Chapter---One-----
My attempts to locate my birth place in Greece on various maps were made to no avail. I could find no way to comprehend it, no way to wrap my mind around it completely. When I left as a young girl, somber villagers pulled me aside and spoke in low, hushed voices, repeatedly reminding me:
Never forget where you’re from.
I read somewhere once that when something traumatic happens, a chemical is released in the brain, causing one to vividly remember, even many years later, every detail about the experience. Leaving my mother in Greece, boarding the plane en route to the states, adapting to a new culture, these events were as fresh in my mind as if they had just happened yesterday. Images of the childhood I left behind pulsed and burned within me. I could not get away from them, could not fully allow myself to relax into the new life I had been given.
And all my years in America had been spent clinging to that reminder, clinging to the hope that I would one day return to the land I knew so well.
Yet the village did not seem to exist anywhere.
As my mind grew tangled with thoughts, I struggled to make some sense of the situation.
Zoya, (my adopted mother) in her penchant for taunting me, often told me that my village no longer existed. With a cruel smile, she described a horrible earthquake that sent the entire village into the sea, killing everybody I knew and loved. Upon saying these words, Zoya would step back, her eyes full of mocking laughter, as she searched my face for the slightest change of expression. She knew exactly what she was doing. She seemed to want me to feel pain; her words were meant to jab and cut at the deep wounds that had already been engraved upon my soul.
Whenever she said these things, my ears heard the vicious words, but my heart tightened in my chest, as if shielding itself, shutting out all traces of matters both dark and shattering. I refused to let Zoya inside. I could not bring myself to believe the things she said. Every aspect of her being rung untruthful to me. At the same time, I couldn’t help but worry about my family.
Where was my mother? Was she lying at the bottom of the sea, pushed there by the violent shudders of the earth?
As a child, I remembered that we did, in fact, experience earthquakes in our tiny village. Did Zoya know that we had them there? Though I tried to keep myself from falling prey to her horrible words, there were times in which I worried what she said was true. My first entrance in the home, Peter, my adoptive brother who was also from Greece and I would speak in the only language I knew, if I was sick or fearful, Peter would be the one I would run to, Zoya could not stand secrecy.
However, as I grew older, I started to realize that everything she told me lacked reality. As a young girl, I looked out the window of my room and squinted my eyes at all the houses, wondering if all the people in them struggled with the same stark realities.
When I was fourteen years old, the tides shifted into another direction entirely, and the pattern of isolation and oppression was no more; Zoya’s reign seemed to be reaching an end.
There is no certainty as to when exactly Zoya’s life officially began to unravel. It might have been from the day she met me at the airport, or perhaps it was the day she retired from her work as a nurse.
Regardless of what it was, at times it seemed that she took great pleasure in destroying herself. It was almost as if the alcohol she consumed endowed her with a kind of power. Through her vicious actions and slurred speech, she freely tossed a variety of vulgarities and insults in every direction. Her resentment was at its highest. “You are a dirty little peasant girl that your own mother didn’t want,” said Zoya with eyes full of hate.
From the day I arrived, my existence seemed to pose threat to her. Since Shully had always wanted a little girl, my entrance placated that desire; however, Zoya never felt the same. She resented my adoptive father, Shully’s adoration of me. She seemed to resent the fact that I had walked into their world. “You are a witch, a little devil, trying to take my husband away from me, with your big eyes and long eyelashes,” she would say.
With alcohol hazily jumbling the cells in her brain, she would point and yell at me, accusing me of being Shully’s mistress. This occurred on quite a few occasions. I simply stood there, listening to her words, knowing from experience that if I remained still enough, she would stop. There was no way to defend myself against such accusations. I didn’t even know what the word “mistress” meant. However, even without that knowledge, her jealously was blaringly apparent to me. I did not know what I had done to be deserving of such torment. A child, I had no choice except to bear it.
The morning hours were the only ones in which her right-minded capabilities were present. There was a normalcy to her, a touch of togetherness screwed in tight by the steel of her cold, sharp mind. She went about the house, engaging herself in chores and the cooking of meals, as if there was some semblance of sanity within her.
As the day rolled forward, all that changed. With each drink she consumed, the layers of polish wore off, and she became another person entirely. The cool, placidness of her gaze was replaced with such vibrant intensity, such crazed disorder and compulsion. Her perfect hair became a disheveled mess. Mad vibrations twisted their way around the house, casting a dark and listless shadow in every corner.
By the time evening crept in, she was a raging alcoholic, consumed by the burning desire to taunt, enflame, and ravage. The more drunk she became, the more my brother and I feared her.
Since we weren’t allowed to watch television, Peter and I would each be in our separate rooms during the afternoons and into the evening. And though the confines of my four walls were, at times, quite suffocating, I was relieved to be shut away from the swirl of rage that was Zoya.
