Afternoons in Ithaka Read online

  The next day, I wake to find Mum making mitzithra, a hard goat’s cheese for grating on spaghetti. She is laughing with Yiayia, wondering if she might be able to sneak a few of the bowling-ball-sized cheeses through customs when the time comes to leave.

  Yiayia turns to Dad. ‘What did you do to deserve this good woman?’ Dad looks a bit taken aback, but then he smiles.

  To Mum she says, ‘That son of mine used to run around with Vlahos’s son, making slingshots and terrorising the town. And don’t even ask what he got up to when we sent him to Kyparissia for high school. You’ve made a noikokiri out of him’ – a good master of the home.

  Next week, our first cousins are coming from Amaliada. Yiayia is still worried about where everyone will sleep. Dad decides that he and Mum will sleep outside, on top of the mulberry tree in the garden.

  ‘What will people say? That I don’t have enough room in my house for my own son?’ Yiayia balks.

  But Pappou tells her to shush. ‘Let the man do what he wants.’

  Dad orders wood, which some villagers help to carry to Pappou’s house. He and Theio Spiro rig up a platform on top of the tree. A few days later, Mum and Dad are sleeping under the stars. I am very jealous, but they won’t let my brother and me up there – we might fall off.

  Pappou has been busy too. He has set up a tank on top of the outhouse with a hose running down so that we can have showers. He and Yiayia still wash in the basin below the house with Yiayia’s handmade soaps. The shower is for us. To get to the outhouse, we have to walk past the chook house and the goat tethered up to a tree. I remind myself to go to the toilet before it gets dark.

  In the afternoons when everyone is sleeping, Dad lets me visit his aunt in the neighbouring village over the hill. It’s a long walk and I’m surprised he lets me go by myself. At home, I’m not allowed to walk around our neighbourhood like this, but I think Dad feels safe here. Yiayia Dimitra makes me warm milk, gives me lollies, and talks with me while her husband sleeps in the next room. I know I’m keeping her up, but I love the warmth of her house, her kind eyes.

  Most days, I take my dolls and play with Georgia, an older cousin who lives down the road. She hasn’t got nice dollies like me. I have one that even has a bottle, with milk that disappears when you feed her. One day the milk bottle goes missing and, soon after, I see it attached to Georgia’s doll’s mouth.

  ‘That’s mine!’

  ‘No it’s not. The milkman brought it for me.’

  I know it’s a lie, but I don’t know what to say. She speaks so fast, seems so much more confident than I am.

  The days turn into weeks and we pass the time: we press grapes in the big cement trough in the back garden, swing on the rope Pappou has rigged up for us, play with our cousins. The three boys, Stathis, Dionysios and Nikos, are like wild animals, climbing trees, throwing stones, wreaking havoc. We go to a saint’s day festival in a neighbouring village, all of us piling into Theio Spiro’s little Fiat and the few other cars in the village. Theio is the last-born of Yiayia’s children, much younger than Dad; he was barely a teenager when Dad left for Australia, and he seems to look up to Dad. I wear my sparkly blue dress that Mum made especially for this trip. Theio tousles my hair and we take a photo together. I feel so proud.

  At the end of the summer, the village school starts. I tell Dad I want to go too. The school room is airy, full of light. The small kids sit up the front and the big kids at the back. The teacher lets me help myself to books from the big bookcase at one end of the room. What the students are learning is too hard for me to understand, but I look at the pictures in the books and try to make sense of the letters. I would like to be able to read all the words, understand the stories. The kids look at me with a mixture of awe and pity – I am the Australeza, the Australian. I keep looking at the words on the page; maybe one day I will know what they say. I know my grandfather would be proud. Perhaps by the time we go back to Australia, the letters will make sense. I keep staring at the pages, wishing and pretending.

  Yiayia Spirithoula’s horiatiko kotopoulo me makaronatha (village chicken stew with spaghetti)

  Serves 6 to 8

  Ingredients

  4 tablespoons olive oil

  1 whole chicken (preferably free range and organic, in the absence of one from a Greek village), cut into chunks and washed

  1 large onion, diced

  3 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced

  4 tablespoons tomato paste

  3 ripe tomatoes, quartered and grated (discard the skins)

  1 teaspoon dried oregano

  1 pinch each of ground cinnamon, clove and nutmeg

  500 grams spaghetti

  Grated mitzithra (a hard cheese available at Greek delicatessens), if desired

  Method

  Heat the oil in a heavy-based pot and brown the chicken pieces until golden.

