7 - A Marriage and Life Carried on

And so, they did get married. With formal and phlegmatic blessings from ‘neutral’ families. The best man and later my godfather was Father’s brother, the only person sporting a smile in the photos of the wedding. There has been an unspectacular gathering of family members and close friends in a taverna, but no honeymoon. A quick calculation shows the big event happened seven months (not nine) before my birth day. It is therefore plausible that an unwanted pregnancy hastened the wedding. Less likely marriage was scheduled in advance before my conception. Whatever plans and even dreams, if any, they might have conjured up for a future and life together until, as they say, ‘death did them apart’ -a flame of love that might have burnt once had been flickering and extinguished fast, well before the birth of little Brother seven years after mine. There were not even embers of that initial fire left, and I did not sense any of the warmth that affection and love between my parents, ever since I began to become aware of what love between two people can be all about. Did it ever really exist, I wondered, or was it a mirage from a fling that led into a reluctant marriage?

One could maintain that such denouements are largely predictable in many relationships, under the conditions that unfold along the paths of common, mundane lives, much of which are occupied by routine work, the needs for self-preservation, raising children, marching monotonously towards the inevitable end. ‘The boat of love crashed on the rocks of everyday life,’ was something that Mayakovsky wrote in his suicide letter and left an impression in my youth. It happens to most who fall in love, as I realized in my youth: the monotony, the inevitable weakening of the emotional bond, the fatigue, the gradual reduction of once a passionate love into a symbiotic tolerance –often not even that, sustained as such by basic needs, barely surviving amidst the friction that routine and boredom and unfulfillment bring along. Many a times what we fundamentally mean by love, the golden crown of eros and passion, that warmth remnant in a corner of the soul retained after passion subsides, and which usually survives longer than love, also melts away. And the few moments of normalcy and rapport, the occasional tenderness and intimacy, give way at best by indifference, at worst by intolerance and hostility, at extremes by pure hatred.

When I was old enough and able to analyze emotions in relationships, superficially it must be said given the lack of conducive life experiences, I came to realize that a possible long-lost love of my parents, in as much as it once existed, was never transformed into some form of conjugal love and affection, even understanding, whilst with the years passing the last remnants and memories of the brief period over which a romance might have flourished disappeared. It did not even transform into a scarcely harmonious, even on conventional terms, coexistence, however unfeeling that might have been. I witnessed fights with Fathe’s terrifying voice echoing down the street, his fists bagging down on tables, I saw dishes flown at the walls of the kitchen, I was frightened by doors slamming, shocked by shoves and the ejections of Mother from our flat. I remember with sadness the sobs of Mother in a locked room, my grandmother coming upstairs to intercede and calm things down and, with her legendary stoicism, saying: “All of them, dear, are worth no more than a bucket of shit thrown at their faces!" She was always comforting, as she had experienced similar arguments and fights of her own accord, with an equally difficult husband and two unruly boys to raise.) Final, poorly patched-up reconciliations merely papered over the cracks that over time, and until their later years, became an unbridgeable rift. Brief periods of calm and quiet did not alter the substance of their relationship, but relegated it to even lower rungs, whence new rounds of quarrels would start, widening further the emotional distance and growing alienation. Those, in short, were the unpleasant parts of family seen through my child’s eyes. Since I began to sense and process what was happening around me usually from emotional starting points (as pure logic can hardly suffice to analyze psychological storms of that kind), I reached the conclusion that growing as a child in a family atmosphere tainted by vicious arguments between my parents left indelible marks on the soul and greatly influenced the formation of my character, on top of underlying, yet unidentifiable, genetic reasons. A minor consolation from such memories was that physical violence, in its crudest versions, apart from the few petty shoves and ejections out of the flat or a car, I bore no witness.

We had, between Mother and Father, a clash of characters who forgot or neglected their beginnings, their romance, the timid hugs and touches of their first love, and who soon after their marriage became unconscious or indifferent  to what had brought them together, and they did not seek and fall back to it in everyday life; who ignored each other in their interchange with the outside world;  who finally let the ravaging stream of time to carry them apart. On the one hand, there was the wounded ego of Mother, whose perceived sidelining and suppression found temporary relief in endless murmurs of protest (‘moaning’, ‘nagging’, ‘carping’, etc. as Father dismissively was labelling it). A predicament compounded by indecision and diffidence and hesitation in taking more radical actions. On the other hand, there was the extreme intransigence and egotism of Father, which was manifested and imposed against the other’s opinions and desires with a stentorian voice, loud enough to wake up the neighborhood and petrify children and adults alike. We were blocking our ears and eyes, keeping silent, withdrawing quietly and shutting ourselves in our rooms during such incidents. Time with the family hardened us and made us less empathetic. Nevertheless, our childhood survived without significant losses or traumas, almost unscathed, one may argue and, in some respects, composed and even enhanced. The generation gap was widening between us and our parents, until we were alienated from the family core, if there has ever been a concrete one. Eventually, we left home to distant places, away from home and country for long periods of time. But on our occasional visits home and family gatherings a similar state-of-affairs, the same mentality and behavior, persisted in the atmosphere -stale and dried out since long ago.

A barely perceptible reconciliation between our parents occurred in old age, under the weight of countless years of friction and discordance, of shouting and fights on their shoulders; rather late in their life, perhaps too late, when the most painful of memories of the past had faded enough to cause regrets. Their monasticism and chronic mutual chronic isolationism under the same roof (of the ‘each minding one’s business’ kind) were abated; a little more understanding and consensus were reached, some signs of tenderness and affection of a different type, I would say similar to those displayed by inexperienced and awkward novices in love, timidly appeared between the two aged parents. Primarily in the face of a need for daily sustenance and survival, whose service becomes increasingly difficult at old age, and the imperative of emotional support: the fear of loneliness lurking, as death approaches, brings people closer.

A few times I asked myself: From more than half a century of our parents living together, was there anything that would have proved worthy of being depicted in some more vivid colors? In a perfectly established, unbroken daily routine, afternoon dining followed by a nap became central to Father's world from early maturity. Mother retired as early as the generously social welfare laws of Greece allowed that to happen. A diminishing passion for teaching, if there was ever any, dried up. The chores, Father's prepared dinner on the table, and the daily cleaning and tidying up of the flat, absorbed her compulsively in a uniform succession of days and years. She devoted herself to these daily chores with zeal, and they became a core and integral part of her existence. Rather inexplicably, she carried those thankless chores in a backdrop of grumbling and resentment emanating from feelings of regret and that she had been taken advantage of from her husband.

The rest of their spare times was mainly dissipated in thinking and unnecessarily worrying about their ‘children’, me and Brother now in advanced adulthood. In their minds they must have always felt, as a parental duty, the need to advise and support, materially and morally, while Father, with Mother’s underlying murmur, engaged in various mini-crusades of our repatriation – because ‘Is there anywhere no than our Greek paradise?’ Sterile thoughts, nevertheless, inconsequential words, ineffective actions, uncalled for interventions, that somehow were enhancing the profile of a veteran in his field of work and, more importantly, generating a sense of purpose: that he was offering something useful, making a difference in the lives of his sons, as old ‘Schmidt’ of the homonymous film tried in vain to affect his daughter’s life. These were some highlights of a life amongst shopping for groceries, phone calls to relatives and friends, the compulsory daily reading of the newspapers, TV viewing and light reading, and, later, as far as Father exclusively concerned, hours on end in front of a computer, browsing the internet. The days passed, they passed ruthlessly, imperceptibly. Both grew old away from us, until, as they pledged in that uncelebrated wedding, ‘death did them part’. Have they been content with the lives they lived together?