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You Walk and I'll Follow
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 email Michael Z.
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The Italian invasion of northwestern Greece in the winter of 1940 reached my grandmother's village when she was barely eight years-old.
Frightened, the women gathered themselves and ran into the forest to hide. (The men, off to enlist in the army, had left the women unattended.)
The women sat huddled in the dark, in the cold of the Greek mountains, when a a pair of Italian reconnaissance infantry-men spotted the red blanket one of the women had used to wrap her child in.
The soldiers called for a translator and descended on the women.
"What are you doing out here?" asked the translator to the women.
The eldest of the women answered, "Please don't hurt us. Please don't hurt our children."
The Italians looked at each other and laughed hysterically. "We're not here to hurt you," the translator replied, "Please, it is cold. Go back to your homes. Rest. Take care of your children."
He waved them back towards the village, "We will raise our hands to no women."
The Italians proved true to their word. The women returned to the village, and for the brief period that they were occupied--before the Greek counter-attack pushed the Italian army back into Albania--the Italian soldiers acted, in the words of my grandmother, like "perfect gentlemen."
"No one of the soldiers," she likes to tell me, "they touch the ladies. They so nice to us the Italians. They no good at fighting."
As it went, the Greeks proved better at fighting. The Italians lost the offensive, the first time the Axis army were defeated in battle, forcing Hitler to delay the German invasion of Russia in order to secure the Balkan peninsula.*
The Nazis, on the other hand, proved less kind. "When they come," says my grandmother, "we kill one and they kill a hundred. If they want to catch someone, they burn down the whole village."
She always gets angry when she thinks back on Nazi rule. "They were dogs," she says, "not even people."
Where's the Post Office?
My grandmother's story, which she has told me a minimum of five-hundred times in my short life, is an epic story. A grand story. It has power and humanity and an arc to it.
You could take my grandmother's story and make it a pivotal scene in a blockbuster movie, with Rachel McAdams one of the scared village women, and Javier Bardem an Italian captain.
The story has weight. It tells us something about the human condition. About kindness in war, about the decency of people thrust into a war greater than themselves.
About Italians. About Nazis. About Greek village women.
But what my grandmother's story is not, is a family story. Family stories are tiny. They don't fit on silver screens. They don't make it into the great canon of literature.
Family stories have no greater arc. They're just little anecdotes that happened between two people.
Here's one of my favorite family stories.
I'm in Cyprus in 2001--the last time I had visited--and I need to mail a letter. This was after I had email, but before I started using it to talk to my friends.
So I go to my cousin, Anthimo, all of eight years-old. This is in Greek, mind you,"What do you call that place where you mail the letters?"
"The tachydromio?" he asked.
"The place where you send letters," I repeated.
"The tachydromio," he said again.
I smiled, nodded, and picked up my letter. "OK, then," I said, "I need you to bring me to the tachydromio."
"Bring you?" he asked. He seemed confused about my choice of verbs.
"Um," I said, not so sure of my Greek, "Why don't you carry me to the tachydromio."
"Carry you?" he asked, even more confused.
"Take me to the tachydromio?" I asked.
"Take you?"
Now, Anthimo is not an obtuse character, and back then he loved his cousins and would hang around me incessantly, so he wasn't trying to be difficult.
He just had no freaking idea what the hell I was talking about.
"OK, Anthimo," I said, "Listen: I need you to walk to the tachydromio and I'm going to walk behind you."
At that, he jumped out of his seat, shot his finger in the air, and screamed: "I understand! I understand!"
And he walked to the post office, and I followed behind him, letter in hand.
No, He Doesn't Drink Coffee
The Anthimo story is not an epic story. Its unsure, if you don't know me, and you don't know Anthimo, if it's funny at all.
But I tell that story all the time. I tell that story whenever anyone asks me if I know Anthimo, because, well, he lives in Cyprus and I live in America, and if you glue all the time we've ever spent together into one continuous stream, we have maybe two days worth.
So it's not an unreasonable question to ask, of the hundred something second-cousins I have in Cyprus, if Anthimo is one of the ones I'm familiar with.
And that's why I tell that story. Anthimo and I share that story. And I could be ninety years-old, and Anthimo like seventy-five, and if someone asks me if I know him, I can say, "Yeah, I know my cousin. Let me tell you about this time..."
And it's a tiny story. It tells us nothing about the human condition. It has no weight. No power. No grace. It's just a family story.
It just shows that we know each other.
Here's another family story.
I just finished telling the Anthimo story to Anthimo's first cousin, and my second-cousin, Leondio. He knows Anthimo and he's glad I have a story about him.
Leondio then asks me if I drink Greek coffee. He has a cup sitting in front of him and he's offering me one.
