The Daughter by Pavlos Matesis

Not a word. Please sit down, I say; we were just sitting down to dinner. Bread and chick peas with olive oil, from Signor Vittorio that was. She takes a seat, but not so much as a glance at the food, nothing. Who are you? Ma asks again; don’t you want something to eat? Without a word she gets up from the chair, goes over to the bed, lies down and dies. Just like that. With her purse in her hand. We knew it right away. Dead people we saw every day. Ma stretched her out on the bed, closed her eyes, wrapped her jaw closed with a handkerchief. So get Mrs Kanello, she tells me, but now it was curfew. Mrs Kanello was working that night though so we waited at the window, the three of us, for her to come off shift. And wrapped up the stranger in some old clothes.
    Around midnight we hear Mrs Kanello’s clogs rattling like a machine-gun; like a home guard she walked. With all due respect, I have to say there was nothing feminine about that woman. But then, I’m comparing her with me, you’ll say … anyway. Mum calls her over, she comes in, looks the woman over. Not from Rampartville, she says. Whereupon I pipe up (where’d I get the idea; I was just a kid) maybe she’s some kind of messenger for the partisans. I’ll find out in the morning, Kanello says, and leaves.
    We kept vigil over the stranger all night, well, all right, so we nodded off a bit before dawn, and little Fanis snored right through the whole thing. To stay awake, I weed the new shoots that were popping up through the floor over in the corner, but Ma snaps at me in a loud whisper, Stop that and bring the lamp over here. So I stop my weeding. 
    First thing in the morning we go out and start asking around, all hush-hush. Nothing. At noon Kanello comes back from work: not a clue, she says; nobody expecting her, all the contacts got back safe. Seems she even telephoned around, not that I asked where, but however you look at it, we weren’t any further ahead than when we started.
    Meanwhile our lady neighbours pass on the word to the priest, he’ll be having a funeral to do and little Fanis goes running off to the police station. Don’t know a thing about it, they tell him, Try the Kommandantur. Can you believe it, the kid’s supposed to go ask the Krauts? Finally Father Dinos shows up along with Theofilis the sacristan and the two of them lay her out in one of those church caskets they always kept handy, for the indigent, you know. We took the funeral procession through the whole town on the off-chance maybe somebody recognizes the dead woman, asking people on the sly. Not a clue. Probably somebody from the capital, they said. We ended up giving her a hasty burial seeing as it was just about curfew time, then we all hurried home. Didn’t write anything on the grave marker, what were we supposed to put?
    I suppose I completely forgot about the incident, all these years. Anyway, just after Ozal gets in, I think it was, I’m back on the stage again, stand-in at some youth movement drama festival and who do you imagine I think of? That’s right. The mystery woman; not her face so much as her green coat. Even today, when I visit our plot in the cemetery I light my candle and burn my incense, then I drop an extra lump into the incense burner. For the unknown woman, I whisper. That’s what I call her: the ‘unknown woman’. Because I performed The Unknown Woman with this road company, you know. What I mean is, I played in The Unknown Woman , not the role of the unknown woman; had two lines to speak but I’m not complaining. It was prose after all, and besides, it was serious theatre. In the musical reviews they always stick me in the back of the crowd scenes or in the chorus. 
    The unknown woman, poor thing.
    I always say a little prayer for her, I know it’s being selfish but I’d like it if someone said a little prayer for me when … anyway, you know what I mean; well. I’m still young at heart and frisky as a filly, why, when I pop backstage after the