Text Samples The Feasts of Memory by Elias Kulukundis © 2003 Please scroll down to read short fragments from the chapters Arrival and The Way to Phry. Elias Kulukundis off Kasos. Photo by Robert McCabe. ARRIVAL I did not see Kasos until I was twenty-seven, when I made this journey. I have never lived there, and neither have my parents. They were born on Syros, another island two hundred miles up the Aegean. I was born in London, came to America when I was three, and have lived here ever since. Only my grandparents were native Kasiots, all four of them. My grandfathers were sea captains, and at the turn of the century they emigrated to Syros, then the largest port in Greece. After the First World War, they emigrated to a still larger port: London. My father and his brothers took over the shipping business their father had begun. Eventually, in 1939, my parents extended the emigration farther to America. They settled in Rye, a suburb of New York, where I spent all but the first three years of childhood. This journey will be back along the course of that emigration. The destination is Kasos, the final island.... To make it I needed a guide and mentor, for on any journey of discovery, the traveler needs someone to accompany him who knows the way. For me, this guide and mentor was the eldest of my father's brothers, Uncle George. He had come to New York when we did. Before that, he had arrived in London at the same time as my father and grandfather. And before that, he had made the emigration to Syros. But unlike my parents, he was born in Kasos at the end of the nineteenth century, and when his father and mother journeyed northward a few years later, Uncle George was a boy of seven, watching Kasos disappear behind him.... Aphrodite by the house of the blue shutters. At the gate an old woman greeted us. She used to be Uncle George's nurse, brought originally from an orphanage to look after Eleni's first four children. She had left the family just after the emigration to Syros, to live out her own xenitia in Alexandria. Then, fifty years later, impoverished and arthritic, she returned to her adopted home in Kasos and lived alone in the house of the blue shutters. She called it "my Eleni's house" though Eleni had long departed this life and she, the old woman, was now its only mistress. For our arrival, she wore a bright, checkered robe, a white kerchief around her head, and thick, gogglelike lenses. Her name-no more appropriate to the plump and saucy island girl than to the wrinkled woman on bandaged and arthritic feet-was Aphrodite. "So you've decided to come," Aphrodite told my uncle.... She led us through the courtyard, beneath the two white houses presiding over it, up the stone stairway to the terrace between them, with smooth black and white Rhodian pebbles, set in the shape of a flower by a traveling mosaic maker. From this terrace, which is like the bridge of a sailing ship, you could sweep your eyes across the Aegean Sea. Aphrodite dismissed it with a wave of her hand. "You should have come to Alexandria," she said. "There I had a house of my own to live in, and another one that I made into a boardinghouse with Arab servants to wait on me and call me Kyra Aphrodite. And then, my bad luck, I got sick so I couldn't run the house anymore, and I didn't have any money, so I asked your uncle what I should do and he said, 'Go back to Kasos, go back to the old house.'" "I said that?" said Uncle George. "On the contrary, I knew you'd be unhappy here but you insisted on coming back." "I insisted on coming back? Why should I insist on coming back to this pile of rubble?" It was an old dispute between them. I realized the relations one forms in childhood can endure a lifetime, and so for Uncle George, Aphrodite was not an old woman to be indulged and pitied, but rather the sharp-tongued island girl who had once led him to the washbasin by the ear. Aphrodite and uncle George. Photo by Robert McCabe THE WAY TO PHRY On our first morning in Kasos, my uncle must have been thinking of his brother Basil. Basil is the lost brother, the only one of my father's brothers I have never called Uncle, the only one my father never knew because Basil died in 1907 and my father was born in 1906. "Basil used to be very nimble and quick," said Uncle George, sipping the tea Aphrodite had brought with our breakfast. "We used to take voyages on my father's sailing ship, the Anastasia. The first mate was my father's cousin Mavrandonis. We took his cabin so that he had to sleep in the chart room. Once Mavrandonis was about to put on a new bowler hat, but Basil ran in suddenly, took the hat, and floated it in a trough of soapy water where Aphrodite used to wash the clothes. "Afterward, Basil became very quiet. Perhaps that was the beginning of his illness. He began to shake, his sight gradually diminished, and his head declined to the right. Father came home to Syros with his ship the Anastasia. He had been in the Black Sea where there was cholera, because he was placed under quarantine and couldn't come ashore. "Mother went to the Port Office to confer with him. Should she take Basil to Athens for an operation? Apparently, by that time, they knew it was a tumor of the brain. But what could father say? What did he know? He said, 'Do whatever God reveals to you.' "My mother decided to have the operation, and she took Basil to Athens. We did not go with him, first because of the expenses of such a journey, and then because we had school. Basil was in good spirits as he left. He wore a peaked cap, which Father had brought. Actually, Father had meant it for me, but I didn't like it, so to please Father, Basil wore it himself. And he wore it that day, on the long journey." After breakfast, we put on bathing suits under our clothes and prepared to walk the two miles from our house to Ammoua, the only sandy beach on Kasos.... The bell tower at Phry. Photo by Robert McCabe. When we'd had our swim, we turned back on the way to Phry. The weather had cleared and Karpathos bloomed out of its membrane of white mist, so close that Kasos and Karpathos seemed one island, the sea like quicksilver poured into all its coves and turnings. Suddenly we saw a steamer turning silently in the empty sea: the Arcadia, the ship that brought us the day before, stopping in Kasos once again on its return journey from Rhodes to Crete. It materialized like an apparition. And it made my uncle think of the day in 1898 when he and his younger brother Basil were walking on that very path, when the Dhekeli, the Turkish steamer from Alexandria, appeared