25c - The Old Neighborhood: Kostakis & Christakis (A Room to Rent)

On the ground floor, in addition to the small laundry room and the dark hall room where an internal staircase led upstairs, there was another room, just below Yiannis’ master bedroom -a ‘chamber’. One of its windows faced the courtyard, our playground, through some thick curtains, the other, faced the street, but had its shutters permanently shut. This so-called chamber was rented by the Kazineris’ from time-to-time to day labourers and journeymen. Of the last tenant I happen to remember was a poor decorator, whom, a few times in early morning I came across on my way to school: in white overalls stained by paint, on a bicycle heading towards the city centre, towards a spot where men of his trade gathered in search of work. He carried a ladder on his shoulders, like Jesus carried his cross, and a bucket from the handle was filled with brushes, and tools of his trade.

One evening the people of the usually tranquil alley, first amongst them the residents of our block across, were perturbed by noises stemming from the Kazineris’ house below. It was Katina shouting: "You bastard! Get out of here! Pervert! Get out now!" I joined Mother in the balcony, curious to see what was going on. Only the pale light of the laundry room could be seen through its open door under the porch. None of those who were listening and peering from their balconies across and above could make out what was happening, until eventually silence prevailed after a ‘Shut up!’ and a ‘Get the hell out!’ cry from Yiannis’ thunderous voice.

Next morning, some whispers between grandma and her daughters-in-law that caught my ear revealed the cause of the trouble below. It was rumoured that the painter was prying on Katina through a gap in the door, as she was having a bath naked or half-naked; it was even mentioned that he had attempted to enter the dim-lit bath room by a sexual impulse. Katina was no beauty; her youth was in the past. She was a relatively ugly old woman, a barren spinster. Then again, for the lonely day-labourer, whose end-of-a day’s hard work, with each evening identical with the previous one and the next  -locked up within the four walls of the depressing chamber with only his thoughts and fantasies, a temptation would in any case be real, and little crumbs of entertainment like the image of a naked Katina, any Katina, could be the object of some cheap self-gratification in a dull life. Or, the presence of a female next to him might have rekindled improbable hopes of a sexual encounter. Or, most likely, it might have been a mere accident, an insignificant careless indiscretion, which the latent paranoia of an old lady stretched beyond reasonable bounds.

Fearsome Yannis, Katina’s and Foula’s younger brother, was always the central and controlling male figure in the Kazineris’ household. Kostakis always referred to him in awe. A bulky former water-polo player and part-time swimming coach for one of city’s clubs, sported a huge potbelly under broad shoulders and brawny arms. He was unmarried, but seen a few times, in our neighborhood as well as patently ill-reputed night spots of the city port area, in the company of licentious women. Uncle Marios, who frequented the same café as Yiannis, told us stories of his heavy whiskey drinking and illicit gambling playing cards. He worked as a customs officer in the port, an employment which in Greece would have automatically positioned him in an unscrupulous an even corrupt professional sector of the city fabric. After settling the altercation with one or two words that evening, he chucked the painter out of the house next morning. Since then, the ground ‘chamber’ remained uninhabited and locked. The dignity and virginity of Katina would be preserved for ever.

25b - The Old Neighborhood: Kostakis & Christakis (Best Friends)

Our second-floor balcony offered a panoramic view of the courtyard and the open terrace for peeping into the comings and goings of the Kazineris’ family, most of the time in anticipation of Kostakis’ visit to his grandparents from his home on Fleming Street, five minutes’ walk away. As soon as he showed up, I was often invited to my delight to play with him in the courtyard, by Mrs. Marika, the old neighbour and friend of grandma’s -with old Kazineris assent, of course, and only in Yiannis’ absence; generally, he did not tolerate noisy kids playing under his bedroom. Kostakis, that is little Kostas in colloquial Greek, he was the boy I could name as the closest of childhood friends; in fact, he came to feature at the top of the pantheon of friends and classmates of that first life stage. I learned plenty through our companionship and friendship, and shared several moments of joy, playing and growing up together in our streets and first school. Inevitably, the memories of the time in each other’s company, in the old neighbourhood stayed with me for the rest of my life, their nostalgia commensurate with the time gap from that distant past.

