Melina Breaking Free. Dimitra Mantheakis

his house. When he arrived he rang the bell, but again there was no reply. The young boy was worried now. “Could something have happened to them?” he wondered, concerned. He waited for another ten minutes and then went next door and rang Mrs. Katina’s doorbell. The woman appeared dressed in a bathrobe with curlers in her hair. “Have you seen my mother, Mrs. Katina? I’ve been ringing for a long time and they aren’t replying and the shop too is closed.”

      “Come in, my boy!” the woman said. She made him sit in the kitchen and said, “They took your father away this morning. They are taking him to Athens with Aristides, the barber, and Melpo, the teacher.

      “Who took him, Mrs. Katina?” he asked with an expression of worry.

      “Well, I don’t know. The police…with these damned politics!” Katina replied.

      “But he only came back six months ago. Why did they arrest him again?”

      “My boy, I haven’t a clue. They said he refused to sign some papers and he will be sent with the others to one of the barren islands for exiles. How stubborn he is, that father of yours! He could have signed and saved you all and himself from all this bother!” Katina commented.

      Iakobos went silent. What could the poor boy say! It hadn’t been the first time his father had been jailed for his political convictions. It was twice as difficult for him now because after his father was freed from jail the last time the boy had thought that their worries were finally over and that no one would bother them again, no one would bang on their door in the middle of the night, nobody would drag his father like a sack of potatoes to lead him to God-knows-what prison, God knows–to-what isolated location. The boy felt indignation welling up inside him. His anger wasn’t directed at that moment against the police; he blamed his father for his obdurateness and his adherence to inexplicable, for the boy ideologies that had been the cause of so much anguish and so many worries for them. What business of his was it to get involved in these to-dos, regularly abandoning his work and family? Wasn’t their poverty enough? Had they the luxury of getting involved in situations that only promised them trouble and no benefits? His anger brought tears to his eyes. Then he thought about his mother and sister and the fear they must have felt. He wiped his wet cheeks and nose with the back of his hand and asked Mrs. Katina if she knew where the women were.

      “The were at the police station from this morning in the hope of persuading the chief officer to let him go, but as Sotiris, the taxi driver, the father of your classmate Dina, told me, they didn’t achieve anything. He saw the three of them being put into the back of an army lorry with some others from nearby villages and they left for who knows where. I believe that your mother and sister will be home soon,” Mrs. Katina said, stroking his head to console him.

      Iakovos didn’t want anyone to touch him at that moment. Even his natural cheerful and playful character didn’t allow him to recover and to get over the latest hurdle by arming him with patience and endurance. The story of his father had gone on too long. The family had no business paying for his mistakes and to be left in limbo for months whenever they took him away. But whatever Iakovos thought, as angry as he got, he knew that he was helpless to do anything. These situations could not be fixed from one moment to another.

      Ten minutes later from the window he saw his mother and sister with an expression of disappointment on their faces. He rushed outside and ran towards them. Kiki, his mother, hugged him silently and Tassia, his sister, looked at him sadly with her eyes red from crying. Iakobos knew what would follow, and for who knows for how long. His mother would break her back carrying crates of water and soft drinks and organizing a myriad of items, wearing out her legs to serve customers for endless hours to keep them happy so that they wouldn’t go to shop elsewhere else. Tassia would start working overtime at night at the dressmakers where she worked to earn a little more to help add to their meager income. 12 year-old Iakovos was determined to help out, as much as he could, after school at their little shop in order for his mother not to collapse from overwork. As a last resort he could do his homework behind the counter to allow Kiki to pop over to their house to prepare a meal and do her housework while Iakobos looked after the newsagents shop in the afternoon.

      The three months that remained until June and the summer holidays went by quickly. The group of friends finished primary school and sat their high school entrance exams. Sarantos fought all this time to convince his father to allow him too to go to high school. Eleni, his mother, stood by him and supported him as much as she could. In the end and after interminable discussions that almost always ended up in arguments and swearing by Mitsos, his father, the mother and son managed to get his much-desired approval.

      The exam results were announced and the inseparable group of friends went on successfully to the next step of their education. Each of the children kept deeply hidden in their hearts aspects of their family life, painful or happy, as well as their worries and troubles, not because of a desire to hide something, but from pride and a wish not to become objects of pity for their peers. The children were still young and they did not know that nothing would remain hidden for ever under the relentless provincial sun.

      The years went by and the boys became men, almost, and the little girls of yesterday filled out and became women, each one metamorphosing with an individual style and each one harbouring her own private dreams and secret ambitions. Melina, had her mind fixed on redemption from the privations of poverty only through the panacea of money, as she had visualized it over the years in her mind, Urania, getting to know love by slipping away from the supervision of her head master father, Paulina, hoping every day there would be a miracle and that her mother’s sexual desires would cease, Dina, hoping that her taxi driver father would reform and would no longer frequent gambling dens and places of ill-repute, shaming her mother and sisters, Mary, desiring a house that would no longer be turned into a gambling nest by unwelcome visitors, Iakobos, looking forward to expanding his business to become a successful and important merchant to allow his mother and sister to stop wearing themselves out at work while his father was exiled for years on the prison island of Makronissos. Sarantos dreamed of conquering his great love, Melina, who though she must have caught on to his unrequited love from the way he showered attention on her, did not include him in her personal plans. She didn’t want any poor person near her, no matter how much she liked them. The constant humiliations caused by the wretchedness and hardships that her family had lived through, for years and years, had wounded her deeply and irreparably.

      The members of the group may have been at different stages of maturity now that they had reached the age of seventeen, and they may have dreamed and planned their futures, but they didn’t know if their parents would give them the go ahead, either for further studies, or to follow a professional path in the capital, far from their small town. Conditions prevailing in their families, their worries, the hardships, and the delights or disappointments of their childhood years were deeply etched into the very depths of their being, irrespective of the fact that none of them had ever chosen to confide, even in their friends, despite the love that they shared for one another, in order not to compromise their family members more than the adults had exposed themselves to the judgment and criticism of their community. It was obvious that final decisions regarding their future would depend exclusively on the disposition and the economic capacity of each family at the specific and critical moment.

      At that time, Mary, the strong-headed one of the group, was already under siege, so to speak, by a young neighbour, Anesti, who had studied architecture at Bologna in Italy and on his return to his country after an absence of seven years wanted to establish himself professionally and to settle down. He wanted a hometown girl with whom to create a family after all the affairs he had with girls belonging to a variety of nationalities at the overseas university. Pleasing in appearance, he was soon targeted by mothers as a potential husband for their daughters who were much attracted by the title “educated abroad”, as they said to their friends. Three or four matchmaking proposals did not tempt him in the least even though the brides had a respectable dowry. None of the girls attracted him sufficiently for him to give up his freedom.

      He met Mary one afternoon at his house when she had come to visit his sister Niki. Mary in no way resembled the slightly-built child he remembered from the sixth grade of the local primary school. She had become a tall, slim, perfectly proportioned young