My Arcadia Books

Arcadia, My Arcadia, Excerpt

Chapter One

It was an early August morning in 1953. A little color had come into the eastern sky over the barren Virgin Mountain, and almost immediately the faint dawn light crept over the land. The sparrows which always announced the coming of day chirped shrilly. Angelos Vlahos said his prayer before the family altar, dressed himself and began the seven-kilometer walk to Polis, the provincial capital, to sit for the entrance exams to high school. His father had gone with his donkey to sell his produce in town. His mother and two older sisters, Sopho and Lemonitsa, had left for the hills to gather oregano for the farmers’ market. 

As he started on his way, Angelos was relieved to leave the smells of mountain goats and pigs in his sleepy Arcadian village. Stunted holm oaks and wild almond trees were scattered along the narrow, winding and rock-littered road. The crops had been harvested and the fields lay bare. Tepid mist rose from the empty furrows and hovered over the naked red-clay fields. Since the Germans had fled the country a number of years before and the Civil War of the late 1940s had ended, Angelos was no longer afraid to walk there.

The road wrapped itself like a serpent around gaunt hillsides and knolls. Then it ran through open fields before it stretched along the border of the stinking swampy stream that functioned as the town’s sewers. The stink from it was so strong that Angelos thought it could twist the nostrils of Hercules. Though the villagers called it the “Brown River,” it was a wide ditch, no more, and mosquito-ridden. Year after year, the people had asked Papa Euthymios, the village priest, to speak to his politician friends in town and have them cover it or treat it with chemicals. He took their votes every election year and promised to talk to them, but somehow he kept forgetting his promise. 

About half way between the village and the town, the road ran uphill and then came into a curving top, the Twin Hills of the Black Birds, where the garbage of Polis was dumped and burned. It looked like the humps of a camel Angelos had seen in a photograph in the school encyclopedia. As he passed, he tried not to breathe in the nauseating odor that emanated from it. A pack of stray dogs roamed about, scavenging in the huge heaps of refuse. Black ravens and magpies screeched their ornery, heavy cries as Angelos passed by.

Though he did not know anybody who had gone to high school, Angelos felt excited to have the chance to break fresh ground. He remembered how his grade school teacher, Nikos Theoharis, had persuaded his parents a few months earlier to let him study further and not keep him in the village. 

“He’s a smart boy,” he had told them, placing his warm hand on Angelos’s shoulder. “He was my prize student with promise of fine attributes. He’s a boy who will go far but right now he’s like a croaking frog stuck in a dry well.  Let him go to high school. With education a person grows wings so he can fly. A boy’s got to be what he’s born to be, even if it’s difficult.”  

By the time he started second grade, Angelos had become a devoted scholar. He took his books home every afternoon and did his homework diligently with his sister Lemonitsa. The legends of saints his mother had encouraged him to read in six-page pamphlets she bought from a peddler over the years and the tales of ancient gods he had studied in school had helped him to develop discipline that often bordered on self-denial. It took very little to make him happy. A new shirt on Easter or a pair of leather shoes every other year pleased him enough. 

The road leveled for a few hundred meters at the Twin Hills before it ran downhill, sloping through knolls and hillocks. The road is a door to civilization, Angelos thought, recalling something he had read in school. He marched briskly, trying to avoid the rocks and the dry, thorny acorns that littered the ground. Now only three kilometers remained. All around him stood the ring of the sun-baked gray Arcadian mountains. Barren and forbidding, the mountains had worked on his psyche over the years. At times, they made him feel so isolated from the rest of the world, so caged in, that he daydreamed of being Icarus and flying over them on wax-held wings. 

Nikos Theoharis, who seemed to have an intimate knowledge of ancient history, had talked a lot about these mountains, which he called “eternal monuments.” He said that it was much easier to hear God up there than down in the towns. Long ago the Arcadians, who lived simple lives untouched by the progress that marked the rest of Greece, had built Doric temples on these mountains for their gods: Zeus, the father of all gods, his daughter Artemis, the virgin patroness of hunters, and Apollo the Rescuer, who saved the Arcadian people from a plague. Poseidon and Hera were born on these mountains. Amalthea, the sacred goat that nursed baby Zeus, grazed here, too. Here Hermes, Pan’s father, invented the harp using the shell of a tortoise and the guts of a sheep.

