The Daughter by Pavlos Matesis Page A

show the people come up to me and say, Raraou you old fish, where’ve you been hiding yourself these days? just as nice as can be not how they usually talk to old people and pensioners generally speaking. Of course. I know what you’re going to say, I look a lot younger than my age. Don’t I know it. Even when I was a little girl I always looked younger than I was, didn’t even get a little bump of a chest until after I turned seventeen. When we used to go splashing in the puddles under Deviljohn’s bridge in the summertime I wore my drawers without a shift just like our little Fanis and the other boys. But my girl friends from school, they only took their clogs off. Well, really they were former girl friends because in the meantime I quit school; after the so-called Liberation I started going again but by then it was only once in a blue moon.
    Still, I went visiting lots of other girls. Afternoons mostly. Always went home plenty early though, back then you had to leave plenty of time to get home before curfew because you couldn’t stay overnight at somebody’s house, forbidden by the Occupying Powers. If you wanted to put somebody up you had to write a petition and get the authorities to stamp it. They had their ways of checking up, too; every front door had this printed form nailed to it showing how many permanent residents lived in that particular house plus their names and how old they were. Mrs Kanello, well, life was tough and she was hungry but she could always find something to laugh about. So what does she tell us at one of those get-togethers of hers? At most of the better houses (did house cleaning on her days off, what was she supposed to do with all those mouths to feed?) they were correcting the women’s ages. Improving them, actually. From forty-eight down to forty-two first, then down to thirty-two. And Mrs Kanello laughed and laughed, till all of a sudden one day it wasn’t funny any more. Seems she dropped by her mother’s and what do you think she saw? Her mother’s age listed as thirty-seven, that’s what! You’re nuts, Mum. Thirty-seven ? I’m twenty-seven myself. But mother Marika wouldn’t budge. I am not nuts, she says. What am I supposed to do, stuck with an unmarried daughter?
    Mrs Kanello had this younger sister name of Yannitsa, couldn’t unload her on anybody. One big headache, let me tell you. Finally they managed to marry her off though, thanks to party connections. Her other sister’s husband, the one in the partisans, he kind of forced one of his comrades to marry the spinster. Party orders, he told the man. Didn’t have much choice in the matter, really. So he married the girl, even though she was older by eight years. But they lived happily ever after, had a child even.
    The fur really flew over at the Tiritomba’s too, age-wise I mean. Mrs Adrianna put down her real age, and that was that; her daughter was eighteen, she was forty-one and a widow, why bother to hide it? But Mlle Salome, who couldn’t have been a day under thirty-four, she wouldn’t hear of it. I’m not telling anybody my age, she declared. I don’t care if they shoot me. And there, beside her name, she writes down fifteen, doing her part for the Resistance, I suppose.
    Aphrodite’s mother never crossed her dead daughter’s name off the list. But in the age column she wrote down ‘zero’.
    Mlle Salome had her reasons, that’s for sure. Back before the war even she joined the old maids’ club; she had a swarthy complexion , all skin and bones, her hair was short and curly and she had beady little eyes like a chicken’s behind (what I’d give for those lovely eyes of yours, she gushed whenever she saw me) and a shrill voice, like somebody yelling at a deaf-mute. But all the same, she was a good-hearted sort. Not much later, the whole Tiritomba clan went off on tour, mind you. Well ‘went off’ was hardly the word for it. What really happened is that they cleared out overnight, and all because a