My father’s family came from one of the many Greek islands flung about the Turkish coast like a necklace of odd shaped and rough cut stones. The family, though large, as one would expect for those times, practised a unique form of family planning. My grandfather would go to America for a time to work and make money, then return to the island. Nine months later there would be another addition to the family. His life was punctuated by long absences and the joy of inevitable new life on his return. Always there was this leaving, exile and return.
My father, born in 1906, was one of nine children. One, a brother Stavros, died before my father’s birth, another after he was born. Medical assistance on the island was extremely rudimentary and death was a companion to most people’s lives. There may appear some coincidence, I suppose, in the fact that my father’s dead brother and I possess the same name, Stavros, but names for Greeks at that time were rolled over, according to a traditional formula, from generation to generation, along with the rest of the dross and bric-a-brac of family. Not even your own name belonged to you.
My father told me the story of how his brother died. The boy was about eight at the time and he died of what was probably a ruptured appendix. He had suffered excruciating stomach pains that left him doubled over in agony and my grandfather, moved by his son’s despair, sat with him, stroking him, till it was no longer tolerable to accept the judgement of his own helplessness. He drew the child around his shoulders like a rolled swag, his arms grasping the burden of the child’s weight and pain into his bowed back. Then he trudged the skaliopatia, the cobbled lanes and stairs that moved about the village, ascending and descending the labyrinthine paths, holding the child, sobbing into the crook of his neck, till he died. He sat by the path with the child cradled in his lap just holding him in the quiet sea-white reflected light of the early morning. The only intrusion was the sound of distant cockerels and the bleating of goats. But no human sound.
No pain or hardship, though, contaminated my family’s idealised view of the island and village life. They saw themselves as people of property and substance, owners of a patchwork quilt of pocket handkerchief sized plots- you couldn’t call them fields- subdivided and subdivided, generation after generation. Today, returning families are thrown into hair tearing apoplexy trying to establish inheritance and ownership of these minuscule neglected plots. The only winners of these wrangles are Athenian lawyers and the cunning revenue conscious Greek government. Beware of Greeks who die leaving gifts! The truth, which I only discovered as an adult, was that their lives were built up with stoic shards of poverty like the ordered stone walls of the island. They were peasants locked to the land, though it was mainly the women who eked out an existence in the stony olive groves and terraced plots. The men fished the sea or exported their labour. Always this leaving, exile and return.
One way or another they all eventually left, part of the massive Greek diaspora. My father’s brothers at the age of 12 and 13 left for America but were trapped in Ellis Island and only escaped deportation by bribing an official with a coin or note they found. Or that, at least, is the doubtful form the story assumes in family legend. Like most family mythologies it contains a sequel, a tale of wondrous success spread in the red rumouring light of island sunsets, told in the kafeneion with ouzo lubricated pride by the returning exiles. And to mark their success, they donated a motorised ambulance to the community, to a village with one dockside road!
They never stayed. They always returned to their land of opportunity to build contrasts with origins that lay in the livelihood of olive and citrus groves, where the families would go together to tend the trees and sleep gently at noon in the huts spread among the groves. The groves nourished them but the village, gripping the hillside, riveted their lives. Viewed from the sea the white washed houses huddling together formed the contorted outline of a startled face, the shuttered windows and doors the pitted marks of gnawing decay.
Even today few navigable roads intrude; only tracks and the inevitable stairs and paths moving up and around the clustered houses, occupied for generation after generation till they settled like some nesting fowl into the bowl of the earth and stone. Here and there are untenanted homes, abandoned by families that have fled into exile, vacant, the roof ridging deformed like some ancient spine bowed under the weight of pipe clay tiles. In the kafeneion, the coffee shop and one room focus of village gossip, the men sit, dark and impassive, sipping a bitter syrup of pikro coffee. They drink from minute cups that seem absurd in their thickened hands, and play tavli, backgammon. Occasionally braying laughter melds with donkey hawing; in the distance the farting, coughing splutter of the three wheeled mini trucks.
