37 - Our Family Friends: Kiki – First Flutter of Love

I was in in the last year of elementary school, eleven years old. In our over-crowded classroom, I was sitting at the second desk, with my good school mate Nikos next to me. But when I was first assigned a seat at the beginning of the school year, when an alphabetical order, as well as height and size were the main factors in our placement in the room layout, I ended up being squeezed next to Yiannis and Panayiotis, somewhere in the middle of the right column of about ten desks allocated for the boys. Thankfully, after the first weeks my place in class was changed by our teacher, Mr. Eugenides, possibly after some external intervention. (Children of teachers and other civil servants, like military officers or policemen, enjoyed some privileges in schools, God knows why.)

My joy from that relocation was twofold. On the one hand, I found the two boys, coward bullies in their moments, annoying: in the inevitable ennui during lessons, they would not miss a chance to poke fun and mock me -trying to be attentive; most importantly, my transfer to the second desk, under the teacher’s table in front of the blackboard, was just behind the only desk occupied by girls, in the boys’ column. I would be sitting just behind Kiki for the very last year the Greek educational system allowed mixed-sex classes!

Kiki was one of the prettiest girls in our class, with short black hair, a small ‘French’ hollow nose, between two shin and playful, round black eyes, and thick and shapely rosy lips. Her petite figure and unformed curves of her body were covered under the unattractive blue uniform that girls had to wear at school. The long boring days of that last year obtained significance and meaning. Sitting behind Kiki, I could watch every move of hers, I could easily draw her attention, as well as demonstrate my acumen, when she solicited my help with some maths questions. We had both teacher parents, who nurtured diligence and endeavored our development in exemplary students and, ultimately, good citizens. Therefore, our interest and involvement in classes and our overall performance had to be (and was) above the average of the class. Beside my ability in maths, I believe I demonstrated bravery in Kiki’s eyes on the few occasions when I was pulled out from my desk by our authoritarian teacher, to stand in front of the class and suffer the corporal punishments Mr. Eugenides favored: caning the palms of our hands several times with a wooden rod, slapping a cheeks or, worst, pulling and dragging us on a circle by our side-whiskers -all of which I endured courageously, when some other pupils cowered in fear and cried in pain. My former neighbors Yiannis and Panayiotis were markedly amongst the latter group. My growing boyish ego was further inflated when in a game-fight during one of the class breaks, I pushed Kiki hard towards the wall. She, instead of getting upset, praised my strength!

On our last school trip to the Monastery of Παναγία Σουμελά, cut off from the few friends I had in my class, including Kostakis, and despite the ardent desire to join their football games, I watched Kiki and her friends from afar on their walks in the pine forest, playing the rope, the lame, and their other games. Then I wandered in circles around their picnic spot trying to draw her attention. I felt that irresistible and unambiguous but unrequited attraction, and instinctive but emotionally blurred pull towards her, and the proverbial flame burning in the underbelly throughout that day trip: I felt in love, without having had the vaguest idea of what love meant and what the process of falling in love entailed, beside a smile, a fleeting touch of hands, and perhaps a furtive kiss. The day passed without bearing any fruits of that sort – or any sort, for that matter. My unmanageable shyness and timidity got the better of me and I kept myself at a fair distance, unseen from Kiki for the best part of the day. Similar efforts by the far more assertive, yet always irritating and often repulsive rival Yiannis, were also in vain -rather predictably.

The revelations from Billy regarding sex drastically changed the nexus of human relations as hitherto were pictured in my mind. They set up a colorful, emotional and erotic stage; the imagination galloped unbridled in unexplored planes. Lying on the couch, with my eyes closed, but my body and mind in a state of overstimulation, I fantasized about what Billy had clumsily described as sexual intercourse with Kiki the object: me on top of her, doing something that naturally happens between the bodies of a boy and a girl that fancy each other. Butterflies fluttered in the stomach, the mind was stimulated and agitated, and I felt a natural but nearly painful hardness under my pants, a frustration that waited in vain for release. It would have been a few more months, before I had advanced on to that well-documented next phase in maturity that afflicts every teenager.

