Springtime: camomile had blanketed the graves, a rose bush in one corner was filled with small Aprilish blossoms. It must have been midday; the sun had warmed the ground, the grass was fragrant. The church door stood open. The priest had put incense in the censer and donned his stole. Crossing the threshold, he set out toward the graves.
“Why is he swinging the censer?” I asked my uncle, deeply inhaling the odor of incense and soil.
It was a warm odor and seemed a trifle sickening to me. It reminded me of the smell in the Turkish bath I had visited with my mother the previous Saturday.
“Why is he swinging the censer?” I demanded once more of my uncle, who continued to proceed in silence between the tombs.
“Keep quiet. You’ll see in a minute. Follow me.”
Turning behind the church, we heard conversation. Five or six women dressed in black were standing around a grave. Two men lifted the tombstone, then one of them stepped into the grave and began to dig. We went close and stood by the open pit.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Disinterring the bones.”
“What bones?”
“You’ll see in a minute.”
The priest had placed himself at the head of the grave, where he swung the censer up and down and murmured prayers under his breath. I leaned over the newly dug soil. Mold, putrefaction; I pinched my nostrils. Though I felt sick to my stomach, I did not go away. I waited. Bones? What bones? I kept asking myself, and I waited.
Suddenly the man who was bent over and digging stood up straight. His torso emerged above the pit. In his hands he held a skull. He cleaned the dirt off it, inserting his finger and pushing the mud out of the eye cavities, then placed it on the lip of the grave, leaned over again, and recommenced his digging.
“What is it?” I asked my uncle, trembling from fright.
“Can’t you see? It’s a dead person’s head. A skull.”
“Whose?”
“Don’t you remember her? It’s our neighbor Annika’s.”
“Annika’s!”
I burst into tears and began to howl.
“Annika’s! Annika’s!” I cried. Throwing myself on the ground, I grabbed all the stones I could find and started to hurl them at the gravedigger.
Wailing and lamenting, I screamed how beautiful she was, how beautiful she smelled! She used to come to our house, place me on her knees and comb my curls with the comb she removed from her hair. She used to tickle me under the arms, and I giggled, I peeped like a bird.
My uncle took me in his arms, carried me off a little ways, and spoke to me angrily. “Why are you crying? What did you expect? She died. We’re all going to die.”
But I was thinking of her blond hair, her large eyes, the red lips which used to kiss me. And now . . .
“And her hair,” I shrieked, “her lips, her eyes? . . .”
“Gone, gone. The earth ate them.”
“Why, why? I don’t want people to die!”
My uncle shrugged his shoulders. “When you grow up, you’ll find out why.”
I never did find out. I grew up, became old, and never did find out.
5
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
WITH MY EVER-MAGIC EYE, my buzzing bee- and honey-filled mind, a red woolen cap on my head and sandals with red pompons on my feet, I set out one morning, half delighted, half dismayed. My father held me by the hand; my mother had given me a sprig of basil (I was supposed to gain courage by smelling it) and hung my golden baptismal cross around my neck.
“God’s blessings upon you, and my blessings too,” she murmured, looking at me proudly.
I was like a small sacrificial victim weighted down with ornaments. Within me I felt both pride and fear, but my hand was wedged deeply in my father’s grasp, and I bore myself with manly courage. We marched and marched through the narrow lanes, reached Saint Minas’s, turned, and entered an old building with a wide courtyard. Four great rooms occupied the corners and a dustcovered plane tree the middle. I hesitated, turning coward; my hand had begun to tremble in the large warm palm.
Bending over, my father touched my hair and patted me. I gave a start, for as far as I could remember, this was the first time he had ever caressed me. Lifting my eyes, I glanced at him fearfully. He saw that I was afraid and withdrew his hand.
“You’re going to learn to read and write here so you can become a man,” he said. “Cross yourself.”
The teacher appeared in the doorway. He was holding a long switch and seemed like a savage to me, a savage with huge fangs. I pinned my eyes on the top of his head to see if he had horns. But I was unable to see, because he was wearing a hat.
“This is my son,” my father said.
