Ekaterini

  EKATERINI

  EKATERINI

  Marija Knežević

  Translated from the Serbian by Will Firth

  First published in 2013 by

  Istros Books

  London, United Kingdom

  www.istrosbooks.com

  © Marija Knežević, 2013

  Translation ©Will Firth, 2013

  Artwork & Design copyright of Milos Miljkovich,

  Graphic Designer/Web Developer -

  miljkovicmisa@gmail.com

  The right of Marija Knežević to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  ISBN: 978-1908236135 (print edition)

  ISBN: 978-1908236982 (eBook)

  Printed in England by CMP (UK) , Poole, Dorset

  This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

  List of main characters

  Yorgos and Maria Poriazi, a Greek couple who have five children. One of them is our heroine Ekaterini, the narrator’s grandmother.

  The anonymous narrator, born in Yugoslavia to Luka and Lucija. Her father sometimes calls her Marilyn, thinking of Marilyn Monroe.

  Ekaterini’s husband Stipe Kozmić, who comes from the Croatian coast. They have two daughters – Lucija and Ljubica.

  Dušan and Stanica are a couple from Montenegro with five children, one of whom is Luka, the husband of Ekaterini’s daughter, Lucija. Lucija and Luka are the narrator’s parents.

  Carol – the narrator’s friend from America.

  In the Beginning

  Who knows why there are so many wars. My father, Yorgos, says that wars have always been thought up by the powerful, and all because of money, and that if he was one of the richest men in Greece this latest Balkan war wouldn’t have broken out. I don’t know if the centuries remember all their wars. Do they need them so they can remember at all? ‘Eternal memory’ they called it on the radio a few days ago. I don’t know what they wanted to say. How long afterwards would that memory last for? There are lots of things I still don’t understand. Grown-ups usually say to children: ‘You’ll understand when you’re older.’ It looks like I’m not old enough yet, or the grown-ups have been fibbing. One or the other. Grown-ups talk about maturity, but that’s something people gain and lose and find again all their life.

  My name is Ekaterini. This is my first war. Father says it’s ‘against the Turks’, probably because some of his Turkish clients owe him lots of money: they placed orders for big buildings with him, he started to build, and then they ran away as soon as the trouble started. My older brother Taki says this is called ‘bankrupt’. Probably he means it’s like when you’re mad for chocolate, and there isn’t any, as if it never existed. But then you think of it all the more, and then all the situations come back to you where you’ve eaten it, just to annoy you, and it’s incredible how many there are! All the details, even the time of the year, the day of the week, the people and the things around you - at the bench by the waterfall in Edessa, or by the sea. Oh, the sea! It most of all. Afterwards the album of scenes with chocolate grows less, but the pictures that remain become sharper and clearer with every day of longing.

  Often I feel that my whole life has been about waiting and longing. You wait and wait until you forget what a day is and only the longing is left. Later, when you hear ‘capitulation’, you try hard to show joy. There’s no point, but you have to – because everyone is doing it. Actually you’ve long been taken over by weariness, but you can’t remember from what. It’s as if your whole life has been like that – in war.

  My mother, Maria, is directly angry at war. She argues with it out loud. She’s never had to work as hard as this, she shouts. Before the war she had servant girls, and now she has to do everything herself, and there are five of us children. She makes filo-pastry pies, it seems she’s always making them, and she yells and curses at the uniforms. ‘This is all because of the blasted uniforms! A bunch of fancy show-offs with their stuff! They know that women have a soft spot for uniforms! Dratted men’s business!’ Mother can’t stand priests either, for the same reason: ‘what does a man of God need a uniform for?! Look at me, I spend the whole day here in an apron and the only dressing gown I have left since those male idiots got the bright idea of strutting around and trying to outdo one another. And they’ve made a right big mess of things to show who was stronger – like rams butting horns. Now just let someone say I’m being irreligious! God sent me Yorgos and all our children, and I love him. Only I can know how much I love him. What is there to talk about? But I’ll have no truck with the priests! Especially now, when there’s hardly enough food to go round, and I’m supposed to feed them too. I won’t have it!’

