros waded over in his heavy boots, carrying an old battered umbrella. Toula put a towel on the floor for his boots and welcomed him in. She had a fire burning in the grate and was cooking a tasty sauce of tomatoes, garlic, and spices in a large pot hanging from the fireplace. On her burners, she was boiling spaghetti. “We will enjoy this while we can,” she said.
Dimitra and Mihalis phoned them every few days, but Toula and Spiros kept telling them that they were still thinking. “You should hurry,” Mihalis said. “This is an opportunity that won’t last.”
After the rains ended and the waters dried up, Takis and the owners of the company arrived again, with more papers to sign. “We will save your village,” Takis said. “Otherwise, everything will be lost.”
Toula spoke firmly. “We do not want our village to be a place for tourists to spend money, to ignore our history or see it as mere entertainment, to believe that everything here is long dead. We will not sign.”
One man, who seemed to have the most authority, spoke to them in English. “He says,” Takis translated, “that he will take legal action, that you have no proof of ownership, that you won’t live long anyway.”
Spiros looked as if he were ready to relent and reached for the papers, but Toula slapped his hand. “We have family. And we have the spirits of our ancestors. This is our village. Please leave now.”
The men turned to leave but one yelled out something.
“What did he say?” Toula asked Takis.
“He said, ‘You will hear from our lawyers.’”
Toula and Spiros sat outside again, watching the sunset, drinking a small glass of ouzo each. “What shall we do, Toula?”
“I will think tonight. I will tell you tomorrow.”
The next morning Toula was up early and called to Spiros to get up. He came to his window, and she called to him. “We are going to go to the Church of Agia Theodora. She will tell us what we must do.”
“How will we get there? Shall I phone the taxi?”
“No, we will walk.”
“Walk? But that will take us several days.”
“Yes. Wear your sturdiest shoes and bring a sweater for nighttime. We can do this. Come.”
They walked along the road, a dirt road with deep woods on each side. They carried flashlights and bags with food, water, and sweaters. They rested every few miles, sitting on rocks or on cool grass, then raising themselves up by holding on to their canes. They slept for a few hours overnight, lying beside the road. Nothing bothered them, not even the foxes or boars or snakes. Then they walked again.
“Ah, xathelfe, my cousin, why did you make me do this? My knee is giving way. I cannot walk anymore.”
“What else can we do, Spiro? This is our journey. The journey we were meant to make.”
In the morning a man from a nearby village drove by in his truck. “May I give you a ride?” he offered. “Where are you going?”
“We must walk,” Toula said, though Spiros wanted to say yes and nudged her with his elbow. “We are going to consult St. Theodora.”
“Would you take donkeys? I can bring you two from my home. I will meet you on the road.”
Toula smiled. Yes, donkeys would be fine.
They walked slowly until the man came in his truck, leading two donkeys from the window. He helped the two aged people get on the donkeys and tied their bags of food and water to the saddles. “Here is more water,” he said. “And some blankets.”
“What is your name?” Spiros asked. “I don’t remember you.”
“I am Manolis. You knew my grandfather Manolis, I think. He has been dead for years but would want me to help you.”
“Thank you, my son,” Spiros said.
“Yes, thank you. May God go with you,” Toula said.
Now the donkeys moved them comfortably through the day, and then through the night, toward the church of St. Theodora.
Toula and Spiros were never seen again. Their families had the woods, roads, and paths searched many times. There was no sign of them, nor of the donkeys. Manolis reported over and over his meeting with them, his supplying of the donkeys. No, he did not mind the loss of his donkeys to such honourable people.
The developers did not touch that village, but found another one that was completely uninhabited. The houses in Toula’s and Spiros’s village gradually crumbled, roofs falling in and weeds taking over. No one came anymore in the summer but went instead to beaches and tourist areas. The village slept.
Years later, in Canada, a man named Peter Poulos sent his DNA to the site 23andme and found relatives. He was compiling a family tree and trying to learn more about his background. He contacted people he found on this website and learned that his original name was Dimopoulos and that his family came from a village that was now abandoned. He travelled there, with his wife and son. Some cousins from Athens met him and told him all that they knew, including the story of the missing elders who had walked, then ridden, away one night. Peter decided to restore the village. He started with the homes of his great-grandmother, Toula, and her cousin, Spiros. He and his family would spend summers here. They would invite other relatives to join them and to restore other homes. Someday he would retire here, honour the ancestors he had just discovered. He would walk to the church of St. Theodora, listening for soft footsteps, for someone whispering in his ear.
