The Nifi Read online

  The Nifi

  a true story

  Linda Fagioli-Katsiotas

  Copyright © 2015 Linda Fagioli-Katsitoas

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 10:0989219410

  ISBN: 13:978-0989219419

  To my children, Nikki and Thomas,

  for you to understand who you are.

  And to my best friend, Nick,

  for your support and patience.

  And in loving memory

  of Paraskevi (Chevi) Lykas-Katsiotas

  One of the strongest women I’ve ever met.

  Circa 1926 – July 5, 2013.

  The word “nifi” is a Greek word

  used to describe the woman who marries into a family.

  Preface

  Over a period of thirty years, my mother-in-law, Chevi, told the stories of her life. I learned of them first through the translation provided by my husband and then in later years through the simple Greek she used as I began to learn the language.

  We often sat in the shade of a giant mulberry tree as she handed me those tiny pieces of the past, pieces that were filled with heartache and betrayal. She told and retold the same stories as if she were tracing the lines of a picture, pressing it into existence. I think Chevi really liked me. I had brought her son back to her after a long absence and I believe she knew I would be a reliable person to whom she could tell her story, a person who would bring it to life.

  In 2010, I started writing her stories down but I never expected them to become a book. I only wanted to give her what she wanted, to be sure those who came after her knew that she existed and would know what her life was really like, not the romantic picture or the blatant lies that some were making of it.

  In the summer of 2012, those stories began looking like a book. And as it began to unfold onto my laptop, I would realize there were chunks of time missing or one event didn’t coincide with the timeline of another so I’d run across the courtyard from my house to hers and ask her a question regarding a detail, a person’s name or a date, and then I’d run back and add it to the story. I thought I’d have plenty of time for those questions, for her clarification.

  In 2013, the book was finished and I brought Chevi her copy. I was so excited as I made the journey from Long Island to Margariti with the book safely packed inside a suitcase. I would present it to her, put it in her hands, the tangible product of those warm evenings. I knew she’d be tickled. I could picture her keeping it in her black apron and showing it to her neighbors as she made her daily treks to the farm. It didn’t matter that it was written in English. She wouldn't have been able to read Greek, either. But I knew she’d like it.

  CHAPTER 1

  The bus pulled away from the side of the road and I was left there in the village of Margariti, standing next to Nick, my new husband of sixteen months. We had married secretly in the Suffolk County courthouse back home, after knowing each other for a year—my parents still reeling from the shock as we announced that we'd be going to Greece for an indefinite amount of time.

  Powdered with the dust created by the wheels of the retreating bus, I watched through strands of sweat-stained hair as the hum of its engine drifted further and further until the bus became a speck in the distance. And then there was only the sound of cicadas, deafening in the midday silence. It was the summer of 1983. My first trip outside of the U.S. I was twenty four years old, inexperienced, uneducated and filled with senseless romanticism. Ready to meet my new in-laws.

  The road was deserted, except for an older man across the street, holding the handles of a wheelbarrow but frozen in mid-step. He brought one hand above his eyes, shielding them from the sun, and then watched us for a few seconds. The cart suddenly dropped from his other hand and he sprinted toward us, recognition in his eyes. He and Nick were hugging and kissing, talking wildly, but I understood nothing. It had already become clear to me on the ten-hour, cigarette-filled flight of Olympic Airlines that the book, Greek Made Easy, I had bought back in Queens, New York, and studied for months, was useless and grossly misleading.

  I looked longingly down the road at where the bus had disappeared as Nick continued his boisterous reunion with someone who was obviously a close family member with all the emotions flowing between them.

  But panic began to threaten my facade of calmness. I needed to somehow relieve myself, preferably with a toilet—one that was enclosed in a bathroom. The bus had passed through numerous quaint little villages with lovely cafes along sharply turning roads, on our eight hour trek north, and then had stopped at an isolated café, far from civilization, with flies nibbling at the food, having first made a stop at the holes behind the cafe that were used for toilets. I wouldn’t be able to hold it in much longer.

  “Who is this?” I hoped my voice would remind them that I was there.

  “This is my neighbor.”

  Nick gave me a proper introduction of which I understood nothing, so I smiled and accepted the kisses and handshake.

  We three walked—gift-laden suitcases in hand—down the dirt path toward home. But apparently, my mother-in-law, Chevi, had been meeting every bus from Athens for the past week, anxious to finally reunite with her first born after having been separated for six years. And having heard the departure of the bus, she and two of my sister-in-laws were running toward us.

  Anastasia was the first to reach us, her eyes wet with tears. She put her hands to her brother’s face as if to be sure he were not an apparition. The two other women followed and many words were exchanged. Much smiling, tears and touching.

  I remember Margariti as a place of muted color. The surrounding mountains were naked with different shades of brown and an occasional tuft of brush sticking up from the bald surface. The houses were piled like a broken staircase up the side of the mountain, their red roof tiles shining with the reflection of the sun. And higher up, walls of fallen gray stones, from the ruins of time, lined the ridges of brown as the mountain ascended upward into the blue cloudless sky.