A gust of wind soughed through the branches of the few trees scattered near the road as Angelos passed. It was a breeze that seemed filled with promise. Between him and the mountains, the weeds of the red-clay hillsides undulated in the breeze. He felt the hardness of human struggle when he gazed at the hillsides. On them his sisters gathered chicory and snails every spring, and bulrush and oregano in the summer. Some days the county agricultural guard confiscated their gatherings and they returned home empty-handed and crying. 

Careful not to tread on horse and donkey droppings, Angelos continued on his way to Polis. Thinking of the town boys, he suddenly felt self-conscious about his narrow chest, flaring ears and old clothes. He had nothing but a dry piece of bobota, similar to cornbread, and a few cloves of garlic stuffed in his pocket, but with his graduation certificate and sixth grade textbook in his hand, his confidence returned. He could feel the excitement of his new adventure thrumming within him.  

Through his village school teacher’s influence, he had come to understand that, regardless of how he would do in high school, he had a purpose in life, a destiny. His maternal grandmother, Calliope, who had the name of the muse of epic poetry and a sweet voice to match it, had told him that people who wrote as well as he did found good-paying jobs and helped their families. 

While these musings played in his mind, he turned to look back at the bell tower of the village church that rose against the eastern sky. The light of the dawn, glimmering across the hills, was a little sharper now. For a brief moment he stood to take in the color of the sky, think about his parents’ redemptive daily toil and cross himself as he prayed silently: Good God, help me. He loved his village but he was ready to leave it now. 

Tucked in a remote corner of Arcadia, a country placed by God and geography on the outskirts of the world, his village was an out-of-the-way peasant community of thirty-five low houses and as many age-old mulberry trees. Angelos knew every house and tree. The mountain-ringed village had no ancient ruins, no claim to Homer’s birthplace or other distinction aside from bearing a saint’s name.  It was prey to the winds that blew across the valley, lifting whole shacks in the air and dropping them a kilometer away.

Angelos’s house was a weather-beaten, small mud-brick hovel at the very edge of the village that his great grandfather had built. The door of the house, narrow and wooden, was scarred by bullet holes from the Civil War. A white-painted sign, “DDT 1947,” sprawled across the panel of the door as evidence that the house had been disinfected against the terrible fleas of the period. A rusty horseshoe was nailed as a talisman at the top of the door frame to protect the house against bad luck. By the entrance to the house stood a big limestone block. It protruded from the earth and looked as if it had been waiting there ever since the Creation.  Around that stone, worn smooth from generations of use, his family and neighbors had gathered after sunset to study the night, discuss the future and hear each other’s stories of Arcadia’s woeful past till midnight and beyond.

The house had two sleeping rooms, one for his parents and one for him and his two sisters. On a shelf in the corner of the children’s room, covered with a newspaper sheet, was the family altar. It consisted of several cardboard icons and a small oil lamp hanging from a rusty nail on the ceiling. The largest icon showed Christ’s head, with the crown of thorns and blood dripping from his left forehead to His cheeks. Angelos changed the lupin in the lamp and knelt before that altar to pray before going to bed every night and after getting out of bed in the morning. The small kitchen had a rough, unpainted wooden table and five old rush-bottomed chairs. A ragged blue curtain separated the kitchen from the stable that housed a pig, a stud-goat, a nanny-goat and two ewes. Occasionally, a few rabbits and chickens moved about in the yard, provided that no fox had come by from the hills. Angelos’s house was known as “the house with the stud-goat odor” because his family kept a stud-goat for extra income.

The outskirts of Polis appeared in the distance ahead of him now. Angelos broke into a run, his single desire to arrive on time for his exams. When he reached the town, the sun had risen two yards over Virgin Mountain. He stopped in front of a dilapidated twostory building whose stone walls were tattooed by the bullets. A tin sign by the big iron gate read, “First High School for Boys, Erected 1901.” He scraped the mud off his broken shoes on the old scraper by the entrance, careful not to undo the hob-nails and half-circles that protected the heels and soles from premature wear, and walked in. 

