The Odyssey of Kostas Volakis

THE ODYSSEY OF KOSTAS VOLAKIS

by

HARRY MARK PETRAKIS

Copyright 1963 by Harry Mark Petrakis

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

Originally published by

David McKay Company, Inc.

New York

DEDICATION:

To my wife and to our journey

http://harrymarkpetrakis.com

Praise for Harry Mark Petrakis...

In his tales, violence is measured by brotherhood, passionate hate by passionate love. And in the end it is man who, despite his weaknesses and his blindness, has the right to victory.

- Elie Weisel

I've often thought what a wonderful basketball team could be formed from Petrakis characters. Everyone of them is at least fourteen feet tall.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Harry Mark Petrakis is good news in American literature.

- Issac Bashevis Singer

I've always thought Harry Mark Petrakis to be a leading American novelist.

- John Cheever

Joy. A strange word when you think of contemporary fiction... or contemporary poetry, or contemporary anything. I am tempted to say that Petrakis is unique in our time because in his stories he can produce it, and he does regularly. It is as if some wonderful secret had been lost, then rediscovered by him.

- Mark Van Doren

Petrakis has something more important than skill; a deep and rich humanity.

- Rex Warner

Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is

for the eyes to behold the sun: but if a man live

many years, and rejoice in them all; yet let him

remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many.

- ECCLESIASTES

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

CHAPTER ONE - 1919

CHAPTER TWO - 1920

CHAPTER THREE - 1923

CHAPTER FOUR - 1927

CHAPTER FIVE - 1932

CHAPTER SIX - 1940

CHAPTER SEVEN - 1941

CHAPTER EIGHT - 1942

CHAPTER NINE - 1943

CHAPTER TEN - 1944

CHAPTER ELEVEN - 1945

CHAPTER TWELVE - 1948

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - 1954

BIO/HMP

The Odyssey of Kostas Volakis

CHAPTER ONE - 1919

CRETE was the world, his father said. A yellow sun tinged with flame over mountains and precipices compounding sites of ambush with sagas of courage. Cemeteries of massive boulders above earth fecundated by the corpses of more than sixty centuries of dead. Great pillars of neolithic stone casting their shadow across a hard earth under a savage violet twilight.

This was Crete, the old men said. A fair land in the midst of Homer's wine-dark sea. Majesty of legend and the golden clouds of the heroic past enveloping the peaks on which the gods had dwelt. Mountains that harbored freedom as unconquerable as the swift eagles soaring from crag to crag. Ruins and relics of warrior cities shimmering under a blazing moon. Serenity of the white monasteries. Shrines to the honored dead. And the splendor of the Gorgopotamos flowing from Candia.

But in his despair, Kostas knew Crete was more than this. It was his village, a parched and poor habitation of stone and clay huts with tiny windows. A few thin and wretched flocks of sheep grazing on arid patches of grass. Some scraggy chickens relentlessly pursued by the bands of wild and dirty dogs made fierce by hunger. A small chapel, a handful of olive trees, and always the men and women and children in the fields, the sowers and the reapers, entreating by their labor a land cracked hard and bled of fruit.

Their village would endure, his father said. It had been decimated and subdued before by massacre and famine, by men who came in dark-prowed ships, by pharaohs and kings, by caesars and sultans, but always it endured.

Kostas would not be contained by these assurances any longer. Men from his village had journeyed across the oceans to new lands. The letters they wrote back that were read to him fired his zeal. In his twenty-third year, after serving eighteen months in the national army fighting in Macedonia and Thessaly against the Bulgarians, he returned to his village with nightmares of death and exhausted by dysentery. He could bear to remain rooted no longer.

There was a fiddler in his village. Blind Limakis, dead now so many years, descended from the lyre players who sailed with Agamemnon to Troy, who played and sang of the visions and dreams of the restless young men.

There is a land across the ocean

where even the poor are rich

and all children wear shoes.

