Читать книгу Greek Girl's Secrets - Efrossini AKA Fran Kisser - Страница 11

After the war, Efrossini’s parents found a maternal aunt of the young Jewish girls and the two young girls were placed with her. Efrossini’ s father sold the Serres home that their maternal yiayia (Zafiro) had left them and moved his family to Thessaloniki, a much larger city. It would be a brighter future for his family. Their brood was growing, and the older children would be needing jobs, possibly leaving home to start their own families. There would be better opportunities in the second largest city of Greece.

There, in beautiful Thessaloniki (named after Alexander the Greats’ half-sister) Achillea stretched their funds from the sale of the Serres house and built them a two-bedroom modern house.

It had electricity, two large bedrooms, one in the front and one in the back. A large square living room with two front windows, a rear kitchen close to the vegetable and herb gardens, and one bathroom with a high window that opened to the rear of the house. The father with the older sons dug out all the dirt under the master bedroom and they created one huge room under the house, a partial basement.

Malama always wished this large room in the earth to be her perfect root cellar. It was cool in the summer and warm in the winter. But her husband had other ideas when he dug it out. They needed another bedroom for their boys.

Achillea had also planned from the beginning to add a couple separate rental apartments on his small piece of property to help with the much-needed income for the winter, when his painting slowed down during the winter's cold and damp months.

So, to the right of the living room there was the fancy exterior front door with a brass door knob. It was a double door with colorful fancy cut crystal glass and side lights. By opening the right door inward, you were welcomed to a thirty-five-foot-long by six-foot-wide, mosaic, geometric design, floored hallway. Achillea created the mosaic floor with a rental machine. The bathroom and the kitchen had the same mosaic floors, too. This type of floor never needs replacing.

This hallway had two steps at the very end, where it escorted you to the rear gardens.

The children loved that long, dark and cool hallway in the summer. The cold floor was like air conditioning. This was also an excellent play and nap area. Many times, they would throw a thick rug there and take cool restful naps during the afternoon hours.

A few years later Achillea saved enough money from his thriving business to buy the materials so he could finally build the two one-bedroom rental apartments on the property. One was along the right side of the long, cool, mosaic floored hallway. At the very end of this apartment Achillea placed concrete steps that went to the top flat concrete roof of that apartment. That was our summer time terrace on top of that one-bedroom apartment.

He also had trained a green grape vine to travel all the way to that terrace, creating shade on top of the wrought iron summer table.

Towards the front of the terrace he built a five-foot brick stone wall so no small child would fall to the road. There in the early fall they had evening meals and would also eat from the hanging sweet green grapes.

On that terrace in the summer evenings after it got dark, the family was able to watch a nearby summer movie. In Greece during those years, there were outdoor summer movie venues. They could not hear but they could watch the movies. Then, sometimes they would also bring bedding there and sleep the whole night under the stars.

Their father would explain the constellations in the sky and tell the children real life stories about his youth. They seemed like fairy tales to the children, but they were all true, Efrossini found out later.

The other apartment was built across the whole back of their property. He called the latter THE garden apartment. Every window and its outside door opened to the beautiful garden, of fruits, vegetables, herbs and flowers. In the middle of the gardens there was a stone-floored circle covered overhead with a wrought iron structure that supported the hanging green grapes. There, the family ate summer meals, weather permitting.

It was a brand-new neighborhood on an extraordinarily wide street, Makedonias. At the crossroad of Martiou and Makedonias were older, classic, two and three story expensive beautiful villas adorned with unusual evergreen trees, perennial colorful flowers, shrubbery and fantastic fruit trees like bergamot and persimmon.

The properties were surrounded by intricate black wrought iron sturdy fences, many with very heavy ornate gates.

On Martiou Street there was public transportation, the electric trams. Her family considered them dangerous with all that electricity and the terrifying train tracks. In 1957 the public transportation had improved.

Now there were brand new modern buses. Efrossini’s house was only about 1000 feet from the corner of Martiou and Makedonias.

The house was small but housed many people, because they had real love for each other. At the beginning there were eight children and their parents. The two older sisters shared the front bedroom. In the spring when they opened their windows, while the acacia trees were in bloom, their scent would fill their room permeating through the white lace curtains with a beautiful, subtle scent. Their father had planted those acacia trees, to shade the home in the front, in the hot afternoons.

