20 - A Year in the Cold Trough: A Misfortune Before our Farewell

Our life in the Cold Trough culminated with an impressive experience, ingrained in memory, which for the soul of a five-year-old child had the hallmark of a tragic incident. It happened one dusk in the paved square of the village, in the eve of St John's Day, close to the summer solstice. Later in life, each time I was listening to a song from one of Greece’s popular singers, Hari Alexiou's, saying: ‘And fires were lit by the kids in the back streets // It was St John’s Day, I think’, my mind was brought back to that evening. Schools closed for summer a few days ago and our stay in the Cold Trough was nearing its end. Children from the village, mostly schoolmates, gathered in the square and started a fire with papers, dry tree branches and, also, plastic objects. I don't remember how I found myself amongst them, being relatively young for that sort of extravaganza. Along with them I was enjoying the freedom from the shackles of the school routine, longing for a summer vacation by the sea and, in that evening, I was attracted by the adventure the moments offered and the pleasure of the company of other children, left in their own world, to improvise games out of nothing. Kids are fascinated by fires and so was I -throughout my childhood, for that matter.

I was next in the queue to jump over that makeshift fire from garbage, but I naturally hesitated from fear and the awe from the unprecedented and daring undertaking. An older boy behind me, fearless and with the experience of a few jumps already under his belt pushed me, out of malice or, more likely, impatience and his eagerness to repeat an exciting feat before the fire went out. With the push I fell into it. ‘A tramp! A bully!’, were the first thoughts of the culprit, although unspoken. I got up from the fire terrified and realising that ‘bad’ boy had disappeared, out of fear himself and cowardice. I was wearing shorts and both of legs and arms were bare and after landing onto the fire my upper and lower left leg was covered in black soot and ashes. Worse, pieces of a melted plastic materials were stuck on the skin. I cried; the kind of refuge or line of defence for every child in physical pain and a mental impasse -in despair, without knowing what to do and fearing the worst. I began to run instinctively towards Mrs. Meli’s house and our room, a little further down from the corner of the square, seeking the protection and consolation of Mother. I was running crying: ‘I got burned! Mom, got burned!’ The owner of the kiosk owner in the corner of the square stood bewildered outside, and asked foolishly and rather jokingly: ‘What’s happened, boy? Have they given you onions to eat and got burnt?’ A cruel and non-sensical joke that was, hardly comforting for my physical and mental pain.

At an older age the mind would pause and ponder for a few moments after the shock, before externalizing any sensations and feelings. But when pain abruptly hits a child's nervous system, it instinctively and vividly expressed with what we consider a natural reaction: crying and, then, uncontrolled sobbing. A rational mature mind would have moderated consequent feelings and emotions, no matter how an innate impulse forced a reaction, before their intensity reached a peak; it would consider the circumstances, pay heed to the surroundings. Containment mechanisms within would have tamed the effects and outwards expressions of the shock, that is loud crying in public; composure would have restrained from running in panic to some harbour for solace. The reaction would not have been the instinctive of the spontaneous child of that moment. Equanimity, however, presupposes the hardening of the soul and a maturity of the spirit. And these, in turn, presuppose accumulation of knowledge and the experiences life sows on our path. Aging and the years weaken extreme tensions caused by sensations and emotions born out from impressions of life events. Bravery and courage are not innate traits, but are cultivated. However, that and other similar experiences were still unprecedented for a still immature spirit and shook his world of emotions at that time, as triggered by that fall in the fire on St. John’s Day.

The crying stopped when I got home and the stinging from the burns, admittedly of relatively low degree, was soothed thanks to Mother’s tender care who washed them with cold water, and then the junior doctor of the village who removed the pieces of plastic with tweezers, before smearing my skin with ointments. The pain subsided to give way to anger, a tide of rage more like. A mood of vengeance flared up inside and a desire for retribution against the ‘bully’ who pushed me into the fire. Even this rage weakened with time, until a catharsis was provided from our visit to the perpetrator's home. He wasn't there or, more likely, he was hiding and didn't want to confront his victim and his mother. He was probably harbouring his own fears, stemming from a subconscious guilt, but more from the fear of punishment: at worst, a father’s hiding or a house detention in days that his mates enjoyed playing in the open. The mothers exchanged a few words, apologies were offered, and forgiveness was granted. As they say, the incident was considered over and done with.

