The Daughter

by Pavlos Matesis

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

CALL ME RARAOU, if you please, I was born in Rampartville, the capital city, even if it's only a provincial capital. Guess I was around fifteen when we left the place, me and my ma and half a loaf of dry bread between us, a couple of months after they pilloried her it was, they were still celebrating that so-called Liberation of theirs. Not even a team of wild horses could ever drag me back there. Ma neither, Buried her right here, I did, in Athens, the only luxury she ever asked for, her last will and testament. 'My child, I'm dying, but grant me my last wish, bury me here. I never want to go back there. (She may have been born in the place but she never said the word "Rampartville".) I don't care how you do it, just get me a lifetime grave. I never made you do anything else. Don't you ever let them take me back, not even my bones.' The Daughter, Matesis's famous novel set in Greece during the war, looks at how far a woman will go to protect her family at a time of great upheaval, and the consequences suffered as a result. The story is told through the eyes of Raraou, now a renowned actress, who recalls a childhood when her mother was forced to sleep with the occupying forces so as to feed her children. Afterwords, reviled by the villagers, she attempts to rebuild her shattered life. But this is more than a portrait of one family: it also delineates a country at war not only with a common enemy - Nazism - but also of Greece's turbulent post-war period.

Release date: July 17, 2010

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 110

Sample

CALL ME RARAOU if you don’t mind.

Roubini’s my Christian name, of course, but when I made my theatrical debut they baptized me Raraou and now that I’ve arrived – look, I’ve even got it jotted down right here on my identity card: ‘Mademoiselle Raraou. Thespian’, so they’ll carve it on my gravestone, too. Quite honestly, I don’t care if I never see Roubini again. Don’t want to know about her. Same goes for my last name, Meskaris. Crossed it out long ago.

I was born in Rampartville, the capital city, even if it’s only a provincial capital. Guess I was around fifteen when we left the place. Me and my ma and half a loaf of dry bread between us, a couple of months after they made a public spectacle of her it was, they were still celebrating that so-called Liberation of theirs. Not even wild horses could ever drag me back there. Ma neither. Buried her right here, I did, in Athens, the only luxury she ever asked for, her last will and testament. ‘My child, I’m dying, but grant me a last wish, bury me here. I never want to go back there’. (She may have been born in the place but she never said the word ‘Rampartville’.) ‘I don’t care how you do it, just get me a lifetime grave. I never made you do anything else. Don’t you ever let them take me back, not even my bones.’

So I bought the plot, nothing special really. And visit her now and then, maybe take her a flower, or a chocolate, or sprinkle her with a few drops of cologne – that I do on purpose because as long as she lived she never let me, not once: that kind of thing was for sinful women she said. Once in her life she wore cologne I think. At her wedding. Well, now I sprinkle on all the cologne I want and, if she doesn’t like it, just let her try and stop me. The chocolates are because she was always telling me how she used to dream of chocolate during the four years of the Occupation: just one piece of chocolate of her own to eat, that’s all she wanted. But afterwards the bitterness came over her, real bitterness; she wouldn’t even glance at chocolate.

So I’ve got my own little apartment, two rooms plus hallway, and my government pension as daughter of a fallen hero of the Albanian campaign. My actor’s pension should be coming through any day now too, just as soon as all the forms get approved, and generally speaking I’m fortunate and happy. Got no one to worry about, no one to love, no one to mourn. I do have a stereo and records, left-wing songs mostly. I’m a royalist myself, but those left-wing songs just turn me to jelly. Fortunately I’m so fortunate.

My father, he was a tripe washer by trade, but we never told anybody. He used to buy the tripes and the guts from the slaughterhouse, rinse them out and turn them inside out one at a time for making spiced liver sausages to roast over the coals. I remember him as a young man, he would have been what? around twenty-four at the time? What I mean is. I remember his 1932 wedding picture; if you really want to know, I don’t remember what he looked like. When they called him up in 1940 me and my two brothers were already born: one of them is older than me. He’s still alive somewhere. I think.

My only memory of my father is from the call-up when Mother and I saw him off at the railway station. He was so afraid he’d miss the train he went rushing on ahead with Mother hurrying after him, dragging me along behind her: the tears were pouring down her face but she didn’t care what people would say. I remember seeing my father standing there in the railway carriage going off to war, and us, all we had to our name was that one twenty drachma piece. Mother tried to hand it to him but he wouldn’t touch it. Then she threw it through the train window; at first he was crying, then he starts cursing and throws it right back at her, and Mother picks it up off the ground and heaves it into the carriage with all her might. All the other recruits are laughing, but the coin drops inside. She yanks me by the arm and we leave on the run. Now, did he ever pick it up, or did someone else grab it? We never knew. That was the last time I can remember seeing my father as a young man, from the front. Mostly I remember his back as he sat hunched over, rinsing out the guts. So I keep in touch with his face in that old wedding photo. I forget dead people, people who disappear from my life, people like that: what I mean to say is, I forget what they look like. All I know is, they’re gone. Even Ma. She was over seventy-five when she died, but when you come down to it I never really had a good close look at her, so I keep in touch with her in the wedding photo where she’s a girl of twenty-three, that’s a good forty years younger than me. So I’m not bashful about taking her chocolates, now she’s like my daughter. Age-wise, I mean.

