Читать книгу Greek Girl's Secrets - Efrossini AKA Fran Kisser - Страница 6

My dear father was an inventor of handy tools, a botanist, a linguist, speaking four languages, and he had never been to school for one day of his life. The virtuous man created a house, church and institutional buildings painting company, later. He had many workers until his sons were old enough to help him in the family business.

I would go to his jobs sites (when they were close by) and bring him freshly made hot lunch. I remember noticing how hard he would work. He had help but he worked harder than all of them. When I was 10 years old my father was 52 years old and yet he climbed tall ladders and even walked on those ladders like an acrobat in a circus.

He loved what he was creating, beautifying places. I remember seeing him up high on very tall ladders and scaffolds painting inside of a church. I had to hold my head so tilted back my neck would hurt. When I was a little older and I was permitted to ride the bus by myself I went downtown to the Thessaloniki’s yearly world’s fair and I also carried him fresh hot lunch there. My father had contracts with the international exhibitions and it seemed those buildings were painted often. With his four languages he communicated with those people very well. I always wanted to be close to him to learn from him. I even volunteered to wash his paint brushes just to be close to him.

Achillea my father also had filotimo. He was not all Greek but somehow he had this wonderful virtue called filotimo.

Supposedly all Greeks have filotimo but I tell you, starting with my own large family, they do not! I noticed it when I was about ten years old. That is where I inherited my filotimo from. It is like forgiveness you either have it or you don’t. I believe it is inherited. You cannot learn this and you certainly cannot buy it.

Every time his company painted a rich home that had old books thrown out, he would bring them all home, for us to read. Some books were even in foreign languages. I remember now there were also black and white volumes of photo albums. Most of these albums were Austrian and German.

I suppose he was wishing the albums would be from his early years when he had so much back in Graz. He considered it a great sin, throwing books out. His hobbies also included listening to the new German made GRUNDING radio with the big green fluorescent eye. He had purchased this radio at the World’s Fair in Thessaloniki and it was his pride and joy. This radio was so powerful, my father would listen to foreign radio stations especially European and the Middle Eastern ones. We were accustomed to listening to Middle Eastern music.

He played dancing music, the classics on the radio and I would dance with him while standing with my stocking feet on his feet. That is how, I learned to dance. I tried to be light as a butterfly not to hurt my father’s aching hard working feet.

My father played the piano in Austria, when he was little. He played the guitar while I was growing up. We did not own a piano. My sister Roula played the accordion, and we all sang to their melodies.

I remember one time he brought home another great find. It was a shiny, ceramic, eggplant colored coal stove that could also burn wood. It was a very handsome addition to our living room, and a conversation piece.

On the top you could also cook on the two burners and under the fire there was a hot metal drawer where you could bake potatoes in the hot ashes. It was the most beautiful wood stove I had ever seen. In the winter we baked our delicious potatoes under the wood stove and roasted our chestnuts on top of that coal and wood stove’s two burners.

On Fridays, payday, my father would bring us freshly caught Aegean Sea fish. Most days my mother cooked vegetables, lentils, dried beans of all kinds, split peas, soups, and stews. That is what the true Mediterranean diet is about; lots of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, eggs, lentils and dried beans. Red meat or foul we ate only on Sundays. Twice per week we feasted on fresh seafood.

Friday night was special, and the family looked forward to it. My father would grill the fish on an electric appliance on the kitchen counter and then bake those tasty potatoes in the ashes.

My mother would fix a fresh from the garden salad, with olives and anchovies, feta cheese she had made from the goat’s milk. The olive oil was from friends’ olive groves and the lemon juice was freshly harvested from my father’s citrus trees.

I read the other day it would take four oranges to give you the nutritional value of just one orange from the 60’s. Imagine that authentic taste of the russet type baked in ashes potatoes. The grilled fish was smothered in our homegrown lemon juice.

This used to be our Friday night dinner. Saturday night we had no meat or dairy products. We fasted for the communion on Sunday.

After church we would have our Sunday feast baked at the local fourno, commercial oven. We had a Petrogas stove in our home but not an oven. Most houses had no ovens at that time, so every neighborhood had a local bakery and a fourno, the public oven.

