Demetra Vaka

“ I found her seated on a couch, all clad in white satin, holding Nouri Pasha’s son fast in her arms.
“Come! come! yavroum, come to see him. Isn’t he wonderful, and isn’t Allah good to me?”
“He is a nice baby; but because you have him you will not go to Paris with me, and you will never, never see the world.”
She gazed up at me as if we had never talked of Paris. “Oh, yes, Paris,” she murmured dreamily. “That was for my selfish pleasure. But now,” she continued with a thrill in her voice, “now I am doing something for the world.” ”

“ That year humanized me, so to speak, and made me understand the reason for much that I used to laugh at before—such, for example, as the spinster’s devotion to her rector, to settlement work, or even to a parrot, a cat, or a dog. Whenever now I see a woman in a carriage with a dog on her lap, I may join with those who laugh at her; but at the same time I wonder if it may not be poverty and loneliness of life which make that woman, rich in money, lavish the treasures of her heart on a dumb creature. ”

“ It came over me how unlike a Greek child she was, and how very Turkish.
“Djimlah!” I cried, “you are not, and you shall not be my equal before God.”
She crossed her hands on her breast and became lost in meditation. After awhile she said:
“There is no other God but God—and we are all His children. So they told me and I believe it, don’t you?”
56 I shook my head. “There is Allah, and there is God,” I replied. “And I am a Greek, and you are a Turk—and the Turks are very cruel people.” ”

“ Yes! they would rather meet their death in the merciless but clean sea, than fall, living, into the hands of the vile Turkish soldiery. Oh! my God—my Christian God—how can you permit it?”
He would bow his head on his arms and remain motionless, until the feeling which was choking him had passed. Then, in a subdued tone, he would resume:
“Crete! Crete! brave, indomitable Crete—always victorious, yet always handed back to the Turks by Christian Europe. My beautiful Crete, when shalt thou be free?” ”

“ On this first visit, Sitanthy told me her history. She was the only child of the only son of the old general and his hanoum. Her father was killed in one of those wars, unrecorded by history, which the sultan wages against his unruly subjects in remote, unmapped corners of Asia. But, if these wars are not recorded by history, their record is written with indelible ink in the hearts of the Turkish women; for every one means the loss of brothers, fathers, husbands, and sons, whose deaths are reported, if at all, long after they have been laid away in unknown graves. ”

“ Brought up on books and nourished on dreams, I had a poor preparation with which to fight the battle of life, particularly in a foreign country, where everything was different, and difficult both to grasp and to manipulate. The only factor in my favour was my Greek blood, synonymous with money-making ability; for we Greeks have always been merchants, even when we wore chlamidas and reclined in the agora, declaiming odes to the gods, talking philosophy, or speculating on the immortality of our souls. ”

“ She had never crossed the threshold of a haremlik; and to her all Turks, be they men, women or children, were pestiferous beings. She hated them as loyally and as fervently as she worshipped her Christian God, and adored her own flag. She was a Greek of the old blood, who could believe nothing good of those who, four hundred years before, had conquered her people, and beheaded her patriarch.
And now, because of her daughter’s misbehaviour, she was forced to obey the summons of a Turkish woman. ”

“ MISDEEDS I DID miss Djimlah and Chakendé and Nashan, yet the halaïc made up for a great deal, and what is more, knowing now that some day she would go to heaven and meet her Greek lover, I was telling her the Greek history, or rather that part of the Greek history where the Greeks were intermarrying with the gods.
It is a pity that the world should be so large, and that we should have to go from place to place, leaving behind those we have learned to love. ”

“ In the East, we talk of these things openly, as common occurrences; and since my intimacy with Djimlah I had unconsciously learned a great deal about Turkish customs.
The affairs of the halaïc quite absorbed me. I watched her carefully. She never looked sad, or even tired. She performed her menial duties as if they were pleasant tasks, like arranging flowers in vases. She did everything, from being the donkey of the well to beating the rugs, washing the linen, and scrubbing the floors.
In the early fall, toward sunset one day, I met her for the first time outside the garden wall. ”

“ He was fourteen years older than I, and he, too, like my uncle lived in the past. His past, however, went beyond my uncle’s past; and from him I was to learn, not of the woes of Greece, but of the glory of Greece, of her golden age, and of the time when she, Queen of the World, was first in civilization.
My horizon was gilded also by the Greek mythology—that wonderful Greek mythology, which to my brother was living, not dead. He spoke one day in such a way of Olympus that I exclaimed:
“You talk as if Olympus really existed, and were not only mythology.”
“Of course, it exists,” he replied. ”

