“What you have to know, now that you are entering the family,” my great-grandmother told my wife, upon meeting her for the first time, “is that the women of our clan are strong. They are made of iron.” Grasping her hand so tightly that my wife winced with pain, my great-grandmother stared at her intently. “Hell, we even pissed in the face of the Germans.”
My Assyrian wife smiled politely. My great-grandmother’s heavy Epirote accent, her rather allusive manner of speaking, coupled with my wife’s rudimentary grasp of Greek at the time, meant that she understood nothing. «Ναι, πολύ ωραία,» she offered in exchange.
An hour later, my great-grandmother offered her assessment: “A sweet girl, but I had difficulty understanding what she was saying. She must come from an island, or something.”
“What’s all this about pissing in the face of the Germans?” I inquired. “I’ve never heard that story before. Is this literal or metaphorical?”
My great-grandmother raised her gnarled fingers and adjusted her headscarf. “Have you heard of θεια-Φώτω?” she asked. “She was my aunt, but she didn’t live in the village. She lived in the Castle in Giannena. The kindest and most generous woman you could ever imagine. All the poor would come to her door and for each of them she would have something to give: some bread, a radish, some garlic or some fruit. And if she had no food to give you when you visited, then she would cut a flower from her garden and give you that. We get our love of flowers from her because she was one of the few people at the time who grew flowers for their beauty and for the pleasure of looking at them.
Now you must know that many Jews lived in the neighbourhood of the Castle. The Turks had moved them after the great revolt of 1611 and they were the dominant group in the area. Don’t ask me where they were before that, I have no idea. All I know is that the old people used to say that they were there since the time of the Emperors. At any rate, they were one of the most vibrant groups in Giannena, and there was great rivalry between traders. While some people, shunned them, most of us got on well with them. Θεια-Φώτω’s neighbour was a Jew. We called her Anna the Freemason and she was my aunt’s best friend. Inseparable they were, to the extent where she would even accompany my aunt to church feast days. Of course, there is the tale of how my aunt tried to enter the synagogue, which was just a few streets away with Anna, but of course she was stopped and prevented from entering, but that is another story.
When the Italians invaded, my aunt, Anna and I, would get together and knit singlets and socks for the soldiers at the front. We would sing patriotic songs and Anna would chant some haunting hymns of her own people. When she wasn’t knitting, my aunt was helping out as a nurse at the local hospital, a position she continued in, during the occupation. In those early days when our boys were beating back the fascists from the mountains of our land, no one made distinctions between Christians and Jews. Jewish boys from Giannena were fighting the invader, alongside their Christian neighbours and friends. We were all Greeks and together we were performing the impossible. Even when our army was defeated and the Italians came and occupied our city, the camaraderie continued. These were tough times. Food was hard to come by. There was great uncertainty and people changed. You didn’t know who you could trust anymore. And throughout it all, there was θεια-Φώτω, with a kind word for all, a morsel of food for an orphan of a soldier killed in the war, for a widow, in truth, for everyone.
Life was miserable and one of my only solaces was visiting my aunt on the occasions that I went to Giannena to purchase food, or to sell produce, in order to listen to her stories. She wove vivid tales of the time of the Emperors, of the Revolution, of our own ancestors in Souli. All her narratives were steeped with a love of freedom, with a love of our country. It was at this time, in 1943, when the Italians switched sides and then surrendered to the Germans, that things became even more difficult. From an Italian you could expect pity. From a German only pain. Food became even more scarce. People closed in on themselves. Fear loomed over everything.
It was no longer safe for Anna and the rest of her people to walk around in public. The Germans announced a set of laws that discriminated against the entire Jewish community. In secret, my aunt would visit Anna and take her food. She would caution me never to speak of her outdoors, lest this draw the attention of the hated Nazis. From snatches of conversation from my other aunts and indeed as my aunt admitted to me later herself, she would, whenever she was able, purloin medicines from the hospital and then, at enormous risk to her own life, contrive ways to visit the households of sick Jews, especially children, and administer them.