I also remember one summer after the schools closed, my father took me to another state, in Greece. The state was Edessa. This was the land of the water falls. They produced fruits especially peaches, very large and very juicy. This type of an unforgettable peach was called yiarmathes. Eating one, it would take two hands to hold the peach and the juices would run down our chins. As kids my mother would place bibs around our necks.

There, in Edessa my father had a contract with the Greek government, painting military buildings. We stayed in a motel and my father would take me to friends’ neighboring house during the day, while he worked.

The lady of the house would wash, and comb sometimes just brush my long brown hair, and then braid it. I played with her children.

In the evenings I would dress up and go with my dad to some beautiful restaurants. One restaurant which also had live entertainment had a little bridge over the running waters. I was about twelve years old. My hair was very long, and I wore it in long braids, with satin bows at the ends.

My father always claimed I looked just like my mother when he met her at fifteen years old. And to this day I claim to be my mother’s daughter, in every way. But since I was such an inquisitive child, I also learned so much from my father. I also have a beauty mark on my right arch under my foot, just like he did and I also have his toes and fingers. All my other looks are from my mother. But I did end up having both of their spirits.

When I was forty years old and had been living in America since I was 13, it seems the computer in my head miraculously got turned on. I started remembering details of the answers they gave to my countless questions. I started remembering the stories my mother told me and the advice my father had giving me. I call this, my enlightening period of my life. It was like I got hit on the head.

My father would also do neighborhood jobs, so he had many close by clients. Many people knew of him and respected him. In the spring I was the flower delivery girl just as soon as I was big enough to carry the bouquets.

My father raised fantastic Easter lilies. To thank his clients for the business he would send them freshly cut flowers. The lilies smelled like Heaven.

His hobbies were fixing things, creating better plants and flowers, and he also had created a fruit tree that had many types of fruits on it.

Even the apricot tree had pits sweet like almonds. Usually apricot pits are bitter and non-edible. This fruit was an exceptional large juicy apricot, we called it: kaisi.

When my father was about 50 years old, we received an unexpected letter from Austria. The Red Cross finally found out my father was still alive. After 44 years they found my father. His mother in Austria was also, still alive. She had remarried after she lost her husband and her little boy, my father Achillea, in the 1^stBalkan War.

She had two daughters Hilda and Lina, after her own name Carollina. When we saw photos of all of them there was an unmistakable resemblance to my father. They all had blonde hair and blue eyes just like my father. Their eyes had the most beautiful shade of blue.

My yiayia’s photograph was so elegant. The Austrian yiayia was standing next to an impressive, deeply tufted dining room chair, dressed in early twentieth century fashion of velvet and brocade. Her hair was on top of her head in a large cluster of curls. She wore round eye glasses. Her face looked just like my father’s. My own father wore the same type of glasses, round eye glasses. They looked so much alike, it was startling.

When my father received this photo of yiayia he had it enlarged to 24”x 36” and framed it in black leather. Even the strap on the back we hung it from, was a coarse, very thick type of a leather cord.

We welcomed this new correspondence with our relatives in Austria. I had a classmate whose mother was from Austria and of course she spoke Austrian.

As soon as we received a letter I would take it to my friend’s mom, she would translate it and I would bring it home to my father. There, we sat at the table and we would answer it in Greek. The next day I would take it to my classmate’s mom’s house and she would rewrite it in Austrian. I was the designated letter writer.

My Austrian yiayia wanted to meet her son, my father again, before she died. So, my father started preparing for this meeting.

One day we received in the mail an envelope trimmed in black. It was very formal and inside of it, the news: our Austrian yiayia had died.

My father’s heart was broken again. It was the first time I saw my father cry. The same day the leather cord broke and the framed enlarged photo of the Austrian yiayia fell on the ceramic tile floor, in the living room. Broken glass was everywhere.

This photo now hangs on the wall of my second oldest brother Carolos, in Australia. He was named after the Austrian yiayia. I have the small, original, photos of my aunts: Hilda, Lina and yiayia.

About ten years later my father sold the family home, rentals and the land to a developer. The builder placed there a nine-story apartment house.

The homes with their beautiful, decorative black wrought iron fences around their flower gardens were no longer in vogue. Those styles were a reminder of visions of New Orleans, very European. The single homes were only twenty-five years old on this very wide street. Also at the corners of Martiou and Makedonias were some older distinguished large homes, more like villas. They were all torn down.

