The Daughter Read Free

left in the shop was the flag and the scale. When we unfurled it on October 28th, the day my father went off to war, it just about covered the whole front of the house. Reminded me of one of those patriotic songs we used to sing in school, the one about Mother Greece with her blue eyes tucking in her children for the night. Fortunately for us, Ma remembered we had the flag. At first we used it for a bed sheet. Now, after we unstitched it Mother cut it into four shifts and two pairs of drawers each. In fact, I remember mine were cut from the middle of the flag, the part with the cross: we couldn’t unstitch that part, so I ended up with drawers in our national colours with the cross right in the crotch. Anyway, we wore those undies all winter long. And there was no danger of them finding a flag in our house – if you had one, you were resisting – if ever they searched us. Still, I’d given up hope of that. But when Father Dinos spots our underwear hanging out to dry on the line behind the church one day, he figures everything out. How could you, woman? he asks our Ma. And Ma snaps back Alexander the Great would do the same thing if his kids didn’t have any clothes to wear. The priest never breathed a word about our underwear again.
    Truth to tell, the Authorities did come calling – once. Before the Occupation it was, during the Albanian war. Five months after my father left, he stopped writing. Mother sent me over to some neighbours who had a radio on the chance I’d catch his name in the dead and wounded bulletins. Maybe altogether ten houses in Rampartville had radios back then, all good families. The neighbours were theatre people which we called the Tiritomba family because they played in our town in a musical called Tiritomba , you remember that song before the war that went ‘tiritomba tiritomba’. They were really from Rampartville all along, but it was pure happenstance that they happened to be passing through town on tour when the war broke out. So they had to stay put. Good people, especially Mlle Salome, the impresario’s sister-in-law. They had a place of their own in Rampartville, an inheritance. Nice folks, I’ll tell you all about ’em later. The house is still standing today, not a brick touched. Seems they forgot to sell it.
    Mlle Salome we asked to listen for the casualty reports so I wouldn’t go wasting my time for nothing. Went to police headquarters and to the prefecture too, looking for information. Were we supposed to put on mourning and hang the black crepe over the front door or weren’t we? But nobody heard my father’s name. Don’t worry, said Mlle Salome. If the unthinkable’s  happened, the Authorities will inform you for sure, and you can pick up the medal.
    That’s why we didn’t put in any black curtain cords either.
    So, one day a gendarme and a guy in civilian clothes come knocking, asking Mother if she heard any news, or if she knew anything about Father’s politics. We showed them the postcards from the front, such as they were; what else were we supposed to show? He’d been absent without leave from his regiment for more than a month, they said.
    As soon as Granny found out she rushed right over: just about tore my mother’s eyes out, in fact, on account of we hadn’t put up the black crepe. Granny wore black the whole Occupation : one day she managed to lay hands on some wheat, so she boiled it up as an offering for the deceased, sent us over a plate and for two days we had food to eat.
    But we never hung up the crepe or wore mourning.
    You won’t catch me mourning him unless I get orders straight from the government, besides, it’s bad luck Mother said. Later, a lot later, after Liberation, we finally got a letter from the government saying that my father Meskaris Diomedes had been declared missing on the field of honour and that his family was entitled to a pension. Well, it just wouldn’t have looked right to go into mourning then. Besides, the religious