I was about three when my mother’s brother, Uncle Christophoros, “bearer of Christ”, entered my world. He was an iconographer, come to satisfy a Greek community starved for rich tinctured imagery from the crush of linseed. Thumbing through the family album, he reaches out to me unsmiling, a generous flowing soot black moustache creasing his square face. Dark, closely cropped barbed wire hair and set jaw, he stands aloof in winged collar, waistcoat and fob chain, his body listing to one side the same way my mother held herself. I can’t remember ever seeing him in such Edwardian garb yet for me the photo always seems to aggregate and summarise him accurately.
Upon his arrival from Greece, my uncle and his wife moved into the flat over my parent’s babywear and haberdashery shop, a late Victorian terrace shop huddled together with a strip of other stores in a pledge of anonymity. It became, simply, his home and studio but for me each time I clumped in my infant insect gait up the stairs, I left behind the hum of merchandise and the chant of small change and entered a loft of thought and exploration.
Before my uncle came to inhabit the upstairs flat though, it had been a kind of half way house for a detritus of Greeks escaping the devastation of the War and the continuing vicious havoc of civil war. It had also frequently been the first port of call for eligible young women sent to fuel a community predominated by men and preoccupied with marriage. My father acted as proxinitis or “go-between” for an interminable number of arranged marriages while my mother whisked the bewildered new brides into Myers to be outfitted and corsetted for weddings and receptions machined to within fine tolerances and sensibilities. My poor sister was always conscripted for the supporting role of bridesmaid for these alliances of people she barely knew or cared about.
In this way my father assumed a public pose, becoming a luminary within the rapidly expanding Greek community or paroikia and more particularly our regional association, a volatile brew of parochial village division, incendiary Greek politics and schisms in the local Orthodox Church. Through this my father ducked and veered with a skill matched only by his determination not to offend. My mother enjoyed the external focus of their lives and the community approbation my father conjured with his expansive generosity, but she lamented too, the cost of these arrangements, which as best man or combaro, my father frequently bore out of his own pocket.
The community and the association representing the region from which my father came, was a central feature of our lives as I grew up. On my father’s Nameday, a day more significant than a birthday, hundreds of people would turn up at our house, filling rooms to sauna proportions. A laughing stream of people would weave their way through a packed mass of flesh seeking refuge on stairways and landings. Others huddled in conversation on the porch or spilled out into the back yard like a pocket of potatoes.
At regular intervals the community association would organise picnics out on an island in the bay away from the view of locals. There was always a gaggle of other children to play with, and prodigious amounts of food to eat. The taste hovered between tart and sweet, dark olives and baklava, feta and melomakarona. It was spread on the ground on white prandial cloths with round ladies in black dresses and dark hair, studded around the edges like large fat raisins. My uncle Christophoros would bring a wind up record player and play Greek music that hissed and spat from corroded 78’s. The sound always seemed hollow, without immediacy, so you had to reach down into the cone of the squat black box to touch it. I watched closely the way he and the other men would weave their arms round each other’s shoulders and, bodies in unison, slowly dance, lurch and twist, the tension teetering on imbalance -a curved line that swerved and lunged.
When he was working in his studio I would sit near him enveloped by the dusky scent of linseed oil and paint while he slowly crafted the austere figures of Christ, haloed images of Madonna and infant, and the shapes of miraculous saints. As he worked he chanted the Byzantine hymns and psalms, his voice wavering in that familiar eastern tonality learned from his father who was a verger and church cantor. For many years he was one of the few iconographers in the country, and he was responsible for creating many of the icons in the scores of churches that sprang up in the wake and surge of post war Greeks.
Sometimes he worked on panels for an iconostasis, the tall screen separating priest from congregation. Prominent on one side he would define an ascetic Christ, on the other, the theotokas, the Mother of God, her arms raised in prayer in the antique orans gesture, her shawl, a maphorion, trimmed with gold lace and decorated with the three golden stars. Sometimes he meticulously crafted individual icons of exquisite beauty, the flawless embroidered nimbus worked in silver and gold in delicate detail. The Byzantine features seemed to remain flat and two dimensional, but the aureole roused a vibrant three dimensional luminosity moving into the depths of the surface and reflecting out breathing light and air. In the elongated faces of saints were dark eyes of charcoal and pitch, black wells of weeping. And hidden in the crumpled folds of garments were changeant silken shades of olive green and vibrant ultramarine.