Thank God, for the war in Albania I always say. At least I got a pension out of it. Frankly I couldn’t care less if our nation was defeated. Anyway, you think maybe it’s the first time? Me, I’m as nationalist and as royalist as they come, but a pension’s a pension. Who’s going to look after a poor orphan girl like me?

So when Father went off to the war with the twenty drachmas, we went home, tidied up the place, bought some bread on credit and Mother took on a job as housekeeper in a good family and did sewing at night on that little mini sewing-machine of hers, the manual one. She wasn’t a real dress-maker, mind you: did things like blouses, underwear, kids’ clothing, helped out at funerals too – she made winding sheets for corpses. Every now and again we’d get a postcard from the front saying I am well best wishes. I would write the answer: I was just finishing my elementary school at the time. Mother, never went to school. ‘Dear Diomedes, the children are well I am working hard please do not worry take care of your health I kiss you by the hand of our daughter Roubini your wife Meskaris Asimina.’

I could never get it out of my mind that those cards of my father’s smelled of guts. That’s how I never could eat tripe, it always reminds me of how human bodies smell. Couldn’t eat Easter soup either, even if I am a God-fearing person. Why just last year this impresario was making fun of me and saying How am I going to fit you into our new review Raraou? Nowadays people like to hear dirty talk but you, you’re such a little goody two-shoes.

Well maybe I am but the men always lusted after me. Still do, in fact.

This was the same impresario who used to stick a piece of styrofoam into his underparts to make a more manly bulge. Even on tour when we wanted go for a swim he used to stick a hunk of it in his swimsuit. All us girls in the troupe knew it so some of us would go feel him up, pretend sexy, but actually knock it out of place. But any girl who made that mistake would never work for his troupe again. I lost my job because when he started cursing me, Why you little slut and your bitch of a mother, for two cents I’d … I tell him. What with, smart ass? Styrofoam? So twice he kicks me in the behind. Big deal. Go on, kick away I say, you, you’re stuck with those two inches of yours till you croak and ain’t no plastic surgery can change it.

Well, maybe my father was skinny and hairy but he was all man. Our place only had one room with no partitions and an outdoor toilet. One time I saw him naked changing his underpants and let me tell you I really felt proud even though I didn’t understand why back then. My older brother, he couldn’t get along with my father. He was just a kid but he was always talking back: one day my father told him something when he came back from work, which he didn’t do much; usually he just went out into the back yard and rinsed out some tripe; brought the work home, you see. So my brother, he goes and throws some dirt into the big tub with the clean tripe and just like that he pipes up, ‘You ain’t a man.’ Remember, this is a thirteen-year-old kid talking. Anyway, that’s when my father speaks up. You’re no son of mine he says. Well, you ain’t no father of mine you gut sucker, says my brother Sotiris. So go find yourself another father says my father and he goes into the house. Sotiris follows him inside, throws open the window and starts yelling Father! father! at every Tom, Dick and Harry passing by. And crying. Just imagine somebody going by in the street and hearing that. Then Mother gets up, closes the window, goes into the yard and rinses off the tripe. All set, she says: and he throws the tripe over his shoulder and leaves to deliver it to The Crystal Fountain, that was the name of the restaurant. Ma wipes her hands, covers the sewing-machine with a pillow-case and leaves; she had a neighbour woman’s body to wrap for burial. Mind they don’t go killing each other when your father gets back, you hear, she tells me. So when my father comes back he sits down on his bench in the yard pretending to smoke but I tell him, Come inside Pa, Sotiris has gone. And Father comes in and when Mother gets back from work she’s got sweet rolls for us. They’re in mourning, can’t eat sweets, she says. So we eat the rolls and Mother leaves again, We’re going to sit night vigil over her she tells my father, I’ll make the coffee, you go to sleep.

My brother Sotiris spent his evenings hanging around outside a house of ill-repute, Mandelas’ brothel it was called. Rampartville had three whorehouses all together but this was the place with the high-class patrons. I already knew what a whorehouse was and what they did inside. I actually set foot in one, during the Occupation. Must have been around thirteen I suppose: some Italian sent me on an errand. But I didn’t see anything reprehensible; they even treated me.

