50b - At Mum's Village (Its People and a Couple of Friends)

I once wrongly assumed that the family who lived in a hovel across the street from grandpa’s was Turkish, as I had inferred from the traditional şalvar both husband and wife I saw wearing and the hijab that covered the hair of the women of the house. I learned later that these neighbours were in fact Turkish-speaking Christians of unidentifiable (of course) ethnic origin –of minor significance in the historical process and whom the population exchanges, based solely on the criterion of one’s faith, uprooted them unwillingly from Bursa in exchange of Muslims of the Thessaloniki region. Their native Turkish language, the silk şalvar and scarfs, the Turkish amanes heard from their radio, the food they cooked over a brazier in their small yard, their apparent poverty, all this I found odd and alien, despite the inherently open mind and the innocence of a child. Grandma and my aunties were in good friendly and neighbourly terms with them, and speaking to them in the Turkish grandma learned as a child in Istanbul, mingled with Greek words. Grandpa barely interacted and regarded them with mistrust and maybe contempt.

At the end of the dirt lane, along the fence of the backyard and grandpa’s bahçe, was another hovel that of the D family. It was built along a few others in the area haphazardly in the 1920’s during those years of the brutal population exchanges and the acute demand for the housing of refugee families from Anatolia. The D’s, like our neighbours from across the street, were also from Bursa, having suffered all the same from deprivation and misery. Grandpa, on the other hand, the well salaried headteacher, built his on the plot that the government granted to great-grandfather Kotis, the relatively wealthy refugee from Istanbul, and then became the dowry of grandma Vasiliki. And this house seemed like a modern mansion compared with the houses of our next-door neighbours and the D’s further up the lane. In fact, it was built on proper concrete foundations, its only floor was raised a few feet from the ground, the bedrooms were laid with wood and the kitchen with mosaic, it had some basic toilet facilities and a basic drainage system, and regular doors, instead of the kilims that were often used to separate rooms between the four bare walls of the ‘resettlement’ dwelling, like that of the D’s as well as that of the great-grandfather, which had remained unoccupied since his passing  and used only for storage.

Mr. Thanasis, the illiterate head of the D’s family, was a lame, life-worn little man who dragged his right leg on a semi-circular arc whilst using the left as pivot. This peculiar and rather amusing limping of his and a crooked mouth that impaired his speech, became the butt of auntie Stella’s cruel jokes in family gatherings. But Thanassis possessed a kind soul and a dignity, in proportion to the poverty that befell his family. He made a living as a handyman, looking for day's work in odd jobs and he was always grateful for the occasional material support, like a bag of flour or sugar, grandma and my aunties offered the family in times of dire need. With only reward a cup of coffee, he once fixed the bike grandpa had bought for me. Of bikes and similar toys and joys the village children afforded at the time, the three young boys of poor Thanasis were of course deprived of. The eldest, Kostas, whom the potential engagement with Mother grandpa blocked for rather obvious reasons, nifty Giorgos, and the little Vassilis or Vassilakis, of the same age as me, were the three sons who survived into adulthood from the six or perhaps more offsprings of Thanasis and his wife Vasiliki; one of them I was told died tragically under the wheels of a bus at the age of six. There is no let-off from misfortune for the poor, as the saying goes. With Vassilakis, the painfully shy and timid youngest son of Thanasis, we hung out for some time in the days of my early visits to the village, before the D’s family gather their few belongings and emigrated to Boston.

Giorgos D maintained his ties with what was left of the grandpa’s family, especially Domna, well after their immigration. After grandpa’s passing, he arranged the pairing and marriage of auntie Domna with a friend from within the Greek-American community of Boston, Panayiotis, registered as Peter in America, pronounced "Pira" in the Greek-American lingo. Later, when in the first month of my studies in America I ran out of money, the same Giorgos, after a call from Father, spearheaded the raising of some funds from the members of the extended, and now wealthier D family, and sent me the $500 that I needed to make ends meet. On the first and only visit to auntie Domna and uncle Peter in Boston, some fifteen years after the D’s immigration to New England, we were invited for lunch at their home in Newton. Giorgos, now well-bred by the American materialistic abundance, poked some fun at me. He thought me small compared to the Father he remembered stout and tall, and said in a crude manner: "Hey, is that you really, L? What’s this? I thought you’d be grown like your dad! Big and tall!” What could I answer? I smiled and said, embarrassed: "Hey, what can one do"? Vassilakis, the timid and feeble boy we played few times as children, had become totally Americanized, and had understandably forgotten, along with the Greek language, the village and its people and his joyless and deprived childhood in it. Sitting next to his Greek-American from a corner of the table, he was smiling timidly, quiet and shy, as I remembered him.