Their windows had no screens, but they had real wooden shutters, painted mint green. Summertime, they would close the shutters with the windows open in the afternoon, to rest in the hottest part of the day when they were home or after their beach trips. That was the original use of the functional wooden shutters. Now, we have them for mostly aesthetic reasons, to complete a certain look for a house.

In the summer the water truck would pass their house with its rear fan-like sprayer wetting the dirt street, settling the dust, and providing some much-needed cooling relief, too.

In the late afternoon, the ice cream man would come by. The vehicle was a large tricycle with a built-on ice cream freezer in the front.

He would sound his bell just like the bell on a bicycle and the children would come out running with small change to buy an ice cream, a real cool treat. Efrossini’s family had the most children and the most customers for the ice cream man, on that street. He never wanted to miss that stop.

The parents had the large rear bedroom, with the two ¾ wide, solid brass beds and a little bed for the little baby sister, Anna. They also had a huge floor to ceiling real walnut wardrobe closet. It was lined in cedar and held all their clothes that needed hanging. Most of their everyday clothes got folded and placed in bureaus but all their Sunday type clothes and coats would hang in that cedar, fragrant wardrobe. The bottom shelf held the family Sunday shoes, cleaned and polished waiting to be used at a moment’s notice. In the hallways and behind almost all the doors, hung hats, scarves, gloves, sweaters and jackets on ornate shelves and hooks Achillea had recycled from wrought iron.

In one corner of the master bedroom was Malama’s personal little sanctuary. There were several colorful religious icons hanging on the wall. These were very old relics that were treasured through the generations. No matter what catastrophe they had for example, (an earthquake,) these icons would be carried to safety after all the people were out and before any other items, like clothing.

Malama also lit an olive oil filled beautiful, red glass votive candle every Saturday night. This was her private place where she prayed to Jesus and where her family bible was stored on a little shelf. She also owned a miniature silver bible like a box with miniature written pages. Again, this was another relic, from yiayia, from Constantinople.

Malama meditated in that corner of her bedroom, every night. Malama taught all her children the very difficult, long Greek religious prayers. It was simply a tradition to teach the next generation what they were taught by their parents.

That huge master bedroom was on top of the basement room. It had a large picture window, and outside of it, a metal awning covering the basement steps and doorway. Efrossini had taken many afternoon naps in that room with her mother and little sister, enjoying the dancing, musical sounds of the rain drops hitting the metal.

Malama used that awning a few times per year, too. She covered it with freshly washed and sun dried white sheets, and there, she dried the trahana. This was fine hand-pressed wheat flour and goat’s milk yogurt creation. The little pieces of different shapes would dry quickly in the hot summer months, and then she would pull the trahana on the white sheets and let them cool for hours on top of the brass beds, all evening.

As we were getting ready for bed she would be storing the trahana in her clean and dry tins. All those tins were stored in the highest of all the shelves in the great wardrobe. Winter time the trahana was a welcomed white, creamy, protein rich soup made with more milk and freshly harvested greens from the winter garden. Along with a fresh loaf of rye or pumpernickel bread from the local bakery, it was a great nourishing, tasty lunch.

In the winter Malama fed the wild birds bread crumbs on that metal awning and the little kids would stand behind the lace curtains and watch the little birds eat.

The children were taught to be kind to wild life and animals, but they never had a pet in the house.

Malama used to tell her children, her pets were producers of foods like milk, meat and eggs.

She had so many mouths to feed she just could not see feeding a cat or a dog. This woman had lived through a horrific earthquake that took her baby sister and her beloved father. She had also lived through the three seemingly-like endless wars with the enemy outside her door. Who can blame her for not wanting to feed a real pet that did not produce any food for her enormous growing family?

The four brothers shared the one basement room. They had bunk beds.

At dinner time the house was full, noisy and busting at the seams. Once they were all seated, the radio would be on, playing soft music. They took their turn talking quietly. Food was plenty, and a pot was always on the stove, filling the home with such wonderful vegetable and herbal scents. Malama always had her dinner meal planned and cooked by 12:00 noon. The meals were mostly vegetarian with added seafood a couple of times per week and meat on Sundays.