His left sole was loose and the right shoe was so worn in the front that it had a hole through which he could insert two fingers. He had tried to block the hole by placing a mulberry leaf inside the toe of his shoe and now hid it by turning it inwardly. A thorn embedded in his cracked shoe was poking him. He had tried to remove it but it broke and most of it remained in the shoe. Now he put more pressure on the other foot to avoid the pain as he climbed the worn wooden stairs to the upper floor, where the exams had been scheduled. The clack-clack of his hob-nailed shoes echoed in the empty hall.

Tired and panting, he stepped into a large room crowded with other boys. Most of them wore socks, clean clothes and fresh haircuts. Angelos had made every effort to make himself presentable. Using his pocket mirror, he had combed his short hair carefully in the morning after oiling it a bit for shine. Yet he felt self-conscious being among so many town boys. Angelos glanced around for a familiar face in the crowd, but he didn’t know anyone outside his village. Feeling insignificant and small, he walked to a corner of the room and stood quietly on the edge of the crowd.

One nearby boy, speaking confidently, said that the exams would be oral and written and would cover religion, basic science, general knowledge and mathematics. 

“What are mathematics?” Angelos asked, moving closer.

“Arithmetic,” the boy responded with a haughty air and turned away.

Humbled by his apparent ignorance, Angelos noticed that the town boys spoke with a different accent and self-assurance. Apprehensively, with his grade school textbook and graduation certificate still in hand, he moved back to his corner of the room. To comfort himself, he thought of the last time he’d seen his kind teacher. 

Two weeks before, Nikos Theoharis had stopped by his house. He was a gentle man with a wooden leg in place of the one he had lost at the Albanian Front during World War II. He loved children but had none of his own. On the day of his visit, his face looked ashen, bleached to a chalky gray, and his mustache needed trimming. He breathed hard as if he had been running.

“Angelos, I brought you the encyclopedia set from the office,” his teacher said. “Nobody is going to use these volumes for a while. Keep them till the examinations are over. Thumb through the pages. You may want to know about important men and women, like Homer, Hippocrates, Socrates, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great. You will find the answers in these books.” A loose cough, which the teacher tried to smother, suddenly shook his body. “Stock your mind, Angelos,” he added as he took out of his old silver-plated watch, a reminder of time running out.

Angelos asked his teacher if he had a chance to get into high school. 

“I think you are smart enough to do anything you want,” Theoharis replied. He carefully wound his watch, checked the time and put the watch back in his pocket. As he turned to leave, he said, “I will be thinking about you.” 

Watching Theoharis walk away, Angelos realized that this would be the last time that he would see his mentor for quite some time. Though worried about his teacher’s health, his gesture of bringing the books and words of encouragement had moved him. Surely, he thought, this was his great chance to become the lettered man Grandma Calliope had foretold.

He kept the big volumes in a corner of the house, reading as much as he could. In those volumes, he came across the biggest rivers and tallest mountains of the world. Pictures and biographies of famous men of letters, like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, fascinated him. His secret wish became to someday be educated like them, wear clothes like them, and write books like them.

The crowd jostled Angelos out of his memories. He watched as, one by one, their names were called and the boys entered a big door that led to something called the Board of Three. The door was heavy and fitted with iron bars. Each time it closed, it sounded as if someone had secured it with a boulder from behind. 

Angelos’s turn came shortly before noon. The door groaned as it opened to admit him. Three examiners sat behind a long table by an open window. Angelos’s mind reeled with a jumble of encyclopedic facts. He hoped that God would not, in His infinite goodness, willfully deny the future of a boy who prayed on his knees every morning and every night, and thanked Him for every slice of bread. What he expected was not a miracle, or a manifestation of the divine powers, but simply justice.

The first examiner was a wizened man dressed in a dark suit. The man moved so slowly it seemed he wasn’t capable of doing anything in a hurry. Angelos imagined the man’s house burning down and him moving as slow as grass growing. The man crooked his finger at Angelos, beckoning him to approach. Angelos advanced to the front of the table and stood under the man’s owlish gaze. In a grave, considered voice, the man asked him to open his textbook, read a paragraph and tell him what it meant. Angelos read about Abraham and his willingness to sacrifice his own son Isaac, because God said so. The man asked him why God made the world, and Angelos recalled the answer from his Bible studying classes with Nikos Theoharis. The man then asked him to recite the Creed and add two fractions with different denominators. Angelos answered all these questions with no difficulty. He began to relax.

