Out of Arcadia, Excerpt
Chapter One
“Who vouched for you? Do you have an affidavit from a sponsor or guaranteed employment in America already?”
Angelo heard a mild elderly man with an American accent, who looked like a country doctor, question a boy seated next to him about his journey. The answer must have come in a low, hoarse whisper, because Angelo could not hear what the boy said. Yet no question could have taken him more unaware, like a slap from nowhere.
Affidavit?
Angelo had no affidavit as such, only a fake certificate of deposit from a local bank in Polis that described him as well-to-do, enough to meet the visa requirement at the American Embassy in Athens. That was all. Angelo sat up, his thin frame straighter in the window seat, self-conscious of the oversized dark-blue suit of clothes his widow neighbor in Polis had given him from her husband’s closet so he could have a good picture for his passport.
Oh, Jesus, perhaps the phony certificate was not a blessing but a curse—that scheme of the Athens agent working for the American Institute of Engineering and Electronics in Chicago, not a legitimate college, but a money-making scheme operated by a Greek-American with roots in an obscure Boetian little town near Thebes, merely offering a way for poor boys like Angelo to secure a three-year student visa and enter America.
The country doctor moved further down the aisle. Angelo’s chest expanded and he sighed a deep breath, thinking about his mission.
He was one of the hundreds of passengers on el al Flight 1155 from Athens, the farthest boundary of his world, the Pillars of Hercules, until he had boarded the plane with a New York City destination. From there he would have to find his way to Chicago, and eventually to Roosevelt University where he was hoping to enroll in the spring. He had no idea who the other passengers were or what they were doing for a living; he was only sure that he wanted to carve a future for himself and become his family’s pioneering steward. He was their only boy, and he should to support them. He loved them beyond measure; they had kept him whole for nineteen years, raising him to know something more than the grafting of mulberry trees and the breeding of sheep.
But where would Angelo live in America? Who would hire him and for what kind of work? Among his documents was an embassy form that he had signed, stipulating that he was not allowed to work while being a student and that he must return home upon completion of his studies. If he found a way to work, would he earn enough money to send home while he studied? The family farm, out of which they had lived, had been decimated by a drought, the new mare they had recently bought from a Gypsy at the county animal fair had drowned in a well, and his father had been crippled after falling off his donkey and was no longer able to sell produce in the neighborhoods—all the family’s dreams that had been bound up with him were lost. Would Angelo’s mother’s arthritic condition allow her to sell enough vegetable and flower seeds to support the family before he started sending her money?
Had Angelo set his expectations too high?
When he had been a small child, walking barefoot in the village grimy alleys with the soles of his feet as hard as cypress, or listening to his school teacher talk about the world’s continents, the future had so scared him that he could not see its prospects. Arcadia, the land of legends that Fortune had abandoned, was, to him, a remote, lonely place within Greece with no ties to the rest of the country, or the world—the land where people since antiquity broke their heads and their hearts on fierce and wild terrain.
The sun-baked land of rocky hillsides and bleached mountains had never yielded to adequate cultivation, as if it wanted to be left alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar savage kind of beauty. Goats, cows, and sheep had a fool habit of catching diseases that no veterinarian could quite cure. The mosquitoes were more dangerous than wolves. And yet Angelo once felt that it had been the land that had made him, the land from which his character had been formed. But he had left Arcadia without a thought for the nineteen years he had lived there, and now he felt that he had left little behind. Everything that was important to his future was in the seat with him. The years of his past had no room in his future. He lacked nothing.
He made sure that his seat belt was firmly buckled.
His pulse quickened as he glanced out at the immense steel blue sky, recalling from earlier that day the image of his mother and sister, Lemonitsa, sadly standing, watching him fly away, his father not able to accompany them—a scene he imagined himself still recalling as an older man looking back upon his life. Shaking away the image for a moment, he could see clouds suspended above the sea. Behind him was all he had ever known; ahead was an unknown future and a girl who had already gone to America.
Almost five hours after the flight had begun, and well out over the Atlantic, lighted signs and a voice from the plane’s sound system warned passengers that they might experience turbulence.
