Ancestry 21 - Yiannis & Vasiliki: A Distant Grandfather and the Village

Grandfather Yiannis retired shortly before a few months before I was born. As a child and, later, as a high school teenager, my encounters with grandfather were casual and our relationship, until the end, remained fragmented and weak. Only few words were exchanged between us whenever Mother and I descended to the village –exchanges minimalistic and inconsequential. The few typical greetings of "How is it going, L?" on grandfather’s part were answered by an expressionless monosyllabic: "OK..." or “Good.” This was due, on the one hand, to an immense and unbearable shyness -especially unbearable for the child in me. Unforseen then, this shyness would torment my soul and being throughout life, quite often raising insurmountable obstacles to expressing myself spontaneously and articulating thoughts and wishes, presenting myself socially. On the other hand, it was due to the teachery, the pedantic and paternalistic style of grandfather that created an emotional distance between him and the people around, typical of that between a teacher and his students; in short, a barrier of a psychospiritual nature. The relatively long physical distance of the village from our home in Thessaloniki that we had to negotiate with the scarce transport means of the time, a couple of hours by bus through the busy city centre and its rugged industrial western suburbs, did not help either. I do not remember grandfather visiting, let alone staying overnight at home, likely because he was feeling unwelcome by Father, while Father himself only grudgingly gave us lifts in his car. A few hours of travel and stay in the village were unworthy of him, his rest on Sunday afternoons hardly negotiable.

The figures of one hand suffice to recount the memories of walks in the company of grandfather Yiannis, when we might have held hands silently, as is the case with two timid guys separated by two generations. The handful of walks I remember took place in Sunday mornings along the old promenade, continued around the White Tower landmark and finished in the small central park with the birch trees stretching from the YMCA building towards the sea, with its rudimentary zoo of pheasants and a sad unkempt bear that could be smelt from afar. They ended in the afternoons, with a couple of spins on the wooden horse carousel for my entertainment, before our farewells and my safe delivery to Mother (the sacred duty of grandparents entrusted with the care of a child). Often, at around noon, I was offered some sort of snack, a ham & cheese toast and orangeade, whilst grandfather enjoyed a glass of ouzo with small plate of mezedes; in the café of Exarchakos, where an endless row of tables under the green awnings bisected the park from the YMCA building all the way to the Royal Theatre, separating two broad paved pathways that buzzed with Thessalonian families on the Sunday mornings and afternoons of Spring and Autumn, and cool Summer evenings. All those scattered fragments of memory from the distant childhood, faint and tangled impressions as they were, in a chronological disorder, were squeezed into the depths of the mind, even crushed into oblivion by the incessant passage of time, by other impressions of greater gravity and intensity and importance. Nostalgia, however, this grand Homeric word which is used to describe a unique passion in human existence, the distinct bittersweet feeling that tends to overwhelm us from time to time, more often -it is true- as we approach the end of the road, this nostalgia reappears as a kind of an unhealed wound in the soul, while the mind flutters from one distant memory to another, it becomes a tide of sadness difficult to overcome. Instead, it flares up undiminished, if not strengthened, with the years. The effect onto our souls is disproportionately intense relative to the magnitude of the causes: the fragments of memory, the trivial events of a distant past, the weight of time elapsed without us noticing.

I was too young a child then. I do not remember a single occasion where grandfather stopped by my childhood flat in the old Thessaloniki neighbourhood, despite his regular visits to the city centre. I attributed this to the notorious discretion and caution which characterised the Economou family and a usually unfounded dread of becoming a burden to others, while this mental burden-in-itself described earlier, was something inexplicable by the circumstances that could potentially raise it. Of course, he would have never come uninvited! And I do not remember his daughter inviting him. Father certainly never did. However, either invited or uninvited, either welcome or unwelcome, it was not hard for even a child to sense that grandfather did not show up to our doorstep primarily because of some kind of innate fear and timidity in the company of an imposing, unyielding and domineering Father. Over-and-above the said discretion, the well-established sensitivity of grandfather's race would be affected inordinately by inevitable micro-clashes, because of the rigid spirit and ideas, the incessant, impulsive, and categorical, almost aggressive points of view that separated Father from the rest of a party (any party); with arguments contradicting that of his interlocutor, and often himself—from one statement to another, even from one sentence to the next. In short, it was always difficult with Father in the presence of other people and, first and foremost, in the company of Mother’s family. The contradictions and arguments of Father, from politics to family matters, which his peers and friends often found intolerable and rejected in kind, to an elderly man like grandfather would have seemed avoidable and unnecessary. If those were eventually erupted, they would become unbearable and a call for taking flight. Father’s piercing loud voice, which could reach thunderous peaks in intensity, sometimes unpredictably, was a factor not to be ignored either.

