16 - A Year in the 'Cold Trough': Winter Evenings & Early Mornings

I was bringing homework regularly back to our little room. Homework that was tailored and personally assigned to me by Mrs. Lola, likely at Mother’s urging. It kept me busy throughout the long winter evenings in the absence of any sort of external distractions; and it helped me grown into the disciplined, studious and industrious individual, as have been recognized by myself and others -colleagues and bosses. Those strengths, if we may call so those attributes, along with several associated weaknesses and flaws, are built early in life with similar learning techniques in insular environments and with limited social interaction. To Mrs. Lola in school days, and to Mother, always by my side in the evenings, I owe a substantial part of the early knowledge I obtained and fundamental skills, like writing down neatly my first sentences or achieving a reading pace and comprehension above the average for my age. The schoolwork in the winter evenings of the Cold Trough added distinctly small but invaluable assets to the person I eventually became. It also set objectives to aim at ahead, which, in retrospect, I would not have had possibly the will, nor would I have taken the initiative to alter: I was wheeled into a prescribed and trodden path, so to speak.

After the meticulous completion of my homework, we would have our evening meal. The child I was never wondered or cared about how, where, and by whom those meals were prepared. What I remember is that it almost always ended with a fruit salad of peeled apple slices, often sprinkled with cinnamon, sometimes with honey, and oranges and tangerines from the local produce, in accordance to Mother's advanced for her time dietary habits. Before going to bed, which would draw the curtain to our daily routine, Mother would read me a fairy tale or sing me songs from the repertoire of the singing lessons she taught her class, with her beautiful, albeit contrivedly choral voice. Her singing classes, within the framework of a national curriculum, as dictated by the military junta in power after the ‘Revolution of April 21^st’ (as the military coup of 1967 was branded), unfortunately included arduous rehearsals of many ethno-fascist and marching songs. And only a handful of melodic themes with politically innocuous lyrics, performed in Mother's calliphony, matched the solitude and tranquility of our room in those long winter evenings. Amongst them, a sorrowful one stood out that I still remember. It told the story of a swallows' nest. A heroic mother of a family of songbirds, left her nest, as she did every morning, in search of food for her nestlings. One evening she did not return, as it had been caught in a net that some hunters had set. The sad tweets of the hungry nestlings went unanswered in the darkness of the night. The song hinted at the unjust end of a tragic mother and, for an emotionally virgin and, perhaps, congenitally hypersensitive soul like mine, the song always filled my eyes with tears and gave way to sad dreams.

My heart has hardened since: from life itself ‘debased in too much association // with crowds, in too much wandering and talking’ as Cavafy wrote. The emotional reaction to human misery that I have encountered along the way, either factual or staged (through theater, cinema, artistic expression), may no longer sink in to the same depths and move the soul to the same degree, but it still touches the heart, often subtly, sometimes it brings tears -as it was with that evening song. Sadness, pity, compassion, and the like emotions, as I have matured and aged, do not reach depths in proportion to the magnitude of the human tragedies I encounter, directly or by association, closer or further away, real or manufactured. But the emotions from that simple, innocent school song, which for most of my peers would have felt no more than superficial and indifferent, perhaps even boring, pointed to me something about the endless labyrinthine path of self-knowledge that begins with birth and concludes with death. I later realized, for instance, that I was born or nurtured into a more sensitive soul than most life circumstances and the world itself demand; whether we become rich and privileged or destitute and unhappy, or follow undistinguished, undulating paths without extreme peaks and troughs. After all, a superfluous emotionalism, that excessive sensitivity of the introvert, and the constant worry and fears that often accompany it, torment the mind. That the ‘heart is often bled’, that our soul is occasionally ‘torn into fragments’ by impressions and stimuli are in themselves ineffective reactions to events. It does not alleviate the human pain that stimulates them, it has minor influence on the course of events and does not change anything of their essence. On the other hand, this hypersensitivity to human suffering, the emotional scales that it reached, was a small coveted privilege and blessing. Whether it was genetically inherited or acquired, or rooted in the soul in those winter evenings of my year in Cold Trough, or both, is irrelevant.

With Mother lying next to me, sometimes under a heavy blanket, pajamas made of a thick fabric, with woolen socks worn even in bed, we slept in the room with remnants of warmth from the turned off stove fading fast. On nights of great frosts, we covered ourselves under two blankets and we laid one underneath, instead of cold and dump white cover sheets, for better insulation from the cold emanating from under the bed and every corner of the room. These measured sufficed for a comfortable sleep in a bed warmed up by our bodies. The morning awakening, however, with the stove turned off, the windows blurred by frozen condensation, I remember myself shivering vigorously with short breaths and my heart pounding fast, whilst Mother trying tenderly to warm up my fingers and toes with her hands. The breakfast was cold, too: chunks of bread or biscuits soaked in milk or slices of bread with butter and honey along with a glass of milk, all went down with effort.

The road to school, a dirt road with potholes, often filled with ice, that took us across the main street and around the square towards the outskirts of the village, was deserted. But the first pale lights were already on behind the windows of many of the houses. The teachers had to present themselves at school before the first pupils starting to fill its schoolyard. My early awakening in the chill of the mornings was richly rewarded by the warmth of the stove and snugness in the Teachers' Room, before the janitor’s alerted the children to toe in line in the courtyard: for the prayer, the hoisting of the flag, the singing in unison of the national anthem, and the headmaster’s daily briefing. As a teacher’s child of not of school age yet, I enjoyed the micro-privilege I enjoyed then was that I did not have to stand in the schoolyard with the older children –something that, in the end, might have arrested the development of social skills. Nor did I have to endure the ordeal of the barren and incomprehensible morning ritual that lacked depth and significance for most of the children, and, I reckon, some of the teachers, but it was done because it had to, as mandated by a protocol, dictated from outside and above. A couple of times, however, I lined up in a queue with the other children in a dwelling at the corner of the schoolyard where breakfast was served —a cup of milk and a slice of bread spread with butter and jam. Something unprecedented and unique in the annals of the Greek educational system, it was one of junta’s populist initiatives. It was eventually abolished as soon as Greece’s backcountry emerged from the poverty of the post-civil- war era. Yet for a similar breakfast, in addition to a weak and lukewarm coffee, I joined after years similar queues as a conscript.