God show us this land before we die…

Kostas Volakis was the only son of Marko, the herdsman, and at twenty-three years of age he could neither read nor write. But he was strong as a Minoan bull, and he had seen men suffer grievous wounds and fall like slaughtered sheep in battle. He was fervently grateful that he had been spared and he yearned to go where he could live more fully. They brought him the name of a girl from another village, whose father offered a good dowry to the man she married. A pact was made between their families.

In our village a young man

broad and strong as Odysseus

waits for Katerina,

sweet Katerina of Viloriti,

Soon they will marry…

Katerina Paterakis was the plainest of four daughters of a teacher in a village across the mountains, a girl betrothed at twenty-one by grace of a dowry supplied by a brother in Melbourne and another brother in Athens. She was bony-shouldered with slim hips and tiny breasts. There were lines of melancholia in the circles of her cheeks. Her eyes were black, so large they unbalanced her pale, pinched face. Her lips were full and dark and sourly sweet.

Kostas consented to marry her for the dowry that would pay their passage to America. A cousin of his father, Stathis Glavas, in a city named See-ka-go, owned a restaurant and offered to sponsor Kostas and provide him with a job. Kostas was frantic to start the journey. So in the summer of that year, the old women came to his father's house bringing small gifts, and the men carried stretchers of mutton to be roasted in the oven of Beroulakis. The girls donned their embroidered skirts with tassels, and the boys polished their boots, and the children screamed as they played around the cypress trees.

Come to dance, come to sing,

come to laugh, come to eat.

Honor Kostas and his Katerina.

There was reckless drinking and wild dancing that day in the village. The lithe youths leaped high off the ground. The black-eyed girls sang with the voices of birds. The old women with faces carved out of marble fed his bride a spoonful of honey to sweeten her tongue.

Now they are alone, Kostas and Katerina,

her hair unbraided and scented

as the flowers of the mountain.

He turned in the dark on that night so long ago and embraced his bride for the first time. As he caressed her, he dreamed of the journey across the ocean. On her lips he tasted, as if for the last time, the sweet flavor of wild honey. And long after the shouts were silent, the last torches burned out, and the weary dancers asleep, Blind Limakis still sang, the soft echoes of his voice lingering in the darkness.

Young men eager to go,

cross the wide ocean.

Then it is too late.

They weep for the village,

for the sky and the fields,

but it is too late.

We see them no more.

They left in the morning in the cart rolling down the road to the sea. The old women wept, and the old men watched in silence. The parents tried to conceal their grief. The bells of the monastery rang on the mountain. Katerina cried beside him.

He looked back and waved for the last time, and the fading vision of his father and mother struck like arrows into his eyes. He felt in that moment he would never see them alive again.

Farewell, Kostas,

Farewell, Katerina.

Go with God

and sow your children

on the strange wild earth

of another land.

Do not forget those you leave.

His first glimpse of Chicago as the train entered the southeast steel district enveloped him in a region of grayness and gloom. Beyond a maze of tracks and shacks loomed the great gable-roofed mills. In the center of a group of stacks, a massive blast furnace lit the underbelly of the sky with flashes of flame.

Here the black snow falls, Cousin Glavas said. Here there is never any daylight, and men work like tiny bugs beside the giant furnaces. He shook his head somberly. When I first came to this country, I worked here for a few days. A man was killed beside me, crushed by an iron mold. I quit on the spot. 'Hey, Glavas,' the foreman said. 'Are you afraid? I thought Greeks were supposed to be brave.' 'Only ancient Greeks,' I said. 'I am a modern Greek, maybe a coward, but not a fool.' Quit just like that.

The doleful shading of his voice came softly to Kostas. I have come, he thought, from the place of my despair to the place of my destiny. The pane of the window was dark with the shadow of the mills, and he could see his face clearly reflected in the glass—his dark thick hair that fell across his forehead, despite his careful combing, and his grave eyes set in their deep hollows and his cleft chin and his broad neck that would not let a collar close in peace. He looked down restlessly at his big hands and wondered if the last few weeks had produced some physical change in him to match the way he felt. He could not yet disassemble the weeks of the voyage and the landing in New York, the mass of impressions and emotions.