Indeed, a sudden wind started rocking the plane, lashing rain beginning to pelt against its windows. Magazines fell out of their racks, and plastic trays cascaded out of the galley like oversized playing cards. Angelo’s stomach ached, feeling as tight as a stretched rubber band that was about to snap. The boy in the seat next to him began to retch into a bag, his eyes closed. Several people moaned, and an old woman cried in Greek that she was going out of her mind. Suddenly, the passengers looked like a gathering of mourners anticipating their own deaths.
Fear took hold of Angelo.
He felt nailed to his window seat, unable to move. He had never felt real panic before. Why had he been so obstinately set on getting to America? He remembered The Spirit of St. Louis, the first book in English he had read to help learn the language. How had Lindbergh dared to make a non-stop trans-Atlantic flight on his small plane alone? Angelo felt his spine stiffen, especially when lightning suddenly flashed outside. He worried that the plane would be struck.
Angelo tried to forget that he was on an airplane and began thinking of pleasant times, of playing soccer in the hilly street with his friends, of being in church on a Sunday and assisting the village priest in the sanctuary. Eventually the turbulence began to settle, although out the window the rain continued. A stewardess came by, handing out newspapers in English and Hebrew. She asked Angelo if he wanted one.
“No, thank you, ma’am.”
Even if his English were good enough to read the paper with ease, he was too tense to read anything; he could only listen to the fast beat of his heart. He gripped the armrests of his seat and took out the blue-eyed talisman that his mother had given him, saying: “This will protect you, my child, always wear it.” He held on to it, prayed to come out of the flight alive, and tucked it back inside his shirt.
Presently, the plane leveled off. The wind had abated, and the warning seat belt sign had been turned off. As if by a miracle, the edge of the drenching rainstorm had receded, and barely a tremor of turbulence was left. Prayers, it seemed, could be answered quickly en route to America. They and the pendant had done their work.
Angelo remembered the Greek countryman traveling with him, Dino Kaparos, who had approached him at the Athens Ellinikon Airport before boarding, tapping him on the back and saying that he would need help with papers and authorities along his journey. Angelo had assured him that he would do whatever he could to be of help. Angelo drew in and exhaled his breath, then got up to check on his new friend and continue their previous conversation.
Moving slowly and with faltering steps, Angelo walked through the aisles looking for Dino. A group of Greek peasants had sneaked greasy broiled chicken, feta cheese, and bread aboard and now feasted, the area around them reeking of garlic. He glanced at several of them, all poorly dressed, weather-beaten, and ill-used by fate, forced to leave their war-ravaged land and sent in the only possible direction: towards America, the last open haven. Like him, they all must have drunk rainwater and slept in the gutter, and now, with a few dollars in their pockets and small bundles loaded with dreams and hopes of a better life, they, too, were seeking a better life in America.
Slouched up in his seat and snoring, Angelo’s patriote was in the aisle a few rows before the service area, at the rear of the plane. Angelo recognized him from his crumpled, threadbare jacket, the color of eggplant and with bulging pockets, his trayaska with a bent peak, and his scuffed peasant shoes. In that trayaska and in those shoes, Angelo saw all the life he had known in Arcadia ever since he was born. Almost the same age as his father, and scrawny like him, Dino was a modest man, with a bronze face toughened by the sun, his upper lip covered with a sparse, untrimmed but friendly mustache, and the careworn, hunted look of a peasant driven by poverty in his eyes. He smelled of earth and looked like a man who could hold a bee in his palm and never once feel its sting—like a man who could decipher the soil and tell within a bushel what harvest it would yield. Under the cracked nails of his hard knotty hands was the brown dirt of the fields of Greece—the familiar, intimate marks of toiling humanity. Angelo could see the farming calluses on his palm, but his face had no scars. Angelo knew such men did not wear their scars on their bodies; their scars were deep inside.
Gently, Angelo patted the man on the shoulder, and he slowly cracked open one eye, his eyelids as dead as shoe leather.
“Oh, my child, are you here?”
“Yes.”
“What good fortune to see you again. How did you find me?”
“One ploughman always can find another, Barba Dino,” Angelo replied, addressing the man with respect by adding Barba to his name as he had been taught to do with elders back in his village.
