Excerpts from Harlot's Sauce

1) Gregori’s mother was known for her tasty moussaka, a merit of which she was proud. The detail that two of her four dinner guests “would not, could not,” eat cheese, “could not, would not” deter her from presenting her best recipe, the scent of which unambiguously wafted through the communal hallway of the building.

 

"I smell cheese," pronounced my father the moment we stepped in. He looked at me like I was Brutus. "Jee-zus Christ, Patricia! Don’t tell me they don’t know I hate cheese!"

 

"I told them, I swear!" I whispered desperately.

 

My grandmother wailed, "It stinks in this hall! Oh, my God, what are they trying to feed us!?"

 

"Shhh! Be quiet!' my mother hissed. 'Somebody’s coming! They’ll hear you. Don’t make a scene, I‘m warning you both!"

 

3) I was accustomed to seeing Nonnie dress cheerfully and I had no idea she was the pioneer of bright-coloured clothing for the middle-class, senior woman. Most of her clothing she made herself, which explained how she’d gotten the shades she wanted. She wore matching costume jewellery and matching accessories, too. If she had a red jacket, white blouse and a white skirt, she wanted red enamel earrings, red shoes and a red handbag. To enhance her ensembles, every week, my grandmother had her hair ‘done.’  ‘Done,’ meant the salon would tease up her pure white hair, smooth it back down and spray it from a bottle labelled, Old-Biddy Hair Gum, until Nonnie’s hair was literally unbendable. What they did next was unclear. They called it, “toning.“  And… I think… they’d say magic words over it, so that the stiff whiteness that was once a head of human hair, tinged blue or purple.  Nonnie‘s ‘done’  hair looked and felt  like blueberry-flavour candy floss. 

4)...an uninitiated tourist on a short holiday didn’t know these same men 'worked the beaches' all summer, in persistent pursuit of new plunder. It was these fishermen who had the most chance of going home with an unwary octopus, hit well, softened up and dangling from a string, ready to be fried....After observing kamakia (fishermen) that first summer and every visit to a Greek beach since, the best advice I can give to all unattached women travelling to Greece is this - everything there in moderation, especially the sun, the ouzo and the men. They’re great in small doses, but too much and you might get a bellyache later.

5)......"I was twelve years old when it happened. We didn’t have a television back then and there was no news of the overthrow in the newspapers. We tried to find information on the radio, but they’d stopped all broadcasts. Just like that, the radio went dead. We ran downstairs to my grandparents’ apartment, because their radio could get the BBC. While the adults listened to the BBC broadcast, my brother and I had to keep watch for anybody who might tell the police we were listening to foreign radio. People were being taken away to prison for less. They even arrested Mikis Theodorakis.”

Mikis Theodorakis is known throughout the world for his music scores to films like Serpico and Zorba the Greek, but he was also the leader of a liberal youth movement in Greece. He'd vehemently opposed the junta...

 
6) ...Then, I heard Gregori's voice. "You know,"  he mused, "everything’s gone wrong since Patricia got here. I wonder if her grandmother put ‘the evil eye’ on us. She didn’t want Patricia to come."

"God forbid. Light a candle at the church before you leave, just in case. You don’t want that on you, especially while you‘re on the plane," cautioned the aunt.

We left for Athens the next day and three days later, we were back in

 New York.

Copyright Patricia Volonakis Davis   All rights reserved.