  Add the onion, garlic and tomato paste and stir until the onions are soft and the chicken is coated with the mixture.

  Add the grated tomato to the pot along with the cinnamon, clove, oregano and nutmeg. Boil some water and pour it over the chicken mixture until it is just covered. Simmer on low heat until the chicken is tender and the sauce is thick, around 45 minutes, stirring occasionally and adding water if it looks to be drying out. Season to taste.

  Bring a pot of salted water to the boil and cook the spaghetti until al dente. Drain the spaghetti, then place it in a large serving dish and top with the chicken and sauce. Sprinkle with mitzithra if desired.

  Coffee cup connections

  Curses are like chickens: they come home to roost

  Greek proverb

  The grind of the overlocker is relentless; it churns through flannelette nighties, the sharp needles binding the fabric together, the knife cutting through the excess material. A thick dust fills the air. It’s hard to breathe in the little tin shed in our back yard in Collingwood.

  Mum wakes early in the morning and works well into the night until her fingers hurt. I often sit and watch, mesmerised. She takes a piece from one pile of cut fabric and expertly joins it with another to form the body of the garment. Every evening, Dad counts and ties the bundles of completed nighties into lots of one hundred, making a pile that reaches the ceiling by the end of the week.

  When the factory boss comes to pick them up, my mother has to haggle over the price.

  ‘But you paid thirty-five cents apiece last time.’

  ‘It’s gone down to thirty cents. The companies are squeezing us. What can I do, Chrysoula?’

  ‘I can’t keep doing them at that price, Niko. You know I can’t. I’ll have to work for someone else.’

  But everywhere is the same – the pay pitiful, the conditions hard, the expectations high. Mum avoids the factories. She wants to be home with her children, even if it means less money and more work.

  I learn to make coffee early for the constant trail of visitors. Mum tells me that by the age of two, I could stand on a chair and stir the sugar and coffee in the briki, pouring it into small coffee cups without spilling it. I take great pride in making sure that each cup has a kaimaki, a crema on the top.

  ‘What a good noikokira she is,’ visitors remark. A good mistress of the home. They smile encouragingly at Mum – I will make a good wife one day.

  My mother’s sisters and Dad’s many family friends usually come by on weekends, and neighbours drop in during the week. There is the gypsy-eyed Despina from the housing commission flats, with her band of eight grubby children. There is Maria from next door, who teaches me to play solitaire and pontoon before I have started school. Even I know, small as I am, that her cheeky smile masks her troubles with her hard-drinking husband, who heads off to the factory each morning in a grey overcoat. And there is Yiayia Yiannoula, the undisputed matriarch of the street, clad from head to foot in black, still mourning her husband who died decades ago. Despite her diminutive size, I am scared of her penetrating black eyes, which are framed by her tsebera, her headscarf. Mum listens
to each visitor’s woes, gives sage advice, and always manages to see something promising in their coffee grounds – they will come into some money unexpectedly, their husband is going to stop drinking, or their daughter will finally start showing some respect.

  One day Mum goes out to use the payphone at the milk bar. She needs to order more work from the factory.

  ‘I want to come with you,’ I whine.

  ‘No, I’ll just be a few minutes.’ She turns on the television, and Tom and Jerry flash by.

  My brother and I are still sitting there half an hour later when Yiayia Yiannoula knocks on the door. Dennis lets her in.

  ‘Mum’s not here,’ he says.

  ‘She’s been in an accident. A car accident. I’ll look after you for a while.’ She sounds shaken.

  Dad comes home later that night. He has a wild look in his eyes. He bundles us into the Valiant, straps our mattresses to the roof and we make our way to my aunt’s house in Northcote, where we will be staying for the next few weeks. That means it’s serious. It’s exciting being with my cousins, but I want my mum. A few days later, we visit her in hospital. Her hand is in plaster, and her knee too. Her room is all white and it smells like disinfectant. I hold Dad’s hand, scared.