Kostakis embodied a common, popular child. He was of the same age and short stature, although with a slightly stronger body, light brown eyes and blond hair, usually cut thin. There was nothing special about his physiognomy that would allow me to recognize him several decades down the line. So, in the courtyard and our alley outside, in the surrounding streets, by the Toumpa stream, in nearby open plots, in football grounds and basketball courts, an innocent and pure childhood friendship flourished spontaneously, between two similar boys through a mutual thirst for play and joy and sports, unconscious of their inherent boyish carefreeness, in no hurry to grow up.

We were often joined by the younger by one- or two-years Christakis, another boy living in the alley, the third member of a little gang, though associate. Rather unfortunately, due to our age difference and, consequently, smaller frame, he had to tolerate the often derogatory and contemptuous remarks by Kostakis, as the latter’s behavior often strayed beyond the patronizing and showing-off or laddish, typical of an older brother, and verged to what one could call bullying. There were many times when Kostakis’ clumsy displays of superiority forced Christakis to abandon our games and return with bitter feelings -often crying. In those confrontations, I, ostensibly a neutral bystander, felt sorry for Christakis, but I kept my temporary irritations from the injustices and unfair play, and a form of compassion towards him within myself and mostly remained silent. Despite all this, he followed us faithfully and willingly in our games and escapades when called upon, and generally complied with the dictates of our domineering friend.

The Kazineris’ courtyard no matter how small it seemed, it was still big enough for our children’s world and became our first playground, especially in the hot summer days. We could, insulated from neighbors' complaints and tellings-off, as well as the heat of the summer, under the discreet supervision of Mrs. Marika and sometimes Katina and Foula –Kostakis' mother or grandma from her balcony, our innovative games of three-way football without undue distractions: with three goal posts for each one of the three friends to defend. The first and the most vulnerable to shots and attacks was at the door of the store-room under the terrace, on which old Kazineris’ used to sit for hours on end vacant and detached, his chin supported by a cane; the second was the front door that led out into the alley; the third was the door of the laundry room under the porch to main entrance- it was the most difficult to assail and score against. A boisterous game was played at a frantic pace, often involving unscrupulous scheming of two players against the third. A game which poor Christakis was incessantly finished third, defeats that he accepted without protestations as something natural amongst good friends, however older and bigger than him. The undisputed winner in most cases was Kostakis: the most competitive of the group, the stubborn winner, but in his rare defeats the sorest of losers.

Our games ended around lunchtime when Kostakis was summoned by his grandma Marika for lunch. In the latter case, unwilling to relinquish our games and naturally disobedient towards his grandma, at least, she had to occasionally chase him around the courtyard with a bowl of pasta and a spoon to feed him. These summons or my own grandma’s calls from her balcony signaled the regrettable end of another day of laughter and fun.  

25a - The Old Neighborhood: Kostakis & Christakis (Our First Playground)

Across our alley, with its roof on level with grandma’s balcony was the old and tired two-storey house of the Kazineris’ family, residence of old Kazineris, his wife Marika, their daughter Katina, a retired nurse, and their son, the formidable Yannis. A second daughter, Foula, moved two blocks away after she was married. The small courtyard was delimited by an L-shape formed by the main building and an upper floor kitchen extension, into the open to the sky and elements terrace, and was enclosed by a perimeter wall. The courtyard featured in even humble dwellings, including grandpa’s old house, that dated back to the last decades of the 19^th century and Thessaloniki’s Ottoman era. A high wall at the street-front hid the interior from the few passers-by who strayed onto our alley. It also allowed us to enjoy in seclusion the innocent improvised games of our early childhood: one-against-one in a two-way or one-against-two in three-way football matches, the ‘restaurants’ we set-up and operated with logs for tables, and stones and weeds for the menu dishes, and whatever else our restless imagination had come up with for a few instants of joy. The courtyard was cemented and daily broomed by the two women of the house, whilst in the morning of hot summer mornings sprayed with water. The aged, nearly crumbling wooden gate, noticeably creaking when it was pulled open, was secured after dusk with a padlock from the inside, even though a barely forceful push would have brought it down. Beside the gate there was a kind of well with its rectangular mouth covered by a sheet of metal. We were strictly prohibited from lifting that cover to see what was hidden under, but we dared not disobey despite an itching curiosity. It was just a dangerously deep hole of a disused and stinking well, we were told. On the left of the entrance to the courtyard, a small bed with herb and flower pots and few tomato vines was flimsily fenced by ropes of wire on one side and, on the other, by a chest-level brick wall which separated the Kazineris’ plot from a narrow corridor that led to another house on the bank of the stream and by the bridge of Deligiorgi Street.