It was a terrible time,” my great-grandmother placed her hands over her eyes and wiped away tears. “It was as if God himself had abandoned these people. I hadn’t been to see my aunt for a month and one day, when I arrived, I saw an enormous elephantine-sized chamber pot in the middle of the room, in front of the fireplace. This struck me as extremely odd. Θεια-Φώτω was obsessed with hygiene and there was no way that she would store this object anywhere except under her bed, let alone in the middle of her living room. The over-sized nature of the receptacle was also baffling.
“What is this relic doing here, aunt?” I asked, stifling a laugh.
“Oh that, my aunt shrugged. “I am old now and I struggle to go up the stairs. I sleep down here now, so what else can I do?
“My aunt is becoming old and senile,” I thought to myself but I thought nothing of it. It was now March 1944. Θεια-Φώτω had grown increasingly frail and this time it was I who was taking food to her, a few greens I had managed to pick and which I intended to boil for her. I knocked on her door and waited for what seemed to be an inordinately long time before she opened. Unlike other times, my aunt did not greet me with a smile. She looked dishevelled and was panting. Looking left and right apprehensively, she snapped: “What are you doing here? Never mind. Come inside quickly,” pushing me into her house.
She said nothing when I showed he the greens that I had brought her. Instead, she continuously looked out of the window, answering my questions monosyllabically with increasing amounts of distraction. When they came, it was in a way, a relief. We could hear their boots tramping on the cobblestones outside and when the sharp banging on the door commenced, my aunt rose like an automaton and opened, regarding the soldiers who streamed into the house with a look of complete indifference. They in turn, without saying anything, began to ransack the house. I was too afraid to ask my aunt what they were looking for. Upstairs, I could hear soldiers opening cupboards, and throwing pieces of furniture around. My aunt, her arms crossed, observed them impassively.
When the soldiers who were searching upstairs descended, most probably reporting to their superior that their quest had been fruitless, he ordered them outside and took a final cursory look at the downstairs room before departing. It was then that his eyes fell upon the chamber pot. He stared at it motionlessly for a time, his eyes narrowing. Slowly he leaned, almost imperceptibly toward it. Instantaneously, θεια-Φώτω sprang from where she was standing by the door, dashed to the chamber pot and lifting up her skirts, sat over it and began to urinate. She looked up at the Nazi and raised her eyebrows plaintively by way of apology. Disgusted, the Nazi spat in her direction, turned on his heels and stormed out.
The tinkle in the chamber pot had ceased yet Θεια-Φώτω remained suspended over it for what seemed to be an age. Then, as if awakening from a dream, she glanced at me, momentarily wondering what I was doing there before ordering me out of the house. “Shut up. Don’t ask me anything. Go quickly” she urged. “Don’t come back for a while. And if I am not here when you do, don’t linger. Just go.”
I left, the hour-long walk back to my village seeming to take an entire day. A few days later I learned that the Germans had rounded up all the Jews of Giannena and taken them away. In the darkness of my home, I shed tears for Anna and worried about the erratic behaviour of my aunt, who even in my subsequent visits seemed more nervous and distracted than ever before. It was only in October when the Nazi scum saw fit to leave, having reduced our entire country to ruins that I found out the truth: Kind and placid θεια-Φώτω was part of a resistance group run by the Metropolitan of Ioannina Spyridon, with a major cell operating out of the hospital. Beneath the gigantic chamber pot placed so carelessly on the floor, was a concealed opening into a crawlspace below. And it is in that crawlspace that my aunt hid her friend Anna and her family, on that fateful day that she urinated in the face of the Nazi jackboot, having also hid on other occasions, some other Jewish boys from her neighbourhood, and a number of freedom-fighters, until such time as other operatives deemed it safe to retrieve them and lead them up into the mountains to safety. She never saw Anna ever again. I don’t know where she ended up.
May your girl be as iron-like as θεια-Φώτω,” my great-grandmother conferred a benediction. “May she piss in the face of all fascists, of whatever description, for in truth they have never really left us.” Then glancing at my open mouth half-forming a question, she smiled: “The pot? What became of it? Why, I brought it with me to Australia.” She pointed meaningfully to a large piece of crockery in the hallway in which a rather Victorian fern was resting. “Why do you think I used to laugh so much when you would go and urinate in that plant as a child? Do you know how many times your aunt has begged me to get rid of it. But it is the only thing I have of θεια-Φώτω. Every time she gives me grief about it, I tell her in no uncertain terms: ΟΧΙ.”