Kiki would never be ‘in body’ next to me, but those unfulfilled fantasies with her lingered for a while beyond the end of that last school year in the same class. After elementary school our ways parted: I was placed in a boys' only high school (along with Yiannis), Kiki, the object of our desires, in a girls'. Equally desperate for a full or quasi -sexual relationships with the other sex, Yiannis persistently searched for her in the catchment area of our former school. He found and stopped by her apartment building; he even had the audacity ask for her and speak with her through the intercom. Disappointed and frustrated, knowing that I might also have an interest in Kiki’s whereabouts and well-being, he eventually declared that “she turned into a really ugly girl with a face full of acne spots…, who barely grew in stature since school; she is like a midget", before concluding with a hint of self-satisfaction that “there are much better-looking girls to go for…”

Over time, my phantasies with the fading image of Kiki next to me were substituted by the livelier and more recent pictures of girls I used to come across in my neighborhood streets on my way to school or to the grocery shop or bump into the Thessaloniki’s seafront parks that we frequented with Yiannis in weekends; not long after, during my teenage years from pictures in sex magazines. I eventually discovered, naturally and by pure instinct, ways to release my sexual urges; initially with an improvised rubber vagina and later simply and practically, with the help of my hand. The way out was not just a release from the torment and the futility of purely visual stimuli, it was a tangible, real, almost dreamlike peak in satisfaction, an exquisite joy, a jolt of effortless pleasure in a period of intense hormonal disorders. The sexual instinct and desire, which Billy’s crudely pulled out of a Pandora’s box, came to the fore of my existence and occupied a big chunk of my being ever after. A new period was beginning where I would struggle with taboos and burdened by inexplicable deep-seated guilts, subconsciously imposed by a conservative and oppressive environment, to tame those instincts and channel them through the limited available channels during the barren teenage years. The world of adolescence was becoming frustratingly colorful. It was a world of abrupt mental ups and downs, of endless hours of an unbearable solitude, confronted by sexual repression and a protracted celibacy of several years ahead. The world opening for me was that of an incessant struggle with dreams and phobias and fantasies, a chorus of invisible hormones crying within me, a self that was changing physically and emotionally by the day.

Time slowed down against my will, almost intolerably, as I was impatiently waiting for my consummation into a man, a real man, to bring about a biological, physical and emotional balance. And along with it waiting for the time when I would take my life in my hands, turn it on a course of my choosing, and strive for my liberty and fair share in life.

36 - Our Family Friends: An Afternoon of Revelations (What ‘f**k’ Means)

My enlightenment continued that same afternoon on a different level. In his untidy room, Billy, lying on his bed and leafing over one of his Asterix comic books, tossed a second unexpected question, one with a rather sardonic grin. “Do you know what 'fuck' means?” No, I did not know. All I knew was that it was a verb for an insult that was voiced, combined with a variety of unrelated object nouns, animate or inanimate (such as ‘fuss’, ‘trouble’, ‘cross’, body parts, persons, relatives, even divine persons)—in football stadiums, in the neighborhood amongst builders, in milder versions even by Father himself in moments of anger or irritation.

I understood that we were entering a taboo area. He explained rather tentatively to me with the same cunning and arrogant smile, the meaning of the word and what boys do to girls with their ‘dick’. It was as if Billy were revealing to me a universal secret, which Greek parents tend to conceal from their offspring for as long as they can, in the hope that somewhere, somehow, a third party will reveal its meaning, explain in some detail the pertinent act, and, thus, relieve them of the burden of a hidden and longed-for but for some reason discomfortable truth, which, nevertheless inevitably one day will be revealed in absentia in one way or another.