on that empty disk, with its hapari. Uncle George was six years old and Basil was four. The year before, there had been a disastrous war with Turkey, the year Aphrodite remembered when the Cretan revolution reddened the horizon with fire and blood. When war broke out, the Dardanelles were closed to all Greek ships, and the Anastasia, bound for Russia with an unprofitable cargo of roof tiles, had to lay up in Syros. The family spent the winter with her: Captain Elias and Eleni, George and Basil, baby Nicholas, and Manuel in his mother's womb. In the spring, when the war was over and the knot of Greek ships was loosened again in the Syros harbor, Captain Elias set out at last for the Black Sea to deliver the wretched roof tiles. After he picked up a cargo of grain for Alexandria, Eleni would accompany him on that journey because her brother, who was a doctor in Alexandria, had just become engaged and she wanted to be present at the emvasmata, the feast celebrating the engagement. That way, also, Eleni could see her sister Virginia, who had moved from Kasos to Alexandria. On the way they stopped at Kasos, to leave the older boys in the care of Aphrodite and their grandmother Marigo. They stayed long enough to take the two boys ashore, the Anastasia anchoring in the lee of Makra Island because the north wind was blowing and the ship could not anchor near the unprotected Kasiot coast.... The boys were left to the tender mercies of this grandmother, Eleni's mother, who lived to have great-grandchildren yet hated children.... To this gentle humanist the boys were consigned. She would put them to bed while the sun was still high in the sky, lock the door of the bedroom, and go visiting. On these nights, George was frightened. It was cold in the bed alone with Basil, for they were used to their mother sleeping with them. And then, before the advent of electricity, the streets were full of horrible imaginings: striglas and Nereids, and women who had died in childbirth and were thought to rise. Sometimes a dog, glutted and crazed with eating lambs, would howl weirdly. And once, the mad girl of Phry, who went around wearing a coarse blanket and her father's underclothes, came up the stairway from the street, calling their mother, who was not there but in Alexandria, "Kyria Eleni! Kyria Eleni!" Their parents had gone to Alexandria, to be present at the emvasmata of Eleni's brother, the Uncle-Doctor, as the boys called him. My uncle remembered him distinctly from a picture he saw only once: the Uncle-Doctor with his handlebar mustache sitting with his fiancée in the first row of a family portrait, taken by a professional photographer of Alexandria-not at an engagement or at a wedding but, unexpectedly, around Virginia's open coffin. Years later, in Syros, my uncle pieced it together. He brought a friend home from school and they were doing an experiment with sulfuric acid, and in his mother's hearing he pronounced the word aqua-fortis. When his mother heard that, she drew in her breath sharply and made a hissing sound, which meant that George had just said something very bad. "God forgive her," she muttered. And George knew by that evidence that what Aphrodite had told him was true: Aunt Virginia, his mother's sister, had poisoned herself in Alexandria with aqua-fortis.... And that was the last they ever heard of Aunt Virginia. Her story was buried with her body, to flower darkly once in Aphrodite's clandestine narration and once again, years later, in a sigh emanating from Eleni's soul. The only relics of her life were the ivory fan and the umbrella with its handle of sculptured roses, which Eleni kept with her always beside the icons of the house, and the photograph: an assembly of mourners gathered at an open bier. I was shocked to see it, no less than I would have been to see the corpse itself, peeping up at us under the rising lid of an old wedding chest. It was the first such photograph I had ever seen, though they were as common as their opposites, the pictures of infants lately born. That afternoon, after we returned from Ammoua, my cousin had seen an end of Aunt Virginia sticking out among dusty glassware and broken crockery in that place euphemistically called a living room. He got hold of her and pulled and kept pulling until out she came. And then the whole house was in chaos-my uncle at the table, one astonished nephew over each shoulder, and Aunt Virginia supine on his knees. Around us, Aphrodite swooped and fluttered. The picture showed an open coffin enclosing a young slender figure. The casket was tilted slightly, and the young woman's head was turned toward the camera. Her cheeks were round and youthful, the eyelids gently closed, her lips faintly touching in a suggestion of a smile. Around the forehead was a crown of lemon blossoms worn by a bride at her wedding. Behind her, along the length of the coffin, relatives stood in mourning: men in the stiff high collars of the time, women in black robes, bareheaded, their hair let down and parted in the middle in two separating locks. "It's Virginia," my uncle said. "You see the crown?" He explained for our sake. A married woman might be buried with her wedding crown around her forehead. But an unmarried woman might also wear a crown to emphasize the poignancy of her untimely death, for of all bridegrooms, Charon was the one to win her. The mysterious sleeper. "This is the picture I saw many years ago," my uncle said. "The one taken in Alexandria in 1898, which my mother kept all her life along with the ivory fan and the umbrella with the sculptured roses. And there, in the first row of mourners, you see my mother." We looked again and, sitting directly behind the coffin, we saw Eleni. It was the only picture I had seen of her. She was dressed in black, bareheaded, her dark hair loosened and falling on either side of her face, not in angry lashing snakes, but in perfectly combed and orderly cascades of grief. In her face there was no mark of violence or distorting passion. She was perfectly composed, glowing with the serenity of a woman complete in either joy or grief. She seemed unaware of anyone around her, her eyes resting on the cradled face before her in distant rapture. But was my uncle right? Was it Virginia? Where was Uncle-Doctor and his fiancée? And where was Captain Elias, who should have been keeping vigil beside his wife? Perhaps these uncertainties began to trouble my uncle even then, though he said nothing, only gazed musingly at the photograph before him. One by one we left him to his own vigil by the corpse.