  Mother really does work all day, and if she sleeps it’s never for more than five hours, and even that is in spells, depending on when she gets the chance. But I don’t think work itself is what she finds hardest. She even loved to work back in the days when she wore a new dress almost every day and didn’t go out without a carriage. She had her own dressmaker and shoemaker, not to mention maids and servants for everything. But she still worked, sometimes so Father wouldn’t find out. So work wasn’t the problem. I think it was the war that disappointed her, and very deeply. Human stupidity stunned her. She couldn’t believe and accept that it was like this – she was constantly up in arms about something. That’s why she copes better when she can yell, when her voice joins in the fray at top volume with the echoing explosions and the constant screams and groans that reach us here, not only in Greek but also in Spanish, Russian, Italian, and who knows what other languages.

  All of Thessaloniki knew the story about Father having been sent to her by God. How obstinate and self-willed she is, how terribly decent and, what’s worse, open – she says what’s on her mind and says it to you straight. A girl like that was certain never to find a husband. It was the night before the wedding of her best friend, Panagia. Mother was bridesmaid and went to inspect the bridegroom, who had been chosen by Panagia’s parents as custom prescribed. They only saw each other once, on that traditional visit. Maria assured herself that Yorgos was a respectable and sufficiently serious young man; she was satisfied. She dearly loved her friend Panagia and was a really natural person in general, without any brow-beating about morals, respectability and all that. She was devoted to her friends. Her few true friends. That’s why she woke up covered in sweat on the morning of Panagia’s wedding. She didn’t know what to think of the dream that she remembered from A to Z like a favourite story:

  ...It was a beautiful spring day. She and Yorgos were walking towards each other. Between them stood an old olive tree. They looked into each other’s eyes as they slowly, little by little, came close to the tree. They finally reached the mound formed by the tree’s thick roots. Briefly they stood, facing each other, and at the same moment glanced into the sun, which blinded them; suddenly, as if from nowhere, there came a loud flapping of wings. It grew and became deafening. Maria was frightened. As the noise grew, so did her fear. ‘We’re done for!’ she cried out, but she couldn’t hear her voice. Just one second lay between fear and terror. She felt she could see the horror on her own face. She saw it clearly, and was repelled by her own appearance. And when she reached the very peak or rather the depths of horror, her eyes fell on Yorgos. He was smiling as he had been when he came up to the tree. Now his smile moved towards her. Her face was glowing. Her panic vanished all at once before this blissful peace, and she went from fear to calm with nothing in between! In that peace she could see Yorgos’s and her own face at the same time –
the faces were the same, like those of two twins. ‘Where did the young man go?’ she asked herself. She stood facing herself, and she knew there was no mirror, nor could this be her sister. Dream though it was, she knew she didn’t have a twin sister. It must be an apparition! A small wave of disquiet heralded a larger one, but then the noise, that deafening sound of wings, was gone. From the piercing light emerged a white dove on the wing, and it continued to glide tenderly through the air, while above, in the light, tiny white feathers danced and wafted. The dove was then gone, and with it all images except that of Yorgos’s face, his once more, and the tiny feathers of white that seemed to be floating down from some heavenly canopy. She and Yorgos watched as they drifted down to land exactly on the small space between their legs. When they then took a step together, they set foot on this downy sward. One hand reached out for the other. Their fingers were wells of longing and interlaced lightly, easily, connecting gently in an inseparable knot as if they had always been that way...

  Maria hardly remembers her wedding. That pleasant agitation forever remained in the dark; instead she remembers that dream, the morning she awoke and for the first time didn’t know what she felt – misery or bliss. Happiness? Oh, reality is so complicated, it demands definitions and explanations. But there was no time for that. Soon a scandal erupted over the breaking off of the engagement, which was hushed up even sooner, and she felt an insuperable sense of shame, intensified by the futile efforts to conceal her joy, a joy not of the ephemeral kind but accompanied by the tranquillity that comes when you know it will last forever; that utter sense of the divine when she saw Yorgos at the door of her parents’ house. She felt all this had already been, as if she was seeing him ask for her hand again, watching their wedding once more, and having their five children all over again.