Barba Dino opened his other eye and stared up at Angelo. Sunken and with the faded look of men who have lived outdoors, his sad eyes seemed eroded by the devouring sun. But then what careworn Greek face was without a touch of sadness?
“Are you okay, Barba Dino?”
“If truth be told, I wondered if I would ever see you again, so many people on the airplane, and then the storm.”
He took off his trayaska, swept it to his knee, and straightened his lank graying hair with a small comb that was missing a number of teeth. There was something about the man, behind all the sadness in his hollow eyes, Angelo had not seen before, only felt: simple goodness. In Barba Dino’s face, he saw the mold that had stamped his own.
The seat next to him was vacant, so Angelo took it.
Like all Greeks since the times of Homer, Barba Dino and Angelo shared their family histories and began recounting their misfortunes. Angelo told him why he had left Arcadia, and then it was Barba Dino’s turn.
His family had been so poor that they had lived in a leaky, mud-roofed hovel, starvation constantly clamping its iron claws upon them. Barba Dino’s life had been a gamble, and he had survived more than his share of falls. In the early 1950s, he had gone to the French Congo, sponsored by his older brother who had sought his fortune in the grain trade. Barba Dino had hoped to rise out of poverty, but following a few years in the Congo, it became obvious to him that working for his brother had not played out well, and he returned home as poor as when he had left—and desperate. Two years before he left for America, he had had the misfortune of burying his beloved wife, Pagona, killed by lightning while gathering oregano on the region’s legendary hills.
“I say a prayer for her soul every night,” he sighed. “My heart was buried with her in the grave.”
He had decided to emigrate to America because he could not provide for his five daughters as a dusty sheepherder back in Ano Pogoni, a rugged, mountain region in Epirus with land like that of Arcadia, which God had forgotten to soften in the palm of His hands, as if He had not expected its inhabitants to survive. The mention of the word Epirus was enough to send Angelo on a bout of reminiscences, thrilling stories his father had told him about when he had confronted Benito Mussolini’s army there. It was his father’s greatest pride; he had fought for the land like a wolf for its den and had been injured.
“It’s the poor man’s old story, my child,” Barba Dino said. “It grieves me to tell it, but from what you’ve told me, we are registered in the same book of fate. The same moira shapes us, and so we’ll be friends for good, I hope.”
Angelo nodded. He recalled his grandmother Calliope talking to him about moira when he was in fifth grade, explaining that it is the limits which must not be passed, and a person’s appointed end, which never comes in the shape someone has looked for.
“My cousin Zaferis wrote that he will be waiting for me at the airport,” Barba Dino said.
“That’s good because we’ll need some help when we land.”
“I’m sure he will help. Ine tou diavolou kaltsa.”
For a few moments, Barba Dino fell silent, stroking his chin with his lanky, hairy-knuckled hand. Then he spoke again.
“He feels some kind of obligation to me and my family, I suppose. He had no money to pay for his boat ticket. He was a barefoot war orphan, and so, he came to my father, may God rest his soul, right after the Nazis left and asked him for help. We’re not blood relatives. I call him cousin because he has helped us ever since he left the village. You don’t find such a person these days.”
“Will you stay long in America, Barba Dino?”
“I plan to work for Zaferis two or three years. He’ll put me on the payroll. Then I’ll return to my village, and if God is willing, I’ll live the rest of my years on my retirement checks.”
“You’re lucky to have his help, Barba Dino.”
“I thank the Almighty for it. You go to New York, too?”
“No, Chicago.”
“Do you know how to get there?”
“I’ll find out. All I worry about is if the thirty dollars I have will be enough.”
“I’m sure Zaferis will help you.”
“But I’m neither friend nor cousin to him.”
“You’re my friend; that’s enough. I’ll put in a good word for you, don’t worry. Maybe we can both work at the restaurant.”
His heart warmed by the kind man’s words, Angelo took in all the assurance with gratitude.
“Thanks for checking on me, my child. What a good fortune to meet you.”
Angelo found his seat. The thought that he had done wrong in accepting the phony certificate haunted him still, but the last few days of intense preparation for his trip soon caught up with him, and he fell asleep.
