The Daughter by Pavlos Matesis Page B

goat, if you please. Cleared out lock stock and barrel, in the middle of the great hunger, just as the Year of Our Lord 1942 was coming to an end.
    We didn’t even have time to say goodbye and before we knew it, they were gone. If I’d have known they were going, I’d have asked them to take me along, I know I was just a little kid, but they were bound to have kid’s parts. I could have played boys even; my feminine charms weren’t all that developed yet.
    That day us kids were snailing down by Deviljohn’s bridge bright and early. The snails were up and around at the crack of dawn, so we had to catch them before anybody else did. We used to eat them boiled and salted; in the coffee houses they served them as an appetizer, along with ouzo. Later on, we sold them in little paper cones at the movies, instead of roasted sunflower seeds.
    So there we were in the early morning cold, gathering snails under the bridge when all of a sudden we see Tassis’ wood- powered jitney go by like a shot – Tassis was Mrs Adrianna’s brother. Well not exactly ‘like a shot’; the old rattletrap was doing maybe ten miles an hour. And in it, who do I see but Mlle Salome, Mrs Adrianna, her daughter Marina, plus an archangel, which may have been part of some stage set, or maybe it was a plaster statue, I couldn’t tell for sure. There were Albanian kilts and medieval costumes flapping in the wind on the side. Traviata and the like. Before I knew it, they turned off towards the mountain villages. As soon as the jitney was out of sight we went back to our snailing. We were cold. There was no sun but even with sun we would have been cold. Not enough to eat, that’s what it was. But the cold couldn’t spoil our fun. What did spoil it, around noon, was the domestic animals from town.
    Down by the riverside there were two cats crouching, waiting to pounce on the first frog that popped up. Or staring up at the sky, maybe the poor dumb creatures were waiting for a bird to drop at their feet, so to speak. Dumb animals when you come right down to it.
    House cats weren’t much good back then, what’s a mouse going to do in a hungry man’s house? They wouldn’t even let us get close enough to pat them, the cats. I mean; they were angry because we couldn’t feed them any more. Mrs Kanello had a cat but she had to tell it I don’t have anything for you, sweetie-pie, you’ll have to look out for yourself.
    One day we spotted a mouse in our house. Must have been just passing through, or maybe it just strolled in through the wrong door. Mother almost took it as a compliment. Mice only lived in rich people’s houses now. Back in the days before the war we had a few, but for Mother a mouse in the house was a kind of disgrace; cleanliness is next to godliness, she always said. We kept traps with bread fried in olive oil for bait. But when the Albanian front fell apart, well, that was it for the bread in the mouse-trap.
    We had a cat too, but she wasn’t really ours. More like half a cat. Showed up on the days Father brought the tripe to wash in the yard. I never knew who the cat belonged to. We got ourselves half a cat, Father joked. We always left her a plate outside the back door, along with a little bowl of water. But when we lost our liberty she lost the food on her plate. We still gave her fresh water every day so she would always have plenty to drink at least. At first, she kept on coming around. She came scrambling over the wall, stared at her plate, then leaped down for a closer look, dumb animal. But there was nothing on her plate, nothing but rust spots from the rain, mixed with dust. The last time she showed up on the wall she spotted the empty plate, then turned towards us and glared at us as it she was accusing us of wrongdoing , like the picture in the cathedral where you see the Archangel glaring at Eve, the one where it says The Banishment from the Garden underneath. Took one look at us and disappeared . Disowned us. 
    I