71 Antonia Sings Again
Alexi appropriated the rifle and its ammunition. He cleaned it up and oiled it
carefully, adding it to his secret cache in a wardrobe. He had a very small derringer, an old Italian pistol with some ammunition, and now this wonderful rifle, one of the best for snipers that was ever made. He had changed his favourite slogan to `We have nothing to lose but our possessions,' and no burglar or Communist fanatic was going to break in or start a revolution with him unprepared. Nowadays he still did not trim his toenails, but spared his mother- in-law her darning by throwing his holey socks away. Despite having become fatter and sweatier, he and Antonia (to whom he also referred as 'Psipsina') were more in love than ever, united by a common love for their enterprises that took the place of brothers and sisters for their son.
As for Pelagia, Iannis had never seen her cry so much. Grandmothers were sentimental creatures, and they even cried if you gave them a seashell that you found on the beach, but this crying for a week was more than he could understand.
First she clutched the mandolin to her chest, going, `O Antonio, mio carino, o Antonio,' her face working with emotion, her tears dripping from her eyes and splashing on the tiles of the floor, and rolling down her cheeks to disappear down her collar and in between her errant and wrinkly cleavage. Then she picked up the sheaf of Italian papers and clutched those to her chest, going, `O Carlo, mio poverino, o Carlo.'
Then she picked up the wad of Greek papers, and went, `O Papas, o Papakis,' and she would hug the crocheted blanket to her breasts, and more tears would flood down her face as she clapped her hand to the side of her head and wailed, `O my poor life that never was, o God in Heaven, o my life, alone and waiting, o . . . ' and she would start all over again with the mandolin, kissing it and hugging it as though it were a baby or a cat. She played the scratchy old records over and over, winding the handle furiously and using up all the spare needles in the little compartment at the side, since each one could only be used once, and all the records were of a woman singing German in a smoky voice from a great distance. He liked one of them, called `Lili Marlene', which was very good for whistling when you walked along the street. The records were very thick, and wouldn't bend, and they had small red labels in the middle.
`Why didn't you have cassettes?' he asked. She would not reply, because she was turning over in her hand the clasp knife that she had once given to her father, or reading the poems of Laskaratos that he had given in return, the voice
of the poetry filling her soul as it once had done in the days of a dead and unrecorded world.
Iannis comforted his grandmother as best he could. He sat on her lap, which he was really a little too old for, and he dabbed at her tears with a sodden handkerchief. He submitted without too much dismay to numerous rib-cracking hugs, and he wondered how it was possible to love so much an old woman with dangly jowls, varicose veins, and grey hair so thin that you could see the pink scalp underneath. He stood patiently whilst she went through the photograph album again and again, repeating the same information in the same words, and pointing with her mottled fingers. 'That's your great-grandfather, he was a doctor you know, he died saving us in the earthquake, and that's Drosoula who was a sort of auntie that you never knew, and she was so big and ugly but the nicest person in the world, and that's the old house before it fell down, and look, there's me when I was young - can you believe I was ever so beautiful? - and I'm holding a pine marten we had for a pet, Psipsina, and she was a very funny little thing, and this is Drosoula's son, Mandras - wasn't he handsome? - and he was a fisherman, and I was engaged to him once, but he came to a bad end, God rest his soul, and that's your great-grandmother who died when I was so young I can hardly remember, it was tuberculosis and my father couldn't save her, and that's my father when he was a sailor, so young, good God, so young, and doesn't he look happy and full of life? He saved us in the earthquake, you know. And this is Gunter Weber, a German boy, and I don't know what happened in him, and this is Carlo who was as big as Kyrios Velisarios, and it's him who's buried at the old house, he was so kind and he had his own sadness that he didn't mention, and these are the boys of La Scala, singing, all drunk, and that's the olive tree before it split, and that's Kokolios and Stamatis, the funny stories I could tell you about them, old enemies, always fighting about the King and Communism, but the best of friends, and this is Alekos, he's still alive you know, older than Methuselah, still looking after his goats, and that's the Peloponnisos from the top of Mt Aenos, and that's Ithaca if you just turn round in the same place, and that's Antonio, he was the best mandolin player in the world, and I was going to marry him but he was killed, and between you and me I've never got over it, and it's his ghost that comes round the bend at the old village and then disappears . . . ' Grandma would pause for tears " . . . and this is Antonio with Gunter Weber being silly on the beach, and as for that naked woman, I don't know who she was, but I've got my suspicions, and that's Velisarios lifting a mule -isn't it incredible? - and look at those muscles, and that's Father Arsenios when he was very fat. He got thinner and thinner during the war, and then disappeared completely without anyone knowing why - isn't that strange? - and that's the old kapheneion where Papas, your great-grandfather, used to hide whenever I wanted him for something, and did you know? I was the first woman who ever
went into it . . . '
Iannis gazed at those unlined faces from the ancient past, and an eerie feeling came over him. Obviously there weren't any colours in the old days, and everything was in different shades of grey, but it wasn't that. What troubled him was that all these pictures were taken in a present, a present that had gone. How can a present not be present? How did it come about that all that remained of so much life was little squares of stained paper with pictures on? `Yia, am I going to die?'