It is a terrible-looking place, Katerina shuddered. If you had not met the boat we could never have found our way here alone. She sat across from Kostas, and he caught her watching him in the glass. The voyage had been difficult, but she had borne up well. She was a plain woman, and he found looking at her oppressive, but at least she had not whined or complained during the voyage as many of the other women had done.

I closed my restaurant to come, Glavas said. First time I have had my place closed since my sainted wife died eight years ago, God rest her soul.

I am sorry, Katerina said quickly. Kostas nodded in grave agreement. Glavas accepted their sympathy with a nervous flutter of his fingers and sat back against his seat with a sigh.

He was a small man in his early sixties, narrow-chested and stoop-shouldered with a sharply veined head and tightly fleshed cheeks. He had thin lips that he pressed grimly together or curled in a wry and crooked grin. His eyes were small and wrinkled as dried grapes, but incredibly bright as if they defied weariness and age.

The train whistle shrilled, and some children playing in the yard before a ramshackle frame house waved.

In this city, Glavas said, trust only the children under six years of age. When an older child approaches, smile to show you are friendly, but be on your guard. When an adult comes near, particularly an African or a Sicilian, prepare to defend yourself against assault. And when a policeman calls to you, hold tightly to your pocketbook.

My goodness! Katerina said.

Whom can we trust? Kostas asked.

Glavas winked one of his little dark eyes. A few Greeks, he said, but not too many.

They left the train in a cavernous terminal and assembled their few boxes of belongings and a single canvas bag into a taxi. They swept through streets darkened and dwarfed by massive buildings on either side. The sidewalks teemed with men and women, all dressed in strange and resplendent grandeur.

Katerina peered from the taxi window, her fingers clasped in excitement to her cheeks.

Kostas, Kostas, she said. Look at the beaded coats and the fur collars. The hats full of lace and flowers. They are beautiful!

This is America, Kostas said brusquely and looked quickly at Glavas, but the old man was slumped in the other corner of the taxi and appeared lost in his own thoughts.

And the shoes the women wear, Katerina said in awe. Little boots with black stockings and high heels.

That is what women wear here, Kostas said, and stared intently himself.

Katerina looked down at her own flat-heeled and shapeless shoes, and with a quick furtive motion of her legs drew them back beneath her long skirt. Will I wear shoes and stockings like that someday? she asked.

Perhaps, someday, Kostas said, and then afraid that Glavas might think they were taking too much for granted, but not very soon, he said.

There are so many automobiles, she said. They seem to rush right at us. She sat back firmly in her seat. God must be angry at men who create monsters such as this to rush back and forth.

You must not talk like that, Kostas said sharply. This is not the village now. This is America. But he spoke with more assurance than he really felt.

The face of the city changed as they drove on. The neighborhoods grew shabbier, and the streets narrower. The taxi slowed to a crawl and honked with a sound like a bleating sheep at the ominous Gypsy and Levantine merchants who ran beside the car zealously exhibiting fruit and clothing.

They stopped finally before a store whose window was bare of any decoration except a small headless plaster statue. On either side of the store were other drab frame stores with chalk-scrawled signs in the windows, and above them loomed tenements with a lattice of fire escapes along the front.

This is my restaurant, Mt. Olympus, Glavas said as they emerged from the taxi. Here I cook food fit for the palates of kings and gods and serve it to beggars and boors.

He unlocked the door, and carrying the boxes they entered a long narrow room with a single row of about twenty stools along a counter. Kostas was assailed at once by a tainted mingling of food odors and felt a stretching sickness In his stomach.

I have been closed for three days, Glavas said. We must start a fire in the stove and prepare to open early tomorrow morning. He walked briskly to the kitchen, and Kostas and Katerina followed. It was a dark and low-ceilinged room with the stench of food still more rank.