The second examiner was a tall and lanky man with a stubborn chin, bushy eyebrows, and a deep voice. Before he examined Angelos, this teacher asked him questions that surprised him. “What village are you from?” “How big is your family?” “What plans do you have for your future?” 

Angelos was glad to tell the man about his home and his parents and sisters and his burning desire to become an educated person. The examiner gave him a little smile before proceeding with more questions. “Why do you think most of Hercules’ twelve labors took place in Arcadia?” “What do you know about the world’s Seven Wonders?” “If you were a Spartan, how would you explain the causes of the Peloponnesian Wars?” 

Angelos did the best he could, then turned to the final examiner. This man was Xenophon Zouzoulas. He reminded Angelos of a huge insect, a wasp perhaps. His lean, high-cheeked face seemed blank while his dark eyes squinted quizzically. Seated next to him was a boy with carrot-colored hair whose face resembled the examiner’s enough to be his son. With a red pencil wedged in his bony hand, Zouzoulas motioned for Angelos to come closer. 

Angelos crept up to the edge of the table.

“What’s your name?”

“Angelos Vlahos, sir.”

“Huh, vlahos! Like name, like thing,” Zouzoulas muttered in a raspy voice, accenting the Greek word for peasant. “Who was Nebuchadnezzar?”

“Who?” Angelos quivered inside him. The name sounded completely unfamiliar to him. He felt as though he’d been hit by a sledge-hammer. Zouzoulas surveyed him from beneath his gray eyebrows with a sneer. He seemed to have the uncontrollable habit of winking. 

“Never mind. Let’s talk about science.”

Angelos didn’t know what science was any more than he knew about Nebuchadnezzar. He was certain, though, that he had studied hard all those six grade school years, reading stories in his parents’ Kazamias, a farmer’s almanac. The pupils in Polis must have progressed while he and the other village children grew up like untrimmed weeds, studying old editions of textbooks in a one-room school in the depths of gray Arcadia.

“What is the scientific process that allows the siphon to work?” Zouzoulas asked.

Angelos stood irresolute for a moment. Then, in a voice broken from the tension, he mumbled, “I couldn’t exactly tell you, sir, but I’ve siphoned must with a hose from one barrel to another for my father.” He fidgeted in embarrassment because of his bleak ignorance. He noticed that the skinny boy with the carrot-colored hair smirked.

“What are stalagmites?”

Angelos could no longer think. All the facts he had collected from his school books, from stray fragments of overheard conversations in the village kafenion and from his teacher’s encyclopedia, had gotten jumbled in his head. Others were completely gone, like water poured through a strainer. He felt a sick feeling building in the pit of his stomach. He ran his tongue over his dry lips and choked out his answer, “I think they are rocks hanging from ceilings of caves.”

“Hanging! God above, don’t you know anything?”

“I’ve seen pictures of them in the encyclopedia, sir.”

“I don’t care where you’ve seen them, but stalagmites are not hanging. Well, I could be lenient and pass you, but you deserve more. I’m going to give you a zero for science.” 

 “Please, sir.”

“Next question.” Zouzoulas opened a book and read, “A farmer bought a cart-load of hay. His cart can carry one thousand five hundred and fifty kilos. How long will the hay last if each group of five goats eats twenty-five kilos a day, and the farmer has three hundred and ten goats?”

Angelos’s thoughts clotted and he couldn’t answer. He told the examiner that he had solved similar problems in his village school and that he might be able to answer if he could use paper and pencil. The man replied that it was not permitted and fixed Angelos with a terrifying scowl. Angelos’s graduation certificate slipped through his trembling hand and fell on the floor. He picked it up and unrolled it to show the examiner his grades and his deportment. “I was a good student in my village, sir,” he said. “My teacher said I was smart enough for high school.  I work hard, sir. When I set my mind on something, I can get it.”

With another eye-wink, Zouzoulas made a gesture of dismissal. Mortified, Angelos pleaded with him for more time to think. 

“I don’t have all day. I’m not convinced that education is suitable for your kind anyway. It’s no use sending someone like you to high school. Don’t worry. Your parents can use you in the fields.”