  She finds it hard to talk; tears roll down her cheeks. She tells us she’s lucky to be alive – a fire engine hit a car, which climbed onto the footpath and ran her over. At the time, all she could say was, ‘Ta paidia mou, ta paidia mou’ – my children, my children – before she passed out.

  A month later, she comes home. Mum’s sister walks us home from Northcote with her own two children, my cousins Kathy and Georgia, in tow. Georgia is in the pram, and my aunty pushes her uncomfortably – her pregnant belly is in the way. Even though Kathy is three months younger than me, I have to force my little legs to keep up with her. I collect flowers along the way and have a posy ready to welcome Mum home. I don’t want her to leave ever again.

  It takes more than a year, but Mum recovers. She has a bent finger that won’t straighten. She has a bung knee, which aches when she presses on the sewing machine pedal. And her pelvis hurts. But still, the piles of nighties keep reaching the ceiling.

  Often I have to vie for Mum’s attention, offering to help if I want to speak to her. Even then, someone or other interrupts us: ‘Chrysoula, are you home?’ they shout from the front gate. Sometimes I wish she was less kind, less generous, and that people would leave her alone; I want more of her to myself. Still, I have no choice and so I sit in on the whispered stories about their lives, about their troubles. I learn to listen carefully, as she does.

  I love it best of all when Mum tells me stories of her own childhood in Greece. Of her stern mother and her gentle father, both of whom worked hard to eke out a living for their family of five children. How Mum hated school and how the letters on the page just didn’t seem to penetrate her ‘hollow skull’. How the sea was a few hundred metres from their door, but she and her sisters were not allowed to swim because the boys might see their bodies. How she worked in her father’s fields, singing with her cousins, and how free they felt. Now that we have been to Greece, I can imagine her in these places, roaming as a youngster with her siblings.

  She speaks joyously of studying to be a seamstress. Her father couldn’t afford to educate her and her siblings, but he did send her to learn the sewing trade in the nearby town of Kalamata as an apprentice. She remembers how hard it was to save for a sewing machine. How the village girls and women would come to her for their once-a-year new dress, usually around Easter. She speaks reverently of the exotic fabrics they would buy when they could afford to. How no matter how poor you were, it was important to dress well; anyone could flatter her body shape with just the right dress; there was no excuse for going about in torn clothes. She is horrified by how some people dress in Australia. Men in singlets and thongs. Women in tank tops, their backsides hanging out of their jeans. What sort of dress is that? Do they not have any self-respect?

  She describes sponsoring her sisters to come out to Australia for a better life. And how hard it was for them – all had difficult relationships, had married men who gambled or were violent.

  ‘Why did you have to leave Greece?’ I would ask.

  ‘We were too many girls. In those days, if a girl didn’t have a dowry, you couldn’t get married. My father gave the dowry to the oldest girl, and there was none left. So I had to come out. And I brought your theies, your aunts. It was different for your Theio Niko. He was a boy.’

  She missed her parents, her older sister and younger brother. Everyone cried for weeks before she left. But what choice did she have?

  Now, in Australia, women still come to her for clothes. They bring a jar of coffee in exchange for her to take up a skirt. A length of fabric for a new dress. A bag of oranges to let out a top. Money is rarely exchanged.

  ‘Why don’t you take money, Mama?’

  ‘They don’t have much money, like us. Anyway, it’s no trouble for me to do it.’

  ‘You could charge. Maybe one day have your own business. You wouldn’t need to work for the factories.’

  ‘Spirithoula mou, I can’t speak English. How would I run a business with no English?’

  And there the conversation ends. Mum turns her head back to the machine, expertly reaching for the pieces of the nighty.

  Spiri’s Turkish-style coffee

  Telling one’s fortune using coffee grounds is an ancient practice, widespread in Africa, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. It goes by the name tasseography. In the Greek tradition, the brew is drunk, the sediment rotated counter-clockwise, and the cup overturned on a napkin. The reader then ‘tells’ the cup, using her knowledge of the shape and placement of the grounds, as well as a hefty dose of intuition.