Greek coffee is made without a filter. It's basically boiling coffee grinds directly in the water itself. To say the least, it's an acquired taste.
To compensate for the strength of the Greek coffee, it is always served with a tall glass of water, presumably to wash down the grinds.
I wouldn't know. Like most Americans who grew up with filtered coffee, the Greek stuff is too rough to swallow. I don't drink it.
But Leondio offers me some Greek coffee and asks, "Sketo?"
Which means 'plain.' So I say, "What are the other options?"
My sister sitting next to me, steps in. "No, he doesn't drink Greek coffee."
"I don't?" I ask.
"Metrio?" Leondio asks, which is Greek coffee with some sugar in it.
"No, you don't drink that either," my sister tells me.
"What if I put milk in the Greek coffee?" I ask my sister.
"You don't drink that either," she tells me.
So I turn back to Leondio and I tell him, "No thank you, I've just been informed that I don't drink Greek coffee."
And he nods, "OK, good."
And my sister goes, "Only a lunatic drinks this stuff." And she pauses for a second. "Our dad drinks it actually. A triple cup of it," she says, "Every morning."
"I didn't know that," I confessed. "That's crazy," I said.
"That's your father," she replied.
My Pet Lamb
There is nothing there of significance in the Leondio coffee story. Nothing at all in terms of grace and power. It's just another example of a family story.
Years later people will ask. "You know your cousin Leondio, right?"
And I'll say, "Know him? Are you kidding? Let me tell you about this one time he offered me coffee." And that's all. That's all the story is worth.
Here's one that's in between a Family Story, and what I'll call a Real Story, like the Red Blanket.
My grandmother grew up tending to sheep. All of six years-old, her mother would send her out with a stick to make sure they all ate in peace.
Of all the sheep in her care, her favorite was a little lamb that she named Andrea. (Which, ironically, means "man" in Greek.)
Everywhere she went, Andrea followed her around. She loved that lamb and my grandmother, as a little girl, was sure that lamb loved her.
That is, until her family got hungry, and they took Andrea to the back, and turned him into dinner.
When my grandmother found out that the lamb on the spit was Andrea, she started crying hysterically. "How could you do that to Andrea?" she screamed at her mother.
"Do what to Andrea?" her mother asked. "He's a lamb. We are Greek. We eat lamb."
But my grandmother couldn't take it. She stormed out of dinner and out of the house and refused to touch a bite of Andrea.
"But it's good meat," her mother pleaded, "and you're letting it to go to waste."
"I won't," screamed my grandmother, "I won't."
If I've Told You Once, I've Told You Five-Hundred Times
When I had dinner with Leondio and a bunch of my other cousins in Cyprus (the first time I had visited in seven years), Anthimo was off in Hungary playing soccer.
He had grown up by then, no longer the little kid that couldn't take liberty with the meaning of a verb or two.
That's part of the reason that I told the story. So that everyone would know that this kid in Hungary, running down the right flank of a soccer pitch, crossing the ball into his teammates, was my cousin, the one that once took me to the post office.
I could tell that Anthimo story five-hundred times, just like my grandmother has told me her Red Blanket story five-hundred times, and her Andrea My Pet Lamb story five-hundred times.
The point of a family story isn't the twist at the end. It isn't the revelation or the morale or the significance. It's the connection, between you, and this other person, you happen to be related to.
"If you saw Anthimo today," his sister told me, "You wouldn't even recognize him."
"And would he recognize me?" I asked her in return.
"No," she shook her head, seeing how I had grown even more since the last time, my face filling out a beard, my shoulders set in their ways.
She looked me up and down again, an adult when last time I had been in Cyprus I was still an awkward teen, getting used to having a smile after all those years of braces.
"No," she repeated, "He wouldn't know who you were."
And we laughed at that. And the table we sat at with our sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles and cousins and parents all nodded. They all agreed.
They all smiled.
"He wouldn't recognize me," I said, "but I bet he'd still walk me to the post office."
*Hitler's delay in invading the Soviet Union in order to conquer Greece exposed the Nazi forces to the cruel Russian winter. This led to their defeat at the Battle of Moscow, the major turning point in the Second World War. By way of air-tight Aristotelian logic, any proud Greek will tell you, this proves that Greece was essentially single-handedly responsible for the defeat of the Axis nations. Q.E.D. |
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Reader Comments
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post comment
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Posted August 28, 2008 @ 6:16PM by DZ |
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See, you're wrong about these family stories. They HAVE weight. YOU care, so your reader cares, too. You MUST write the fucken grandmother book, MZ, or I'll never talk to you again. This is great. It's so you, such a big heart south of that ridiculous crew cut. :) |
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