After the gathering of the teachers and their families, at the customary farewell dinner at the end of the school year in the village hall, paid for by parents’ donations as a token of appreciation, we bade farewell and left the Cold Trough for good. A fellow villager known to Mother drove us with our two suitcases, for the last time through the road with the melancholy poplars on either side, forming like farewell arches, and dropped us at the plane tree and the coach stop, outside the junction canteen. The village and its winter were printed on the very first pages of the very first chapter of the book of conscious life: the reading and writing I learned, the first kick-abouts, the first TV program I watched at Mrs. Meli’s and Mr. George’s living room, Mrs. Lola, the kind teacher with the genuine love and interest in my learning she showed, the older girl who became my partner in the gymnastics demonstrations, the melancholic evenings in Mrs. Meli’s cold room and Mother’s tearful songs before going to bed, the bookstore of Mr. Avramides, the slaughterhouse, the tall tobacco warehouses; all these were stored in the mind and have been with me to the present day, along with the faded scars on the burnt skin. Several other faces and events from that time were lost deep in the subconscious and might have unknowingly resurfaced in night dreams.

In the Cold Trough I began developing consciousness and, ultimately, forming a personality. It was there that some of the first building stones of my ‘being-in-itself’ were laid from very first memory imprints. Early foundations, I have later discovered, obtain great significance in shaping one’s future, whatever walks of life he pursues. A slight change in the initial conditions of a chaotic process, like life in our world appears to be, can later lead to dramatically different behaviours and journeys.

16 - A Year in the 'Cold Trough': Winter Evenings & Early Mornings

I was bringing homework regularly back to our little room. Homework that was tailored and personally assigned to me by Mrs. Lola, likely at Mother’s urging. It kept me busy throughout the long winter evenings in the absence of any sort of external distractions; and it helped me grown into the disciplined, studious and industrious individual, as have been recognized by myself and others -colleagues and bosses. Those strengths, if we may call so those attributes, along with several associated weaknesses and flaws, are built early in life with similar learning techniques in insular environments and with limited social interaction. To Mrs. Lola in school days, and to Mother, always by my side in the evenings, I owe a substantial part of the early knowledge I obtained and fundamental skills, like writing down neatly my first sentences or achieving a reading pace and comprehension above the average for my age. The schoolwork in the winter evenings of the Cold Trough added distinctly small but invaluable assets to the person I eventually became. It also set objectives to aim at ahead, which, in retrospect, I would not have had possibly the will, nor would I have taken the initiative to alter: I was wheeled into a prescribed and trodden path, so to speak.

After the meticulous completion of my homework, we would have our evening meal. The child I was never wondered or cared about how, where, and by whom those meals were prepared. What I remember is that it almost always ended with a fruit salad of peeled apple slices, often sprinkled with cinnamon, sometimes with honey, and oranges and tangerines from the local produce, in accordance to Mother's advanced for her time dietary habits. Before going to bed, which would draw the curtain to our daily routine, Mother would read me a fairy tale or sing me songs from the repertoire of the singing lessons she taught her class, with her beautiful, albeit contrivedly choral voice. Her singing classes, within the framework of a national curriculum, as dictated by the military junta in power after the ‘Revolution of April 21^st’ (as the military coup of 1967 was branded), unfortunately included arduous rehearsals of many ethno-fascist and marching songs. And only a handful of melodic themes with politically innocuous lyrics, performed in Mother's calliphony, matched the solitude and tranquility of our room in those long winter evenings. Amongst them, a sorrowful one stood out that I still remember. It told the story of a swallows' nest. A heroic mother of a family of songbirds, left her nest, as she did every morning, in search of food for her nestlings. One evening she did not return, as it had been caught in a net that some hunters had set. The sad tweets of the hungry nestlings went unanswered in the darkness of the night. The song hinted at the unjust end of a tragic mother and, for an emotionally virgin and, perhaps, congenitally hypersensitive soul like mine, the song always filled my eyes with tears and gave way to sad dreams.