  And my in-laws’ house.

  It stood on a small hill of dirt. Mammoth stork nests sat atop its roofless structure of gray stone and wild unkempt grape vines grew into the unprotected windowless window frames. A full stairway made of large crooked stones went up the side of the house and stopped at the second-floor entrance of the structure. The fact that, all but one room was without a roof, and the bottom floor was uninhabitable, was explained with a brief comment about a fire that had occurred twenty years before. At the foot of those stairs was a smaller, two-room house, which is where we would spend the next two months, and I would try—but never succeed—to acclimate myself to the pests that came in the screenless windows, the bats that had taken residence in its roof, the spiders that found their way into every crevice, never discouraged by my vigilant destruction of their webs and the flies that were a constant buzzing nuisance until dark—which is when the mosquitoes took over that role.

  I don’t remember seeing my father-in-law, Tomas, but he must have been there. I know that Nick’s younger brother, Fotis, was in the army and we wouldn’t see him until the end of the visit. His married sister, Vaso, lived a few miles away in Igoumenitsa and we would visit her at the hospital after the birth of her first child, in the following month, and it would be years before we would find out that she had never received any of the wedding money we had sent her through Tomas. But sisters, Anastasia and Eftihia—though they lived and worked in a different village, enjoying an unprecedented amount of freedom for young village women of that time—seemed to be with us all that summer. They would cart our dirty laundry off to the vrisi—the natural spring near town—hand-wash it, sun-dry it and then return it folded. I did go with them sometimes and tried to do it myself, but previously, I’d never i
n my life hand-washed more than a few light items. This laundry was heavy and difficult. Just trying to lift one water-soaked pair of jeans was a feat, but then to wring the water from it was beyond my physical capability. In the time I could wash those jeans, and I use the term wash lightly, the other woman would be finished with their entire load. I felt like a child being kept occupied while the adults attended to a task of importance. Our drinking water also came from the vrisi, as there was no indoor plumbing and the well water from the yard could not be trusted. This lack of water made personal hygiene a challenge.

  Before Nick was able to construct a makeshift shower by rigging a barrel of water atop the wall in the burned out portion of the house, we showered by soaping up and pouring water over each other. I remember enjoying that a great deal. Not because it was an act of intimacy, but rather because it was the only time I was alone with him . . . and I missed having someone to talk to.

  The word privacy does not translate well into Greek and in those days, the idea was a bit elusive. I suppose it was a harsh life so, between the poverty and the arranged marriages, the idea of a private peaceful moment from others seemed more like isolation, a lonely event. And so, there was always someone between us, being a good host, seeing to our needs and being sure we were never left alone which would have been a terrible insult.

  I remember always feeling slightly nauseous. The sunlight was intense. The air smelled of sheep dung and burning wood at all times. Wood fires were used for all cooking so, especially first thing in the morning, the smell was everywhere. The food tasted odd in my mouth. Everyone tried desperately to give me what they thought an American would eat. Meat and Coca Cola. But I’ve never liked carbonated drinks. And meat? Well, I would have loved a nice hamburger, a porterhouse steak, roast chicken, but the coveted lamb that was killed and cooked for the prodigal son’s return was the icing on the cake for my nausea.

  My two sister-in-laws worked tirelessly trying to maintain a living space that was welcoming and comforting. I wanted to tell them how grateful I was, but all I could do was smile.

  It was Anastasia who held my head and stroked my face when I was weak from the prolonged vomiting that occurred from the poisoning I would get at the bouzouki club. If I hadn’t been so shy, I might have told them that the bottle of portokalada tasted a little strange.

  But on that first day, Eftihia—strong and beautiful—took my arm and led me into the little two-room house. She spoke to me with her smile and I didn’t know then that I was looking at my own daughter as a young woman, as they would someday have so much in common. But at that moment, Eftihia was trying to cushion my shock as I looked around.

  I tugged at my husband’s sleeve and whispered, “I need a bathroom, Nick.” He smiled at the hushed giggles as the women discussed the way I had shortened his name.

  I looked around and wondered where they had built the thousand-dollar-bathroom. Nick and I had worked extra hours at the diner and saved relentlessly, turning our earnings into a money order which had been sent with a letter explaining to Nick's father, Tomas, the need for a bathroom for the American bride. But it simply did not exist and I didn’t understand the reason for its absence—though in my mind I had pictured a modern, tiled room, complete with a locked door. Perhaps there had been a discussion about it, but not with words that I had understood. I do remember, however, where I was ushered to, as the family listened in awe to their Nikos speaking English.

  The family bathroom—a small closet-sized room on the second floor, up the uneven stone staircase—had a wide pipe leading to a ditch far below and a spider-filled opening in the wall, one might call a window, next to a porcelain toilet that had been placed over the pipe, a bucket of water waiting, as a means to flush.

  There is a term that comes to mind as I recall that day: shy kidney—which was coined for those who have difficulty doing their business when others are about, and this may have been my problem at that time, with the family waiting outside the rickety wooden door which was held shut by a string. But I tend to think it was the snake skin that I saw embedded between the stones and the realization that snake skins come off of actual living snakes. Consequently, the bathroom issues remained for the entire summer.

  As time crept forward and the villagers came to get a look at the American, I did my best to sit, smile, nod and listen to the buzz of incomprehensible conversation. When I would say anything to Nick, all movement would stop as the ever-captive audience would become entranced in the gibberish between us. So—naturally, when a bug was trapped within one of my muffled yawns and I felt it flit about my palate, given the choice of a hacking spit with no hope of explaining my behavior or an unnoticed swallow, I chose the latter. It just seemed more tolerable to me.

  “I want to go home!” Tears streamed down my face. I tried to sob as quietly as possible, enclosed in the small room, Nick’s sisters on the other side of the door. We’d been there less than a week.

  “Okay, We’ll go home,” Nick said.

  He was being pulled between the two worlds, wanting to live them both but also wanting me to love them both as much as he. In the end, it was the sea that had the final say.

  We rode the bus to the seaside village of Parga. From the bus window, as we teetered on the mountain edge with each hairpin turn, I saw the hypnotic blueness of the Ionian Sea for the first time. The mountainside continued down into the shimmering turquoise, revealing rocky edges of underwater cliffs as if they were only inches from the surface. And patches of changing shades of blue slowly became black as they descended into the depths.

  It was love at first sight. If all else had been pushing me to leave, run, get out as fast as I could, this one sight ensnared my heart and I knew I would stay. I had grown up on Long Island and had a variety of seaside fun at my disposal: the wild Atlantic Ocean, the calm salty bays, and the east end with the lush Hamptons on the south shore and quaint beaches of the north.

  But they were completely ruined for me that day.

  The untouched beauty was enough to hold me there that summer, but the warmth of that crystal water as I submerged myself into its welcoming embrace, was the seductive siren that continued to call me back over the years. That coastline, in the northern region of Greece known as Epirus, offered pristine beaches that were often deserted. At that time, and for many years afterwards, that particular area was the poorest and least visited by tourists, which was the reason for my simultaneous misery and joy. That day, I bathed in the warmth of the Ionian and the nausea washed away. I had Nick all day, someone to talk to and share the beauty with. I was renewed.

  But each beach visit ended in Margariti. On the return bus ride, I felt my throat tighten, my heart quicken and braced myself for the evening. Cars were rare back then, so we would walk into town when the heat subsided after sunset. The main street was packed with people, sauntering back and forth, stopping to gossip, visiting with friends or relatives in the houses on the way. We were no different. Many had heard about Nick’s return and stopped us as we walked. The cafés and taverns were filled with men, a wreath of cigarette smoke hugging their heads. It seemed everyone was a talker with very few listeners. They had loud excited voices, their faces animated, their hands gesturing with large exaggerated movements. I was sure there’d be an altercation of some kind. Chairs were flung aside, shirts grabbed across the table and then . . . hugs, kisses and hearty slaps on the back.

  “They’re just saying hello,” Nick explained. “Most of these guys live outside of the country – in Germany. I’m the only one that went to America . . . well, there was that other guy, Louie’s brother. We visited him in Manhattan, remember? But we were the only two . . .”

  I nodded. I remembered, but I didn’t yet know Nick’s friend, Louie, and the old man we had visited in Manhattan, was just that . . . some old guy. None of these names or faces had much meaning to me yet.

  The women strolled back and forth past doors that had big names painted above them such as: hardware store, supermar
ket, stationery store, butcher, produce seller, bakery. All were packed with their wares in tiny ground-floor rooms of old stone buildings with worn facades. As the women walked in their unhurried pace, some with both hands behind their backs, others holding hands or arm in arm, they stopping to chat but none sat with the men. Conspicuously, I was the only woman sitting in a café when Nick and I would choose a destination. I knew we were breaking some unspoken rule, but my foreign status seemed to excuse me for such behavior. Within moments, the empty chairs at our table would become filled with men; more chairs would be pulled across the square and crowded around us with old friends from childhood, their fathers or brothers, friends of Nick’s father or brother and most of them were absently swinging beads through their fingers. I’d learn that they were called worry beads, though none who swung them seemed too worried. And the men would talk while minutes became hours. It’s not an easy feat to sit for what feels like eternity, understand nothing, and yet nod and smile.

  On the walk home, away from the dim lights of the town, Nick would point out the constellations and I would relish those moments, enveloped in the darkness of anonymity. Without streetlights—those would be installed years later—the majestic black sky was peppered with varying sizes of twinkling lights, crowded together. It seemed that no part of the sky was forgotten.

  Once back at the house, we had a meal, and as guests or family members went off to bed, my mother-in-law, Chevi, would quietly talk to he son. She seemed to have much to say. She talked and talked.

  “What is she talking about, Nick?”

  “Oh, just the old days. . .”

  I was interested to know about the old days and it would take me thirty years before I could understand most of what she was saying, but that night I watched her as she chewed small pieces of her story and waited for her son to translate it for her nifi before the next bite . . . and I was completely mesmerized by her rendition of the old days