The eye of the needle

My grandmother Maria was a wise woman.

She was the daugher of a butcher, who with his family fled to Athens in 1922 to avoid being massacred by the Turks during the Greek holocaust in Smyrna.

She was forcibly married at the age of 18 (her husband Lazarus was 1 year younger) back in 1930.

Lazarus too had fled the massacre. He recalls, while attempting to escape the Turkish soldiers in the shores of Smyrna, holding his mother’s hand (Euterpe) . Euterpe was holding in her other arm his baby sister, unbaptized yet.

Lazarus then blacked out and found himself in a storage facility in Pireus Greece all alone with fever. He never saw his parents again (Euterpe and Kostandinos) nor his baby sister. He believes that his parents and sibbling managed to board one of those french ships, but were cast back into the sea by the french sailors, a fate suffered by many Greeks and Armenians trying to escapte the Turkish hoardes. Lazarus had boarded a Greek ship.

Lazarus (my grandfather) and Maria (my grandmother) were married in a gunshot wedding sort of marriage by Maria’s father, the butcher and a local priest.

Since there was no love involved, the wedding didn’t last very long.

As a matter of fact, Lazarus, after having had enough of Maria, preferred to split for the Greco Italian front in 1940 rather than endure another day with her. This happened the following day, after an argument the previous day, where she beat the pulp out of him and accused him (after hitting him with a pan on the head) of being a no good since he couldn’t even buy her a pack of cigarettes.

My grandmother raised my mother Zoe as a single parent (something that was very difficult to do in a very conservative 40s and  50s Greece ravaged by war).

She did this by fortune telling coffee and tea leaves, and by working as a cleaning lady in TWA (where she acquired by dubious means alot of cuttlery and glassware with “TWA” infringed upon the items).

My grandmother built a house. She went into debt with a local builder (his name was Abarzoum, an Armenian!!!) and payed the debt through weekly installments. One day Abartzoum, who at that time was 55, was busy doing the ditry deed with his girlfriend of twenty, Litza. Upon one push two many, Abartzoum suffered a massive stroke and croaked, collapsing on Litza. Litza panicked and ran out of the Abarzoum house, semi naked screaming that the old Geez had died.

My grandmother, upon hearing this news, rushed into Abarzoum’s house, found all the debt notes, took them to her house, and burnt them. Debt settled once and for all and the house was hers. She thus did her duty of not leaving any debts to her daughter and eventual grandchildren.

My mother married my father, and my grandmother Maria noted that since my father was from Mani , he was either a cop or a pimp (he was neither; he was a concert violinist and professor of music) and was thus not entitled to any dowry.

After being married about a week, my mother Zoe had a big argument with my father Nicolas, and split from the house and returned to her mother, my grandmother. My grandmother,upon seeing my mother, wore a big round hat, grabbed my mother by the hair, and dragged her back to her husband. While kicking open my dad’s door and pushing my mother inside she screamed to my old man “what kind of man are you, can’t you keep your wife in the house?”.

My parents never had such an argument again.

My grandmother lived on through the 60s , 70 s and 80s and because she well respected in the neighbourhood since she was the local fortune teller, and because of the information acquired through all these transactions (a human Google if you will) kept records on all the people, especially the young ladies, that lived there. No one dared mess with my grandmother since she knew everyone’s, and I mean everyone’s history. As a matter of fact most of the local women believed that she was a witch and thus payed monthly tribute to her (aside from the fortune telling income). Better to keep the old hag quite than to have her expose everyone’s dirty laundry, and closet skeletons.

Men of Honor, know that my grandmother was a woman of respect.

On Monday January the 12 1998 my grandmother received simultaneously two distinguished visitors. A Catholic priest and and Greek Orthodox priest (they were friends of her and they visited her regularly). During a discussion where the priests referred to the bible and said that “it was easier to pass a camel through a needle rather than a rich man through the door’s of heaven” my grandmother screamed at them : “Dummies learn proper greek. The proverb properly translates”: “it was easier to pass a rope through a needle…“. The St James translation is wrong since the greek text contains κάμιλον (rope) and NOT κάμηλον (camel).

My grandmother Maria embraced eternity on Tuesday January 13 1998 and was sent to the Most High with honors fit for a queen. About 2000 people attended her funeral payed by the municipality.

A couple of days later, I was informed that she was reincarnated in the form of a tortoise (I don’t know if it was a male or a female tortoise) since one of the local ladies who had visited her grave, noted an open grave, the coffin still visible, and a tortoise standing on top of the coffin audaciously looking upwards at her.