Ghosts of People Past

Chapter one - Exiled

CHAPTER ONE

 

Exiled

 I WAS BARELY SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD.  I remember that day as vividly as I would a bad dream that awakened me in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat and terror.

        It was the end of June, a week or so after my high school graduation, hot as hell, when my father dropped the mega-bomb on me. We were all sitting around the dinner table relishing his Sunday specialty, lasagna, when without so much as lifting his eyes from his dinner plate, he flippantly announced that in two weeks’ time I would be leaving for Greece.

            “Nora, I bought you a ticket to visit Greece this summer. You´ll see your sister again and meet your grandparents, see where you were born and discover your roots.  You leave at the beginning of July and you come back at the end of August. Your ticket is on your bedside table.”

        That´s all he said and then went back to nonchalantly wolfing down his lasagna as if he hadn’t just punched me in the stomach with an iron fist. The ensuing silence was deafening. No one dared say a word, dared to defy the absolute power of the omnipotent pater familias.  Tina, my little sister, began to mutter something but our father stopped her dead in her tracks, reminding her that it was forbidden to speak English at the dinner table. This he did whenever he was pissed off or  in a bad mood. Most of the time, he simply overlooked our endless girly chatter. Renie, my second oldest sister said nothing. She just stopped eating and reached for my hand under the table.  I wanted to protest, to scream, to tell him how unfair he was being, that he had no right to run my life and that his beloved Greece was not MY country. The words I so wanted to shout out got stuck in my throat along with his crappy lasagna. My eyes brimmed with tears. I looked at my mother sitting next to him, head lowered in female servility, looking sad as always, silent, a ventriloquist´s doll sitting in her master’s lap. Pretending I had a headache, I asked to be excused from the table and went straight to my room.

And there I remained for three consecutive days. I refused to eat or open the door to anyone. On the second day I raised a fever that I simply ignored. I sat in bed contemplating my predicament. It was unfair and I didn’t deserve it. I knew that the reason I was being forced into exile to an unknown country was to get me miles away away from my boyfriend, Nicky. Nicky was Greek, fresh over from the boat almost, but  no, that was not enough for my father! He wanted us girls to marry someone who lived in Greece so that one day he could back move to the old country and not leave us behind.  It was his dream. His dream only. As for our dreams, my sisters and mine, he could give a damn.  We weren´t allowed to have dreams. Young people didnñt have dreams. They just obeyed their parents. 

        He was an egoist and a tyrant andI was right to call him Hitler.

        On the third day, I opened the door to my sisters and almost immediately wished I hadn’t.  Their words of consolation irritated me like the squeaky sound of chalk on a blackboard.

        “Oh, come on Nora!   Don’t take it so hard.  It’s not that ….” .  That was Tina, my younger sister. 

        “Stop right there!  Hear me?  It’s easy for you say.  You’re not the one being shipped all the way across the planet.”

        “Tina is right, Nora.  Think of it.  You’ll see Cynthia; meet our grandparents and cousins, our aunts and uncles.  What’s so bad about that? Think of it as an adventure.”      Cynthia was our big sister. She had moved to Greece a year earlier, to Salonika, the second largest city in Greece after Athens. What my two darling sisters failed to consider was that Cynthia had left of her own free will. Plus she hadn’t left a boyfriend behind.