Glavas went at once to the stove, a black iron monster with a half-dozen lids. He raised a large lid in the center of the stove and threw in kindling wood from a box on the floor. He followed that with crumpled sheets of old newspaper and then a few more pieces of wood. He struck a match and dropped it through the grill.

Nothing but the best here, he said, turning back to Kostas. He pointed to a massive wooden icebox with six doors that took up almost the entire length of a wall. That was a piece of booty captured by the Greeks at Troy. You think I am fooling? A Greek junkman named Achilles Poulitis sold it to me.

They smiled a little, but the effort for Kostas was severe. He could see that Katerina was as repelled as he by the stench and the dirt.

If you thought that here all men and women work in gilded palaces, you will find out different, Glavas said with a sharper edge to his voice. You will work as I work to earn your bread. He walked to a pair of large tubs joined by a shelf of battered tin. You will work at these tubs, he said to Kostas. Here you will wash the plates and glasses and scour the pots. Katerina can peel the potatoes and help me with the cooking. He stared at them both with a look of pride and defiance. I have operated this place for twelve years almost by myself. During the rush at lunch, a girl comes in to wait on the counter, and I remain in the kitchen. The only other help I had was a man to wash the dishes. He motioned Kostas to follow him into a storeroom behind the kitchen. There are old clothes and aprons hanging there, Glavas said. ''Change into them while I take Katerina to the room I rented for you. She need not start until morning."

Yes, cousin, Kostas said, and he felt an aching wish to start, as if to establish quickly some bond to this new country. Cousin, he said, and he lowered his voice slightly so Katerina would not hear. You know I cannot read or write. He pointed a little resentfully toward the kitchen where his wife stood watching the stove. She can read and write Greek, but I can't. I am anxious to learn the language of this country.

Glavas made an impatient gesture of rejection. That will come later, he said. To make a little money and get on your feet you should concentrate for a while on working hard. He patted Kostas on the shoulder. Believe me, he said kindly, you will miss very little. The papers are full of nothing but stories about Sicilian hoodlums, crooked politicians, and wanton women who expose themselves in cinema pictures.

Yes, cousin, Kostas said, and tried to conceal his disappointment.

Glavas walked into the kitchen. Katerina came to the door of the storeroom and spoke almost shyly to her husband. Goodbye, Kostas, she said. He made a quick and silent gesture of farewell with his hand and did not look up.

That night after they closed the restaurant, Glavas and Kostas carried his belongings to the old stone tenement about a block away. The hall was black and stained by the scuffings of many feet. The stairs were rickety with rungs missing from the banisters and on the walls old paint peeled in faded strips. On each floor they passed, the corridor ran off into long tubes of darkness. On the fourth floor, Glavas left Kostas at the door of his room.

My room is one floor further up, he said trying to catch his breath from the climb. I will wake you at five o'clock in the morning. Later on we will get you an alarm clock.

Kostas nodded and said goodnight. Glavas started up the stairs. Kostas knocked on his door, and a moment later Katerina opened it and moved out of the way so he could carry in the boxes.

He put them down inside and looked slowly around the room. His first quick and unhappy impression was of the cell of a prison. Once in Thessaly during the war, after getting drunk while he was on leave, he had been locked up overnight in a basement prison. His fear and despair at being severed from the sky returned fitfully at that moment.

The room did not have a window. In one corner stood an old iron-postered bed. There was a stained basin and a dresser with a crack in the mirror, and a wicker chair with a shock of the filling visible through a rip in its seat cushion.

Katerina with a scarf knotted about her head watched him uneasily. There was a bucket of water and a bar of brown soap beside a dampened section of floor that she had been scrubbing.

I was trying to clean up a little, she said, and pushed nervously at a strand of hair that slipped from beneath the scarf.

He did not answer and removed his coat. She took it to hang on a hook behind the door. He sat down in the wicker chair and felt the strands creak beneath him.

There is no window, he said shortly.