“ Father Arsenius looked at me with a humorous twinkle in his eyes, and I laughed aloud to hear how the Greek saint had got the better of the Turkish pasha.
“I have been here for fifty years now,” Father Arsenius went on presently; “and my wish is to die in the service of my saint.”
“Do you think that when I am sold to him, he will take care of me?” I asked.
“I do not think so—I know so. His power is omnipotent; and his kindness to people is wonderful. When there is any mortal disease among them, he leaves here, goes out and fights for them.” ”

“ One night, he told us of his experience when, in disguise, he had managed to penetrate into the tekhe of the dervishes of Stamboul and witness one of their secret ceremonies. It was one to which the most orthodox Mussulmans alone were admitted, and a Christian took his life in his hand if he tried to be present. He described the ceremony as something weird but not unpleasant, as something worth seeing.
There are people in the world who add splendour to whatever they describe, a splendour which is in their hearts and minds and not in the seen thing. Such a man was Damon Kallerghis. ”

“ These were the words chanted, from a minaret near by, in the shrill sweet voice of a young muezzin, as I emerged from my compartment of the Oriental Express, in Constantinople, two days later.
My soul answered to this call of the East. I felt as if I should like to throw myself on a prayer-rug, face Mecca, and cry with the young muezzin, “Allah-hu-akbar!” ”

“ Like you, he was a Greek, and like you he said things about nymphs and goddesses. He said that I was one of them, and he loved me. Some day soon I was to be his. But in our household then there was another man who vowed that no infidel should possess me. We were living at the time over the hill, in the outskirts of the forest of Belgrade. One night when the moon was at its waning, like the night you saw me in the garden, that man killed my lover. I buried him myself—in the forest of Belgrade—and, have tended his grave for these seven years. ”

“ I desired to become an American myself, considering it a great honour, as in the olden days people came from all over the world to Greece, to become that country’s citizens. I started my Americanism by adopting its brusqueness—it is an unfortunate fact that one is as likely to imitate the faults of those one admires as the virtues—but brusqueness which is so characteristic of America is mitigated by its young blood and by its buoyancy, and we of the old bloods can very little afford that trait. ”

“ He had taught me the Greek Revolution as no book could ever have done; and he had given me an idea of the big things expected of men. He had given me a worship for my race amounting to superstition, and bequeathed to me a hatred for the Turks which would have warped my intelligence, had I not been blessed almost from my infancy with a power of observing for myself, and also had not good fortune given me little Turkish Kiamelé as a constant companion. ”

“ Chakendé did not speak with dislike of the Turks to me. She looked upon them entirely as her people. “We have become one race,” she said. “They are full of our blood, and we are full of theirs. Besides, we are of the same faith.”
I could see, in spite of Djimlah’s affection for me, and the old hanoum’s kindness and tolerance, and of the politeness of all the Turks toward us, that they held a Christian to be inferior to a Mohammedan. ”

“ She sat down on a stump and cuddled me in her lap; and I, pushing aside her dress at the throat, kissed her where she was the prettiest.
“Why are you a halaïc?” I moaned. “Why do you have to be a donkey—you who are beautiful as a Greek nymph?”
Her face softened, her eyes became misty, and her lips quivered, yet remained wreathed in smiles. Silently she patted me, and I spoke again of the cruelty of her position.
“Well, well, yavroum, you see the old people are very poor. They have no money this month to engage a donkey, and the men on this place are too old for such hard work. ”

“ One summer I spent in a working girl’s vacation home, where all the girls were shop girls, and where I met the proletariat of the New World on an equal footing. And once I spent the entire four months visiting in the mountains of North Carolina, where I learned how much more American money is needed for schools there than in Constantinople, where it goes, not to civilize the Turks but to educate at the least possible expense to themselves the children of well-to-do Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians—especially the first. ”

“ I was only four years old when the icon was sent, but I fell an immediate victim to its beauty. Had it represented St Gregory or St Aloysius, my devotion would have been the same. It is always thus with us: scratch a Greek and you will find a pagan.
However, when my mother told me that she was going to send for St George of the Bells, I raised no objection. I knew enough of his deeds to have a respectful fear of him. Among the orthodox Greeks, especially among those who, like us, lived on the sea of Marmora, to send for a saint is an awe-inspiring act. ”