Grandfather was the undisputed head of his family in a patriarchal community. A traditional paternalism reigned at home, austere and incontestable, as one would have expected from a family with no male members other than grandfather and the disabled Giorgos who passed away at a young age. The condescending style of the old-time teacher, the pedantry, the sophistry and the sarcasms, the rigid opinions rarely inviting counter-arguments, the instructions and orders, the monologues with creatively composed phrases from of a rich vocabulary, were delivered with pomp to the four women of the house at the dinner table and, occasionally, to neighbors, shopkeepers and tradesmen. This eloquence created an aura of superiority and authority and erected unassailable walls around him against any attempts at arguing. Yet, it was the form and style of his presentations rather than the content, which, in the culturally backward environment of the village, often left his audience dumbfounded and in awe.
Vasiliki was fated to live on
the margins and under the shadow Yiannis cast on his family. Her social life
was rather non-existent and she spent most of her time within the confines of
the small village, barring the rare recreational visit to Thessaloniki with her
daughters. She got on stoically with everyday life, dragging her lame leg, in
defiance of a debilitating arthritis getting worse with age, and a high blood
pressure somehow under control with drugs. As the years were passing by Vassiliki’s
wanders were mostly bounded by the house walls and the bahçe fence, with
increasingly rare trips to the grocery store across the street or to the church
on Easter or to attend a wedding or a funeral. Most of her diminishing with age
energy was spent in cooking and cleaning, her only social interactions being through
the bahçe fence, in the Turkish language with the Prousan neighbors (amongst
the non-Greek speaking victims of the populations exchanges of the past, because
of their Christian beliefs) or in plain Greek with passersby, members of the Dardonis’
clan and the other large families who lived further down the side lane. Grandmother
Vasiliki loved me tenderly, as her first grandchild, and she manifested this
love with cheese pies, sugar pies, pasties and patties, and other specialties from
the rich culinary heritage of Istanbul she eagerly prepared when we visited. To
her implicit appeals for appreciation of her cooking, I always responded in the
affirmative, although without the formal "thanks" but a nod of the
head and a smile, and the customary kiss when we said our goodbyes. She was
pleased, even grateful, for seeing me enjoying the food she prepared especially
for me to honor my visits, and addressed me kind-heartedly
with spontaneous Turkish
exclamations: "Ah, paşam!", "Ah, yavrum!" and, later
as a teenager, "Ah, babacim!" It
goes without saying that Mr. Yiannis, the intellectual, was not particularly pleased
with Vassiliki expressing herself or conversing in the Turkish dialect he
considered barbaric.
The paterfamilias strongly
urged his daughters to study. At all costs, often with arm-twisting and
yelling. Aliki was left untouched by all this. She had been the house rebel and
a free spirit, and was armed with a personality more dynamic than her father’s,
and, for some unknown reason, she decided on her own volition to become nurse.
After school she left the village for Athens, where she found her bearings, qualified
as nurse, and built a life free from the overbearing paternal influence and the
shackles of the small village community. Litsa, on the other hand, seemed less enthusiastic
and rather disinclined to pursue any studies beyond the mandatory high school
education; her comfort-zone was delimited by the narrow surroundings of the
house and the yard and bahçe at the back, where she
was happy to keep herself busy with housework chores and nurturing and patronizing
her younger sister Domna. She spent her plentiful spare time in gossiping with visitors
and neighbours in coffee soirees, which were culminated in Litsa’s “coffee
reading” to the participants, a pastime in which she developed a remarkable
skill, as I can attest from personal experience. After several failed attempts at the exams, at the exasperation of grandfather,
she was eventually admitted to the Law School. After graduation, she practiced
as a small-time solicitor, in a disinterested manner and charging tiny fees or
no fees at all (barely amounting to a regular income), primarily having to deal
with the ominous state bureaucracy on behalf of illiterate and ignorant
clients, that is, to act on errands requiring nothing more than basic reading
and writing skills.
Domna, the youngest and
prettiest of the four daughters, having, however, been nurtured into a feeble, hypersensitive
and highly-strung personality, after similar struggles with her father’s
intransigence and obsession for education, eventually graduated with a dubious
degree in Business from a public college. She complemented this degree with some
inconsequential qualifications in French and typing, but she remained
unemployed for the rest of her life without having ever displayed any detectable
effort or initiative to work -somehow, somewhere. Possibly, she was not
attracted by any type of employment or, merely, because daily work seemed to
her like a tall mountain that she felt too scared or too lazy or both to climb.
Like her elder sister, she found solace in household chores and endless everyday
gossiping.
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