She stood helpless to console him, and the silence stretched out between them. She moved quickly then and walked to the bed and stripped off the spread. It had been carefully made with their new linen and the quilted comforter given them by her mother on their wedding day. The bed is fresh and clean, she said eagerly. Do you know this is the first time since our marriage that we will sleep on our own sheets?

He rose and undressed silently and washed his hands and face and climbed into bed. She turned out the light and undressed in the dark. When she entered the bed, she lay still and unmoving on her own side. He stared into the blackness and waited helplessly for some glimmer of light to cut the solid and frozen dark.

How will we tell night from day? he said, and his words hung grieving in the air.

She did not answer but drew a little closer to him, a cautious and uncertain shifting of her body until her leg grazed his leg and her small bare foot touched the flesh of his ankle. He did not respond with any touch of his own, and after a moment she drew quietly away.

Glavas knocked urgently on their door sometime before five in the morning and waited in the hall while they hurriedly dressed. They walked down the stairs and heard the sounds of the building as the tenants stirred awake. There were wails of hungry babies, and the voices of adults speaking shrill, strange tongues.

In the street, the night was turning before a first faint trace of dawn splashing the rim of the dark sky. Glavas walked with a quick and nervous stride, and they had to follow rapidly to keep up.

The restaurant was cold and damp, and Glavas stirred up the banked coals in the iron stove and added thick chunks of log and a bucket of coal. He showed Kostas the level to fill the kettles with water for the coffee and explained to Katerina how to measure and mix the oatmeal.

Have some breakfast before we open, Glavas said. You will need your strength as the day goes on. I will fry you some eggs and sausage patties.

They sat and ate uneasily. Katerina spilled a thimble of cream on the counter and looked in apprehension at Glavas. He wiped it up and sought to reassure them.

You will be all right, he said. Listen to what I say and try to remember. A restaurant is like a zoo. The animals grunt and tear and rend their food. Don't get too close or you may lose a finger. He winked at them. ''Katerina can watch the coffee and the oatmeal and help clear the dishes from the counter. Kostas, make sure there are always clean saucers and cups. He paused to fill their cups with hot coffee. Our morning customers are mostly peddlers and produce men, he said. ''We do a frenzied business at lunch, and for an hour then we must run like crazy. In the afternoon we are honored by some big Irish and Polish women from the electric company who work as coil winders and assembly helpers. They are worse than any man. He opened his mouth and showed them a gap in the row of his lower teeth. One of these baboons did that with a mustard jar, swinging at a friend beside her at the moment I was serving her a plate of stew. Knocked me out for five minutes and the stew all over my jacket. He drew a large railroad watch from his pocket. It is six o'clock, he said. Time now to unlock the door. He walked to the front of the restaurant and turned the lock. He put his face to the glass and clenched his fists. Enter donkeys, he said fiercely. Come in gorillas, baboons, and assorted relatives. We are ready for you now.

Kostas looked at Katerina in shock, as if he were not sure the old man was sane. He motioned to her to gather their dishes and follow him to the kitchen. They both peered through the small circular glass in the kitchen door at the first customers who entered, a pair of shabby and dour-faced old men with sacks that they dropped inside the door. Glavas greeted them cheerfully.

Other customers entered to fill all the stools along the counter. As Kostas washed the cups and saucers, he marveled at the swift and relentless manner in which Glavas worked. The old man darted in and out of the kitchen never wasting a moment or a move. As he worked with drenchings of sweat broken across his face, he laughed and talked loudly to everyone in the ludicrous animation of a clown. In the kitchen, the contrived mirth fell away, and his face appeared gray and old. When he returned to service the patrons, the shrill laughter exploded again from his throat.

At noon, a waitress came in to help them, and in the kitchen Glavas repeated her orders in a harsh shriek and assembled them swiftly. The stools were all full, and patrons waited standing behind each one. Kostas washed dishes furiously and stacked them on trays that Katerina carried out front. Twice the plates fell from his fingers, and each time Glavas cried out and made his cross.

In the afternoon, the factory women were big and powerful, and