In the weekend that followed, Billy used the pictures in the porn magazine we found walking amongst the pine trees of the Panorama Forest, in our joint families outing to illustrate the subject matter and edify my ignorance on that important issue. Barely eleven years old, I was initiated in the Secrets of Birth and Life. I learned; my existence was illuminated by a bright light. In two random instances, I unknowingly climbed a large step on the ladder of life and emerged from the naivete and innocent of childhood into the terra incognita of manhood. It was a week in my tenth year of life, that I crossed the threshold into the dark and mysterious era of adolescence with whatever that entailed. And a libido was born.

35 - Our Family Friends: An Afternoon of Revelations (Music)

Back at the Queen Olga's apartment, that hive of intellectuals, my guardianship from Billy, as if by an older and bigger brother, continued and touched upon issues on which my real guardians had neither an opinion, nor they were reluctant to discuss. It was another Saturday afternoon during a family visit, when we were lying on the floor in front of Billy’s state-of-the-art stereo system, of which naturally I was in awe and envious– thanks to the several control buttons and knobs and corresponding features, as well as the size and power of the two loudspeakers on either side of a rack of selves, which housed the different components. Billy enthused demonstrating the power and fidelity of his stereo by varying the volume to its maximum amplitude, whilst orienting his ear in the direction of each speaker. The bottom shelf of the rack was occupied by a respectable in size set of vinyl records with artistically intriguing covers. He would select an album and then, meticulously and with uncharacteristic dexterity and diligence, he would pull an album out of its case so that we could listen to a piece of musing of his likings. At a pause he asked me: "You, L, what kind of music do you like listening to?"

What answer a musically ignorant child, whose deplorable experience with listening to music was limited to a handful of popular Greek songs, hits of the time that were played on the radio, television, the jukeboxes of taverns, or could be heard from the open windows and balconies of my working-class neighborhood? What could be the response of a child, whose musical education could be summed up by a single hour of week of choirs-singing of patriotic songs at school, with inadequate music sources, a non-existent collection of records and tapes and, therefore, utterly incapable to distinguish between genres and trends and styles, foreign or Greek, modern or classical, let alone fully appreciate and enjoy a music composition? ‘Light Greek pop..." I timidly whispered in two words to that dreadful and evasive question, ashamed by my ignorance which laid bare. Yet, I answered to the best of my non-existent knowledge (of music). The one and only vinyl record of 45 rpm, was a gift from one of my aunts on my eighth birthday, and I played it on the old mini-record player Father normally kept on the top shelf of our wardrobe for my aunts and Kostakis, the only guest amongst friends, to listen to. It had two singles, hits of the time, by a popular singer and former neighbour, Kalantzis: "Dolphin, little Dolphin" on one side, "The Glib Man" on the other. Oh, I forgot... There was also collection of old songs of Father’s, either forgotten or banned by the junta censorship, from genres popular amongst the progressive youth, branded as ‘artistic pop-music’ and the ‘New Wave’ in a tape, but that semi-damaged tape could not be played in the dysfunctional player without being twisted and warped, and a handful of scratched 45rpm records in a plastic bag; the Beatles' Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ is the only one I recall.

Billy’s query was well-intentioned. He just wanted me to pick a song to my musical likings, if any, from his rich record collection so that we could both enjoy listened to in high-fidelity. Undoubtedly, his musical ear was more cultured and refined, yet he did not mock my feeble answer. But instead of something like ‘light Greek pop’, always with good intentions, he chose and put on the turntable the closest available to that genre: of the then communist Theodorakis' ‘The Little Songs of a Bitter Homeland’, whose music was censored and banned by the junta government since 1967. It was an album that the Akrivides’ purchased in Paris and smuggled into Greece, another piece of evidence, symbolic as it was, of a small but brave under the circumstances, resistance to the policies of the regime. We recorded the album on a cassette. Despite Mother's protests (the always fearful and compliant teacher), we listened to them, in the privacy of our FIAT when on the motorway. I might have been too young then to resonate with the revolutionary lyrics and beats and the mobilising melodies of Theodorakis' music.