The covered well, the flower and vegetable bed, unused sheets metal and planks resting against the street-front wall, logs for the kitchen and laundry room stoves, left limited space for grandiose game designs. But it was enough for what we were coming up with and played and, at the same time, a haven and refuge and cool summer space for naïve and vulnerable beings in the early stages of a yet unripe childhood. It was our first little private playground where we played under the watchful eyes of parents and grandparents.

24d - The Old Neighborhood: Grandma & Grandpa (Goodbye, Dear Grandma)

Grandma survived more than two decades after grandpa’s death; despite the privations following the Catastrophe and the wars, despite the consumption that ate up half of her lung, despite the strenuous limping after the fall and the fracture of her hip on that fateful Sunday evening. Many said it was the innate stoicism and inner strength that kept her going, both instilled, as with many people of her generation, by unprecedented struggles for survival.

I remained throughout her conscious life her beloved grandson -her ‘favorite’ to quote uncle Marios. A frequent visitor for lunch in her kitchenette as child and teenager and, later, as a student, we would sit at the table under the blue cupboard and chat – about anything that two people of the same blood separated by 60 years in age could possibly chat. At the end-of-school farewell party with high school classmates in 1981, in a taverna on Delphi Street, I was intoxicated by ashes insidiously thrown into my retsina drinks by the bully of the class. By the end of the ‘banquet’ I was in a state of heavy stupor. Despite my unprecedented intoxication and a nearly unconscious state of mind and body, I managed to instinctively instruct the two school mates who offered to take me home, the always benevolent Zois and Dimitropoulos (perhaps the only persons I was in friendly terms with throughout the high school years) with directions to our grandma’s apartment. Going back to our family home since the previous year, in the Harilaou district of the east side of the city, by bus or taxi was out of question. The two fellows had to carry me by the shoulders, like an incapacitated wounded soldier, for the few hundred meters walk to grandma’s house -the closest harbor. It was past midnight and the lads had to wake grandma up. After they laid me down on her single bed in the bedroom, with the icon of the Virgin Mary and the whole ceiling spinning above my head, they left me under her care.

She was too strong a character to panic and had confronted by far worse situations in life, although it was unlikely she had to deal with similar deadly intoxication states of close family members in the past. ‘Oh, Mum, Mum! Why I did not listen to you...’ I was mumbling in my drunkenness. Thus I was teased by Father and uncle Marios in the following days. After grandma phoned Mother, she gave me to swallow a spoonful of Turkish coffee powder with plenty of water, a known powerful antidote to the effects of alcohol, something that Mother, when she arrived, approved of as the appropriate action. How did the old woman know, given than neither she nor her husband ever drunk more than a sip of liqueur?

After high-school, when I was enjoying university life to the full, socializing with friends or when busy relationships with girlfriends occupied the best and most of my spare time, I always put aside some hours of the week left to see grandma. She used to call me more than once a month to invite me for lunch, invitations I never declined. The meals she offered turned simpler as the years passed. Her physical strength was depleted; dementia was getting hold of her mind. When Father bought my first car, a Yugo, after our lunch, I used to drive her to a pharmacy behind the ‘Euclidean Technical College’ to buy her medication. I never understood why she had to go that far for her medicine, but no less explicable was the fact that she adamantly refused my offer to take her back, but insisted instead on walking the few hundreds of meters distance back home, in her slow limp supported by a cane. It was an unequalled perseverance, an unyielding will, and a rarely seen will to live.

