Matoula's Echo

3

3It was just before sunrise when Matoula touched Maria Christina’s arm, waking her, and softly put her finger to her sister’s lips.

“Pappou is gone,” she whispered. Her eyes were red and filled with tears.

“Gone?”

“To heaven. Please wake Zoitsa and take her down with the animals.”

Maria Christina quickly sat up and turned to see the blurred figures of Yiannis and Papa Yiorgos carrying a body wrapped in a thin blanket out the door. Matoula tenderly kissed the top of her sister’s head and pressed it gently to her waist. Then she hurried from the room. Maria Christina remained frozen a moment, then quickly threw a heavy woollen cape over her shoulders and scooped up Zoitsa in a thick blanket and, before Zoitsa was fully awake, was hurrying down the stairs, desperately searching for a way to explain to the two-year-old something she could barely comprehend herself. She showered the child with kisses as the little one fluttered her eyes awake, then set her in the corner on a bundle of hay and turned away to milk Afendoula. Zoitsa was now wide awake and wondering.

“Moumou. Pappou has gone away. He is in heaven with God.” She let the thought linger a second before she turned back to the puzzled child, smiling through watery eyes, “And we are happy.”

Just then Matoula hurried in from the outside, quickly kissed her daughter, gave Maria Christina a hug with one arm, then ran up the stairs and into the winter room. Within seconds two old women came through the open door, weeping and wailing, and kissed Maria Christina who reached for Zoitsa who had become suddenly frightened. The women continued weeping and wailing and crying out to Pappou as they climbed the stairs, followed by then yet another neighbor arriving wailing and crying. The next few days would be lost to Maria Christina forever, although she would always remember Pappou lying in his coffin facing to the east, clean shaven with his mustache neatly trimmed, wearing his best suit and black curly-lamb cap, a peaceful smile on his lifeless face and a piece of bread in his pocket, so he wouldn’t be hungry on his journey, his hands loosely cupped on his chest, and his wedding band on his finger. Now and then someone would put a coin in those hands and ask him to give their regards to a loved one on the other side.

Everyone from the village came to pay their respects, the women wailing and crying as they sat in the sitting room around the coffin, telling Pappou the latest news and who was there and how much they would miss him. After paying their respects, the men would retire to Papa Yiorgos’ room to smoke and drink tsipouro and talk about Pappou and the coming war.

The funeral was at Papa Yiorgos’ church, Agios Demetrius, named after one of the most important Orthodox military saints. It stood under three huge sycamores in the lowest part of the village at the end of a very steep and winding stone path that led to a series of winding stone steps to within sight of the bell tower, then continued down until you stood parallel to the big bells not ten feet away, then down to the entrance of the stately and proud stone church.

Papa Yiorgos led the somber service with tears in his eyes, while the four Triantafyllou women sat next to the coffin with the rest of the family. After the service, the men walked in a procession to the cemetery, while the women returned to the house to lay out the meal they had collectively prepared and await the men.

At the end of the long day, the rituals had done what they were designed to do, exhaust the bereaved by keeping them continually occupied. Maria Christina was thoroughly drained after the last relative had left and the last crumb swept as she crawled into bed next to the spot where Pappou had always slept. Holding his glasses to her breast and laying her other hand on his absent form, she closed her eyes. He had taught her to read and write and created games to make rudimentary mathematics fun. Whenever he sensed she was feeling melancholic, he would remind her that her name, Triantafyllou, meant “of the rose”.

“There are many kinds of roses,” he would kiss her hand, pretending to be a suitor, making her laugh and blush. “Your sister, Matoula Triantafyllou, is a big red rose, like an autumn cabbage. Maria Christina Triantafyllou is a fine, delicate, wild pink rose with brave blue eyes. Each is perfect and beautiful. But remember, even though the wild rose appears to be the more delicate, it is in fact the stronger.”

Then he would squeeze her hand to test her strength to which she always squeezed back as hard as she could. Who would tell her now that the world viewed beauty differently than in Metsovo? That her slender wrists and long fingers would be admired everywhere else?

“I’ll go drown myself in the well if it’s not true!” he would bellow.

The person in the world who knew her best, the man she would always be closest to was gone. She hadn’t even realized just how sick he was. She had been told he was just weak from old age. Then with a long sad sigh, she fell asleep almost immediately.

For the next forty days the Triantafyllou women would not leave the house lest they be spat upon by the villagers, it being considered disrespectful to the departed. In three days a large oak vat filled with water appeared in the courtyard, and Pappou’s half-sister, Lena, arrived with a block of black dye and collected all of the tapestries hanging in the house, including the treasured chimney apron, all of the rugs, bed and table covers, curtains, cushions, and the clothes the women would be wearing, including those of Zoitsa. All were to be dyed black and then the weavings returned to their place, tapestries re-hung and the clothes worn for one year.

All the next week Maria Christina didn’t really think much about Pappou - only fleetingly and with no sense of loss. Then on the ninth day it began to snow again and, as was the custom, the women of the village came to sit and wail amid the coal black tapestries in the sitting room, while Maria Christina stayed in the winter room in front of the fireplace, holding and rocking a frightened Zoitsa. With one eye closed and the other squinting, Maria Christina looked through the fireplace window and saw a large white snowflake drift onto the glass, stick for a moment, then melt into nothing. That was when she fully grasped that her beloved Pappou was irretrievably gone. A welling in the pit of her stomach wanted to make a sound she had never made before. It frightened her, as it certainly would her little charge, so Maria Christina quickly hid it away in the deepest recess of her being and continued rocking and letting her thoughts wander, until she suddenly remembered a promise he had made he could now never keep. He would take her to see the sea one day. And the welling began again when the door opened and Yiannis and Matoula came to take their daughter downstairs to play in the hay.

After she had been alone for a moment, Maria Christina held herself tightly and stared out the little window at the gray light. She knew what it meant to have a wounded heart. But for the first time she would allow the wail in her wounded heart to escape. And when she began, she was astonished at how deep and how great the well of sorrow was, and that nearly no amount of wailing might be enough to drain what now appeared to be a sea of despair. And so she continued wailing for her grandfather, for herself, for every woman in the sitting room who had ever lost someone so important to them. She didn’t even stop when Panorea walked in, watched her a moment, then left with a tray of sweets.

The morning of Yiannis’ departure, everyone pretended to be cheerful as he stood in the fog at the door of the cottage in his western clothes under a heavy goat-hair cape, with two large heavy woollen sacks strapped to his back, one with medical supplies, the other personal. Holding his walking stick with the handle of white meerschaum that Pappou had carved and custom fit to his hand, Yiannis looked tired as he kissed the family one by one inside the door of the cottage. Even Panorea allowed herself to be bussed quickly. When he leaned in to kiss Maria Christina she involuntarily inhaled and, for the first time, smelled his musky odor and blushed. Matoula, who was holding Zoitsa, noticed the moment and thought it sweet. Then she handed the child to Maria Christina and walked with Yiannis to the edge of the courtyard, where they stood a moment, her head against his chest. After a moment, they embraced sweetly and kissed, and then Yiannis, too, was gone. Although for Maria Christina, his sweet smell would always remain.