In that diner party, Thanassis, despite his years, looked sprightly in the presence of the couple from motherland. He dominated the chat from the head of the table, with animated gestures and conversing, mingling his poor Greek vocabulary with English words in that strange, unlovable Greek-American accent. It seemed that they all found a better place and a true home in America, above all dignity and status. He lived for many years after that dinner, as the head of his large and once destitute family, who threw a black stone behind and prospered in their new world. I still remember him, his lame body and big heart, half a century later, bent over my bike in grandpa’s backyard, fixing the punctured tube, tightening the brakes, in the end polishing the frame with a piece of cloth, whilst sipping grandma's Turkish coffee and chatting with my aunties.

But my regular company for most of my days in the village was another Vassilis, whom I carried on playing with for years after poor Vassilakis and his family left. In truth, the three of us never settled down as a trio of neighbour friends. The burly Vassilis mistreated the feeble Vassilakis and often our games ended with the latter withdrawing to his hovel in tears, despite the compassion I and auntie Domna showed for his distress from the bullying he was subjected by big Vassilis. The latter was the well-fed son of a greengrocer, Petros, who came to the area War from a town in the Macedonian planes with the Slavic name Karatzova after the Civil War. How he ended up in grandpa’s village in after that tumultuous period and with what capital he set up a sizeable and respectable grocery store across the road from grandpa’s house, which, incidentally, dwarfed the other grocery store in the same road, that of uncle Leonidas, is shrouded in mystery. As a child, I wondered how the two competing grocery stores, on the same street, one directly opposite the other, could survive competing in the village over a clientele without much purchasing power, and puzzled by the fact that my family preferred stranger Petros’ store for their groceries instead of their relatives’ next door. The two enterprises, however, evolved along different paths over the years. Petros' grocery store, in addition to the goods he bought and sold loose: the halva, the coffee and the sugar, the cheese, the olives, the mortadella, and the other goodies, which my aunties rushed to procure for my pleasure each time I visited. Petros also maintained a couple of warehouses where he stored sacks of flour and wheat. In those warehouses, Vassilis invited me to play, by climbing up to the tall ceiling, jumping from the top of the pile to a soft landing on the sacks, whilst his dad was busying himself with customers in his store. For their part, uncle Leonidas and his sons diversified into selling drinks in the village and its surrounds, drinks that were distributed in a classic Volkswagen campervan, until the sons and grandsons of old Leonidas transformed it into a warehouse for the wholesale and distribution of alcoholic beverages: to cafes, taverns, clubs, and some suspect establishments. The people of the broader region, once a backward agricultural zone, naturally followed the trends of the advanced bourgeoisie of the neighbouring city, and became enthusiastic drinkers of Scotch whiskey. Old Leonidas himself used to wash down his afternoon meal with a full glass of the tipple.

The times with Vassilis were admittedly full of fun. We played marbles under the acacia tree, furtively jumped from the top of the piles of sacks in his dad’s warehouses and jumped joyously, jarped eggs at Easter, sang Christmas carols, designed and made catapults and practiced shots on fixed targets and, sometimes reluctantly and, thankfully, unsuccessfully at birds. At later years we went to the football ground of the local non-league team which despite the poor condition of the pitch sported sought-after goalposts. For all those treats and joys, Vassilis longed for his cosmopolitan friend from Thessaloniki, who carried the aura and had the experiences of the big city. It never took Vassilis long to sense my presence in grandpa’s house and abandon the chores he was assigned in the family store, despite the scolding that inevitably followed. Then he would send his poor young brother away (who sadly had his face scarred by the hot iron Vassilis once stuck to his cheek to satisfy a morbid childish curiosity about the result), order Vassilakis, if he was around, to leave us alone, and allowed himself the exclusive privilege of my company. It was his escape from a miserable routine of the grocery store and the otherwise dull village life