I said my emotional goodbye, after another invitation for lunch in her kitchenette, the last one, in 1986 before taking my own path to immigration. ‘Who's going to drive me now to obtain my medicines, L...,’ she told me jokingly. The first symptoms of her dementia had begun to become more apparent to my uncle and aunt who still lived upstairs, and were also evident to rest of the family and on show during our Easter family meal in the same year. Memory loss, forgetfulness of people and things, and confusion, would be the subject of family discussions for quite some time; an illness impossible to be dealt with by the impatient young.

Against the odds, I saw her alive again several years later, shortly before I was dismissed by my military service in 1992. She came along with my uncle's family to our house in the Harilaou district for a family get together that turned out to be the very last time I saw her alive (and sadly uncle Marios, as well) -for lunch and a photo opportunity in the balcony. Her dementia had progressed substantially - her mind functions virtually limited in keeping the heart beat and the body alive. By then I was  completely erased from her memory banks: ‘Who is this lad?’ she muttered at one point. She gazed at the camera, with eyes squinted due to the bright afternoon sunlight, unsmiling and expressionless, for the family photo on the balcony. ‘What’s going on here?’ she seemed to think, but through her vacant gaze, one could still see remnants of the tenacity and determination.

I could not tell whom from the family party she could identify and name, if any. She did not say much that afternoon, but my uncle's jokes and always joyful demeanor brought a rare fragile smile. It would have been the last time I saw her, either alive or in her final resting place, but I was not moved as much as I was when we parted in 1986, before my departure for America; either because life abroad and the military service had hardened me, or because I knew that a big part of herself had been lost, along with memories of time spent together during my childhood. I heard the news of her death in my apartment in Rochester of England: ‘Grandma burnt out like a candle,’ Father told me over the phone. My uncle, her second son, whom she unhesitatingly donated one of her kidneys a decade before for a transplant that extended his life span by a decade, died a few months before her. When she was brought to the room, where he lay dead in his coffin, grandma asked: ‘Who is this gentleman who sleeps in there?’ Her past and with it her own being had long since died. 

24c - The Old Neighborhood: Grandma & Grandpa (Grandpa's End)

Grandpa’s presence in my childhood was fleeting; in Brother’s life non-existent. He left their little apartment and Eudoxia in the early 70s, at the beginning of his battle with neurasthenia and, perhaps, a type of mental illness, which, as with more ailments of the brain was poorly understood by the psychiatric community of the time. It was even more incomprehensible to family members. My cousin, in one of our chats about the past we shared, alleged that grandpa’s illness was based on a depression triggered by chemicals in the candies he sold for a living (and some of which he, inevitably, consumed) as a peddler during the German Occupation; a professional might have discarded such theories as scientifically unfounded, if not absurd.

Grandpa had, like many of his generation, a difficult life in a turbulent century at the historical crossroads of the Balkans. During his mental crises, mind and soul and, inevitably, body were shaken. My parents meticulously kept grandpa out of his grandchildren’s sight. Few of these crises did I witness, most of them I heard discussed: his head and hands shook violently, and on occasions they culminated in verbal and physical assaults against his poor wife: he would shout at her, pushed her away, and sometimes raised his hand to hit her. The aftermath of one of those crises, left his sons no other choice but to introduce him to a psychiatric clinic, where he remained to be haphazardly treated lengthy periods. I occasionally accompanied Father on his fortnight Sunday visits for a quick chat, by the entrance and the car park in front of the clinic, where we delivered a bag with the homecooked food Eudoxia had prepared. In the very first visits, boxes of cigarettes were also packed in with food and fruits. In my last vague memory of the old man, he met us in the courtyard in his red-silk pajamas. His white hair was combed back, exposing a broad forehead akin to thinkers, his pallor face was expressionless. Father was standing behind me, with his hand on my shoulder nudged me greet him with a handshake. I was too shy to say anything, I was just smiling. Grandfather tenderly pinched my cheek with his index, and said: "Well, well, little L... ! How fast is this boy growing up!’

