Melina Breaking Free. Dimitra Mantheakis

had given herself so easily to a stranger, offering him her virginity. If she had a hundred virginities she would have sacrificed them for the indescribable fulfillment she had experienced. Neither did she think about her fiancé, Yannis, nor about his reaction when in two months time he would probably discover that someone else had reaped the fruit of her harvest. Respecting her innocence and her virginal shyness, all Yannis had enjoyed until then were some kisses and a few embraces. At this very moment, no external circumstance, no social restraint could spoil the pleasure springing from the echo of her happiness and the relaxation she felt in her body, sated as it was with love.

      A shadow would be cast over the memory of that strange evening the next month when Maria returned to Athens and vainly waited for her period. The strong and uncontrollable passion in Aegina had borne fruit. The odd thing was that the thought of an abortion never entered her mind, even for a moment. Her bizarre stubbornness carried the risk of exposing her. She started desperately looking for solutions beyond the only logical one, an abortion. She decided to confide in her cousin, Myrto, the “fast” one of the family who kept others’ secrets safer than if they were in a bank vault. Myrto, so full of charm and coquetterie and the joy of life, didn’t give a hoot about the constant criticism from her family circle that often stigmatized her “unbridled”, as they called it, behaviour, and her frequent switches of sexual partners that made her relatives bow their heads in shame for the lost lamb of their clan. Good-natured Myrto had solutions for all of their amorous entanglements. When she found out about Maria’s doings she advised her cousin to keep the baby, and since she was about to get married, to present the child as Yanni’s. Maria was horrified when she first heard the proposal. She did not want to deceive her fiancé, but, word after word, Myrto convinced her that there was no other way. “Nobody,” she said, again and again, “can be hurt by things they do not know.”

      She repeated it so many times that Maria succumbed to her advice.

      Maria married Yannis and seven months later she gave birth to her “premature” daughter, Urania. Myrto had fixed the problem with the obstetrician convincing him that with his collusion he was saving a potential victim from the wrath of her relatives who would severely punish Maria who had strayed from the narrow path. Yannis did not for a moment have any doubts about his premature daughter, on the contrary, he concentrated all his love and devotion on the two women in his life. The arrival of a second daughter, and later the birth of twin sons completed his circle of happiness. Maria was an exemplary mother and wife and ran her household with perfect order and discipline. No one ever learned her secret and no one would learn it in the future. Only at night when she felt the lukewarm embraces of Yannis did her mind travel to that enchanted August evening brimming over with sexual passion and her body sought that urge, that intoxicating sense of excitement that was now only a distant and priceless memory. She knew she would never again experience such sexual tension, never would her body seek with an almost obsessive desire to have a male enter and pull her apart as Demosthenes had done then. On the one hand she was lucky because Yannis did not notice, or pretend he did not notice, that someone else had beaten him to the looting of her vaginal passage, and Maria was grateful for his discretion.

      When her schoolmates left Melina at her doorstep she entered the dilapidated two room house where the six members of her family lived. Her mother, on her knees, was brushing the wooden floorboards with ochre. Despite the freezing February cold, beads of sweat stood out on her forehead. Each time she stretched her hands forward to spread the mixture on the planks “Ohhh…Ohhh” sounds came from her lips, but that which made the girl’s heart tighten was the expression of sorrow in her mother’s eyes. The endurance of a lifetime of tribulation was focused in that look, or was it despair? How many times had Melina not seen that same expression when watching her mother examine the three kitchen cupboards, looking for something to cook for her family on those days when her father’s wage had not entered the family purse because no one had hired his cart? The pitiable woman tried to dilute the trachana or the rice soup to make it suffice for all the mouths she had to feed. Melina observed her mother time and time again when with her back bent she washed the family’s clothes on the washboard out in the yard in the severe cold in the middle of winter or in the scorching heat of summer, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing, with caustic ash powder until her hands were on the verge of bleeding.

      They never opened up their house on a feast day nor did a visitor ever cross their threshold. They didn’t have the money to buy the essentials for those occasions. And Melina was envious then, during festive days, to see the illuminated houses of others with people coming and going, music pouring out of open windows, and her smelling the tantalizing aromas of food that made her stomach gurgle in protest at her deprivation. Melina, out of pride, never accepted invitations, knowing that she could not reciprocate. She cried to herself from time to time and on other occasions became furious at her family’s wretchedness, hurling anathema at their poverty and realizing that her grandmother’s constant solace “let us be happy that we have our health!” sounded empty to her ears, and was anything but consoling.

      “Is there an illness worse than poverty?” wondered the young girl. “Is there worse torture that an empty stomach, the overcoat you don’t own, frozen hands and feet when the winter brazier dies out because there is no more coal? Money is the cure, the only cure! Without it you are nothing and others see you as nothing!”

      Many similar thoughts found a nest in Melina’s mind, as if she was a grown-up woman, and they verged on becoming an obsession. The worry and humiliation with which she watched her family suffering like Christ on the Cross, but without hope for the future, was killing her. She preferred not to have been born because she could not put up with this daily anguish from as far back as she could remember. She couldn’t bear seeing her underweight siblings getting up from meals with their stomachs still half empty, and young Melina pursed her lips, promising herself she would put her life in order one day at any cost.

      Mary entered her house and threw her satchel onto a chair. Her mother was spreading the green baize material over the table in the living room. “Are they going to play cards again?” wondered the girl. She was fed up twice a week hearing the knocking of knuckles on the card table and smelling stifling cigarette smoke coming through cracks in her bedroom door. Her mother Penelope, like so many of her compatriots, had acquired a card-playing habit. Wherever they looked for her, one could be sure of finding her at one or another poker or rummy table. She had long ago got over the stage of playing an innocent game of biriba and had entered very deep waters. Penelope could hardly wait for her daily family obligations to be over with, to be free to play cards either at home or at a house of a friend with the same passion.

      She was a good-looking woman who took particular care of her appearance and took full advantage of the dollars sent without fail every month by her sister from overseas. Penelope felt no remorse at parting with some of this at the green felt covered table since her sister was unmarried and the money that she made from her business was more than enough for her. Penelope wasn’t doing anyone any harm by wanting to enjoy herself a little. Provincial life was so boring and the days were so much one like the other without her beloved pastime!

      Menelaos, her doting husband, had a permanent weak spot for her. He went to great lengths to justify this need of hers since Penelope didn’t have the opportunity to let off steam by enjoying herself at nightclubs as she had in Athens from where he had brought her to this isolated province when he had opened his pharmacy. The whole family put up with their mother’s vice because she had been given the go-ahead by the father, the head of the family, despite the secret disapproval of the children who knew the futility of expressing any objection. Neither of their parents would take any notice.

      CHAPTER 3

      Iakovos rang the doorbell of his house for a long time after managing to get away from his schoolmates. He had forgotten his keys and he wondered what they were doing by not opening the door for him. “Have my mother and sister gone deaf?” he asked himself. He waited for a quarter of an hour, in vain. He then decided to go to his father’s newsagents shop two blocks away to see if his mother had gone by there. When he arrived he found the shop closed and the shops next door were also closed for siesta time. “Maybe they’re