Like a presence, religion accompanied their lives: miraculous ikons sheathed in silver oklad; rubbled sainted shrines along the roadsides; and the fervour of precious relics, the venerated grisly fragments of skull, limb and bone exuding sweet odour. My childhood was saturated with stories of startling, unfathomable mystery, legends of astonishing cure and disaster averted. My mother described with awe, how, when her parents were young, the island was saved by the woven camels’ hair Girdle of the Virgin, granted at the Koimesis to the Apostle Thomas, and brought from Vatopedi by special ship to cleanse the orange and lemon trees of the disease that threatened ruination to the island economy. Even the Sultan had requested the precious relic when Constantinople was racked by cholera some years earlier.
As I recede from my own time into the haloed images my parents conjured for me, I begin to see how they really lived, inextricably linked to their poverty and to one another. They moved so you could hardly tell their hard features apart. My father’s family stare unsmiling from a curling photo, my grandmother in billowing vrakes, the Turkish pants the women wore; they balloon from beneath her looming breasts and gather in close to her ankles. She stands mute before me in her porcine frame. I know little of her except for her early death, obese and thirty eight. And the adoption of my aunt, thea Kaliopi.
To her sterile sister my grandmother gave my father’s younger sister, Kaliopi; not a male, only a spare female to fill the space of longing. They lived side by side in the same village, silent about this practical arrangement that satisfied the wants of both, till in a child’s game of kokala, Knuckles, at the age of ten, the contemptuous rebuke was made that my aunt did not even know her real parents. She returned home immediately to confront her adopted mother with the accusation. Possessed of the truth, she packed her few belongings, gathered her life and went to the home of her real mother, silently to where she belonged. Nothing was ever said. Places were shuffled, arrangements made, space provided for my returning aunt.
Like his older brothers, my father was driven by an economic imperative to leave the island. At 17 he left for Egypt. Then, for reasons that he never explained, he went from there by boat to Australia, along with other men from the village who were later to weave themselves through our lives. He arrived in 1923 with seven shillings and sixpence in his pocket and made his way to the home of a family originally from his village. They were among the earlier families that came to Australia and accepted responsibility for new arrivals. They lived like an echo of their home and roots, an island of familiarity in a sea of people they perceived as foreigners. They had always lived in the presence of foreigners, Turks whose Ottoman yoke still lay about my father’s childhood till the war of 1912, but they had been hated and familiar. They had absorbed dress and language though this would be denied; drank coffee and ate food that was suspiciously familiar. They were linked by their hatred. But Australia was different. Here they were exiles among exiles whose crude attempts to recreate a Motherland in barren scrub and eucalypts only heightened the alienation.
My father made no attempt to connect with local people. He was here to labour and save to buy a business. Each day he walked the unfamiliar streets to the rattle of trams and the clatter of language, past pubs with Penfold mirrored advertising, where men drank tall glasses of brown stench in crowded bars with all the tiled ambience of a pissoir. He concentrated within the confines of work, a dimension enlivened only by boats that brought the company of men and marriageable women from his island home. Eventually, in the early 1930’s, he chose further exile into the arid interior of western Queensland, to a dusty town with no use for a name. There, with a little capital and a measure of confidence, he gradually acquired a store, picture theatre and service station.
He was joined there by my thea Kaliopi and her newly acquired husband, who tethered themselves to my father’s business ventures. Restored to her place within family she had sailed to Australia to marry a man from our own village on the other side of the world. Like a coin slowly turned over ring and index fingers. Lives of contrasts and opposites that remained the same. Years later I heard the whispered intimations of scandal surrounding my aunt. Her clandestine village lover could hardly accept her as a wife, having as she had, so readily traded her virtue. There was no choice but to have her re-virgined, like Aphrodite, for export to the antipodean marriage market.
They laboured obsessively, accumulating within the acquisitive ring around their world till my father felt sufficient in his affluence to seek a suitable wife packaged by boat and transported for convenience. Through the network of contacts he found one, an attractive woman, suitable in every way except for the opinion of my aunt. “She’s a slut,” my aunt railed. She smoked. And while Greek, she not only didn’t come from their village, she didn’t even come from their island. My father caved in to my aunt’s taunts, quietly acquiesced, and waited for my mother, in 1939, to pass through the eye of the needle.