He was taken out of the clinic on the eve of the 1974 World Cup. Treatment with psychiatric drugs apparently had a tangible effect and somehow tempered the mental outbreaks. In the last image in my mind of grandpa, he was sitting quietly, in a blue kimono over his red-silk pajamas, expressionless and silent, his immovable body fixed in our only armchair at the corner of the sitting-room, staring at the black-and-white TV broadcast of a match of that World Cup in West Germany. He was an ardent football fan. From his youth, a member of sports clubs and associations, social outlets for meeting friends and colleagues. His love for football was passed on to Father and by extension to me, as often is the case with lifestyles and hobbies from one family generation to the next; so much so that my interest in the game I thus inherited by association grew with time, and became a passion in various stages of life. The same evening, after the end of the televised broadcast, grandpa went down to the apartment and assaulted grandmother. Her cries were heard through the flights of stairs to our floor and apartment. Father and uncle and daughters-in-law rushed downstairs and saw grandma sitting on her stool next to the hallway phone, with her head between her hands, crying. He was slapped for no apparent reason, after another unpredictable mental outbreak. The same night, grandma was taken upstairs to sleep with us, my uncle, ever the peacemaker, after he managed to calm things down, kept grandpa company downstairs. Next morning he was transported back to the clinic. Since that episode, forty years ago after Dimitra, the matchmaker, introduced them, the old couple was separated for the rest of their lives.

Months later from that incident, on another bright Sunday afternoon, the phone next to our TV in the living-room, where we watched the world cup match with grandpa, rang. I was on my own -my parents and Brother were next door to Uncle's in one of the lunch parties my aunt used to organize on Sundays, for family and friends to enjoy her exquisite dishes. I picked up the phone casually:

"What's your name, my boy?"

"L..."

"Is your dad there?"

"No, he's next door at my uncle’s."

"I'm a nurse and I'm calling from the clinic. Tell your dad that grandpa died. Will you, my boy?"

"Yes."

"OK, goodbye now."

"Bye."

It was the first time I heard the word ‘died’ with specific reference to a family member or an acquaintance. I was shaken and my heart start beating fast; I gasped. I ran down the corridor to Uncle’s apartment opposite. My cousin opened the door for me, my brother, one year her junior, standing beside her – they were panting themselves after a running game in the hall. The meal was over and everyone was sitting in the living-room that formed an L-shape with the dining room where we had our lunch. The women, including grandma, were drinking coffee and chatting, Father was smoking and talking with his brother, in anticipation of his unpreventable afternoon siesta. I stood on the threshold of the open glass door of the living room and in a voice broken by the shock I said: ‘A lady called from the clinic to say that grandpa died...’ The luxuriant meal, the lively conversation, the panting of excited children from playing were the antithesis of death.

There was no surprise, only silence that lasted a few seconds. I remember no panic or hysteric reactions, just some mumbling amongst the adults, then uncle speaking nonchalantly on the phone, first with the clinic, then with a funeral director, the women in the hall him listening to him attentively and Father unable to constrain himself from furnishing instructions and orders. Brother and my cousin had been ushered beforehand into my cousin’s room with a few toys behind a closed door, conveniently distanced from the events unfolding.

