49 - Epilogue to an Awkward Friendship

In the years that followed, Mother & Father continued with the life professions they had chosen and served until their retirement, and an unchanged daily routine: they walked a "well-trodden path", as they say, like many common people -of their class and nation. Nikos became member of Papandreou’s Socialist Party, as soon as the military junta collapsed after the Cyprus crisis and the transition to a parliamentary democracy began taking shape, and quickly ascended its ranks, partially due to his roots in the populous Pontian community of Thessaloniki. The populist party he adroitly joined opened wide open its doors and allowed him to pursue his ambitions and a career in politics he had been dreaming of and meticulously planning and putting into play, with determination and perseverance, since the early days of the dictatorship. His rise in the arena of Greek politics was meteoric: from municipal councillor to member of parliament, from member of parliament to a minister, then to almost Thessaloniki’s mayor. His efforts were vindicated, his talents awarded.

Billy and I, after school and university, followed our own different paths, unshackled from parental guidance (or, one might say, coercion into career paths of not one’s liking or choice). We met again after nearly twenty years, one December evening at the party for Nikos’ name day, that is on St Nicholas day of the orthodox calendar, in which he organized every year, in the latter years in spacious family mansion at the eastern outskirts of city. Apparently, politics increased substantially the family wealth. Both Billy and I had long since spread our wings and emigrated to different shores. We did not exchange many words that evening. Nikos was fervently filling my glass with wine of his own making, whilst joking and recalling the old days when we were children. Later, during dinner, sitting right across the long table from Nikos at its one head, I was challenged to answer some rather staged question from him about life in England, a country that I had long since adopted and its culture began to embrace. My answers, with valid comparisons with life in modern Greece, attempted with hints of wit to dispel several myths and impressed and caused laughter amongst his guests. His questions, after his visits as a member of the Greek parliament in London, were stemmed from entrenched perceptions and prejudices about Greek and European societies from an old-school patrician and politician, and expressed the sort of stereotypes that the minds of many average middle-aged, middle-class Greeks, either “worldly” and cosmopolitan or not, form even to date. For the first (and last) in the presence of that family and their social set, I somehow felt liberated from the various inferiority complexes that plagued me during childhood. Yet, it might as well have been because of the influence of Nikos’ wine.

Years have passed since. We went our separate ways on almost parallel and in some respects symmetrical paths: with our immigration, our marriages and divorces and children, our parents’ illnesses and deaths, and so on. Perhaps, all those apparently ill-intentioned remarks I made about Billy at that time and the feelings of envy and low self-esteem in his company were both symptoms and part causes of a more generic inferiority complex in progress and with deeper roots than our sleep-overs or early adolescence holidays. Those associations merely acted as centripetal forces of withdrawal and further distance myself from the social environment. Most of thoughts and feelings merely swirled within myself, locked in self’s well-guarded confines. I walked through life under the veil of inwardedness, cryptic and laconic or concealing truths and even lying, sometimes serially and compulsively, whilst often displaying a cold and expressionless exterior. I was ‘cold’ indeed, as Tina, Billy’s beautiful friend, rightfully branded me, with long periods of repressed and deeply buried emotions, interspersed by explosive eruptions of temperament, with only a few flashes of extroversion and sociability to speak about; and those often carefully pre-planned or artificially prefabricated or supported by doses of alcohol.

Digging into the far reaches of memory, into the outback of the human mind, is essential; especially during the last half of one’s life. What is all about this amazing self-awareness which emerges, god knows how, from the inner chambers of the human brain? It could be said that is the consciousness of self and of existence in relation to the other human beings that surround ourselves with movements and words and actions and exert their influence. It is built gradually with the passage of time, before its expiry with death, as the impressions left by the world and whatever is sensually experienced, the application of reason that attempts to explain phenomena and their causes and effects, their crystallization into opinions, ideas and feelings, accumulate and deepen, as the being and the self-perception of this being, one’s self-awareness and conscience, are maturing. Human nature is shaped through cyclical repetitions of common everyday phenomena and through the vortex of our relationship and interaction with others, the emotions they cause, the imprints on the soul they leave, through an incessant processing and correlation by the mind of the impressions left by sensations and observations of what is taking place around us. It is a continuous and ceaseless process that concludes with death, but somewhere in mid-life, after the end of our youth and as we enter old age, it seems to peak. In that vein, the friendship with Billy and the days in his family apartment and the Skotina campsite, despite the vast temporal distance from the present that makes them look insignificant events, were big steps towards the integration and culmination of my being into what it is; at least as seen and judged subjectively and from within.

Inner order and peace contribute to a harmonious existence and even happiness, but this balance and peace can be brought about after one had encountered and negotiated emotional storms and acquired sufficient experience and knowledge to manage the emotional turmoil and the bottomless depths that the abyss of human sour is well known that it can reach on occasions. Knowledge is a necessary condition for freedom and harmony, always within the constraints of our environment; it is a prerequisite for extending the limits and broadening the horizons of our freedom. I learned a lot during those years through our friendship with Billy and his family: from what constitutes the biological basis on which the attraction between boys and girls is grounded, contemporary ways of how to approach and get that love, what music people listen in foreign cultures, the beauty the countryside can hide, and others. It was a friendship, of family and childhood, which ended constructively and with a positive sign, despite disappointments and embarrassments and awkward moments.

Recently, in the cemetery of the ‘Resurrection of Christ our Lord’, a few steps away from the grave of the Mother in a forest of gravestones, Brother alerted me to a neglected grave with Kiki’s name on it. On a weather-worn stone amongst the weed, a short epigram was engraved with some verses by the poet Sikelianos, the literary passion of her life. Mother always spoke enthusiastically about Kiki’s soirées that included reciting poems by Sikelianos, at a time when neither the poet, nor his poems made much sense to me. Mother was always invited to those literary evenings until old age and dementia got hold of both of their lives. Kiki, our friend was dead and despite the thirty odd years that passed since the last time we met them in their house, I felt a sadness with no apparent rational basis. At the end of the day, the loss of every person we met in our lifetime and our paths crossed sometime and somewhere, weighs down our souls with nostalgia. Their death cuts a piece off from our own lives.