My heart has hardened since: from life itself ‘debased in too much association // with crowds, in too much wandering and talking’ as Cavafy wrote. The emotional reaction to human misery that I have encountered along the way, either factual or staged (through theater, cinema, artistic expression), may no longer sink in to the same depths and move the soul to the same degree, but it still touches the heart, often subtly, sometimes it brings tears -as it was with that evening song. Sadness, pity, compassion, and the like emotions, as I have matured and aged, do not reach depths in proportion to the magnitude of the human tragedies I encounter, directly or by association, closer or further away, real or manufactured. But the emotions from that simple, innocent school song, which for most of my peers would have felt no more than superficial and indifferent, perhaps even boring, pointed to me something about the endless labyrinthine path of self-knowledge that begins with birth and concludes with death. I later realized, for instance, that I was born or nurtured into a more sensitive soul than most life circumstances and the world itself demand; whether we become rich and privileged or destitute and unhappy, or follow undistinguished, undulating paths without extreme peaks and troughs. After all, a superfluous emotionalism, that excessive sensitivity of the introvert, and the constant worry and fears that often accompany it, torment the mind. That the ‘heart is often bled’, that our soul is occasionally ‘torn into fragments’ by impressions and stimuli are in themselves ineffective reactions to events. It does not alleviate the human pain that stimulates them, it has minor influence on the course of events and does not change anything of their essence. On the other hand, this hypersensitivity to human suffering, the emotional scales that it reached, was a small coveted privilege and blessing. Whether it was genetically inherited or acquired, or rooted in the soul in those winter evenings of my year in Cold Trough, or both, is irrelevant.

With Mother lying next to me, sometimes under a heavy blanket, pajamas made of a thick fabric, with woolen socks worn even in bed, we slept in the room with remnants of warmth from the turned off stove fading fast. On nights of great frosts, we covered ourselves under two blankets and we laid one underneath, instead of cold and dump white cover sheets, for better insulation from the cold emanating from under the bed and every corner of the room. These measured sufficed for a comfortable sleep in a bed warmed up by our bodies. The morning awakening, however, with the stove turned off, the windows blurred by frozen condensation, I remember myself shivering vigorously with short breaths and my heart pounding fast, whilst Mother trying tenderly to warm up my fingers and toes with her hands. The breakfast was cold, too: chunks of bread or biscuits soaked in milk or slices of bread with butter and honey along with a glass of milk, all went down with effort.

The road to school, a dirt road with potholes, often filled with ice, that took us across the main street and around the square towards the outskirts of the village, was deserted. But the first pale lights were already on behind the windows of many of the houses. The teachers had to present themselves at school before the first pupils starting to fill its schoolyard. My early awakening in the chill of the mornings was richly rewarded by the warmth of the stove and snugness in the Teachers' Room, before the janitor’s alerted the children to toe in line in the courtyard: for the prayer, the hoisting of the flag, the singing in unison of the national anthem, and the headmaster’s daily briefing. As a teacher’s child of not of school age yet, I enjoyed the micro-privilege I enjoyed then was that I did not have to stand in the schoolyard with the older children –something that, in the end, might have arrested the development of social skills. Nor did I have to endure the ordeal of the barren and incomprehensible morning ritual that lacked depth and significance for most of the children, and, I reckon, some of the teachers, but it was done because it had to, as mandated by a protocol, dictated from outside and above. A couple of times, however, I lined up in a queue with the other children in a dwelling at the corner of the schoolyard where breakfast was served —a cup of milk and a slice of bread spread with butter and jam. Something unprecedented and unique in the annals of the Greek educational system, it was one of junta’s populist initiatives. It was eventually abolished as soon as Greece’s backcountry emerged from the poverty of the post-civil- war era. Yet for a similar breakfast, in addition to a weak and lukewarm coffee, I joined after years similar queues as a conscript.