I returned to our apartment and my room, sat at my little oak desk, and immersed myself in memories and reflections. The memories of my grandpa in my few years of life with him present were counted on the fingers of one hand: the Turkish delights and the dark chocolate he brought in the early years, especially for me, it was claimed –the privileged first grandchild, the football match we watched one evening, myself sitting between him and Father on the stands of Kaftazoglio Stadium under the floodlights, the visits to the clinic with Father in his first FIAT, visits admittedly unpleasant and which I tried to evade. And our very last time together: grandpa silent with a vacant expression in front of the TV, in the evening of the dreadful episode with grandma, which marked the beginning of the final stretch of his journey, of an unremarkable, yet struggling life: from fleeing his hometown Melnik, to the house in the alley he owned and shared with his mother and two of his siblings, its sale for a pittance to a black marketeer to finance his brother’s hospitalization in the sanatorium, the repugnant rented dwelling in Toumpa where they moved with Eudoxia and his two boys, the judicial intervention that allowed them to repossess their home, the exchange of the plot for three apartments in the block of our alley, the unhappy end in a bleak psychiatric clinic ward.

He did not and, possibly, could not have left much behind for his children and grandchildren, either memories or belongings: two apartments from the exchange, a pitiful state pension for grandma, a handful of Elizabeth's gold sovereigns still in a pouch to remind me of his struggles. However, he made the most of his being, within his range of limited abilities and few skills, and from the even fewer opportunities life presented to him, in the face of asymmetric adversities along and against the movement of the tectonic plates of history. It might and could not have been much better. The nurse's ‘your grandpa died’ still echoed in my ears, words mingled with those few faded memories that swirled in my mind; my soul was weighed down by the loss of one who was only a small-part actor in my life memories. I cried alone in the room for grandpa, for a first and last time. He was the first of close family members to die, at an age when I could barely grasp the meaning death. I was deemed too young a child to attend his funeral.

24b - The Old Neighborhood: Grandma & Grandpa (Faith & Friends)

Grandma retained, unwavering throughout her life, the traditional and narrow-minded version of the Greek Orthodox Christian faith, without necessarily comprehending much of the content of the long liturgies and sermons in her visits to Church on Sunday, as neither did many others of her generation. When the old legs could not carry her to the church, she used to watch the repetitive and as much incomprehensible Sunday liturgies live on television. That is until senile dementia erased from her brain the images of Christ and the Virgin Mary and the Saints she was devoted to, along with the human presence around her and eventually her own self. The oil-candle in front of the bedroom icon had long ago burnt out and removed by her sons, the pervasive scent of incense could not be smelled again in the building on Sundays, but until the very end, various stimuli, visual or auditory, caused her to unconsciously cross herself – like many devout Greek Christians do when they pass in front of one of the numerous churches or a cemetery.

Sunday church visits and holy communions were elements of a reverent routine, but major part of her social life and recreation as well. Sundays were focal and central days in the six-day working week, as established in post-war Greece, and remained as such for some time until after the transition to democracy in 1974, and the gradual westernization of the Greek society that was taking hold. On sunny Sunday mornings (I can only remember the Sundays of my childhood to be sunny) grandma dressed in her elegant attire, a dark-gray 2-piece skirt suit with a brooch on the lapel, perhaps the only formal costume in her wardrobe, and a handbag on arm, and walked down our alley down into Deligiorgi Street, passed in front the locked Tsapatsaraina’s taverna and over the bridge into Fleming Street, then descended towards the seafront, and turned left at Delphi Street before she reached her parish church of the Transfiguration of the Savior. On the main religious feasts or for my occasional holy communion subjected to accompany her in those church goings.

Within the same parish district several of our relatives from grandma’s family, the family of Kampakis, were scattered: her brother Stelios and his family, her nephew Eleni with her husband and four children, and others, and after the ‘Divine Liturgy’ she often stopped by their homes for a cup of Turkish coffee. On rarer occasions, she caught the suburban bus for a long journey to the district of Foinikas, with its relatively modern blocks of apartments for worker’s families: to visit her sister Chrysa and the oldest of Chrysa’s two daughters, Despoina, a factory worker and a spinster for life. Or, alternatively, she walked uphill to her old neighborhood in Toumpa, to some of her childhood friends, such as the legendary Charikleia and her beautiful daughter Mary. (Ah, Mary... The unrequited love of Father's youth, who could have become his wife should adamant Charikleia had not timely recognized his awkward character and vetoed against any attempt for a union.) Or, on the listless Sunday afternoons, which working people dedicated to a siesta or attending football matches, she would welcome the good friend Foula, equally religious but chattier, whom the single golden tooth was showing  through her smile made an impression on me. A lovable woman Foula was; she always brought an almond ION chocolate as a treat for me, a chocolate that later, as I grew older, became a gift of a hundred-drachma note to spend as I wished. Grandma's life was, therefore, uncomplicated. Pleasure was to be found in the small joys that her friendships and a close-knit family offered, and it was enough to fulfill a life she might not have imagined any better in her prime and old age, within the city she grew up and died.