One other time I went calling on the whores, a couple of months later. Our parish priest, name of Father Dinos, sent me, from Saint Kyriaki’s church. Our house was right behind the sanctuary, you see, and every morning on the dot of half past six Father Dinos appeared. He was our alarm clock. And on the dot of half past six, he’d go round to the back wall of the sanctuary for a piss before mass. Time to get up for school, Ma would call out. ‘Father Dinos just pissed.’ On account of we didn’t have a clock at our place so that was the only way we could be on time for school; if we were late the teacher would whack us with a ruler, five times on each hand. So one day during the Occupation, back when we were just about to break our record, twenty-six days without bread – boiled weeds was all we had to eat – and we were really curious to see how long we could last … like I was saying, on the twenty-sixth day, Father Dinos calls me over, ‘You’re a good girl’, he says. ‘I want you to run an errand for me, but you mustn’t tell anybody.’ He takes me into the church, and then into the sanctuary, I knew women weren’t allowed in there. Don’t be afraid, come on in, Father Dinos says. You’re still without sin. So he plunks this chunk of holy bread wrapped in an embroidered cloth napkin into my hands. I try to refuse, I’ll sell myself before I’ll feed you on charity was what Ma used to say. But the priest wouldn’t take no for an answer. You know The Crystal Fountain restaurant? he asks. Of course I did: the Germans were using the place as a canteen. Go and ask for Madame Rita and give her this. Tell her it’s from Father Dinos, she’ll understand.’ And I stand there gaping at him. ‘She’s a poor woman without any means of support and it’s our Christian duty to assist her. Off you go now, and be careful nobody steals it from you, and don’t forget to bring back the napkin; it belongs to my wife.’

I knew who Madame Rita was, all right; she was the number one whore in Rampartville, and she worked in the highest-class whorehouse, plus she did Germans on the side. She was rich, and she was tall. Walking along all I could think of was how scared I’d be because I’d never seen a German so close up; I was so scared I forgot to smell the crusty white holy bread. All of us were terrified of the Germans because they never spoke. The Italians we got to like because they laughed, teased the women in the street and sometimes threw bread to the kids. Little loaves of army bread they called paniota. So when I got to The Crystal Fountain my legs were like rubber imagining how scared I’d be. From hunger too, maybe. Ma wouldn’t let us walk unless we had a very good reason, every step is a wasted calorie (that was a new word she’d learned) and every step was one step closer to the Grim Reaper.

So anyway I walk into The Crystal Fountain. The place is full of Germans eating, fortunately, me they didn’t even turn around to look at me: the waiter comes over, a Greek he was. What do you want, little girl? he asks (For reasons of hunger I was kind of underdeveloped for my age, didn’t start my monthlies until I was seventeen, if you can imagine.) I ask for Madame Rita. The waiter gives a kind of vulgar laugh. Hey Rita, another surprise from the reverend! he calls out. And Madame Rita gets up from another table. She’s all woman, but nice, really nice. What do you want sweetheart? she asks me. I give her the message and the holy bread. Ah, from the good father, she says. Here, sweetie, Mmnnh. And she gives me a kiss. What a nice lady, she looked like she was so happy. Pretty old too, I think to myself. Old to me the thirteen-year-old is what I mean to say. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-six at the time. Anyway, it was a big thing for me to meet her, like being socially accepted in a way. Why, I was so excited I even told Mother, even though I swore to the priest I wouldn’t tell a soul. During the Occupation my mother stayed at home. There was no work, only two or three homes in Rampartville were hiring cleaning ladies, besides, who needed a seamstress for things like breeches and kids’ clothing? They didn’t even sew up the dead in winding sheets any more. People were buried wearing whatever they had on when they died. Mother still did the night vigils out of respect for the departed but she could only come back at dawn. The curfew was in force back then, from seven o’clock at night.

I hardly get Madame Rita’s name out before Mother slaps me. You should have brought it here, she said. That was the first time she ever ordered me to disobey, a priest too. I cried, because it was cold as well. Mother was working at the sewing-machine and to comfort me she let me give her a hand. She was unstitching our flag, the one we hung up beside the front door the day my father left, and one other time, too, when our army took some city or other somewhere in Albania. Korce I think it was. Now was the Occupation and the flag was worse than useless, it was downright dangerous especially if they ever searched our house. They searched all the houses, a Greek interpreter and two Germans. At first they sent Italians, but the Italians always got involved in small talk with the Greeks, so the Germans relieved them of that job. But they never got around to searching our place, which I took as some kind of social humiliation. Anyhow, on the subject of flags, I never kept one around the house again. I may be a nationalist but I never could figure out what good they’re for, except maybe in a patriotic number or two in some musical review or other.