At that moment, Angelos heard the voices of peddlers outside. He thought that one of those voices was his father peddling his produce from his donkey, “Turnip, oregano, chicory of the mountain!” He rocked back on his heels. Feeling keenly aware of how poor he and his family were, he walked across the room and stepped out without answering the examiner. 

Still no friendly faces appeared in the crowd of boys in the high-fenced school yard. Angelos sat on a stone in a corner of the yard, where a fig tree with obvious signs of human abuse stood under a bright sun. Boys talked and played together in the shade of the tree. Most of the tree’s low-hanging branches hung over the school yard, but its roots extended behind the weathered fence, and into the back yard of the neighboring house. Miserably, Angelos thought over his oral examination. He suspected that he must have missed a great deal of life by living in the village and suddenly felt hatred for the world that had let him grow up so poor and ignorant. He wished that he could die and be born over again into a prosperous town family. 

Angelos was distracted from his thoughts as one of the boys began to thrash the fig tree’s branches in hopes that he might find a late fruit on them. Suddenly, the shrill voice of a woman rang out from the balcony of the nearby house. “Keep off my fig tree, wood-heads, or I will wring your necks!” she threatened. 

“He did it,” the boy said, pointing to Angelos. Startled, Angelos looked up and noticed an angry, middle-aged woman on the balcony. Before he had a chance to jump out of the way, she threw a large pan of water down at him. The cold water splashed over Angelos as the woman shouted, “I will teach you, bastard, not to touch my fig tree again! If I find you trespassing, I’ll unleash the dog!”

Angelos cleared the water of his eyes and moved to another edge of the school yard, near the outhouse. A few village boys had gathered there, looking out of place. Angelos sat down, laid his textbook and diploma by his side and took out his snack. The stale bobota, hard as a rock, bruised his gums. The garlic burned his whole mouth and he had no water. Sometime later, while the garlic was turning sour in his stomach, he followed the other boys back inside for the written exams.

The students sat at wooden desks in a huge classroom which smelled of chalk dust. A teacher wrote questions on the blackboard while two other teachers passed out pencils and sheets of paper. The first assignment was to write a composition on the topic, “My goals for the future.” 

For a few minutes, Angelos sat unmoving, his head in his hands. He thought hard before he finally picked up his pencil. At length, he wrote that he would like to emulate his father and grade school teacher, quoting what he had heard from both of them over the years, especially their favorite proverbs and sayings. He stressed that these two men had become part of him, and that from them he had learned lessons of love, hard work and discipline.

While he wrote, he made a realization that the world seemed to consist of two distinct groups of young people: the well-nourished, refined town boys whose bodies smelled of soap and hot water, and the raggedy, sun-burned country boys, with scabby knees and their behinds sticking out of their short pants, smelling of mountain thyme and garlic. Nikos Theoharis had once used two words to describe the Romans: patrician and plebeian. Angelos thought that the grouping applied as well to the boys of Arcadia. Apparently, God in His holy and wise providence had deemed that some be rich and some poor, some city dwellers and some highlanders.  A sudden sensation of having been let down by God filled Angelos.

After the students had completed their compositions, they were tested on grammar, religion and general knowledge. In the hushed room, Angelos wrote for three continuous hours quickly and neatly, driving his pencil over page after page of paper. He checked and rechecked his answers until satisfied, put down his pencil and sat back to admire his work. He was the last one to finish. He handed in his papers and stepped outside, feeling dazed. He was unable to measure what, if anything, he had accomplished. Of one thing he was certain, though, that life in this city bore no relation to what happened seven kilometers inland in his village. Polis seemed a mean town, hard like Babylon, about which he had read in the encyclopedia. If he got into high school, Angelos wondered if he was equipped to survive town life.

The sun had curved to the west, preparing for its descent over the horizon, when Angelos took to the village road toward home. He paced slowly, tired from his exams. Nearby, a goat-bell clanged and a flock bleated as though to welcome him back to the village. The heavy cries of bull-frogs filled the air and flies and mosquitoes buzzed as he approached the stone-bridge at the sharp bend of the Brown River. An old memorial shrine by the roadside, containing an oil lamp and an icon, reminded him that the bridge had been the scene of many accidents. 