Untangling my hand from his own, he turned me over to the teacher.
“His bones are mine, his flesh is yours. Don’t feel sorry for him. Thrash him and make a man of him.”
“Don’t worry, Captain Michael,” said the teacher, pointing to his switch. “Right here is the tool which makes men.”
A pile of heads remains fixed in my memory from those elementary school days, a pile of children’s heads glued one to the next like skulls. Most of them must actually have become skulls by now. But remaining in me above and beyond those heads, undying, are my four teachers.
Paterópoulos in the first grade: a little old man, very short, fierce-eyed, with drooping mustache, and the switch constantly in hand. He hunted us down, collected us, then set us out in a row as though we were ducks and he were taking us to market to sell. “The bones are mine, the flesh is yours, Teacher,” every father instructed him as he turned over his wild goat of a son. “Thrash him, thrash him until he becomes a man.” And he thrashed us pitilessly. All of us, teacher and students alike, awaited the day when these many beatings would turn us into men. When I grew older and philanthropic theories began to mislead my mind, I termed this method barbarous. But when I came to know human nature still better, I blessed, and still bless, Pateropoulos’s holy switch. It was this that taught us that suffering is the greatest guide along the ascent which leads from animal to man.
Títyros—“What-cheese”—reigned over the second grade; reigned, poor fellow, but did not govern. He was pale, with spectacles, starched collar and shirt, pointed down-at-heel patent leather shoes, a huge hairy nose, and slender fingers yellowed from tobacco. His real name wasn’t What-cheese, it was Papadákis. But one day his father, who was the priest in an outlying village, came to town bringing him a large head of cheese as a present. “What cheese is this, Father?” said the son [using the form tyrós instead of tyrí, to show off his katharévousa]. A neighbor happened to be at the house. She overheard, spread the word, and the poor teacher was roasted over the coals and given this nickname. What-cheese did not thrash, he entreated. He used to read us Robinson Crusoe, explaining each and every word. Then he gazed at us with tenderness and anguish, as though begging us to understand. But we were thumbing through the book and gazing ecstatically at the poorly printed pictures of tropical forests, trees with great fat leaves, Robinson in his broad-brimmed straw hat with an expanse of deserted ocean on all sides. Bringing out his tobacco pouch, poor What-cheese would roll a cigarette to smoke during recess, look at us imploringly, and wait.
One day when we were doing Sacred History, we came to Esau, who sold his birthright to Jacob for a pottage of lentils. When I went home for dinner, I asked my father what birthright meant. “Go ask Uncle Nikoláki,” he said, scratching his head and coughing.
This uncle had finished elementary school, which made him the family’s most educated member. He was my mother’s brother: a stubby little Tom Thumb, bald, with large timorous eyes and monstrous hands all covered with hair. He had married above him, and his jaundiced, venom-nosed wife felt nothing but scorn for him. She was also jealous. Every night she tied his foot to the bedpost with rope to keep him from getting up during the night and going to visit their plump big-breasted servant, who slept downstairs. In the morning
she released him. My poor uncle endured this martyrdom for five years, but then the Lord willed that the venom-nose should die (this is why we call Him the All-good) and this time my uncle married a solid, kindhearted, foul-mouthed peasant girl, who did not tie him. He used to come to our house, all elated, and find my mother.
“How are you getting along now with your new wife, Nikoláki?” she inquired.
“Marghí, no need to ask how happy I am! She doesn’t tie me.”
Afraid of my father, he never lifted his eyes to look him in the face but gazed constantly at the street door, rubbing his hairy hands together. On this day, as soon as he heard that Captain Michael was calling him, he rose from table with his mouth still full of food and sped to our house.
What could the ogre want with me now? he asked himself with irritation, swallowing his last mouthful. How does my poor sister stand him? Recalling his first wife, he smiled contentedly and murmured, “I, at least, was saved. Praise the Lord!”
“Come here,” my father said as soon as he saw him. “You went to school. Explain this.”
The two of them held council, bending over the book.
“Birthright means hunting costume,” said my father after much reflection.
My uncle shook his head.