On the stove, there was always a secondary pot, a heavy-duty tea pot. Sideritis is a wild, very fragrant mountain Greek tea. Everyone drank from it. The last person that served himself had to make more tea for the next several people. They would sweeten it with honey and of course the father’s lemons from his trees. Their mother used to say, that tea would make them strong as iron. Sideron is iron.

Truly, that tea has many benefits. No one went hungry in that home. Their vitamins and minerals came from their fresh and wholesome unprocessed foods they ate.

When occasionally anyone would get sick, their mother would nip it in the bud with her herbal medicinal teas, her natural remedies, homemade chicken soup and loving hands.

If anyone ever had a cold in their lungs she would heat special round glassware and place them on the sick person’s upper back, behind the chest. There, the round glasses created a vacuum. After a while she would pull them off gently making a popping sound. They were called ventouzes. These ventouzes pulled out the inflammation.

Another remedy was camphor cubes. They were placed in a little cloth bag and safety pinned in the sick child’s undershirt. It became a priority when a child came down with something. She would stop it from spreading to the rest of her brood. Basically, the family was healthy. Amazingly, no one ever had a broken bone or an illness that required a surgery in a hospital.

There was one time though, on election night when Efrossini was about seven years old and was playing with the renter’s child in the front apartment when an accident took place. In a tall floor umbrella stand, there were some ornamental peacock feathers. The children used those feathers with the renter mother’s permission to decorate their heads as fancy hats.

Little Efrossini had climbed a chair in front of an ice box to look at herself in the mirror hanging on the wall, on top of the small ice box. Climbing on the way down, her outer right thigh got caught on that fancy, chrome, sharp, water faucet on the ice box door. Efrossini’s leg was cut wide open to the bone. She fell and passed out on the cold hard ceramic floor.

Later she was told two of her brothers picked her up off the tile floor and took her to her divani.

Efrossini opened her eyes temporarily and witnessed everyone crying around her, like she had died. Instead of taking her to the emergency room at the hospital, someone poured some type of an antiseptic liquid in that huge open fresh wound. The pain was so intense she nearly died. She passed out again.

By morning they took her to the hospital. There the doctor told them they should have brought Efrossini as soon as the accident took place. They could have sewn the wound then. Now he said: I must staple it and that would leave her a large scar. She is a girl who should not have a scar like that.

Little Efrossini remembers the many nights and days she had to spend in her divani in pain from that wound. She missed a couple of weeks of school too. That was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. That was the time they found out also, Efrossini could not swallow any kind of pill.

She remembers her father getting so angry with her because she could not swallow the pain pills the doctor had prescribed to her.

Her father crushed the pills and watched her swallow them like a hawk those terribly bitter, sour the most horrible things she had ever put in her mouth. She never forgot that night, the two weeks of school she missed and that awful pain. After she recovered she ended up with an ugly scar on her thigh.

Efrossini remembers taking empty, clean, folded neatly, brown paper bags a few doors down to the neighborhood grocery store. There, the family had a tab in the winter for some absolute necessities, like coffee, salt, black pepper, sugar, toilet paper and toothpaste.

The friendly grocer and family friend Pericles would give her a tiny bag of fresh fruit or candy for the recycled paper bags, a real treat for a young girl. This was usually done in the winter. They had a bounty of fresh everything in the summer.

She also remembers sleeping in the living room on a metal spring divani (sort of a cot) with no headboard or footboard, but with just a mattress on it. It was covered with hand-embroidered white sheets and a pillow case her mother made.

During the day, a beautiful damask-type bedspread adorned that cot that matched the walnut table’s tablecloth which her mother had sewn. Their formal dining room table, which seated a dozen people, was the centerpiece of the large living room.

The cot (her divani) was against the wall, and during the day it also served as a sitting area too. On the wall behind this divani, there was a large six by eight-foot hand embroidered hanging. It was customary to hang such an item there to make the wall by the bed cozy.

The older sisters embroidered it for the home. The material was burlap and the colorful yarn was wool. This was a one-year long project for the older girls, Roula and Soula. It depicted a wildlife scene from a forest, dotted with wild animals of deer, rabbits and one owl. This wall hanging being wool was a warming welcome at night for Efrossini.

She remembers feeling the warmth of the wool, by running her hands up and down the wall hanging.

At the end of the divani, stood a tall, glossy, mint green and medium blue, five drawer bureau. This was a very interesting accent piece. This item was really a wooden, well-crafted trunk sent from America by Efrossini’s aunt, full of clothes, toys, and candy.