But it was a winter Sunday and another translucent Sunday morning when her joyful routine commenced as usual with the attendance of the church service and ended in the early winter dusk, after one of her social visits, when on her way home she slipped at the curb of the Deligiorgi Street bridge pavement and fractured her hip. Grandpa and Father bemoaned, in a typically ungraceful manner, the high heel shoes she wore for the occasion. Marios displayed more sympathy. The surgical operation the followed inserted a metal blade to allow her back on her feet, but from then on, the cumbersome walk on a  crooked limping leg had to be supported by a cane in her outdoors forays. Who knows in which turn in a lifetime some bad fortune will show her ugly face to the detriment of one’s life? For the rest of her life, she limped with an increasingly bent posture, leaning more and more towards the shorter right leg. The will and perseverance, an innate optimism and stoicism that always distinguished her, as sculpted by years of hardship after their forced immigration from her homeland and wars, her extrovert and outgoing personality, her sociability and longing for human interaction, all these attributes her Smyrna heritage bequeathed to her, managed to keep her aged body standing and walking on one- and-a-half leg until the last months of her life. Unfortunately, apart from the persistence and some will and perseverence in the face of life’s obstacles, a bit of stubbornness, the other beautiful and admirable elements of grandma's personality were not passed on me.

x

24a - The Old Neighborhood: Grandma & Grandpa (Their Last Little Place)

They had their little place on the floor under ours -their last permanent nest after forced immigrations and the dislocations and tumults of three wars. At the end of his strenuous journey, grandpa did not even come to own their apartment. It was allocated to his brother Socrates, as his  share from the plot the family relinquished to have the block of apartments built.

It was a small apartment, with its door at one end of the dark corridor of the first floor. Half the size of ours or my uncle’s above and sparsely furnished, but it was more than adequate for the old couple who, until death, were sustained by grandpa’s meagre worker's pension. Things could not have been much better in the twilight of the life of the retired usher of the Tobacco Merchant’s Association and a housewife, part-time seamstress, who left the shacks and muddy streets of the refugee slum for a better neighborhood and life. Their furniture was old, its upholstery worn out, the appliances second-hand, but decent and functional. More importantly, the old stove was doing its job for grandma to produce her range of exquisite dishes from her Smyrna heritage.  

Opposite the front door and against the wall of the small hall stood a rustic varnished etagere, which displayed a set of porcelain coffee cups and some silverware on handmade laces grandmother knitted during the plenty of spare time she enjoyed in old age. The few antique items on the shelves were left over from previous generations or were part of her negligible dowry. By the etagere there was a mismatched phone stand and a straw stool, for the phone user to crouch on it. Grandma loved her telephone and made the most of that corner from the first day her son, an engineer in the telecom organisation, pulled a few threads for a prompt installation and connection, at a time when applications for home telephony services took months, if not years to be dealt with by the cumbersome public monopoly, even more so in period of sharp increases in demand for coveted home telephone lines. And despite being virtually illiterate, she managed to compile handwritten, for her own use an easy-to-read telephone index, a major fit that impressed even the more educated echelons of the family.

The bedroom, a few steps from the front door, barely fit their double-bed with its threadbare mattress, stuck, for that matter, against the wall, along with a single bedside cabinet, and the bulky Scandinavian-style oak wardrobe with shiny veneer and tapered legs. At the top-corner across from the door there was an icon of Virgin Mary, with a permanently lit oil-candle in front illuminating the holiest of faces. This object of prayer was often derided at by her secular sons, and grandma was reprimanded for its potential to cause fire. She quietly disregarded any derogative comments: she always had God and Virgin Mary by her side.

