A Bed for the Wretched – Chapter 5

A Bed for the Wretched – Chapter 5

I don’t know how many of us there were. A lot, brought there from all the hospitals. Most of us were wounded that had almost recovered, but many were without eyes, without arms, without legs, lame and blind... Those healed or almost healed from their wounds, that were not blind or missing limbs did not stay long. The trucks came at night and after a quick handshake and a short farewell they were shipped back to the front. We slept in two storey barracks, on flat boards nailed down on both sides with a passageway in the middle, just wide enough for two people to pass one another. We slept next to each other on the bed of boards with nothing on them. Dividing us we usually had a coat, a worn out blanket, or nothing. Two of us slept under my coat, myself and Vangelis, a Greek man from Thessaly. In the bed next to ours was a Madzhir (Asia Minor colonist) from Kostur. Every day they woke us early in the morning before sunrise and took us out for exercise. We flapped around our empty sleeves and pant legs and hopped up and down for a short while to get limbered up and get our blood flowing before returning to our bare board, rough beds. There, in the silence of the vast green meadows and vineyards, we all became generals and had answers for every battle we lost. We argued bitterly all day and night. Why? Because we lost the war and those who were a bit more enlightened about military matters and had gone to officer school tried to explain why, but without much success because our desire for achieving something imagined could not be overridden. Icarus certainly knew what awaited him in the heights even before he sealed his wings with wax, but as he drifted up high in the sky the height became his desire and in him born was the spirit of “anything was possible”. It was the same with us. We villagers, peasants, nobodies, with confiscated weapons managed to seriously fight the enemy, to extricate him from the cement bunkers, to persecute him, boasting that we were not only fighting against the Greek Royal Army, but against Britain and against America. We, a bunch of village idiots, were going to fight against America… We had fought against our enemy in Kopanche, Aliavitsa, Krusha, Tumba, Bela Voda, Bigla, Gorusha, Haro, Kleftis, Patomata, Orle, Odreto, Pirgos, Bel Kamen, Glavata, Kula, Sveti Ilia, Iorgova Glava, Mali Madi, Vicho, Butsi, Ianova Glava, Plati, Kulkuturia, Bukovik, Baro, Iamata, Polenata, Vrbitsa, Stenite, Kaimakchalan ... We had fought the enemy in the mountains in Macedonia, Epirus, Thessaly, the Peloponnesus and Rumeli... In Suk we had fighters who had fought in every battle mentioned above. Opposite me was an older man with two empty sleeves. His hair was gray. He had been a participant in World War I and in the Asia Minor Greek campaign. He had survived Akronafplia, Metaksas’s salty fish and castor oil. He had fought in the Albanian mountains and clashed with the Germans. He had fought with ELAS; he had fought in the mountains and hills of Kichevia and Shar Planina and now this... Time and his ordeals were weighing down on his shoulders... Beside him was a Greek of similar age. One of his sleeves was empty and in place of an eye he had a black ball. He constantly sang quiet and soft, pious and sad, disturbing and moving, isolating and compassionate songs. And after he cried and cried, he again sang the same song: Why are the mountains black and constantly crying? Is it because the blizzards beat on them and the rain thrashes them? No blizzards beat on them and no rain thrashes them, Only death passes and sows the dead. First it takes the young and then the old after them, And fragile children are next in line to be saddled... He stopped and remained silent, as if to take a deep breath. His face was yellow and waxy and his good eye was sparkling blue... “Why are the mountains black and constantly crying?” he quietly asked while rocking side to side on his wooden bed. So, Pando, there were people in Suk from everywhere. We suffered together but were unable to “reconcile our differences”.

We suffered many sorrows before we reached a fork in the road. But even at the fork it was still possible to extend a hand. But we didn’t even do that so, as a result, we abandoned everything including the blood we spilled together in the same trenches, in the same bunkers, the piece of bread we shared, the drop of water we drank, the tears and the dignity that we built together. Everything we built together in the snow-laden hills of Gramos and Vicho we abandoned. And had we done any differently we would have been unworthy. And for those on the one side or on the other, after they abandoned their posts and hung their rifles somewhere on a thorn tree and found a warm bed somewhere in a hole under a roof to weather the storm and sow evil, we also need to find a place among us. We are the seed of Macedonia; we belong on the land over there, on the other side of the border. We belong there and life there too can be exactly as we want it... The time will come when we will walk the boulevards of Solun and Athens, with these wooden legs. These wooden legs will creak to remind us of the bursts of gunfire we endured, of our friends we left behind and buried every day, day after day and of those who stopped believing. But by then who knows how far we will go and where we will end up. And who knows over how many roads we will travel before we return to our homes only to find our yards overgrown with thorn trees… Why do we always have to go somewhere and always have to come back from that somewhere... I have said this and I will say it again, we are the seed of this land called Macedonia. If we succeed in eradicating the hatred then these seeds will sprout and grow into trees that will bear rich fruit. We are still burdened by our many vices and perhaps that is why there is no trust in us. And that too is a struggle, like it is a struggle when you want to get out of a swamp, from every evil, from every wrong, from the stench, I would say... And that cannot be cleansed just with slogans. And the larger the letters on the slogans, the more garbage they spread. The maggots cannot be cleansed that easily. The trash has to be cleaned first... It is nice when you look into people’s eyes and see a peaceful reflection in their pupils. It’s the same as looking at the wheat field you sowed last spring and watching the green wheat ripple in the wind in front of you. We had such moments in Suk, peaceful moments, serene moments when things came together. We looked up into the blue sky and together with the clouds pushed our way to the light and flew through the endless blue... We sat on the green grass on May afternoons and stared at the surrounding mountains until they turned ash gray. We watched the various colours in the sky changing from blue to gold, to purple, to silver and sometimes to flaming red and burgundy during sunsets. The colours were soft, soft like the moist morning dew, like the wet of a late evening shower. Watching the colours gave us hope that life goes on no matter what, and let us know that the struggle for life is continuous and never ending… And by doing this we managed to calm ourselves and our feelings, but then there were always those amongst us who wanted to destroy that sense of self... In the first days of May they brought many lame young ladies to Suk. Among them was our Kalesha. I watched them, Pando, and wondered. What kind of hearts did they have to encourage them to stand up straight and walk tall, as tall as they could with broken ribs, shattered shoulders, missing arms and legs, blind and with crutches in their hands and under their armpits? What kind of future is there for them? What kind of dreams would they dream? Almost all of us were like that in that place. And even though we were all like that, we still took joy in watching the sun rise and observing nature’s rainbow of morning colours. We took delight in the first rays of the morning sun entering our barracks through the cracks of the beams and watching the sun spots on the wall climb down to the floor as the day progressed.