“I think it means musket,” he objected. But his voice was trembling.
“Hunting costume,” roared my father. He knitted his brows, and my uncle cowered.
The next day the teacher asked, “What does birthright mean?”
I jumped up. “Hunting costume.”
“What nonsense! What ignorant fool told you that?”
“My father.”
The teacher quailed. Afraid like everyone else of my father, how could he dream of contradicting him?
“Yes,” he said, swallowing hard, “yes, certainly, sometimes, but very rarely, it can mean hunting costume. Here, however . . .”
Sacred History was my favorite subject. It was a strange, intricate and somber fairy tale with serpents who talked, floods and rainbows, thefts and murders. Brother killed brother, a father wanted to slaughter his only son, God intervened every two minutes and did His share of killing, people crossed the sea without wetting their feet.
We did not understand. We asked the teacher, and he coughed, raised his switch angrily, and shouted, “Stop this impertinence! How many times do I have to tell you—no talking!”
“But we don’t understand, sir,” we whined.
“These are God’s doings,” the teacher answered. “We’re not supposed to understand. It’s a sin!”
A sin! We heard that terrible word and shrank back in fright. It wasn’t a word, it was a serpent, the same serpent that had beguiled Eve, and it was coming down from the teacher’s platform and opening its mouth in order to eat us. We shrank into our desks and did not utter a sound.
Another word which horrified me when I first heard it was Abraham. Those two ah’s reverberated inside me; they seemed to come from far away, out of some deep, dark, and dangerous well. I whispered “Abraham, Abraham” secretly to myself and heard footsteps and panting behind me—someone with huge bare feet was pursuing me. When I learned that he had taken his son one day in order to slaughter him, I became terror-stricken. Without a doubt he was the one who slaughtered little children, and I hid behind the back of my desk to keep him from discovering me and carrying me off. When the teacher told us that whoever follows God’s commandments goes to Abraham’s bosom, I swore inwardly to transgress all the commandments in order to save myself from that bosom.
I felt the identical agitation when, in the same subject, Sacred History, I first heard the word Habakkuk. This word also seemed extremely dark to me. Habakkuk was a bogeyman who came to lurk in our courtyard every time the darkness fell (I knew just where he crouched: behind the well). Once when I dared to venture all alone into the yard at night, he sprang from behind the well, reached out his hand, and shouted at me: “Habakkuk!” In other words, “Stop! I’m going to eat you!”
The sound of certain words excited me terribly—it was fear I felt most often, not joy. Especially Hebrew words, for I knew from my grandmother that on Good Friday the Jews took Christian children, tossed them into a trough lined with spikes, and drank their blood. Oftentimes it seemed to me that a Hebrew word from the Old Testament—and above all the word Jehovah—was a spike-lined trough and that someone wanted to throw me in.
In the third grade we had Periander Krasákis. What merciless godfather gave the name of Corinth’s savage tyrant to this sickly runt of a man with his high starched collar to conceal the scrofula on his neck, his skinny grasshopper legs, the little handkerchief always at his mouth so that he could spit, spit, and spit as though breathing his last? This one had a mania for cleanliness. Every day he inspected our hands, ears, nose, teeth, and nails. He did not thrash, did not entreat; he shook his oversized head which was covered with pimples, and shouted at us:
“Beasts! Pigs! If you don’t wash every day with soap, you’ll never, never become men. You know what being a man means? It means washing with soap. Brains aren’t enough, you poor devils, soap is needed too. How are you going to appear before God with hands like that? Go out to the yard and get washed.”
He drove us to distraction for hours on end—which vowels were long, which short, whether to use an acute or circumflex accent-while we listened to the voices in the street—vegetable mongers, kouloúri boys, donkeys braying, women laughing—and waited for the bell to ring so that we could escape. We watched the teacher sweating away at his desk as he repeated the points of grammar over and over again in an effort to make’ them stick in our minds. But our thoughts were outside in the sun, on pebble warfare. We adored this game and often came to school with broken heads.