  My Grandmother

  ‘Where is he? Why is he late? All right, I always come a little early just in case, but he should have passed by already, like every other day. How do I look? Is he going to come? Is he going to give me a piece of chocolate today too?’

  * * *

  Although that war brought with it the dangerous competition of other events and impressions, for little Ekaterini, my grandmother, it was and remained about the pilot whom she sat and waited for in the same place every day. She sat there on a step, unconvincingly pretending not to be waiting there on purpose; and then he’d come along, tall and smiling, in the most beautiful uniform, even from a distance dispelling everything else she longed for and even overcoming the longing itself. She watched him walk up; he stopped and offered her a piece of chocolate, without a word but always with a smile. She saw her hand and the shame on her impish face. That was her first and, as she said, greatest love. Not even ninety years from the day the pilot stopped coming could anyone make her stop believing in it, nor did anyone try. She had got to know love. Love is a secret we cannot convey even if we want to. Everyone receives this gift and cultivates it or does with it what they wish. Love is only inside you – indivisible, incommunicable, and thus inherently shielded from all the perplexities which tend to accompany other feelings: is it real or am I imagining it? Concerns of quantity and quality. But love is one word. It exists only because people need speech. Love has it all.

  Ekaterini always thought of her mother, Maria, as a proper lady who wore elegant dresses, just as she remembered her from when she was a very little girl, from the time before the wars. Her ‘real’ mother wasn’t this woman without an apron, or wearing that apron constantly over her only dressing gown – the ‘uniform’ she didn’t managed to change between the Second Balkan War of 1913 and the First World War. This woman didn’t tie her hair up into a bun; her dangling locks were like a raucous voice vying with the clamour of war. The world Ekaterini wanted to live in could be found in only two places – mothballed up in the attic, and absorbed in the infinity of a gaze devoted to the sea. We can only devote ourselves to the sea completely, although, or rather because, it demands nothing of us. It accepts us imperceptibly with its mute plenty, open for us to read all our thoughts into it. The sea – and peace and drama and pure beauty and blue and grey and green and solace and promise and just that gaze. A world in itself -independent, self-sufficient -and the never-ending call for us to abandon ourselves to it.

  I want to be like the sea, Ekaterini often thought when she heard the explosions of war. But she also felt this in the years of peace, the good life, poverty, love and loneliness. She remained constant as far as the sea was concerned, equally devoted – both as a girl of seven who stole out of the house to go down to the water by herself for the first time, and as an old lady of ninety eight, captive in continental Europe and so far from the sea.

  The attic was locked. Her brothers and sisters came to accept this as a fact and soon forgot about it, caught up as they were in everything that was happening in the rest of the house, in the street and the world. For Ekaterini, the attic presented a challenge, first and foremost. She was allured by exactly that declaration of impossibility, of the place being inaccessible, and also by the desire to defy the will of her parents, which her brothers and sisters considered indisputable. She couldn’t stand anyone else making decisions for her; any at all, even if it was something as simple as the choice of nightie before bed. Dead-ends made her laugh – human stupidity, the need for mystification, any kind of weakness. There’s always a path, you just need to find it. And indeed, in the courtyard there was a pine tree, unusual for that clime, and therefore probably forgotten in the company of fig and almond trees, lemon and olive frees, vegetable patches and the ubiquitous chickens. She raised her eyes, calmly and searchingly, and noticed that the pine tree’s branches were leaning on the house, and then she saw the open attic window.

  Out of breath from climbing and cautious lest her steps on the decrepit parquetry gave her away, Ekaterini knew she wouldn’t have long for the marvels she felt a premonition of, even before she set eyes on the ‘enchanted room’. Amidst the order of neatly stacked boxes and other stored objects, which her mother Maria had managed to create here too, stood a large seaman’s trunk which dominated the attic. It wasn’t locked, which calmed the girl’s racing breath, because it meant that no one expected her there. To her surprise, she found she could raise the heavy lid. And from that moment on, she felt she had been literally transported to a different world. How divine! Such dresses, their collars adorned with imitation feathers of various colours, sashes, lace, garters, stockings... What designs, what colours! She chose a colour, managed to wriggle into the dress, wound a matching sash around her neck and adroitly threw the end over her shoulder. She slipped her feet into her mother’s shoes with particular relish. They immediately enchanted her more than everything else. She admired her new appearance for a few moments in the large antique mirror with the carved frame, and then used the rest of the time to walk in the shoes, which were at least five sizes too big for her.

