The Diary of Fiona J McNally

Coloured Eggs

Krystina lived in a four-bedroom house at the end of my street. You could tell it was a Greek house as soon as you stepped inside the front door. The ancient Greek script below the religious paintings gave the game away. The living area was a shrine to the Greek Orthodox Church offset by a garish red carpet. The family seemed to go in for all things gold and red, as if they lived within a large Christmas box.

Krystina’s room was defiantly non-Greek. Despite the obligatory household furniture, no doubt chosen by her parents, she had covered her walls with pictures of celebrities and added her own touch to the surroundings. Krystina was always trying to escape her Greekness. Even within the confines of her own bedroom.

When it was the Greek Easter, Krystina would seem to disappear for a whole weekend. So busy was she being encapsulated into the egg cracking ceremonies and the family reunions that it seemed as if she momentarily ceased to be. As if she had dropped out of society and escaped to her Hellenic roots like a non-person. A non-citizen.

“How was it?” I would ask upon her return to suburbia.

‘You know, the usual. Same old thing with the relatives and the eggs.”

On Saturday mornings Krystina went to Greek school. One suspected this was also an activity that was against her better judgment. It became clear by the time we were thirteen that Krystina was being schooled in the ways of a Greek wife.

‘But you already know how to speak Greek,’ I would say to her, disappointed that she wouldn’t be free to assist me in being a teenager.

‘I can speak it but I’m still learning to write it.’

What good would all this Greek knowledge do her, I wondered? Would she be able to map her way through life much more easily armed with all this Greek information and culture? Was she going to win an award for her ability to converse, her skill in painting boiled eggs?

Soon her parents enrolled her at a Greek dancing class. This took place on Sunday afternoons. A time when we would both rather have been eating ice creams and talking about boys.

‘They make me get dressed up in traditional Greek costume,” she told me. ‘I have to dance with the ugliest guy in the class.’

On cultural days at school, Krystina’s dance troupe would be asked to perform a few dances. It was bizarre to see her paraded before the front of the entire school, decked out in a peasant dress and scarves. As she dipped and jumped to the music her face betrayed her feelings. She looked sad and remote. You could almost hear her thinking ‘ how many more times do I have to leap about to hand clapping and strains of Zorba?’

We used to plot ways for Krystina to escape the path her parents had planned for her. We would try and contrive ways in which she would be able to abandon this ancient culture and ride forward on a tide of freedom. Somehow we both knew this wasn’t going to happen.

Krystina’s father was suspicious of Australian culture. He never allowed Krystina to attend overnight school excursions or day trips. I’m not quite sure what he thought would happen to her on one of these outings. Did he fear that she might start to lose some of her Greekness? In associating with her classmates at the zoo or on a bus trip, did he envisage that some of our Australianness would start to rub off on his daughter and that she would slowly but surely start to become divorced form her heritage? Were we seen as stealing her ethnicity, her very core?

I suspected strongly that at the core of Krystina there was no Greek at all. I imagined that what lay at the heart of her was a very different individual to the one her father dressed in costume and spoke to in Greek. Maybe if one could journey to the centre of her being they would find a female version of Russell Coight, knocking back tinnies and watching the NRL.

This fatherly fear and suspicion was not reserved for field trips. Mr. Papadopoulos disliked Krystina associating with Australians after school. I could tell, despite his polite conversation and the offer of food, that he wanted me to leave. He wanted me to stop seeking out his daughter and allow her to make Greek friends. Greeks were thin on the ground in our year at school. She would have been hard pressed to find a whole bunch to hang out with, even if she had wanted to.

Her mother however, was another story altogether. She wasn’t atypical of other Greek mothers I had met. She didn’t spend hours cooking or decorating herself with gold medallions. What she did do very well though, was lurk. She seemed to hide in rooms like a spy, watching, listening for any discrepancies in our speech, anything that became too unexpectedly Australian, so she could throw me out of the house. I knew she could speak English. She usually chose not to when in my company. She would revert to long tracts of Greek and her voice would get higher and higher in pitch until it felt like the roof might blow off.

A favourite phrase of hers was “yia di!”

She would yell this phrase at Krystina constantly. From one end of the house to the other, we could hear the interminable “Yia di! Yia di!”

For years I had thought of it as slightly exotic-sounding. As some catch phrase belonging to a secret club might sound. Every time the words resonated around us I would imagine that those two Greek words held such important meaning for Krystina, even if it meant she was being reprimanded. One day I asked for a translation.

Krystina laughed. “It means “what”,’she said. ‘That’s all. She’s saying ‘what? what?’ to me all the time.”