One divine spring day the windows were open. A tangerine tree was in bloom across the street, and its perfume entered the classroom. Each of our minds had turned into a blossoming tangerine tree; we could not bear to hear anything more about acute and circumflex accents. A bird came just then, perched on the plane tree in the schoolyard and began to sing. At that point a pale redheaded student who had arrived that year from his village, Nikoliós by name, was unable to control himself. He raised his finger.
“Be quiet, sir,” he cried.
“Be quiet and let us hear the bird.” Poor Periander Krasákis! One day we buried him. He had rested his head calmly on his desk, palpitated a moment like a fish, and given up the ghost. Terror-stricken at the sight of death right in front of our eyes, we rushed screaming into the yard. The next day we donned our Sunday clothes, washed our hands carefully (in order not to deny him anything at that point) and took him to the old cemetery by the sea. It was springtime; the heavens were laughing, the soil smelled of camomile. The coffin lay uncovered. The dead man’s face was full of oozing pimples; it had begun to turn green and yellow. And when his students leaned over one by one to give him the parting kiss, the spring no longer smelled of camomile, but of rotting flesh.
In grade four we had the principal of the school, who both reigned and governed. He was short, as tubby as a storage jar, and had a small pointed beard, gray eyes that were always angry, and bowlegs. “Good God, just look at his legs,” we used to say to each other in hushed voices so that he would not hear. “Just look how they wrap around each other. And listen to him cough. He isn’t a Cretan!” He had come to us from Athens, freshly educated, apparently bringing New Pedagogy with him. We thought it must be some young woman named Pedagogy [the word new in Greek can also mean young woman], but when we confronted him for the first time, he was alone. Pedagogy wasn’t there; she must have stayed at home. He was holding a small braided cowhide. He lined us up and began to lecture us. We must see and touch whatever we learned, he said, or else draw it on some paper covered with dots. And we were to look sharp. He wasn’t going to stand for any nonsense, not even laughing and shouting during recess. We were to keep our arms crossed, and whenever we saw a priest in the street, kiss his hand. ??
?Look sharp, poor devils, because otherwise-see this?” He pointed to the cowhide. “I’m not just talking; you’ll see that I mean business!” And indeed we did see. When we were disorderly, or when he felt in a bad mood, he unbuttoned us, lowered our shorts, and thrashed our bare skin with the cowhide. And when he was too lazy to undo the buttons, he lashed us across the ears until blood flowed.
One day I fortified my heart, raised my finger, and asked, “Teacher, where is New Pedagogy? Why doesn’t she come to school?”
He bounded out of his chair and removed the cowhide from its hook on the wall.
“Come here, you impudent brat,” he cried. “Unbutton your pants!”
He was too lazy to do it himself.
“Here! Here! Here!” he bellowed as he struck. When he had worked up a sweat, he stopped.
“That’s where New Pedagogy is,” he said. “Next time shut up!”
But he was also a sly little devil, this husband of New Pedagogy. One day he said to us, “Tomorrow I’m going to tell you about Christopher Columbus, how he discovered America. But so you’ll understand better I want each of you to be holding an egg in his hands, and whoever doesn’t have an egg at home, let him bring some butter.”
He had a daughter of marriageable age named Terpsichore: short, but very delectable. Though she had many suitors, he did not want her to marry. “I won’t have any such abominations in my house,” he used to say. And when the toms came out in January and began miaowing on the pantiles, he got a ladder, climbed onto the roof, and chased them away. “Nature be damned,” he murmured, “it has no morals.”
On Good Friday he took us to church to do obeisance to the Crucified. Afterwards he brought us back to school to explain what we had seen, whom we had worshiped, and what crucifixion meant. We fell into formation in our seats, tired and disgusted because we had eaten nothing that day except sour lemons and had drunk nothing except vinegar so that we too might taste Christ’s suffering. Whereupon, New Pedagogy’s spouse began in a deeply solemn voice to explain how God descended to earth, how he became Christ, suffered, and was crucified in order to deliver us from sin. Exactly what this sin was we did not understand very clearly, but we did understand clearly that he had twelve disciples, one of whom—Judas—had betrayed him.