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.