Always when my uncle worked in his studio, I could sense light moving from the tall curtainless domed window to his face and the surface of his work. A spectrum of dull earth ochres and rich greens and reds, specks of silver but always the saffron discs, sometimes glossed to a rotating shimmer -the ubiquitous radiance of gold. The bare boards I played on beneath his easel, dusty and smelling of earth, would clunk and echo as he stood back to review his work, his chair scraping in protest.
In the icons of the Virgin I found myself drawn and repelled. In the hodigitria style, the Virgin, severe austere and remote, lightly balances a Christ manikin on her arm. There is no weight in the child-man figure, and there is something strange in what seems so oddly old, the features mature and the gestures precise and deliberate. But in the Virgin of the eleousa style the child becomes infant and innocent, one hand caressing, grasping his mother’s maphorion, one hand slung lovingly round her neck, while his cheek gently melds with hers. There is a greedy longing in the generous features of the child, while in the mother’s face there is a mourning, sorrow and compassion that still grips me. The prescription of form and style worked like an alchemy, a mysterious transformation and union, fusing subject and image, mirroring the mystery and violating with the divine.
And while these fragments of religiosity had a singular and secret glow, they blazed when they moved into the tapestry of the church. I would accompany my uncle as he worked each into its place within the greater icon of the building itself, constructing a universe that swirled around and above me from the centre of the church. From the towering Logos, the Word and seed of Meaning, my child sight poured round the curve of dome over an excess of archangels and apostles, down to the pictorial upper walls embracing detailed scenes of Annunciation and Transfiguration, Crucifixion, Anastasis and the mourning of Koimesis. Below these were a plethora of saints and martyrs, twisted and brutalised. And in the hermetic sanctuary of the altar, sealed by the iconostasis, the icon of the Mother of God hovers over the Feast to which she gave birth, the appalling Eucharist of the Christ consumed. “A pure Virgin grasped and him did give to friends to eat forever.” The divine anthropophagy ingested with the words of Avercius of Hieropolis.
My uncle Christophoros was a singular, hallowed figure in my life, special not only because everyone else in my world worked in shops but because he was revered and religious. It seems irreconcilable then, that when he came from Greece he brought for my mother a whip to discipline the children. The whip had a thick wire core plaited about with leather, with leather thongs, thin spurts of hide, flailing from the tip. My mother always provided the discipline in our household, never my father.
I can remember once emerging from under the ancient settee, a large rolling sea swell of mournful black that dominated our lounge room. I had spent an aeon of child time entranced by the melded smells of horse hair, dust and people, and I stated, in serious tones, to the horror of my mother, that it smelled like ladies’ bottoms. She seized me in a fit of frenzy and swung the stripes of leather from the whip across my back and buttocks. She stood, legs propped apart like rigid scaffolding for her stout frame, with her jutting jaw gritted in towering determination to perform the onerous but necessary task. I folded my body into a scrunched, foetal ball and hugged the floor, pleading, begging, beseeching in a thin hysterical whine that I would never ever again violate her unfathomable laws of right and wrong. Punctuated use throughout childhood saw the whip fray and decay. The vicious threads of wire from the twisted core emerged from the leather casing and the wisps of metal stung and sliced when wrapped about flesh. Eventually, in a quiet conspiracy of repressed outrage my older brother and sister took the whip and buried it in the garden at the end of the yard.
Like most, I suppose, I remember that fear and panic of childhood punishment but there are even darker edges etched around the remembrance. Always with these punishments was a gush of crude invective from my mother. Once, as an older child returning from school, I stopped to play at the home of an Australian boy, and returned home late. My mother’s rage galloped and her tongue seared me with insults that, to me, so young, meant nothing –palio kerata! dirty old cuckold! roufiano! slut’s pimp! gigolo! piss hole!