Pelagia looked down at him, `Everybody dies, Ianni'. Some die young, some die old. I'm going to die soon, but I've had my chance.
You die, and then someone comes to take your place. "The Deathless Ones have appointed its due time to each thing for man upon this fertile earth."
That's what Homer says. Apart from being born, it's the only thing in which we have no choice. One day, I hope when you are very old, you'll die too, so don't be like me. Make the most of everything while you can. When I'm dead, all I want is for you to remember me. Do you think you will? O, I'm sorry, Ianni, I didn't mean to upset you. No, don't cry. O dear. I forgot how young you were.'
Iannis begged Antonia to get him some strings for the mandolin from which she had derived her name, and she promised to find him some when she went to Athens. Alexi promised to buy him some when he went to Naples, which he still had found no reason to visit. Pelagia took Iannis on the bus to Argostoli, and bought him some strings in a music shop on one of the sidestreets that goes up the hill at right-angles to the main thoroughfares. `I love your parents very much,' she told Iannis, `but they never notice anything that's right under their nose. Athens and Naples! What rubbish!' Back at the Taverns Drosoula, Spire carefully cleaned the mandolin and polished it. He rubbed graphite from a pencil tip into the machine-heads, and turned them over and over until everything rotated smoothly, without squeaks, creaks, hesitations or resistance of any kind. He showed the young boy how to pass the upper end of the string through the silver tailpiece, hooking the loop with the polychrome balls of fluff onto the correct hook. He showed him how to wind it through the hole of the machine- heads in such a way that it was less likely to break, and how to settle it in the grooves of the bridge and nut, having first scribbled some graphite into them too,
for easy tuning.
He showed him how to tune up each string slowly, going from one to another in turn and then back to the beginning. He demonstrated the use of harmonics to find the correct position of the bridge, he explained the principles of tuning each string to the seventh fret of the pair of strings above it, and then he began to play. He produced three simple chords to accustom his fingers to the reduced space of a mandolin's fretboard, and then he cascaded down a scale at a rapid tremolo.
Iannis was hooked as certainly as the strings with their odd little balls of fluff were hooked to the tailpiece. He digested religiously all of Spiro's information about not letting it sit in the sunshine, not letting it get damp or too cold in the winter, not letting it drop, keeping it polished with special polish such as is used on a bozouki, detuning it for storage, tuning the strings a semitone high in order to get them settled more quickly . . . Spiro told him seriously that he was holding in his hands the most precious thing he would ever own, and it awoke in him a sense of awe and reverence that had never struck him in church when dragged there by Pelagia. He only permitted Spiro and his grandmother to touch it, and was furious if ever anyone knocked it.
Most curiously, even though he had wanted it in order to be able to impress girls when he was older, by the time he was thirteen, and already quite a good player, he had discovered that girls were a complete dead loss. Their intractable mission in life was to frustrate, annoy, and have things that you wanted but that they would not bestow. In fact they were spiteful and capricious little aliens. It was not until he was seventeen and Grandma had begun her wild and frivolous second youth that he met one who made him burst with longing, and who had stopped nearby to listen when he was making Antonia sing: