Ekaterini

By Marija Knežević

Ekaterini, born in Greece at the beginning of the twentieth century, is a woman who knows her own mind. Against the wishes of her family, she marries an immigrant worker and follows him from the port of Thessaloniki to Belgrade. There, Ekaterini is not only forced to learn the country's 'odd' language and adapt to life in an alien culture, but soon becomes a young widow who must guide her two small daughters safely through the turmoil caused by the Second World War and the socialist post-war period. Refusing to cheer Stalin or to bend to the new political environment, the story of a remarkably stoic and courageous woman unfolds: a woman whose life spans the collapse of Yugoslavia, the last Balkan war, the Kosovo crisis and the bombing of Belgrade, and yet still dreams of one day returning to her beloved Greece. Ekaterini is the human story of an epoch. Though set in the Balkans, it is nevertheless a tale of universal human survival, chronicling the ordinary lives of women who live through history's most turbulent times.

While written in homage to the ancient story of Odysseus this remarkable novel sees the roles reversed, so that it is a modern Penelope who must travel and suffer in search of her homeland. With her distinctive brand of humour, Marija Knezevic cleverly parodies the traditional biography by demystifying the everyday events of life and allowing a female narrator to share her version of events. The story of Ekaterini is the story of one woman who lives through the twentieth century in a part of the world where a long life could bear witness to four major wars. Just as there is no such thing as a 'normal life', so we can understand that one individual story can be the story of a country, of an epoch. The heroine of 'Ekaterini' is born in the Balkans, and her story is one of human survival, and is therefore universal. This is history seen from the woman's point of view, the story of the ordinary lives of the women who live through the turbulent historical events of their time. With her own brand of humour, Knezevic wants to parody the traditional biography by demystifying the everyday events in one 'ordinary life' and let the female narrator tell her side of the story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Istros Books
• Release date: Dec 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781908236432

Book preview

In the Beginning

Who knows why there are so many wars. My father, Yorgos, says that wars have always been thought up by the powerful, and all because of money, and that if he was one of the richest men in Greece this latest Balkan war wouldn’t have broken out. I don’t know if the centuries remember all their wars. Do they need them so they can remember at all? ‘Eternal memory’ they called it on the radio a few days ago. I don’t know what they wanted to say. How long afterwards would that memory last for? There are lots of things I still don’t understand. Grown-ups usually say to children: ‘You’ll understand when you’re older.’ It looks like I’m not old enough yet, or the grown-ups have been fibbing. One or the other. Grown-ups talk about maturity, but that’s something people gain and lose and find again all their life.

My name is Ekaterini. This is my first war. Father says it’s ‘against the Turks’, probably because some of his Turkish clients owe him lots of money: they placed orders for big buildings with him, he started to build, and then they ran away as soon as the trouble started. My older brother Taki says this is called ‘bankrupt’. Probably he means it’s like when you’re mad for chocolate, and there isn’t any, as if it never existed. But then you think of it all the more, and then all the situations come back to you where you’ve eaten it, just to annoy you, and it’s incredible how many there are! All the details, even the time of the year, the day of the week, the people and the things around you - at the bench by the waterfall in Edessa, or by the sea. Oh, the sea! It most of all. Afterwards the album of scenes with chocolate grows less, but the pictures that remain become sharper and clearer with every day of longing.

Often I feel that my whole life has been about waiting and longing. You wait and wait until you forget what a day is and only the longing is left. Later, when you hear ‘capitulation’, you try hard to show joy. There’s no point, but you have to – because everyone is doing it. Actually you’ve long been taken over by weariness, but you can’t remember from what. It’s as if your whole life has been like that – in war.