The sun had emerged again when Angelo woke up. The stewardesses had picked up all the remaining trash from passengers’ tables and reminded them to bring their seats forward and fasten their seat belts in anticipation of landing. From the air, Angelo could see the general contours of the earth below—the real American earth, God’s earth. He took his first glimpse at the horizon of hope, aware it would be the anchor for his new life. He could not wait to enter the land of opportunity and lay down his burden. He breathed quickly, taunt with suspense.
The plane began to descend, and from somewhere behind him, a man hummed a Greek song, full of longing. All Angelo wanted to do, however, was sit quietly in his seat and let the realization of the completed flight wash over him. The man’s song came to an end as the plane flew over the welcoming statue at the tip of Manhattan Island.
“The statue, the statue!” someone cried!” “The Statue of Liberty!”
The plane eased downward gradually, encouraging passengers to peek out of the windows. Soon they would land at La Guardia Airport. So, here it was—America! It really existed! It was not a country on paper only! The breathtaking panorama below—the spread of the biggest American city and the sparkling ocean, blue as a potato flower and broken only by the shores of the Atlantic—fueled Angelo’s excitement. The massive city of New York, no longer a black dot on the page of a geography book, sprawled bathed in the slant, bright mid-day September sunlight that sparkled on the silver water. Its rays touched the skyscrapers below, and, for an instant, they looked to be made of gold, just as the people had said to Angelo back in the village. In a few minutes Angelo would land, ready to start living his life’s dream. “America, America!” he cried under his breath, saying it as if it were one word, full of the deepest yearning.
Angelo held his breath.
The plane tilted, dropped, and rose, and the whole earth slanted, leaning and then dropping out of sight until the plane’s wheels struck the ground with a brief and heavy thud. Passengers clapped to celebrate the safe landing, and the plane taxied to a halt on the runway, the safety belts snapping off and the crew opening the door.
Angelo helped a young African-looking woman with a massive belly, clearly with child, steady herself, then got in line to exit the plane, descending an extraordinary set of steps to the Promised Land. The sun had found its highest place in the sky, and the energy of the place pulsated through him. He felt wonderfully alive. Shivering with joy, with a queer sense of unreality, yet aware of the deepest sense of thankfulness, Angelo joined a group of men and women who fell on their knees, kissing the tarmac and uttering the same hymn of thanksgiving—each in his native tongue.
Rising, Angelo released a sigh, deep as the sigh the Pilgrims must have breathed when they first touched upon America’s shores. He felt as if he had been transferred from one world to another. He felt as if he saw his beloved grade school teacher standing beside him. Taking a large handkerchief from his pocket, Nikos Theoharis said: “Here, take this, Angelo. Sorry it isn’t cleaner. Seize the day now, and make your life extraordinary.” Theoharis had taught him a few important things—enough to realize that life was all pattern and that discipline and hope were what made it worth living.
Angelo shook his head to clear the mirage, delirious with joy. Nothing he had ever felt before had been like this. He was standing on American soil. His blood surging through his veins, he trembled. And just as dreams sometimes seemed as vivid as reality to him, this reality now began to seem as far off and as tenuous as a dream.
All fear lifted. Angelo was in America, the land of prudently harvested plenty. Images he often had of himself as a child flying like a bird over the bleached Arcadian mountains and floating away flashed before his eyes. The old order of things was behind him; the solemn promise of a new world whispered in a multitude of voices to him—all full of hope. He was certain that everything would be all right. He felt confident that his passport, visa, and thirty dollars would prove to be enough to launch his new life. He had broken free from poverty’s relentless grasp; he must now succeed in his endeavors and do something big for himself, his family, and the world. Failing that, he could do no more than strut upon the crest of this great mountain of opportunity like a cockerel on a dunghill.
Amidst the throng of travelers, a cool wind greeted Angelo. For a few moments, he had lost sight of Barba Dino, but then Angelo looked about him, and soon his compatriot approached from within the group.
“Edo hani to skili ton afenti tou,” he said.
He looked about him.
“It’s an exodus from the four corners of the world to the Promised Land, Barba Dino. The tribes of Israel are fleeing Egypt in search of a shining city upon a hill.”
Reunited, the two compatriots pressed on, toward the vast hall in front of them—the last remaining obstacle that separated them from the new world.