After ‘The Little Songs…’ of Theodorakis’, Billy, pulled another record out of it album cover, and with his index finger and thumb of softly touch the circumference of another album, as if holding a valuable and fragile object, he placed on the turntable; an album of his liking, I presumed. His cover featured a photograph of a Zeppelin airship, which I recognized from a war film we had recently watched together in the nearby cinema. It was a milestone album of the ‘Led Zeppelin’ band, again purchased in Paris at Billy’s behest. Squatting next to the speakers, the volume of the amplifier being adjusted to higher scales, after the few seconds of the characteristic spiky noise created by the needle after it contacts the vinyl record, our ears vibrated and our souls were filled, wholesome sound of Jimmy Page's electric guitar and Robert Plant's raw and powerful voice. I had not listened to any rock music until then, let alone the innovative heavy metal sounds that were captivating the ears and souls of avant-garde young people, like Billy, and, of course, I had not heard of Led Zeppelin either. It had taken several years, from the barren days of utter world music ignorance, for me to discover rock and heavy metal, along with many other genres and sounds of the then contemporary but timeless music production, even the classical heritage; everything that might have reached the ‘bitter homeland’ homeland and my room from the musical pioneers of the world. Pop and rock music, foreign and unknown, always sounded like ‘noise’ and an incomprehensible ‘buzzing’ in the ears of Mother and Father, the artists as scruffy and ‘hairy hippies.’ I would have to tread for a few more years the lukewarm waters of Greek light-pop music, before experiencing a broader musical repertoire, Greek and foreign. 

34 - Our Family Friends: A Country Walk

It was an August morning, some days before the ‘Dormition of Theotokos’ on the 15^th, the Orthodox holiday especially distinct amongst the Pontian faithful and marks the end of ‘holidays-by-the-seaside’ for most Greeks, when Nikos took us, a bunch of carefree children enjoying their break from school, for a hike in the countryside that surrounded his father’s village of which he knew too well: to proudly demonstrate the paths he walked as a child and the hidden spots amongst the groves and the orchards, where he played with his mates and maybe found love; places and times over the memory of which the older the man gets, the more nostalgic he feels.

We descended the dirt uneven roads, carved by the grooves opened by the winter rains, that led out of the village towards the fields. We crossed dried streams, under the foliage of thirsty planes and climbed trunks of fallen trees. We made sticks from the fallen tree branches to fight the nettles and weeds that blocked paths untrodden for ages. We lurked in fear for wasps, lizards and snakes, on guard for leaping locusts we did not want to harm. Only light, engulfing the ever-resilient trees and the vegetation that defied the drought, under a spotless blue firmament and a relentless sun, indifferent to our travails. In that unrivalled serenity, our outstretched ears could hear sounds of summer: the buzzing of flies, bees and buzzers and the persistent loud chorus of tireless male cicadas, our footsteps on the ground, the dry branches cracking under our steps. Human beings, voices and movements, apart from shepherd Nikos and his flock of children who faithfully followed him, were absent from as far as we could see and hear. With the calm voice from the top of our phalanx, he named places, old trees, derelict farm houses, haunted to our imagination, told us the little history of each one. It was his village, the place where he grew up and he was looking back to his own childhood, perhaps trying to relive some of that time. Everything around seemed familiar, its presence there and then made sense to him.

In an orchard of peach trees, we quenched our thirst from the water of a well. It felt fresh and cool. On a bench under the shade of a shanty we ate the peaches and medlars we picked along. The sun began his decent behind the ridges of the Pieria mountains on our way back home. Nikos guided us through a different route, which felt longer as we were getting tired from the hot and sweaty August day, but its light started playing hide-and-seek behind the treetops and was fading. A barely perceptible chill of the late afternoon was welcoming nevertheless. But Nikos wanted to awaken our tired spirits children's souls and reignite the feelings of adventure, to unleash more butterflies in our guts, make us forget the tiredness and the hunger and the thirst: with a serious face he feigned doubts about our way back amid the unfamiliar wilderness and the fading sunlight. We had to find a path that led back home before dusk!  Perhaps, he added, we might be caught up by the darkness of the night in that lonely place with its alien creatures and terrifying sounds. ‘He would not have wished it, but, hey, such things can happen!’ We listened to him with open mouths and an anxiety mixed with excitement of walking in the darkness. That we were a company led by a brave leader was a consolation. Eventually, before the sun disappeared behind the mountains, the first houses of the village emerged through the foliage of the trees of an orchard. We relaxed and longed for food and rest.