My mother came at a relatively late age to Australia, at thirty two. I could only imagine that the real truth was that the poverty she chose never to discuss had barred her from marriage by depriving her of any chance of a substantial dowry. In Australia the supply and demands of the marriage market meant one last great opportunity. She spoke proudly of the many suitors that were brought before her for consideration in the parlour of the home where my father had stayed when he first came to Australia twenty years before. Back to the beginning; exile and return! It was not surprising my father was on the roll of potential suitors. And he must have seemed a very positive find. He was now the owner of a general store, restaurant, cinema, bakery and service station and seemed to represent every material desire.
My mother had grown up in a world as artificial as dried flowers, the colour sucked out by the light. Her father, the church verger and cantor, saw toil in fields and groves as beneath the dignity of his high office and coveted a grandiose region of refinement without the means to effect it. He was accompanied by my silent suffering grandmother, a handkerchief folded neatly and placed precisely in my grandfather’s top pocket. Or crumpled and discarded when my grandfather was over taken by annoyance, which was frequent. And all the time he was stalked by the judgement of the village. He was not a good provider, and there was no shame greater that my mother could think of, or what is worse, have to live with.
But on Sundays my grandfather would climb the wide whitewashed steps to the bleached church that squatted into the hillside and searched the sea from its one eyed jutting steeple, the belltower cyclops. There, surrounded by the luminescent gold and iridescent colours of ikons, he would sing into the pungent incense that spiralled into air, a deep resonant Byzantine baritone scaling the stairs of ancient chants into the domed Pantocrator Christ. Monumental for a moment in the exquisite harmony and subtle vibration of marrow and domed plaster his lofty vision had some substance. My grandmother knelt in the resonating dust particles hovering in the light cascading through church windows, angelic, silent.
My mother would gather a rhythm and excitement in her voice when she spoke of her young life, of wonderful family picnics where laughter filtered through olive groves and settled round them like dust; of neighbours close and safe, encompassing her world. A vast contrast to the dust and silence of profound exile in western Queensland. When she arrived at the outback home of her new husband, my mother quickly realised my father’s apparent affluence was conditioned by relentless work, constant oppressive heat and the veiled resentment of local people. She saw my father shrivelling and cracking in the desiccating isolation and saw the gnawing worm of dissatisfaction and loathing that surrounded him. My aunt Kaliopi held sway with her harping discontent, flailing my father with her contempt and agitating him with her threats to leave. My father was trapped by his assets and his dependence on the close knot of family whose labour carried the businesses. Slowly, he twisted himself into a coil of silent tension, broken by brief outbursts of repressed irrationality.
“He’s falling to bits!” my aunt hissed in my mother’s ear. “Leave him. Come with us. Leave him.” It was a slow litany of whispered erosion delivered like some rote repeated incantation. In the background was my aunt’s silent husband, small and thin, the skin sucked in beneath the ridge of cheek bone. He always found reason to be close to my mother, to brush up against her as they worked together, to breathe the smell of her body. But he held his fragile lust in check and quietly and loyally echoed my aunt’s refrain rolled in his own unctuous concern.
But they did leave. One night without a word, they left with all they could carry of value, including the flour bag containing the week’s takings. The weight of my aunt’s leaving hollowed my father of feeling but my mother now took up where my aunt left off, a new refrain of nagging and discontent though with one difference- my mother held the triumph of her own steadfast loyalty above my father like a cleaver. There was no way he could resist further. He buckled under the weighted obligation of such hated goodness.
And so my father in 1945 sold his thriving business to some relative or other and moved well south from the heat. Into the same house as my aunt! Crawling into the searing contempt like some comforting womb. And when a house opposite my aunt came on the market, my father bought it and in so doing stayed within the circle. Why they continued to huddle together in this perverse animal terror of snarled relating still confounds me. I feel a gathering rage. My father, manacled by acquiescence to these women. But as I scrape dust from my own Greek myth I see myself tethered to their past. Exiled from myself. Caught between rage and the sorrow of seeing too much.