We watched the blessed sunlight in silence and it filled us with thoughts of hope and joy. We watched it as long as we could. We waited for morning, for the break of dawn, so that we could listen to the birds sing; it gave us a sense of serenity. We relished the sunrise and it was always a pleasure to stare into the flower cups and watch them bloom. We felt gifted to be able to sit and watch the bees fly from flower to flower on a carpet of green grass that stretched to infinity and to watch the clouds float in the blue sky all day... And who knows, maybe that is why the young women on crutches, the blind, those with defaced cheeks, shaved heads, full of wounds and fresh scars, those with empty sleeves and pant legs, looked so beautiful. At night

we dreamt and during the day, for hours, we gently fondled them with our eyes... blissfully, passionately, modestly, warmly and with delight... As I watched them I thought: What kind of fate were they dealt? Hey, you, Donka, Kalesha, you with your two cut off feet and missing right hand, how will you, as a bride, wave your handkerchief when you dance the bridal dance? How will you dance our “Beracheto” dance? And as I thought of her, Donka, Kalesha, dancing, I cried and cried like a crazy idiot! I then dragged myself and hopped down to the vineyard, lay in the grass and cried some more, Pando. Then I began to cry with joy. I felt something hit me here in my chest; it was Kalesha’s pride and dignity. Even though now she was not the same Kalesha as the one from our company, the goddess with the long braid of hair, the slender woman that could dance like a fairy... Still, she was our Kalesha. Even though she was sluggish in her movement, had less fire in her eyes and her smile was a little sadder, nonetheless she was our Donka, our Kaleshata. Even though her hair was only a few centimetres long, it was still black, thick and it shone in the bright sun. And so, even though she was caught up in the game of cripples, she was alive and carried on dancing the steps of life being held under the arms... fate brought her to this dance which she must now find the strength, the clarity, the means, the support, the joy of existence, the dignity and the security in her friends in order to dance it to its end. I then began to see our Kalesha happy, learning slowly, carefully, how to walk as if barefoot on broken glass, kneeling beside some daisies, gently plucking them and collecting them in her lap, then braiding them in her long braid of hair… One day I saw Kalesha with a wreath of flowers on her head. She was with Katerini, the Greek woman from Rumeli who had a caved-in temple and a missing left eye. Kalesha’s hair had grown. With her one hand she was adjusting the wreath of daisies whose white petals were covering her eyes. Kosta, a bulky man, an artillery man from the Greek-Italian war and later a DAG fighter, leaning on his crutches was looking at the women. And Donka, after passing by him, said: “Hey, fat boy, don’t lean so much on your crutches you might break them…” Katerini was walking ahead. She was smiling, but from the vibrations of her shoulders I could sense that she was crying inside. She was protective of her blind eye and her sunken temple and had them well covered up so no one could see them. She also had a large scar on her right cheek. But we all looked past that and only saw a beautiful, slender young woman, the machine gunner who wore a medal for bravery. All I saw was a beautiful girl wearing very wide military trousers and an oversized English blouse that hid everything. She came to Suk from a hospital in Tirana; she was wounded in Bela Voda. She had received a severe head wound which took out her eye and left a large scar on her right cheek, but

outside of that she had red, plump, passionate lips. And her smile; it was fulsome, narcotic and passionate… And as such new moments of joy were born among us and hopes that, by nature of things, would only last a brief time and move on to make way for new concerns, doubts, internal erosion, dark thoughts that would come after new experiences... But, while we were still in Suk, we did not concern ourselves with our scars, our wounds and our pain. We would not sleep until our friends were loaded on the trucks and had left the compound. There were no organized sendoff ceremonies; we knew that they were taking them back to where they brought them from. This was our job, a task we took on to do every day, just the same as those who were sent to the front. “Safe trip comrades and take care not to come back here again!” we whispered after the trucks moved away. And being as we were, without limbs, we still had the desire to be back at the front with them. By going back we felt that we could enrich the battlefield with our wounds, with our scars, with our missing eyes, with our empty sleeves and empty pant legs, but much smarter and wiser… And I must say that we were most sorrowful when the sun did not shine and when the sky was covered with black clouds. One time the sky was black, thunderous and gray for an entire week. We anxiously waited for brighter days while we quarreled more frequently with our friends.