Once, they even found a tasty nut and fruit cake in a beautiful, colorful tin, which her mother Malama cherished. The tin was very large and it looked like stained glass. It was beautiful.

For the holidays Malama would bake kourambiethes (Greek cookies, drenched in white powdered sugar with almonds,) they were crunchy throughout and placed them in this decorative tin. In the Thessaloniki house, Malama had a special china closet in the living room where she stored the home-made sweets, cookies in tight fitting tins and her glass jars that were full of fruit preserves. This piece of furniture was locked, and only she had the key.

There were a lot of sweet toothed children in this family. Before she started locking it, this china closet was constantly raided by the children.

One day Malama reached in the china closet to bring out treats for her guests and she found out there were none. She was embarrassed that day. After a lecture to the kids, she started locking the china closet.

Malama used to say touch "the donkey with the stick" and "the children with the words."

She made the children feel bad with a certain look and her intense words, but she did not have to spank them. This was a time where people did not tell each other “I love you” constantly. They were shown love by their parent’s discipline and hugs and kisses. They treated each other lovingly.

Actions are much more appreciated than words. They felt they were loved. To this day Efrossini feels like one of the family in the two shows on television.

One is The Little House on the Prairie and the other is The Walton’s. These two shows reminded Efrossini of her home life back in Greece, safe, loved, well fed when she was a little girl.

Everyone loved their wonderful aunt in America for thinking of them and sending them the large trunks. They had never met her, but they loved her for her thoughtfulness. This woman had brightened their lives so many times, through some tough years, especially during the war before Efrossini was born. On top of this twice handmade bureau, perched a large, shiny, brown, glossy Grunding radio. It was a German made quality radio with a large fluorescent colored green eye.

From this radio came entertainment for the family, and news from around the world. Efrossini had not seen a television yet in a home, other than the one at the yearly World’s Fair in Thessaloniki.

In this living room with the four pastel and different colored walls, with a large and colorful ceramic tile floor, also sat against the rear wall, a beautiful eggplant colored ceramic coal stove. This was the central heat. In the bottom drawer were the ashes, and there, their father would bake the most delicious potatoes.

Sometimes when they only needed a little heat for a few hours then they just lit a portable brazier (mangali). It was a metal round appliance that just held the coals they lit. This little appliance was on metal legs and it was only used when everyone was awake. When lit, it quickly heated the entire space very efficiently.

Efrossini remembers the winters within this living room.

While her older siblings were playing cards for small change on the walnut table, which her mother bought, the younger children were playing under it. They would peel and squeeze the rinds before they ate the oranges and the tangerines. They ate healthy snacks like roasted chestnuts, sunflower and pumpkin seeds. Sometimes they cracked nuts. They also played games with Victorian colorful, shiny die paper cutouts which they collected through the year (skalista.)

Christmas time the children would decorate the citrus trees in the living room with the Victorian shiny, colorful die paper cut outs and some were even articulated with moving limbs like a cat cut out or a clown, or an angel with moving wings. They also added real small candles that were attached to miniature colorful clothes pins. They secured them to the branches and only on Christmas Eve they would light them one by one, and then enjoying them for a few minutes, all lit.

Natural fragrances were simply unforgettable from the citrus trees that many times were also blooming in the winter. Under the walnut table sat her mother’s pride and joy: a very large, thickly made, woolen, handmade Persian rug. It was nice and warm sitting on that wool rug. It felt like sitting on warm velvet.

The rest of the furniture was mint green consisting of a well-constructed rattan living room set with thick colorful cushions. These colors complimented the tall green and blue handmade bureau. We have such furniture today, usually in our sun rooms. Efrossini’ s oldest sister Soula had bought the living room set with her own money when she was working, right before she got married.

The small wedding reception was held in that living room and it had to look its best. So, by the time Efrossini was 12 years old, the two older sisters and two older brothers had gotten married and moved out. The family consisted now, of only the last four children and their two parents.

The last two boys moved out of the basement which developed a moisture problem. Malama did not want her boys to develop a respiratory ailment. They took the older sisters’ front room, and Efrossini was still on the divani! The boys were 16 and 20, when Efrossini was 12. Anna was eight years old.

1961 Edessa, Achillea and an employee