My mother, Maria, is directly angry at war. She argues with it out loud. She’s never had to work as hard as this, she shouts. Before the war she had servant girls, and now she has to do everything herself, and there are five of us children. She makes filo-pastry pies, it seems she’s always making them, and she yells and curses at the uniforms. ‘This is all because of the blasted uniforms! A bunch of fancy show-offs with their stuff! They know that women have a soft spot for uniforms! Dratted men’s business!’ Mother can’t stand priests either, for the same reason: ‘what does a man of God need a uniform for?! Look at me, I spend the whole day here in an apron and the only dressing gown I have left since those male idiots got the bright idea of strutting around and trying to outdo one another. And they’ve made a right big mess of things to show who was stronger – like rams butting horns. Now just let someone say I’m being irreligious! God sent me Yorgos and all our children, and I love him. Only I can know how much I love him. What is there to talk about? But I’ll have no truck with the priests! Especially now, when there’s hardly enough food to go round, and I’m supposed to feed them too. I won’t have it!’

Mother really does work all day, and if she sleeps it’s never for more than five hours, and even that is in spells, depending on when she gets the chance. But I don’t think work itself is what she finds hardest. She even loved to work back in the days when she wore a new dress almost every day and didn’t go out without a carriage. She had her own dressmaker and shoemaker, not to mention maids and servants for everything. But she still worked, sometimes so Father wouldn’t find out. So work wasn’t the problem. I think it was the war that disappointed her, and very deeply. Human stupidity stunned her. She couldn’t believe and accept that it was like this – she was constantly up in arms about something. That’s why she copes better when she can yell, when her voice joins in the fray at top volume with the echoing explosions and the constant screams and groans that reach us here, not only in Greek but also in Spanish, Russian, Italian, and who knows what other languages.

All of Thessaloniki knew the story about Father having been sent to her by God. How obstinate and self-willed she is, how terribly decent and, what’s worse, open – she says what’s on her mind and says it to you straight. A girl like that was certain never to find a husband. It was the night before the wedding of her best friend, Panagia. Mother was bridesmaid and went to inspect the bridegroom, who had been chosen by Panagia’s parents as custom prescribed. They only saw each other once, on that traditional visit. Maria assured herself that Yorgos was a respectable and sufficiently serious young man; she was satisfied. She dearly loved her friend Panagia and was a really natural person in general, without any brow-beating about morals, respectability and all that. She was devoted to her friends. Her few true friends. That’s why she woke up covered in sweat on the morning of Panagia’s wedding. She didn’t know what to think of the dream that she remembered from A to Z like a favourite story:

...It was a beautiful spring day. She and Yorgos were walking towards each other. Between them stood an old olive tree. They looked into each other’s eyes as they slowly, little by little, came close to the tree. They finally reached the mound formed by the tree’s thick roots. Briefly they stood, facing each other, and at the same moment glanced into the sun, which blinded them; suddenly, as if from nowhere, there came a loud flapping of wings. It grew and became deafening. Maria was frightened. As the noise grew, so did her fear. ‘We’re done for!’ she cried out, but she couldn’t hear her voice. Just one second lay between fear and terror. She felt she could see the horror on her own face. She saw it clearly, and was repelled by her own appearance. And when she reached the very peak or rather the depths of horror, her eyes fell on Yorgos. He was smiling as he had been when he came up to the tree. Now his smile moved towards her. Her face was glowing. Her panic vanished all at once before this blissful peace, and she went from fear to calm with nothing in between! In that peace she could see Yorgos’s and her own face at the same time – the faces were the same, like those of two twins. ‘Where did the young man go?’ she asked herself. She stood facing herself, and she knew there was no mirror, nor could this be her sister. Dream though it was, she knew she didn’t have a twin sister. It must be an apparition! A small wave of disquiet heralded a larger one, but then the noise, that deafening sound of wings, was gone. From the piercing light emerged a white dove on the wing, and it continued to glide tenderly through the air, while above, in the light, tiny white feathers danced and wafted. The dove was then gone, and with it all images except that of Yorgos’s face, his once more, and the tiny feathers of white that seemed to be floating down from some heavenly canopy. She and Yorgos watched as they drifted down to land exactly on the small space between their legs. When they then took a step together, they set foot on this downy sward. One hand reached out for the other. Their fingers were wells of longing and interlaced lightly, easily, connecting gently in an inseparable knot as if they had always been that way...