This Makedonias Street was created with wide and comfortable to walk on concrete sidewalks. This street was in demand and people needed more housing. So, for the next generation, apartment living was coming. My father was given two apartments on the third floor and one retail store on the ground level. My father was retired then.

Two of his sons had gone to Australia, the oldest son lived in Athens and two sons were in Thessaloniki with their own families and businesses. It was time for my poor over worked dad to rest now. So, he opened a hardware and paint store there and he was home for lunch every day. Neighbors came to him for painting advice, they would buy their supplies at his store and now they would go home and paint their own apartments. It gave him something to do, that he enjoyed.

When I went back to Greece for the very first time, it was almost an emergency. I had received a letter saying both of my parents were very sick. I was 26 years old. I had not seen my parents for 13 years.

When I arrived in Thessaloniki’s airport I was received by the whole family with bouquets of flowers, just like a celebrity.

Everybody was there, my father, my brothers, sisters and their families. My mother was at home at their apartment. She had not recovered well enough to meet me at the airport.

At the airport, I was hearing everyone, but the Greek language somehow was a little strange to me. They spoke a different dialect, it seemed to me. It took me days to get adjusted to the Greek language. We cried, we hugged and kissed again and again.

I left as a young school girl, an innocent girl of 13, and I came back after 13 years, a mother of three.

My mother saw me, and she got so happy and got well quickly. Jokingly, she asked to look at my beauty mark under my right foot.

My father had the same beauty mark in the very same place. Everyone there was happy to see me. My relatives would put me in a taxi cab and send me to the next relative’s home after paying the cab driver in advance. For two weeks I saw nothing but my relatives.

In the afternoon I would sit and talk with my dad downstairs at his store. My mother would drop a basket from the third-floor balcony with coffees, small drinks of ouzo and munchies. These were delightful little morsels of olives, feta, smoked fish, fragrant fresh lemon wedges and pieces of crunchy black bread, to accompany our drinks. It seemed a whole lifetime ago, I had left for America. I was never lost for words talking to my wonderful father.

When I was little I sat on his arm and played with his ear lobes. I was so fascinated with his ear lobes. That was truly my very first memory ever, remembering the safety of his hugging arms.

I never told my parents about my terrible sacrificing, the four years living with my aunt and uncle in America. There was no reason to upset these two wonderful parents, in their late sixties now.

Before I knew it, the two weeks were up. My life now was in America. I kissed them good bye and for my dad this was to be the very last time I would see him.

Both of my parents had diabetes after they were 65 years old. It was controlled by a pill and a diet. My dad had pains in his feet. It must have been nerve damage from the diabetes. Just a few years later he died in a hospital. If I were there, he would not have died at the hospital. He would have been living in my home.

I would have enjoyed hiscompany. He would have been well cared for, he would have been more comfortable in my hands.

When my youngest sister had gone to visit him one time at the hospital, my father told her this: I should not have sent Efrossini to America. I should have sent you, Anna. Efrossini would have taken care of me, I know, she has a good heart.

Years later this same sister got me to believe her, she was in danger. To get her away from a boyfriend that would not leave her alone or move out of her apartment she found the solution to come to America and stay with me for a while. She came here at my expense and told me what my father had said in the hospital. She came here for vengeance, at my expense. This is called mikroprepia in Greek. It translates to shabby, evil works. Who does that to their flesh and blood? Or to strangers for that matter!

Through the years I remembered my father every time I built a new home. I had owned seven homes and three were brand new custom homes. When I was preparing gardens, raising a few animals, I always thought of my wonderful father. I always imagined him being here guiding me through my building and creating.

I always wondered with more modern resources what his genius of a man would have discovered and created if he had lived here in America.

How proud he would have been to see that I had learned so much from him and followed in his footsteps with the botany and with his painting. I painted all my homes and I was a great edge trimmer. He had taught me to have the best quality brushes. I also have fig and citrus trees now in huge tubs in my home in the winter. I eat a fresh Meyer’s lemon with the pulp and the peel daily, remembering my dad.

Since I came to America in early May of 1962, I was bringing gifts from the Greek Easter we had just celebrated in Greece. From my father, hard boiled eggs painted with beautiful flowers and his double lemons off his trees. They were long like double yolk eggs. I still do not know how he was able to accomplish this.

Do you wonder who you look like?