The house on the cliff

Numerous Saints had been recruited to play protective roles in my life. Agía Marína, for example, was assigned to keep my eyes safe from shampoo suds in the bath, and Ágios Sóstis rescued moths from a death by immolation in the flame of the paraffin lamp - or sent them heavenwards with singed wings when that wasn’t possible. Loxándra would read out to me the daily instalments from the serialised adventure story in the paper, and show me the cartoons of Zacharías and the Fat Lady in Thisavrós magazine, which she bought regularly but kept hidden under her mattress because my father found it too vulgar. She sang me folk songs from Greece and Smyrna, and the songs she called tangá , with a beat from Argentina and Greek lyrics, songs from the popular comic operettas too, which I found funny - “Little girl, no need to worry/ For your kiss is sweet as honey” - when I was sad. She gave me little sips of her sweet coffee, and taught me how to roll her cigarettes, and tell fortunes with cards. The first proved useful among my friends in the 60s, the second made me highly- sought after by my lovelorn classmates at university. When she found me one day, weeping inconsolably with the discovery that death is unavoidable and comes to us all, she managed to convince me that didn’t apply to my father, me, or herself. I must have been four or five years old. When, a few years later, I furiously presented her with incontrovertible proof to the contrary, she shrugged and replied, calmly “What should I have done, let you cry your heart out?” That made me even angrier, because I was ready to be consoled with a new lie. Then she explained that by the time people died they were so tired and old that not only did they not mind dying, they actively looked forward to the peace and consolation that death brought. This struck me as suspect and provoked further questions, about those who die before their time. Finally, and somewhat abruptly, she put a stop to my inquisition by saying “If the thought of death upsets you so much, then stop thinking about it. It’s not as if there’s anything you can do about it, anyway!” The logic of this was indisputable, and, in its own way, a comfort. In Athens I didn’t mind the loss of the island, because I got my father back. Anyway, we returned there often, in the summers and at other times too. Daddy did not consider my frequent absences from school to be a problem. Our house was on Omírou - a quiet street in those days, beginning at the grandiose neoclassical buildings on Panepistimíou Avenue, and climbing up to the rocky slopes of Lykavittós, terminating in wide, shallow stairs where the pine trees began. Our building was between Sólonos and Skoufá streets, and we lived on the third floor, an apartment of many large rooms little seen by the sun. The living room and dining room always had the wooden shutters rolled down, and smelled of floor polish. When we wanted to enter those rooms, we stepped onto dust-cloth “boats”. I would sneak in on my own, using them as ice skates. The wooden shutters on our windows descended with a drawn-out rattle, like a passing train. At night, when a car came up the street, the headlights made stripes of light and shadow flow across the ceiling above my bed.