Ghosts of People Past

Chapter two: shaking hands with the junta

                                                             CHAPTER TWO

 Shaking hands with the junta

 

AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT,  I landed in Salonika in the throes of a wicked heat wave. My big sister whom I hadn’t seen in a year was waiting for me at the airport. She had been shipped to Greece the year before soon  after graduating from college with paternal orders to shop around for a good husband.

        As a first-born child, Cynthia was taught filial obedience very early on in her life. She was forced to take on responsibilities way too burdensome for her years. She cleaned, cooked, shopped and performed household duties that our mother had no time for since she had started working at the same shoe factory where my father worked. My parents would get up in the dead cold of night at around six and trudge off to the factory in fair weather or foul. At around four thirty, they’d come home, down a highball, then a quick lunch -usually made up of lamb chopsor pork chops and canned corn or beans. Then, totally wiped out, they would practically pass out in their bed. Sometimes my father would fall asleep on the living-room carpet. Maybe he just didn’t want to get too comfortable for two hours later, he had to get up again and punch the clock at the handbag factory just down the street from our house. 

        I recall how my big sister would come home on Saturdays after school bearing tons of fruit and vegetables from Hay Market Square where the open market used to be.  It was quite a distance and now that I think back to it, I wonder, however in the name of God, she did  that considering her frail frame and youthful age. Unlike me, Cynthia did what she was told and never protested. This is just how she was and this is how she remained all her life.

        As soon as the arrivals doors slid open, I saw Cynthia and ran into her arms, crying. She swept away my tears and patted me gently on the back saying over and over again that I shouldn't worry; that things would be just fine.  I didn´t believe her, of course.

        The first images that swooshed by the taxi window were disappointing; dust everywhere, unpaved roads, big and small potholes, no sidewalks, towering apartment buildings of every size and shape, hardly any trees and a glare that turned everything to a blinding white.  

        Cynthia´s apartment, thank goodness for small miracles, was cool. I had something to eat and then conked out for forty-eight hours straight. When I woke up, awareness, like a cloud of dust, settled over me and I burst out crying.  I drew the sheet over my head and refused to get up. I stayed in bed all week, reading and eating, eating and reading. I had nothing else to do.  No TV, not even a small radio. It was a good thing I had brought along tons of books to read.

        A few days after my pitiful arrival, Cynthia came home one day carrying a little portable radio. “For you. So you can listen to music” she said and quietly left the room before I could even thank her. After twiddling around with the knobs for some time, I stumbled upon several pirate channels that played rock music all day long: Led Zeppelin, John Mayall, The Doors, Rolling Stones, Animals and other favoritegroups. Armed with my music and books, I settled down to wait for August to come round so that I could at last return home. But time, as is so often  the case, was blind to my need for expediency, and the days just dragged on and on in a never-ending cycle of listless boredom and depression. My only solace were Nicky´s letters, a ray of light, stretched over the Atlantic ocean, a golden string, unraveled from one end of the Earth to the other.  

        That whole summer of 1971 got sucked into the soundless void of a loneliness that does not resist its gloomy destiny. I barricaded myself in my room in that apartment on Artemidos Street, stuffing myself on chocolate cake from the neighborhood sweet shop and reading cheap women´s magazines like Vendetta and Romantzo. I had become my own vigilant prison guard, a self- exile in a cell that I custom-made for myself.