On his part, during his rare visits to Magnesia, he usually presented himself and confronted the Economou family through a standard catalogue of ironic and derogatory, supposedly "humorous", comments, a behaviour which, although seemingly was disguising good intentions -harmless atnd innocent to the close family members who knew him and usually ignored them with indifference or a feigned smile, the same behaviour in relatively unfamiliar or, even worse, sensitive circles of people gave sufficient ground for misunderstandings, and sometimes even fiery reactions and quarrels. Father projected himself, at least in the village of Magnesia, as an intellectual, a university graduate, a presumably cosmopolitan bourgeois, detached from his own family humble origins –as opposed to the bunch of inferior peasants around him. (Mother was often called a "little peasant" or mocked about her short height she “sadly” inherited from her father, amongst alternatively serious or ironic remarks. That I remember. The "serious" part of such characterizations weighed heavier to Mother’s psyche and pride. Although they were seemingly and initially expressed as constituents of some innocent teasing, they could potentially lead to unnecessary irritation and escalation. Deep down, though, he often meant his derogatory remarks; he might have even derived pleasure from the reactions they caused.)

I am sure those kinds of sarcasms of Father were not greatly appreciated by grandfather. He never followed up or responded to contentious conversations, especially about economic and political issues, but usually retired discreetly to his room, in his own space, in his sofa by the old radio. Nevertheless, secretly in his mind he must have had cultivated some respect, even perhaps admiration, for his educated, cultured, certainly assertive and courageous and son-in-law, characteristics not featured amongst all members, bar one, of the Economou family.

After my brother's birth, he used to call us on Sunday afternoons, sounding tipsy after several glasses of ouzo in the café on his way home for lunch. His tipsiness was evident even to an uninitiated child by his characteristic overture in the old-school teacher’s archaising form of Greek. Whenever it was me who picked up the phone he used to say: "Which estimable gentleman do I have the honour to speak to?" "I'm L, grandpa..." was my short answer. Then reverting to more colloquial Greek: "How are we doing, Ore L? How is it going? How things?" -"Well, I'm OK..." -"Where is your mother, Ore?" -"Here she is... Mom!" The conversations ended abruptly, rather awkwardly for me, the sober one.

Like Father, neither did I honour my grandparents sufficiently with frequent visits and my presence in their home as a child, even less so as a teenager. We usually visited on sunny Sunday mornings with Mother after catching a morning bus that waited for us behind the Bey Hamam. Less often we were accompanied by Father, the undisputed and proud driver of the first and second FIATs of the family. Along the main road of the village, I was always struck and at the same time slightly embarrassed by the strange, fixed -to our car and the passengers inside, gazes of the villagers -passers-by or sitting in the café or balconies of their houses. And they kept staring with prying eyes at us until we moved outside their field of vision. We were clearly the faces of strangers; they had to clarify in their minds or amongst themselves our descent, our identity, most importantly the household of the village we intended to visit. For Father, of course, those persistent and indiscrete gazes of the villagers of Magnesia following our trajectory, focusing into anything alien to faces and objects of their daily routine and intimacy, which I still perceive today when I drive through its streets, fed back his notions of "peasantry" and the cultural backwardness that this concept implies.

During those visits, the conversations we exchanged privately with grandfather were few and inconsequential to have left any significant imprint in memory. We are both naturally laconic, which of course goes hand in hand with the natural shyness and timidity and introspectiveness that characterizes some people. Grandfather’s speech was often categorical and imposing (due to the wealth of his vocabulary rather than the tone of his voice) and his arguments could hardly be objected to or even questioned by his close environment in the family and the village, at least by the women of his household: Mrs. Vasiliki, the aunts, Mother. Only aunt Aliki, whenever she ascended to the village from Athens, I did notice on occasions that she used to become a source and target of confrontation and criticism and found herself the midst of fierce domestic arguments (being also the cause of those), either over property matters or the thornier subject of the rehabilitation of the two still unmarried sisters. There were shouts and quarrels in the kitchen, and the otherwise exemplary environment in a house of peach and calm was perturbed. In those incidents, when Mr. Yiannis' vocal intensity slightly rose above average and his opinions and speech became more emphatic, hardly anyone was taking Aliki’s side of the argument. But I remember her standing imperiously, a lone figure in the centre of the kitchen condescending, expressing fearlessly scathing views with equivalent intensity, which a defensive grandfather tried to answer with the headmaster’s pomp from his seat at the head of the table, barely lifting his head from the plate of food in front of him. All the while Mrs. Vasiliki, always a bystander, a neutral or without opining, watched silently from the divan against the wall. The other sisters were moving restlessly in and out of the kitchen and, in conversations between them, at every opportunity, they whispered venomous remarks behind her back: aunt Aliki had already been blacklisted as the obstinate and wayward of the family, because more of her intransigent and occasionally offensive style, than the integrity of her character. She was Mr. Yiannis’ least favourite daughter, yet grandfather barely favoured and approved of any of the rest. Maybe, just Mother.