  Although she had to be doubly careful now, due to the size of her feet, she herself was surprised how much she enjoyed it. More than trying on the dresses, which she had longed to do since first seeing them, and more than the shoes themselves – it was the act of walking that thrilled her. Those unexpected steps made her laugh and at the same time gave her the indescribable satisfaction of a completely new feeling. She was important. But no longer just to herself: it was as if she had entered the world of importance. For the first time she looked grown up and ladylike. She couldn’t have imagined just how much this experience would put her in touch with her true desires and stimulate them to become clearer, more pronounced and far from the daily humdrum of waiting for the pilot and his chocolate. In her mind, she heard a question she had never imagined before: what would she like to be when she grew up, in other words soon, when all this was over. I’m a proper lady! she thought, and it stuck. From that day on, the whole world just looked like an introduction, something preparatory, a boring interim she had to go through to get to the proper life.

  * * *

>   My grandmother could easily have become a Chavela Vargas or an even more famous singer-songwriter. Refractory as she always was, Ekaterini wisely kept quiet about her aspiration to play the guitar and sing, knowing that the mere mention of such an idea would cause a scene, at the very least: ‘Our daughter become a Gypsy?! We’d rather die than allow that!’

  Hard times came and even harder ones followed. Her father finally gave up his vain attempts to maintain the family. Her mother continued to do the washing for the rich, be they the new ones, the war profiteers, or those who had been cunning enough to protect their property at a time when no stretch of the imagination could have aided that intention. Some of them managed to, at least. And there was washing to be done – it assumed preparedness for everything. In times of war, morals and everything else recedes before the invasion of thoughts about survival. And so, Maria decided that her eldest child should learn a trade in order to contribute to the household budget as soon as possible; she only barely kept the finances afloat, working as a laundry lady, and had higher hopes for her daughter.

  Madam Atina’s fashion salon was the first address in Thessaloniki. If you’re setting your sights on something, aim for the bull’s-eye. Maria was overjoyed when the senior associate listened to her story and accepted her request that she take on the ten-year-old girl as an apprentice. ‘The starting pay is modest, but money is money and every penny is needed. Besides, after learning the trade at Madam Atina’s – gosh – she could even sew for a king!’ Maria euphorically repeated this time and again to her husband, who looked melancholically first at her, then at the apprentice-to-be, mischievous Ekaterini, the eldest child of their pure and undying love.

  She was quick to learn and really took to sewing. She surprised herself with her newly acquired skill which she had never imagined she possessed. Her mother assured herself that Madam Atina’s salon was a ‘respectable house’ and soon stopped picking her up after work. Ekaterini came back by herself, always along Paralia, Thessaloniki’s seaside promenade. At that time, she let her thoughts float free, not ever suspecting that in ten years time she would have to use very different names for seafronts and piers. She felt calm and ease in those moments. Her step was free, light and gracious. This bodily grace came from the awareness that she was earning her own money and that she could almost pay for the upkeep of a family of seven by herself; she assured herself that she was capable, competent and independent. Down by the waterfront, she also reflected on her new friends and replayed their secret conversations about the young gentlemen who often looked in at the salon to buy dresses for their wives, daughters or mistresses. Those walks home were the high point of every day: the sunset, her thoughts about the future, the dream of becoming a celebrated dressmaker and being able to choose between Paris and London... But unlike most people’s arduous ‘making plans for the future’, these were buoyant thoughts – pleasant like the mistral, the murmur of waves or the rustle of fig trees in the breeze, both soothing and encouraging. Somewhere in the panorama of those walks, she could make out that stretch of Paralia were the Free Trade Zone was situated. She had heard of the Yugoslavs who earned very good pay there because their currency was stronger than the dollar. ‘Quite incredible!’ she thought in passing. ‘Can there be anything stronger than America?’