21 - A Year in the Cold Trough: Passers By as Adults

It was not the only reason that my girlfriend from the university days and, as it turned out, one of the greatest loves I had in life (judging by the depth of the feelings and intensity of the memories from our time together) grew up in the nearby town of Giannitsa. It was also the call of a latent nostalgia that drew me back to the Cold Trough again, several years later, through the same road with the poplars, even though this distinct feeling is not yet that strong in young people. Avramidis' bookstore was still located at the junction, as it was the kiosk at the same corner of the square renovated beyond recognition, which was now paved and featured flower beds and a fountain at the centre. I mentioned all those remnants in memory to Eve before we passed through the village in my Yugo on our way to her hometown to meet her family. Eve was impressed with me retrieving such trivial elements, like the name of the proprietor of the bookstore I frequented as a five-year-old boy or the kiosk – all now distant childhood memories. I spent a few seconds to behold our former landlady’s Mrs. Meli’s home and that only through the car window. The house and its front courtyard, behind the gate and the low fence looked quiet without visible signs or sounds of life. It was a sleepy hot summer afternoon, siesta time, and, therefore, inappropriate for intrusive peeps behind the fence. Besides, if I was caught peeping, queried about my indiscrete presence outside the gate and tried to explain, who from the still alive members of Mrs. Meli’s family would remember a five-year-old child who lived under the same roof for a few months nearly two decades ago?

Many streets of the Cold Trough were now asphalted, the ones around the square even featured slabbed pavements in place of the trenches outside the yard fences that were inhabited by the frogs I used to observe. By instinct, I drove to the outskirts of the village in the direction of my first school. The old rectangular building with the tiled-roof and its two chimneys, the always open, two-leaf decorative door at its entrance to which a broad staircase led, with the large windows, was gone. In the same site, a prefabricated, impersonal building was built by, a rectangle without a façade and a flat roof, in the centre of a concrete, fenced yard. No eucalyptus trees, no flower beds, no annex for the breakfast of milk and buttered slices of bread I queued up on occasions to enjoy. Nothing apart from the flag post by the staircase, recalled memories of the old-school, as it was painted in my mind that first school year, as it was by all children in their ‘Painting’ class.

We left taking the same road with the poplars on either side without wandering around the rest of the village. The canteen at the intersection where the plane tree in front had long since been abandoned. Coach passengers, its main clientele, had decreased. It was the last time I said goodbye to the Cold Trough, with a sense melancholy: for a past that will never be relived, for the nostalgia, that very human feeling, which does not fade away, or when it seems lost, it reappears more vivid and intense with each passing year, when we reminisce about our childhood and youth. A consolation, that partners nostalgia at each instance, is that our minds have managed to retain memories from the past, the building stones of the being-in-itself, of existence before its end.