Read Online Fugitive pieces by Anne Michaels - Free Book Online Page A

through Athens. Thousands of us, the whole city, accompanied Palamas’s body from the church to the grave. At the cemetery, Sikelianos shouted that we must ‘shake the country with a cry for freedom, shake it from end to end,’ and we sang the national anthem, surrounded by soldiers¡ Afterwards Daphne said to me—”
    “No one but Palamas could so rouse and unite us. Even from his grave.”
    “The first weekend of the occupation, the Germans held a procession through the city. Armoured cars, banners, columns of troops a block long. But Greeks were ordered to stay inside. It was forbidden for us to watch. The few who could see anything from home peeked through their shutters while the mad parade marched through empty streets.”
    “On street corners, in restaurants, like sideshow acts, black marketeers pulled raw fish out of briefcases, eggs from their pockets, apricots from their hats, potatoes from their sleeves.”
    … When it got too hard to find stones flat enough to skip, we sat on the bank. Mones had a bar of chocolate. His mother gave it to us the day we went to the cinema to see the American cowboy Butski Jonas and his white horse. We saved it because we were already planning our next expedition to the river. Inside, under the wrapper, there’s always a card, with a picture of a famous place. We’d already had different palaces and the Eiffel Tower and some famous gardens. That day, we got the Alhambra and folded it and tore it in half and pledged our eternal loyalty like we always did, and Mones kept half and I kept the other half so that when we went into business together we could join them up and pin them on the wall, his half of the world and my half, everything shared right down the middle.
    “The night before the Germans left Athens: Wednesday, October n. Daphne and I heard a strange sound, not quite a breeze, very faint. I went outside. There was a tremor in the air, like a thousand wings. The street was deserted. Then I looked up. Above my head, from all the roofs and balconies people were leaning, quietly calling to each other across the city, spreading the word. The city, which had been like a jail only a moment before, was now like a bedroom full of whispering, and also in the darkness the clinking of glasses filled with whatever we could find and ‘yiamas, yiamas,’ to your health, rising like gusts into the night.”
    “Afterwards, but before the dekemvriana, the December battles, we began to hear more of what happened elsewhere. …”
    “Daphne’s sister in Hania sent a letter: ‘In the middle of a field of freshly ploughed earth, nothing anywhere, you’ll find someone has put up a sign: “This was Kandanos.” “This was Skines.” All that remains of the villages.’”
    “Jakob and I also saw signs, marking where villages had once been. All across the Peloponnesus.”
    “They say over a thousand villages are gone.”
    “Jakob and I were at Kalavrita. Send the tourists to the burned-out chorios. These are our historic sites now. Let the tourists visit modern ruins.”
    “Here, people stood in long queues, waiting to bury their dead. The streetcleaners collected bodies. Everyone was afraid of malaria. We heard children singing the German soldiers’ song: ‘When the cicadas shrill, grab the yellow pill….’“
    “‘Too many funerals crowded temple gates.’“
    “Athos, you’ve taught Jakob well. Pedhi-mou, do you remember where the line is from?”
    “Ovid?”
    “Very good. Do you remember the rest? Wait, I’ll look it up.”
    Kostas opened up a book and read aloud:
    “‘Meanwhile the dead were fallen all about me.
    Nor were they interred by usual rites:
    Too many funerals crowded temple gates … … and none were left
    To weep their loss: unwept the souls of matrons, Of brides, young men and ancients — all vanished To the blind wilderness of wind …’“
    There was a long silence. Athos crossed his legs and banged the table. The dishes rattled. Kostas ran his