Contact with outsiders was always accompanied in my mind with a dark thrill-tinged disquiet, for my mother had instilled a subtle, nameless and sinister sexuality. They had lived under centuries of repressive Ottoman rule where a form of paidomazoma or Janissary levy was used to recruit attractive, intelligent young boys into the service of the Empire. The tradition though, had long since declined into a way of stocking the household of the local Turkish Pasha with the most beautiful boys from the villages, a demand which the local people were powerless to deny, forcing them to hide the truth of such practices in a silent unspoken pit of shame. For my mother contact with the household of any foreigner meant possible contact with some unspeakable obscenity. The Australian women who wore pants or smoked were sluts. And the men were capable of all manner of abomination.
To be fair, it was not a simple bigoted xenophobia or peasant ignorance that drove my family in on itself and the Greek paroikia. My father, on the contrary, was always generous and hospitable to outsiders, and certainly not just for the sake of business. The worship of paroikia reaches back into the traditions of the Greek diaspora, the communities spawned from Alexandria to Odessa and more recently in America and Australia. Always like the Jews they retained their identity, like the Jews they bound themselves to the community and threw themselves into commerce. Probably like the Jews, if the Greek preoccupation with commerce had not been so intense, they would have discovered psychotherapy, given the mix of ingredients!
I feel the need sometimes, to loosen the collar of Greek family and community, push it into sociological perspective and dilute its emotional power. But the beast of people doesn’t cease to twist inside and no dry dissection can alter the veneration of family. Included in there would have to be my uncle Christophoros though he remained for me separate and unique. When he was working I would play in the same room with him, distracted in play but at the same time acutely aware of his presence, the painstaking deliberation of his work and the reverberation of the dark baritone incantation.
Sometimes when he broke from work he would lie back on an old chaise lounge covered in black coarse leather stretched taut over the drummed frame. He would take me by the wrists and, his instep under my buttocks, gently lift me into gathering fear and elation, my crutch gripping the bridge of his foot. We would play that way for what seemed ages, our faces wreathed in symbiotic delight. The pleasure was intense. My genitals pressing into my own flesh, I was absorbed into myself through the rhythmic swaying. The unyielding tension of being lifted rigid into space packed with air and pleasure then subsiding into satisfied calm.
His wife rarely emerged from their room but remained largely confined to bed. She was drawn and withdrawn, passive and incommunicative, depressed and unresponsive so that I had little to do with her and found entering her room oppressive and dank and her total lack of interest in me, upsetting and annoying. If I had to stay over for some reason it was he who would bathe me, soaping my body, the cream smooth gloss gliding over and under, softly invading me. Then he would dry me, rubbing me vigorously, laughing and teasing, tickling my genitals and sending through me a thrill of astonishment. I would laugh to the point of intense exhaustion where my breath caught and failed with the pleasure.
When my mother had to work along side my father in the shop it was usually my uncle Christophoros or my mother’s sister, aunt Argyro who would look after me, though the contrast with the two was substantial. With her there was a conspiratorial air of intense femininity and softly shared secrets. It intrigued me the way she would dress her own son in soft and flowing clothes and garland his long hair in ribbons and curls. But he remained remote and passive, blushing intensely and stammering when approached to play. My uncle Christophoros always argued with his sister, Argyro, and a strained contempt was exuded by their presence together when I was with them, though I enjoyed the slight thrill of their competitive and quiet rivalry.
In my mind my uncle always retained the aura and granite authority of his work that reached back into certainty and ordered antiquity. Years later though, after his funeral I sat with my uncle’s cousin, blending fragments of recollection with protracted silence. He grew from birth with my uncle, inseparable, sharing their play and their labours, exploring in unison a world of crumbling ramparts, caves and beaches. Grew too in the shadow of my grandfather’s intense religiosity and ritualistic duties as verger and church cantor, which drew my uncle inexorably to his precise craft. As young men they courted together the dark eyed girls of the village under the watchful gaze of wary and censorious relatives. And when the parental arrangements and dowry contracts were sealed it was natural that they would have a double wedding, crowned and led by the priest thrice round the altar in a shower of grain. Natural too, I suppose, that they would spend their nuptial night in adjoining rooms.
Then in an uncomfortable pause of pained remembrance my uncle’s cousin drew out the thorned thought, unspoken till then, the lurid memory that had placed a silent gulf between him and my uncle thereafter. Of how he lay frozen beside his new bride listening to the sounds from the next room, the sharp screams and stifled cries, till the dawn muffled the moans and weeping of my uncle’s wife.