The day became a milestone: as a first acquaintance with the desolate and serene world of the countryside, far from the noises of the neighborhood and the city, which was choking by tall buildings and cars, spreading at pace in the woods and devouring the country around it, multiplying its inhabitants. But that day and the impression it left on me became the inspiration for an essay at school, under the vague and unimaginative theme: ‘Describe a Memorable Day of Your Summer Holidays’. It was read in front of the class and earned the teacher's praise.

The week in Katahas, in Nikos’ family home, with its little pine forest, its groves and orchards, the dry stream, the workshop of Kalevras, was one of the rare occasions I felt on par with Billy. It helped of course that we played away from the ‘society’ crowds that gathered in their apartment, but also helped because I saw him sheepish looking down on the floor, humbled one of his father's telling offs I had not witnessed before. The noises we made and our giggling from the room we shared, that continued despite the reprimands from his parents, prevented Nikos from Greek man’s ritual of an afternoon nap. As a guest I escaped the telling off, although I was equally responsible for the racket and the lack of consideration we displayed. Nikos frighteningly loud voice could only be compared with that of Father’s; it was decorated with offensive words, like "Donkey! Tramp!", and some swearing, and had the immediate effect of shutting our mouths for the whole duration of Nikos’ nap and beyond. The lambasting of boys by the thundery voices of fathers temporarily defeats spirits and, sometimes, as it is in my case leaves inedible marks, if not scars, in the soul that are carried through into adulthood. After the dressing-down Nikos grabbed Billy by the arm and threw him out of the house ignoring my presence. I stood faintly hidden behind the door of the small room, straining to contain my laughter in a throbbing chest, to keep my lips pursed from smiling. With Nikos’ ferocity and Billy’s abashing, for the first time in my presence, I felt that distinct feeling of Schadenfreude, the joy with someone else’s misgivings. I followed Billy to the yard under a shelter, where, after we had vented to laughter by Billy’s theatrical mocking of his father's wrath, we continued in a low tone of voices our quiet board games.

33 - Our Family Friends: Village Art

Despite sitting quietly by the sidelines for the most part, our association with the Akrivides’ family and the peripheral friendship with Billy proved an educational experience. This concerned the arts (literature perhaps excepted), as well as nature, with which my family never developed a good rapport, and lacked an appreciation of its diversity and often concealed beauty. Escapades to the countryside from our concrete urban habitat were few and far between, and limited within the hot summer months. On Father’s initiative we embarked on day trips to Chalkidiki peninsula or weeks of vacation by the beaches of Pieria -more as a kind of compulsion to log a respectable number of sea baths, which, each summer, the common city folk counted as stamps, before generous al fresco meals and the inevitable afternoon siesta. (Father's dozing in summer and, in fact, each and day of the year, had always been a sacred sine qua non element of family life that ought to be respected.)

On the other hand, Mother’s village, in a devalued area past the industrial western outskirts of the city, had no special natural attractions to offer. It was surrounded by fields and factories, and most of my time there I spent playing with other children in the streets by my grandparent’s house or in his vegetable garden at the back. Sometimes auntie Domna took me out for a walk to our small field in Sabli, a family land, in fact a government hand-out after great-grandfather’s resettlement in the area from his lost home and fields in Anatolia, which, in turn, my grandfather, a teacher by trade, rented to a local farmer for a petty amount. Domna wanted to take me there less for the invigorating walk in the countryside it entailed, than to remind and make me aware as an heir to the family fortunes, that the field was a very own landed property and family asset, and check that it was still there and being cultivated. But on the way back, we collected tomatoes from the vegetable fields, figs in mid-August, or, as they say, ‘to catch May’ on May Days, by picking up daisies and lilacs and poppies along the way, or celebrate the legendary Greek Easter in the church of Agios Athanasios by the graveyard, in the outskirts of the village. From those spring walks in the fields, I retained the scent of lilacs and the sweet flavor of the plum tomatoes we sampled on the way -not much else.