Toula and Spiros are riding down the road, thick forests on each side of them. They have prayed at the small chapel with the seventeen trees growing miraculously from the roof, and St. Theodora has given them hope. They ride back now to their village, which they will always keep safe. They travel through the darkness, into the light.
OMEGA
O
WORDS. LETTERS. EASY to hear, to see. Not so easy to put together. When she was a child, her mother taught her the first and last letters of the alphabet. Alpha. Omega. She loved the word “omega” and would shout it out every now and then as she was sitting on the mountainside watching the sheep. Boys went to school, at least for a few years, but formal education was not thought necessary for girls. She peeked into her brother’s schoolbook and loved the strange markings. But no one taught her what they meant.
When she arrived at Ellis Island, and was presented with documents to sign, she proudly put a large X on the blank. A woman from her village printed her name, Marigo, and helped Marigo answer the questions: the name of her village, her profession. But the officer would not believe she was a shepherd and wrote down “housemaid.”
She could talk, and sing, and listen. The jumble of English words confused her, and she was relieved when she saw her brother, who embraced her, as did his friend, the man she would marry.
No one ever thought to teach her to read or to write in either language—Greek or English. But she sang old folk songs. She worked for a time in a laundry, where a Jewish woman taught her English words until she could communicate at a basic level. But all her life she used Greek prepositions, articles, and conjunctions when speaking English. She mixed the two languages. Created a hybrid.
She did like and understand numbers. When her husband died, she raised their four children and continued to operate their hotel and restaurant. She calculated their finances, listing numbers in a small notebook. Still, written words were a mystery to her. A waitress in her restaurant tried to teach her to print her name. Mary, as she was now called. But she preferred her X. And there was no time for such pursuits. There was always too much work to do.
After her oldest son died from his war injuries, she alternated living with her three other children, but finally settled with her youngest daughter. She was happy there—watching television, confusing reality with fiction, cooking for herself, gardening. No one ever taught her to read and write.
She loved the X. The X was freedom.
What would it be like to be unable to read and write? What would the world look like? What would the brain see and understand? Street signs. Could she read them? Words on containers of food. How could she tell what was in each can or box? Sitting in a room, watching television.
She loved stories, told them, mixed real events from her past with television plots and other fictions. Her mind put together so many stories. But she understood everything, loved watching the news, learning about space travel, following politics, cursing the political party she despised, enjoying baseball. But she never could read a book or write anything down.
Could she have secretly learned on her own? Kept it a secret? Let others help her, knowing when they lied or softened the truth? I can imagine her stealing a romance novel from her daughter’s bookshelf, reading it under the covers with a flashlight, surreptitiously returning it before anyone noticed. Or reading the newspaper while peeling potatoes, pretending she was using it to catch the peels. Or maybe writing her name in the dirt while tending to her garden. Mary. Marigo.
But probably she was content to be who she was. Her bold X marking her place in the universe.
I like to think that, when she died, she saw above her all the letters, Greek and English, floating in random orders and mixtures, glowing like stars. She understood them all perfectly. Two letters became more prominent. Alpha. Omega. Especially omega. So beautiful.
She gazes upward as the letters form themselves into words, sentences, entire stories.
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from . . .
—T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets
Acknowledgements
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“Bertha” was published in Food, Migration, and Diversity, edited by Maurice A. Lee and Aaron Penn, 2021.
Thank you to my husband, J.R. (Tim) Struthers, and to my daughter, Eleni Kapetanios, for reading these stories and for reacting so enthusiastically.
About the Author
O
Marianne Micros’ story collection Eye (Guernica) was a finalist for the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and also shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Her suite of poems Demeter’s Daughters was shortlisted for the Gwendolyn MacEwen poetry competition in 2015 and published in Exile: The Literary Quarterly. Now retired from her career as an English professor at the University of Guelph, she is also the author of the poetry collections Upstairs Over the Ice Cream (Ergo) and Seventeen Trees (Guernica).
Marianne Micros, Statue