In one of those accidents, his neighbor, Barba Photis, had lost his horse buggy and wife. The accident seemed to have marked the old man with guilt and shame and had left a deep sadness in him that was still reflected in his deep brown eyes. His real name was Photis Sophoulis, but Angelos always called him Barba Photis respectfully, as if he were his uncle. In turn, Barba Photis acted as though he saw in Angelos his own son and always had good advice at hand.

Barba Photis was friendly and well-liked by the people. As old as the hills, he lived out his life quietly like a cuckoo on the western outskirts of the village, nearby Angelos’s house. His face, creased and furrowed by the seasons, was lean and sharp. His white beard hung from his chin as if it had been stuck with carpenter’s glue. His forehead was high and disappeared into receding fuzzy hair. He always chewed a clove of cinnamon and wheezed and coughed a lot. One day, Angelos had wanted to know why he coughed so much. “During the war,” Barba Photis replied, “if we had the urge to smoke and we had no tobacco, we smoked leaves of plants and all kinds of shit. Anything to make the ball-shrinking wind and the cold more tolerable.”

Angelos ran errands for Barba Photis, and he appreciated it. Sometimes the old man reached into his pocket and gave him a small coin. When Angelos helped him load his donkey one evening, Barba Photis told him that for a long time, after losing his wife, he was in so much pain that he thought of taking his own life. Angelos wanted to know why. “I felt useless without her,” the old man responded. “We were like the two parts of the grindstone. It doesn’t work with only one side. If the Almighty knew that it is not good for man to live alone, why does He permit such tragedies?” In the end, Photis Sophoulis chose drinking over suicide. He always made it home from the kafenion on his own two feet, and in the mornings he was the first to get up in the neighborhood.

Angelos reflected on his neighbor beside the road shrine of St. Anthony, the patron of the poor and the sick, pigs and swineherds. The sun was down and gentle purple light suffused the valley. To the east, the Virgin Mountain was still yellow with sunlight. By the time he entered the village, a windless evening had arrived, and the gray mountains had begun to cast their solemn shadows over the land. 

When he arrived home, his sisters were cleaning the back yard, singing as they swept. His mother was trying to milk their old nanny-goat nearby. His father had returned from the street market and was fixing the stud-goat’s stall. His trousers were smeared with mud and his tattered sleeves were rolled up, showing the big scar on his left arm that he had brought home from the Albanian Front. 

“What did they ask you in town, son?” his father asked, fishing out a cigarette from under the visor of his limp cloth cap. He always bought loose cigarettes in twos or threes because he couldn’t afford a whole pack. “Anything important?” 

“About Hercules’ labors, the World’s Seven Wonders and other things, Patera.”

“Seven? What happened to the eighth, son? Didn’t they ask you about that one?”

Angelos stood puzzled. He was certain that even in Kazamias only seven wonders had been mentioned. He also knew that his father had had so little formal education that he misspelled his own name whenever he had to sign a document. If there was an eighth wonder, what was it?

His father straightened out his cigarette. Then he took out his old flint-and-wick lighter, lit his cigarette and replied with a smile, “I am looking at it, son.”

Angelos grinned back in surprise. He had never doubted his father’s love but his father wasn’t usually so expressive. His mother suspended her milking and lifted her head up.

“I don’t know, Demos,” she muttered. “The boy doesn’t need all that education. He should forget the books and stay in the village to help us.” 

Angelos knew that his mother loved him with the intensity a peasant woman reserved for her only son. It made her reluctant to let go of him.

“Angelos is a smart boy and deserves a better chance,” his father said. “Don’t you remember what the teacher said?”

“The last thing we need in this house is more expenses,” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard her husband’s question. “Besides, letters are for those who live in large houses in the city and eat meat regularly and have fine clothes. We can hardly keep our heads above water! Don’t you see that I cannot even get a cup of milk from our nanny-goat?”

“It’s all right, wife,” his father said. “We’ll manage somehow.”

 “I have the feeling that our son might not come back if he goes off to town,” his mother said. “It’s like the dream I keep having. Angelos prepares to leave for a journey and a damn cuckoo keeps appearing. When he finally comes back from his trip, some kind of misfortune has befallen us. It’s like when you went to war, Demos, and you came back wounded.”  

“Don’t pay any attention to dreams. It’s real life that counts.”

To settle the matter, she told Angelos to go over to his Thea Anna’s house and borrow her Oneirokretes, a small handbook of dream interpretations.