11 - A Year in the 'Cold Trough': into the ‘Lame Village’ then

‘Cold Trough’ like most villages in the predominantly agricultural region of Central Macedonia, was surrounded, as is today, by cultivated fields amidst the fertile plain that extend to the town of Giannitsa in the north, Thessaloniki in the west and south, and the town of Veroia on the slopes of Vermion Mountains in the east, which enjoys panoramic views overlooking the plains below. At times when private car ownership and use were not widespread, the first impression of ‘Cold Trough’ for the unsuspected visitor would have been, proverbially, that of ‘a place in the middle of nowhere’. From a geographical point of view, however, reality might not have been that disheartening. There was life and transport links amongst the villages and nearby towns of the region, thanks to the regular routes that a vibrant franchise of privately owned green-grey coaches established, as well as the agricultural vehicles of local farmers. Nevertheless, it was still a place burdened by dullness and a dire lack of sophistication that characterize many villages of the Greek countryside. There were always the few, especially amongst the older and retired of the village folk, who were contented with uneventful or indolent lives, even if for a cosmopolitan outsider they appeared trapped in an inescapable boredom of a daily routine, oblivious to a monotony that gnaws away invaluable time on this earth and, at the end, reduces a life an amorphous mass of trivial, repetitive and forgettable days.

Agriculture, therefore, was at the heart of the economy of the village and its region, as it has been for generations in the long history of Macedonia and the Balkans. At that time, cereals and tobacco accounted for the bulk of the local produce. I remember, from my first autumn days there, the bales of grain stacked on tractors or horse-drawn carts, going back and forth along the central and peripheral roads and, later, on school excursions the tobacco dryers in tall wooden warehouses.

There has been raising of cows and pigs, too, for our meat on the table, as I realised in another school walk that passed by a local slaughterhouse. A wretched and gray building, covered by corrugated metal sheets, in the middle of a muddy patch dried by the spring sun, with only a few scattered, sad acacia trees behind a broken wooden fence. The barren landscape, a calvary -so to speak, that the children procession traversed was crisscrossed by rough, makeshift dirt roads, marked by animal footprints and cart and truck and tractor wheels; in grim contrast against the deep blue firmament, the glorious sun, and the green fertile plains beyond. It was an intimidating place for virgin souls. The mind inevitably conjured images of living creatures indoors suffering horrible deaths, by cruel men in blood-stained overalls with butcher-knives in hand, wandering nonchalantly in pools of blood. (The horrors emanating by such mysterious buildings, perceived as haunted by young children, exerts an unwarranted attraction and intensifies the vivacity of an already vivid imagination.) I was shaken by those fantasies then, as triggered by the ugly site. Feelings with the intensity of ‘first time’ tightened my heart. The natural curiosity that the unfamiliar attracts is combined with a primordial feeling of fear springs instinctively from every soul in the face of the unknown.

Our eyes probed for glimpses of death, or at least shadows of it through the openings into the dark enclosure, our ears were grasping for groans of suffering, but in vain. Escaping, however, from the pervasive and unforgettable stench of death, which I have not experienced again ever since, proved impossible. Many children used their fingers to trick their noses. It was the very first sensation that bore witness of death -through the stench it left behind in its path. And the sense of its presence nearby causes dread even amongst the young, no matter how detached and distant in time still are from the event per se. Admittedly, the feeling was fleeting and shallow. Beyond a momentary strong heartbeat and the memory of that smell, it left no other imprints and was quickly forgotten in our plays and relaxation, later in our trip. It was nothing more than a little stepping stone in the building of our living consciousness. Besides, later in life I learned that the idea and expectation of death can be more distressing and frightening than witnessing it happening. But I had still a long way to go.

Childhood innocence could have hardly been compromised in that school trip. It was not in our teachers’ intentions their school children to conjure images of the horrors of death taking us around the slaughterhouse, for the educational purposes of maturing and toughening our souls. The autumn walk ended up in a citrus orchard in its full blossom, in a fruit and vegetable farm, where enjoyed our play and snacks, followed by fresh fruits and cool spring water from a trough in the yard of an old farmhouse. It was just unfortunate that the path to a pleasant destination had to pass through the hell of that dreary site, which inevitably would intrigue children and stimulate their imagination far more than an orchard, whilst it leaves indelible, yet thought provoking, imprints in memory.