Fugitive pieces by Anne Michaels Page B

dark. We heard sirens, anti-aircraft guns, yet the church bells kept ringing for early Mass.”
    … When they pushed my father, he was still sitting in his chair, I could tell afterwards, by the way he fell.
    “Our neighbour Aleko came to the back door to tell Kostas and me that someone saw swastikas hanging from balconies on Amalias. They flew, he said, over the palace, over the chapel on Lykavettos. It wasn’t until evening, when we saw the flags ourselves, and the flag over the Acropolis, that we wept.”
    … I could tell by the way he fell.
    “At the beginning, we continued to go to the taverna, just for the company and to hear some news. There wasn’t anything to eat or drink. At the beginning, the waiter still pretended, brought out the menu; it became a ritual joke. People still told jokes then, didn’t they, Daphne? Sometimes we even heard the one from student days when we were so poor and someone used to call out to the waiter: ‘Cook an egg, there are nine of us!’“
    … When I was in the ground and my head was prickling, I dreamed my mother was scrubbing the lice from my hair. I imagined skipping stones with Mones on the river. Mones once caught his finger in a door and his nail came off, but he could still make the stones jump more times.
    “Daphne’s brother heard that when they found Korizis, he had a gun in one hand and an icon in the other.”
    “After the macaronades and before the Germans, there were the British and Aussies everywhere. They took sun baths without their shirts.”
    “They sat around Zonar’s and sang songs from The Wizard of Oz. They burst into song at the slightest provocation, Fioca and Maxim’s suddenly seemed like sets for operetta. … I went looking for pipe tobacco at the King George. I thought maybe there they’d still have some, but they didn’t. And maybe to pick up the Kathemerini , the Proia , any newspaper I could find. A British soldier in the lobby offered me a cigarette and we had a long discussion about the differences between Greek and British and French tobacco. The next day Daphne answered the door and there he was, bringing us meat in tins.”
    “That’s the only time one of Kostas’s vices has ever been useful,” called Daphne from the kitchen where she was pouring me a glass of milk.
    … Mrs. Alperstein, Mones’s mother, made wigs. She used to rub her hands with lotion to keep them smooth for her work. She gave us milk while we were studying and the glass always smelled of lotion, it made the milk taste pretty. When my father came home from work his hands were black, just like he was wearing gloves, and he used to scrub them until they were almost pink, though you could still smell the shoe leather—he was the best bootmaker— and you could still smell the polish, which came in tins and was soft as black butter.
    “They made us take in a German officer. He stole from us. Every day I saw him take something—knives and forks, needle and thread. He brought home butter, potatoes, meat—for himself. He watched me cook it and I had to serve him, while Kostas and I ate only carrots, boiled without oil, without even salt. Sometimes he made me eat part of his meal in front of Kostas but wouldn’t let Kostas eat. …”
    Kostas stroked his own cheek with Daphne’s hand.
    “My dear, my dear. He thought it would make me crazy, but truly I was happy to see you have enough for once.”
    “At night, after curfew, Kostas and I lay awake and we heard the sentries marching up and down Kolonaki, as if the whole city was a jail.”
    “Athos, you remember how they wanted our chrome before the war. Well, when they didn’t have to pay for anything, they took what they wanted from the mines: pyrites, ore, nickel, bauxite, manganese, gold. Leather, cotton, tobacco. Wheat, cattle, olives, oil….”
    “Yes, and the Germans stood around Syntagma Square chewing olives and spitting out the pits so they could watch the little children scramble to pick them up off