Anna Malamis was his mother’s first cousin but bore no resemblance to her. An older woman with no children, she was so sweet and welcoming of Angelos that he thought of her as his aunt. She had a large dark mole on the right side of her long chin, with a tuft of curly gray hair spiraling up from it. The space between her lips and nose was deeply etched with wrinkles and two of her teeth had been filled with gold. Lame though she was, she was kind and patient like a saint, he thought. 

Unlike most people in the village, who always blamed God for their misfortunes, she never seemed to hold any grievance for her fate. In her kitchen she kept an oil lamp, lit every day and had enough hand-dipped tapers and icons to make God feel at home. In the village, everybody talked about Anna Malamis as a fortunate woman because she was the wife of a brooklis, a man who had been to America. Vasilis Malamis had gone to America in his youth, returned to the village to marry and left again months later. After working for the Pennsylvania Railroad for thirty-one years, he retired permanently to the village as Bill Malam. Bill Malam was not the thin and humble man the village knew any longer, though. He had changed into a fat, reclusive and arrogant man, mean as a ghost with a grudge. As much as he loved his Johnny Walker so he despised his fellow villagers. He prided himself on being an Americano and put down the villagers for not washing often enough. He never visited the kafenion. People no longer regarded him with significance; instead, they considered him a total failure. 

But Uncle Bill had money. Thea Anna had a Singer sewing machine, a rarity for the village, white towels, whole sets of plates and many other amenities not seen elsewhere in other homes. On Christmas and New Year’s, she gave Angelos more money than anybody else did for singing her the carols. Only rarely would a family in the village give coins in return for the good wishes, giving stale cakes or chestnuts instead. But though she was filled with goodness and grace, and she had enough money to buy things she needed, Thea Anna never gave Angelos any dollars, which he wanted so much. Village rumor had it that Uncle Bill forbade her to give them out. He was notorious for his stinginess. If he ever went to the village graveyard to light the oil lamp on his father’s grave and found a mulberry leaf fallen on the street, he would gather it and bring it home to feed his rabbits. 

Nevertheless, Angelos visited Thea Anna often, especially when he felt sad or hungry, because she always treated him to a piece of candy before he left and had a kind word for him. When he was in fourth grade, she began having him water the flowers on her balcony and in the courtyard, which he did faithfully. Stuffing his shirt and pockets with pomegranates, walnuts and plums from the trees on his way out, he always mumbled to himself, “Uncle Bill, now we are even.” 

Angelos borrowed Thea Anna’s Oneirokretes of One Thousand Dreams, got his candy and returned home. He opened the well-thumbed booklet, its pages yellow and curling, found the appropriate entry and read aloud the interpretation of his mother’s dream, “If you see someone who prepares for a trip and also see a cuckoo, formidable obstacles will have to be faced.”

 “I knew it,” his mother said. “What’s written is written.” 

Angelos told his parents that he wasn’t hungry. He said his night prayer before the family altar and crept into his bed without dinner, quiet and worried. But a good night was not possible. It was not so much because of the mosquitoes that buzzed about; he was pretty used to them. He worried about things that he had missed on the exams. The chill of guilt for not having been better prepared was upon him. A sense of dread filled him thinking that he had no chance of getting into high school.

Then one evening, two weeks later, when his father returned from peddling his vegetables in town, he brought Angelos the most pleasant news of his life. His father said, “Son, you made it to high school! Of four hundred applicants, only fifty-six passed.” 

Angelos ran to Grandma Calliope’s old house on the other side of the village. He whooped with joy as he staggered into her courtyard. “Yiayia, epetiha! Epetihaaaa!” he shouted gleefully. “I’ve passed!” 

Grandma Calliope received him as if he had won the world. Tears coursed down her bony cheeks, and delight and pride flooded her faded gray eyes. Her wrinkled face beamed. “Angelos, precious child, you will become an educated person and prosper some day,” she said in a tremulous voice. She told him that his success was the work of the Lord. He hugged the frail old woman and darted out the door to spread his news.

“Wait,” she called out. With her trembling hand, she picked up a palm-size paper icon from her table and handed it to him. “Take this and keep it with you all the time for protection.” 