So there we were, my mother and me, unstitching the flag. Lucky for us it was a big one; I can still remember how my father got it, years before. This butcher he worked for went bankrupt, owed Father for three days’ worth of washed guts and tripe. So Father requisitioned the flag and a scale, the kind where you hang the meat from a big hook to weigh it. He was too late for anything else, everybody else had got there first: the only thing left in the shop was the flag and the scale. When we unfurled it on October 28th, the day my father went off to war, it just about covered the whole front of the house. Reminded me of one of those patriotic songs we used to sing in school, the one about Mother Greece with her blue eyes tucking in her children for the night. Fortunately for us, Ma remembered we had the flag. At first we used it for a bed sheet. Now, after we unstitched it Mother cut it into four shifts and two pairs of drawers each. In fact, I remember mine were cut from the middle of the flag, the part with the cross: we couldn’t unstitch that part, so I ended up with drawers in our national colours with the cross right in the crotch. Anyway, we wore those undies all winter long. And there was no danger of them finding a flag in our house – if you had one, you were resisting – if ever they searched us. Still, I’d given up hope of that. But when Father Dinos spots our underwear hanging out to dry on the line behind the church one day, he figures everything out. How could you, woman? he asks our Ma. And Ma snaps back Alexander the Great would do the same thing if his kids didn’t have any clothes to wear. The priest never breathed a word about our underwear again.

Truth to tell, the Authorities did come calling – once. Before the Occupation it was, during the Albanian war. Five months after my father left, he stopped writing. Mother sent me over to some neighbours who had a radio on the chance I’d catch his name in the dead and wounded bulletins. Maybe altogether ten houses in Rampartville had radios back then, all good families. The neighbours were theatre people which we called the Tiritomba family because they played in our town in a musical called Tiritomba, you remember that song before the war that went ‘tiritomba tiritomba’. They were really from Rampartville all along, but it was pure happenstance that they happened to be passing through town on tour when the war broke out. So they had to stay put. Good people, especially Mlle Salome, the impresario’s sister-in-law. They had a place of their own in Rampartville, an inheritance. Nice folks, I’ll tell you all about ’em later. The house is still standing today, not a brick touched. Seems they forgot to sell it.

Mlle Salome we asked to listen for the casualty reports so I wouldn’t go wasting my time for nothing. Went to police headquarters and to the prefecture too, looking for information. Were we supposed to put on mourning and hang the black crepe over the front door or weren’t we? But nobody heard my father’s name. Don’t worry, said Mlle Salome. If the unthinkable’s happened, the Authorities will inform you for sure, and you can pick up the medal.

That’s why we didn’t put in any black curtain cords either.

So, one day a gendarme and a guy in civilian clothes come knocking, asking Mother if she heard any news, or if she knew anything about Father’s politics. We showed them the postcards from the front, such as they were; what else were we supposed to show? He’d been absent without leave from his regiment for more than a month, they said.

As soon as Granny found out she rushed right over: just about tore my mother’s eyes out, in fact, on account of we hadn’t put up the black crepe. Granny wore black the whole Occupation: one day she managed to lay hands on some wheat, so she boiled it up as an offering for the deceased, sent us over a plate and for two days we had food to eat.

But we never hung up the crepe or wore mourning.

You won’t catch me mourning him unless I get orders straight from the government, besides, it’s bad luck Mother said. Later, a lot later, after Liberation, we finally got a letter from the government saying that my father Meskaris Diomedes had been declared missing on the field of honour and that his family was entitled to a pension. Well, it just wouldn’t have looked right to go into mourning then. Besides, the religious waiting period was long over. That’s the pension I still get to this day, but we only started collecting it much later, of course, after we left Rampartville for good.

Those two were the first officials ever to set foot in our house. Later, around the end of the first year of the Occupation they finally came looking for weapons. Italians, this time. They rummaged through the chest-of-drawers and then checked out the floor, some floor, nothing but hard-packed earth, wall to wall. One of the Italians took a long look at Mother. My name’s Alfio, he said, you can find me at the Carabineria. Looked like a nice man, the homely type; shy too. He spoke a few words of broken Greek. After they left, my brother Sotiris called her a slut and I smacked him one.

That earth floor of ours was nothing but trouble. Ma was a real housekeeper; like mother like daughter, I always say. We had to keep the floor damp all the time. If we used too much water it would turn to mud. So we all took a mouthful of water and sprayed it over the floor to keep down the dust and make it hard like cement. Sprayed it during the winter time, too, all of us together. And after the spraying came the tamping. We’d lay down a board and all of us walked up and down on it, then we’d move the board to another spot and start all over again. Because if we didn’t look after the floor it would turn back into dirt, and weeds would start to grow, mallow mostly, but once a poppy sprouted right next to the sink.

I know, I know it’s sinful to say, but I always loved that earth floor of ours. Maybe because I always had a . . .