My first close and memorable encounter with nature occurred the one week I spent on vacation at Nikos’ parental home in the village of Katachas, on the foothills of the Pieria mountains. There I appreciated for the first time, even if fleetingly, its beauty and serenity. A young boy, surrounded daily by the hustle and bustle of an urban environment panting from a relentless construction and development, could only have underestimated its hidden treasures by the few imprints in memory from that distant past. Decades have passed since until I made my reacquaintance; and nature attracted me again, ever more so profoundly -a revelation of grandeur and diversity. Ever since, in magnitude inversely proportional to the time I have left on this earth, I long for the hours of solitude I could cherish in the last remnants of some desolate wilderness after the onslaught of the industrial civilization, thankfully before its subsumption under capitalist development and human activity becomes irreversible. Its colors and scents and echoes have obtained the true value they merit in contemporary lives, for its most part confined in urban dwellings and workplaces. Only few acquaintances from our fleeting presence on earth offered that unique pleasure, generously and in abundance, and have such a profound effect into our senses and being.

In the old forest on a hill at the boundaries of the village, unshackled from school duties, free spirits under the pine trees, sitting on scattered rocks, we chatted with Billy and other children, played hide and seek among the trees, the rocks and the earthworks; we created artifacts with the pine needles and the cones, we collected flowers and plants for our herbariums. The only sounds that could be heard were the discordant noise of the city bustle, but the rustle from the trees above us, as soothing to the soul, as their shades in the heat of August invigorating to our bodies.

On the way to Nikos’ paternal home, at the edge of a forest clearing isolated from the core of the village, stood the sculpture workshop of a local artist, Efthymios Kalevras, whose name I discovered in the internet decades later. In the small courtyard, in front of the entrance of a simple square building of four white walls and a flat roof, a broad entrance door, but tiny windows on either side, a statue was erected on a cubic uncarved plinth stone. What was taking place in the dark interior of that workshop aroused our curiosity from our first day, until one afternoon, escorted by Nikos, we entered the workshop of his fellow villager and artist friend. Kalevras had the presence, that we normally envision: that of a bohemian visual artist of the Parisian ilk. He had sloppy gray hair and a thick gray beard and wore a smudged apron. The disorder in his workshop, benches with hammers, needles, tongues, spatulas, soiled with remnants of plaster, moulds and unsculpted and unformed chunks of marble, in short, a dark pit engulfed by the bright light outside covered in dust, both intrigued and disappointed the immaculate person I was growing into. I could discern no beauty or elegance in that disorderly place. How could it be possible through this mess, the white dust and dirt, the amorphous pieces of stone scattered around, harmony and order and beauty could be formed and something beautiful be carved like the statue of the local or national hero that stood outside? The mystery of artistic creation primarily rests with the mind and hands of the artist. As always, behind the magic of creation in sculpture, painting, music, poetry exists man, one’s soul and inspiration, talent and genius. I was never able to tame these arts, the fine arts. Perhaps, I lacked the innate talent or a sufficient depth and sensitivity of soul. A spark from something seemingly small and insignificant becomes a fire in certain spirits, it transforms emotion and sensual impressions into inspiration, and the inspiration, with the help of talent and skill, into creation. The creativity of my own youth had been exhausted in more practical and mundane occupations that later became a livelihood profession. The works of art I never managed to be immersed into as a creator would nevertheless present themselves and fascinate me, distinguishing the artists behind as exceptional beings, admirable for their skills, talent and inspiration, the wealth of emotions and richness of their souls -none of which attributes I have been able to emulate in life.