The straight, narrow corridor on either side of the front entrance, which connected the kitchenette to the sitting-room, was the spot where first accident in my life occurred, before the memorable traumatic fall into the fire in the square of the Cold Trough a year or two later. I must have been less than five years old, not yet fully conscious of my existence in the world, so the incident was dumped into the subconscious. As a toddler, spending time in grandma's apartment when both parents were at work, I was intrigued by the housework chores performed exclusively by grandma and grown-up women around me -men played no part in those. Such tasks fascinated me to the point of sticking my tongue out in concentration in my attempts to imitate adults in executing them. It was morning and grandma, who used to look after me in the absence of my parents at work, was cooking in her kitchen. With a piece of dump cloth I was handed, I was assigned and went about to dust furniture, floor and walls, an innocuous and useful way to keep a toddler busy -so did grandma think. When I tried to wipe clean the only socket in the corridor, my little body was thrown away a few meters down the corridor by an electric shock. The incident caused due panic to grandma and was followed up by a rather disproportionate turmoil amongst the family later in the day. Uncle Marios, present in the building at that time, came down to reassure grandma and calm both of us down with his remarkable equanimity. Ever since he used to mention that memorable incident of our family history with his light-hearted manner, although it could have ended my life prematurely.  

In the kitchen, the oven with its stove-top and the refrigerator were amongst the first post-war generation of electrical appliances in Greek households; they outlived both grandparents. An old shaky table was stuck to the wall opposite the sink, under a cupboard covered by shiny blue laminate. There were only three chairs; no need for more in the household. On top of the tarpaulin tablecloth outside mealtimes grandma used to throw one of her handmade laces, for the other uses of the table: for her coffee and gossip time with friends, family and neighbors, her embroidery and sewing, for arduously reading the headlines of a back issue of her husband’s or sons’ newspapers.

I ate dozens of times at that table, from my toddler years until my graduation from university, sitting always on the inside of the door of her balcony that bordered Mrs. Vangelia's tiny one. I enjoyed meatballs, fried or from a classic Smyrna recipe, fried zucchini with her homemade garlic sauce, kapuska and other stews, stuffed vine and cabbage leaves, lentils and bean soups, revani on her sons’ Name Day celebrations, melomakarona and kourabiedes in Christmas, dunking slices of tsoureki in Easter week. All those treats were amongst my favorite delicacies, but some she often prepared exclusively for the sake of her beloved grandson – because she “knew that I loved them”. She passed on her culinary art and techniques by word of mouth to her daughters-in-law (she resorted only to her memory rather than written down recipes), and to an extent, through Mother, to me. Her cooking skills, legendary within the broader family, weakened as old age took its toll and memory started failing her. The wealth of her Asia Minor cuisine shrank to few basics, but her longing and joy of seeing me at the table enjoying her cooking remained unabated, despite the scarcer visits, until the day of my departure to foreign lands.

The other side of the corridor led to the all-purpose sitting-room. An old, worn-out sofa was placed opposite the balcony at the façade of the building, which overlooked the two-storey house of the old Kazineris family and its courtyard that was enclosed by a tiled wall with an archaic wooden door. There was a second sofa with a few laced cushions, more like a divan, stuck against one of the side walls; in one of my games, I loaded it with house items -chairs, stools, etc., pretending it was a removal truck I was supposed to drive, to the irritation of grandpa when, on his return home for lunch, was confronted by a mess. At the opposite end of the room, there was a mahogany dining-table with chairs. It was the most expensive furniture in the household, but it barely lifted the room from its simplicity. We never sat to eat at that table and there had never been used for any sort of family gatherings. The small coffee table in the middle and two armchairs on either side of the balcony door, on the other hand, were more frequently utilized. There they sat, overlooking the courtyard of the Kazineris’ house from across the street, grandma and her solo visitors for coffee and endless small-talk.