Maria hardly remembers her wedding. That pleasant agitation forever remained in the dark; instead she remembers that dream, the morning she awoke and for the first time didn’t know what she felt – misery or bliss. Happiness? Oh, reality is so complicated, it demands definitions and explanations. But there was no time for that. Soon a scandal erupted over the breaking off of the engagement, which was hushed up even sooner, and she felt an insuperable sense of shame, intensified by the futile efforts to conceal her joy, a joy not of the ephemeral kind but accompanied by the tranquillity that comes when you know it will last forever; that utter sense of the divine when she saw Yorgos at the door of her parents’ house. She felt all this had already been, as if she was seeing him ask for her hand again, watching their wedding once more, and having their five children all over again.

My Grandmother

‘Where is he? Why is he late? All right, I always come a little early just in case, but he should have passed by already, like every other day. How do I look? Is he going to come? Is he going to give me a piece of chocolate today too?’

* * *

Although that war brought with it the dangerous competition of other events and impressions, for little Ekaterini, my grandmother, it was and remained about the pilot whom she sat and waited for in the same place every day. She sat there on a step, unconvincingly pretending not to be waiting there on purpose; and then he’d come along, tall and smiling, in the most beautiful uniform, even from a distance dispelling everything else she longed for and even overcoming the longing itself. She watched him walk up; he stopped and offered her a piece of chocolate, without a word but always with a smile. She saw her hand and the shame on her impish face. That was her first and, as she said, greatest love. Not even ninety years from the day the pilot stopped coming could anyone make her stop believing in it, nor did anyone try. She had got to know love. Love is a secret we cannot convey even if we want to. Everyone receives this gift and cultivates it or does with it what they wish. Love is only inside you – indivisible, incommunicable, and thus inherently shielded from all the perplexities which tend to accompany other feelings: is it real or am I imagining it? Concerns of quantity and quality. But love is one word. It exists only because people need speech. Love has it all.

Ekaterini always thought of her mother, Maria, as a proper lady who wore elegant dresses, just as she remembered her from when she was a very little girl, from the time before the wars. Her ‘real’ mother wasn’t this woman without an apron, or wearing that apron constantly over her only dressing gown – the ‘uniform’ she didn’t managed to change between the Second Balkan War of 1913 and the First World War. This woman didn’t tie her hair up into a bun; her dangling locks were like a raucous voice vying with the clamour of war. The world Ekaterini wanted to live in could be found in only two places – mothballed up in the attic, and absorbed in the infinity of a gaze devoted to the sea. We can only devote ourselves to the sea completely, although, or rather because, it demands nothing of us. It accepts us imperceptibly with its mute plenty, open for us to read all our thoughts into it. The sea – and peace and drama and pure beauty and blue and grey and green and solace and promise and just that gaze. A world in itself -independent, self-sufficient -and the never-ending call for us to abandon ourselves to it.

I want to be like the sea, Ekaterini often thought when she heard the explosions of war. But she also felt this in the years of peace, the good life, poverty, love and loneliness. She remained constant as far as the sea was concerned, equally devoted – both as a girl of seven who stole out of the house to go down to the water by herself for the first time, and as an old lady of ninety eight, captive in continental Europe and so far from the sea.

The attic was locked. Her brothers and sisters came to accept this as a fact and soon forgot about it, caught up as they were in everything that was happening in the rest of the house, in the street and the world. For Ekaterini, the attic presented a challenge, first and foremost. She was allured by exactly that declaration of impossibility, of the place being inaccessible, and also by the desire to defy the will of her parents, which her brothers and sisters considered indisputable. She couldn’t stand anyone else making decisions for her; any at all, even if it was something as simple as the choice of nightie before bed. Dead-ends made her laugh – human stupidity, the need