  Before you can go there, you’ll need a well-brewed cup of coffee. This is how I’ve been making it since I was old enough to stand on a chair to reach the stove.

  You need a briki (a coffee pot sold in Greek and Middle Eastern delicatessens), some small espresso cups, and finely ground Turkish- or Arabic-style coffee.

  Fill one espresso cup with cold water and pour it into the briki. One cup serves one person, so multiply this by the number of guests. It is important to use a briki whose size corresponds to the number of guests – if your briki is too big, the all-important kaimaki (crema) won’t form.

  For a medium-sweet (metrio) coffee, add 1 teaspoon of sugar per person to the cold water and stir briefly. Then add 1 heaped teaspoon of coffee per person and stir again. Heat the briki over a low heat until the coffee starts to rise and bubble, but do not let it boil. Take the briki off the stove and slowly pour it into the espresso cups, being careful to include a little kaimaki with each serve.

  Mine is bigger than yours

  Don’t sprout where you haven’t been planted

  Greek proverb

  ‘Faye, faye.’ Eat, eat.

  My Theio Nick Tasiopoulos thrusts a cucumber at me as I walk past. I take it. I know he’ll be offended if I refuse. Theio Nick has just picked half a dozen cucumbers from his garden – they are displayed on a garden table, the faux-marble top of which is peeling away to reveal bloated chipboard. The cucumbers look like stunned snakes in the summer sun, turgid and still. Theio takes them inside and his wife, Tasia, peels and cuts them into quarters, sprinkling them with salt. They feel crisp and cool in my mouth.

  Theio Vlahos and Dad are standing in front of Nick’s tomato plants. ‘My tomatoes are good this year, no?’ says Nick. It’s more a statement than a question. ‘And my cucumbers, they’re huge. I brought the seeds back from Greece.’

  Dad and Theio Vlahos nod. There’s no doubt about the size of Nick’s cucumbers.

  Vlahos counters, ‘I tried sheep manure this year for the first time and the cucumbers like it.’ I’m willing to bet that Theio Vlahos has bigger cucumbers, but he’s too modest to admit it.

  My uncles’ back yards in Preston and Reservoir are so much bigger than our
tiny patch in Collingwood. Their cucumbers are always bigger; they have more string beans; their tomatoes are plump with seeds. Still, our few metres of soil are packed with spring onions, beans, tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. A grape vine winds its way up recycled iron plumbing pipes. A prolific fig tree drops fruit all over the tin shed that houses the barrel of wine and Dad’s tools. My brother and I clamber up to get the fruit before the birds do. On hot summer days, I like to watch the heat coming up in waves off the concrete. When my cousins come over, we eat watermelon or grapes, spitting the big pips as far as we can – into the garden, over the fence, into the drain under the garden tap. We have fun, but our yard is so small compared to Theio’s.

  The back flyscreen door bangs and Theia Tasia comes out.

  ‘Ah, Nick, are you bragging about your cucumbers again?’ She looks to the men. ‘Café?’

  The men nod and turn back to the garden.

  Theia goes back inside and I follow her. She takes out the big briki and puts the coffee on to brew. She produces a jar filled with glistening pieces of preserved grapefruit skin, and places these onto little crystal plates, which she arranges on a tray along with tiny forks. I carry the tray of sweets and Theia brings the coffees. The men finally tear themselves away from the cucumbers. I join Theia inside with the women.

  ‘Tasia, these grapefruit are lovely,’ Mum says.

  ‘Yes, we had a good crop last year. I made lots. I nearly killed myself peeling them. Here, have a jar to take home when you go.’

  Mum makes as if to refuse, but I can tell she doesn’t mean it. She places the jar near her bag. They talk about the recipe and Mum says she will try it next time. Her grapefruit always turn out a bit watery.

  I wander back outside. The men have moved on to talking about pest repellents.

  ‘Beer is good for snails. You put it in little pots. They drink it and they drown.’

  ‘What a way to go.’ The men laugh. The coffee is finished and Theio has brought out a slab of beer and wheeled out the oversized barbecue. He has a tray piled with chops marinated in olive oil, lemon and oregano, and sausages for the kids. Soon the coals are hot and he places the meat onto the hot plate. We only came for coffee, but now we’re staying for dinner.