He was glad to have an icon of the Virgin Who Grants Requests Quickly. From school he knew that the original icon, found in a nearby monastery, had been painted by St. Luke the Evangelist himself and had miraculous qualities. He thanked his grandmother and left laughing. He laughed so much that the Arcadian hills seemed to echo with his voice.

On his way back to his house, he ran into Nikos Theoharis returning home from the kafenion. His dog, Mourgos, followed closely behind him.

“Bravo, Angelos,” his teacher said as joy suffused his face. “You’ve made a good job of it. Do you know that you’re the first boy from our village in twenty-five years to go to high school? Never quit the noble race. I hope you are always as happy as you are tonight. But remember, ‘It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.’ No one can walk away from the consequences of his own deeds.” 

His teacher’s words dazzled Angelos as never before. He felt proud that someone so important thought so highly of him. His teacher had no sooner said “Good night” than Angelos began to fantasize about becoming a learned man like him, maybe a doctor or a lawyer.

Racing his shadow and feeling lucky to have scraped through the high school entrance requirements, he returned home. His mother and sisters were preparing a meal of boiled cabbage and potatoes. His mother asked him to buy kerosene for their lamp, five match sticks and three cigarettes for his father. Angelos ran to the village grocery store with an empty wine bottle, had it filled with kerosene, put the matches and cigarettes in his pocket, and started back home.

Suddenly, the priest’s bitch sprang from around a corner, barking maniacally. Angelos was frightened of her because he knew that she had bitten half of the village so far. He pretended to pick up a stone to throw at her, but it had no effect. She ran straight for him. Fear lent wings to Angelos’s feet as he ran. The dog lunged and snapped at his legs and would have bitten him if Barba Photis had not come out and shouted and flailed at her with his stick. Relieved by his narrow escape, Angelos thought, Soon I won’t have to worry about that bitch anymore. 

When Angelos came home from his errand, the family sat down for dinner in their small kitchen. His father seated himself at the head of the table, next to his mother. Alongside her sat Angelos’s sister, Sopho. Lemonitsa, who had been out of sorts all day, occupied a seat apart from them. On the other side of the table, to his father’s right side, Angelos sat on a stool. It was a wooden stool with a rabbit’s skin on the seat that his father had made for him when he turned three. His mother placed a loaf of bread on the table and handed Angelos his knife and fork. These utensils, left behind by the Nazis upon fleeing the country in 1944, served to remind Angelos’s family that the horrible times had passed. Whereas the family’s other spoons and forks were battered and made of softer metal which needed tinning every few years, these were of stainless steel that seemed to last forever. Angelos had the privilege of using them because he was his parents’ only son.

His father made the sign of the cross, mumbled his prayer and started to eat. Between mouthfuls, he said that he had an announcement to make. Curious, Angelos and his sisters stared their father in the pale light of the kerosene lamp. Their father might surprise them with an unusual story as he often did, taking them all over the villages of Arcadia. 

“I’ve found a place for Angelos to stay in town,” he said. “It’s a reasonable room.” 

Angelos joyfully thanked his father. 

Sopho said, “Brother, I’ll come and bring you vegetables and wash your clothes from time to time.” 

Lemonitsa, on the other hand, looked as if the news had been a slap in the face. “You let him go to high school but you keep me home to feed the chickens and the stud-goat,” she snapped. “I’m smart enough myself, but your ‘golden boy’ gets off easy. Wait and he will lay you a golden egg!” She flung down her fork and stormed out of the kitchen.

The kerosene lamp’s wick sizzled and threw out sparks as Angelos’s mother sighed in frustration. Angelos knew that his sister was resentful because his parents had not allowed her to go to high school, believing that girls should stay home, do domestic work and help their parents in the fields. Unlike Sopho and most girls in the village, whose schooling was done when they learned to read and calculate, Lemonitsa had completed all six grades of grammar school. She was smart and had excellent memory. She knew what months had thirty-one days, could name all the prefectures of Greece in alphabetic order and was a good speller. Angelos pitied his sister, yet he felt sad seeing their home upset by her outbursts. His father must have noticed it because he leaned over and whispered in his ear, “She will be all right, son. Don’t add fuel to the flames.” 

They finished eating, and Sopho cleared the table. Then they all went to sit on the limestone outside the house and chat with their neighbor, Barba Photis, for a while before going to bed.