Suddenly any respect I had for Mrs. P vanished. The once alluring sound of ‘yia di’ now represented an uncouth cry that seemed to brand this woman as some kind of nag, some sort of Greek yobbo. Why had she been following us around her home for years yelling “what” at Krystina like she was deaf? Like we had been saying things we hadn’t intended her to hear?

She never laughed when things were funny either. I soon learnt that she couldn’t hide behind the language barrier because Krystina or her sister Voula would soon provide their mother with a hasty translation. She would simply shake her head gravely, as if what we found funny was somehow exceedingly serious and shocking. She would look at the three of us with her dark eyes and shake her head soberly as if we had taken the joke too far and should cease our laughter immediately.

Krystina once confided to me that her one saving grace was that her mother worked three afternoons a week. This meant that for almost one whole day out of seven, the house would be free of her parents and her mother’s ever-suspicious eye. It was on those afternoons that we would crank the stereo up until the walls shook or hang out the windows and feel the spray of the ocean on our cheeks. It was also on one of these occasions that Krystina decided to try smoking. Standing underneath the house in the safety of the basement she took her first few puffs. I watched in horrified fascination. Too scared to participate but intrigued all the same.

We laughed as Krystina doubled over in a coughing fit and then had another drag. What would her mother say if she caught us underneath the house with a packet of Benson and Hedges? Would she cast me as the villain? Would I be banished from the house forever and a day? We cranked up our portable stereo and laughed and coughed to strains of her brother’s Fleetwood Mac album. It seemed amazingly cool to be puffing on an illicit substance while listening to a band that hadn’t had a hit for ten years. How very retro of us. How hip.

We thought we were even cooler at school discos. The in-crowd had organised a committee to decorate the walls of the school hall. The names of bands that were currently popular had been painted in fluorescent colours and positioned strategically underneath flashing neon lights. Krystina and I had sneaked in and added our own contributions. We erected names like Dolly Parton, Slim Dusty and Julio Iglesias. We thought this was the funniest thing in the world and laughed until the tears ran down our cheeks and we rolled around on the floor.

‘You’re becoming very childish, “Krystina’s sister Voula told her one day. “It’s that bloody Australian kid you’re hanging around with. You were never like this before.”

When we were sixteen, Krystina met a Lebonese boy at the mall. We had taken to visiting the pizza hut for lunch on Saturdays and he just happened to work there. He took an instant shine to Krystina and her exotic features. It soon became apparent that any future meetings they would have, would have to be clandestine and so the two of us embarked on a campaign of subterfuge in order to allow the relationship to develop. Ahmed was as far removed from the ideal Krystina’s parents had for her as could possibly be contemplated. If they thought I was a pernicious influence in her life, one could only imagine what they would make of him. Mince meat probably.

As time passed, Krystina and Ahmed became inseparable. They met after school, they made excuses for Krystina to sneak out on weekends and they lied quite aggressively to her parents. One day Krystina told her father she was going into town to study for our yearly exams. She told him she would be ready to be picked up at 5 o’ clock when the library closed. She had in fact spent four hours at Ahmed’s brother’s house and they had both walked back to the library at 4.30pm. Krystina had supposed her father wouldn’t show up until at least the designated time and was sitting happily entwined around Ahmed when Mr. Papadopolous strode in at 4.45pm.

I never got the full account of what ensued but it would appear that sparks flew and for the following two weeks Krystina wasn’t allowed out of the house, except to go to school. Short of playing truant, there became no way for her to communicate with her paramour as her parents had banned her from using the phone. I called one night to ask about homework and was unceremoniously disconnected by her mother. During school days she was very quiet and withdrawn.

‘What if they keep this up?” she asked me in desperation, ‘what if they never let me see him again?”

It all seemed very melodramatic at the time but who knew what her parents had planned? Not only had Krystina defied them in seeing a boy who wasn’t Greek, but she had been lying to them for months on end. Her Greekness was in serious jeopardy. There was even talk of sending her back to Greece and finding her a husband.

‘They did that to Con,” she told me. “They arranged a marriage for him and now he’s stuck with Anna.”

Con was Krystina’s older brother. Always a bit on the wayward side at school, the Papadopolous’s were not taking any chances that he might bring home a girl from another culture, so they had arranged for him to marry a Greek girl from the old country. While relatively attractive, Anna the chosen bride, turned out to be a hopeless cook with limited intelligence. Krystina said the newly weds were driving eachother crazy.

“But there’s no escape you see. He can’t divorce her. They spent thousands of dollars on that wedding and the families are determined it will work out. What if they do this to me? What if I end up married to some sleazy Spiro, forced to churn out babies? I’d go mad!”

Eventually Ahmed got tired of waiting for Krystina’s exile to end and he drifted on to someone else. Although I could tell she was devastated, Krystina saw that it was hopeless to go against her parents a second time so she withdrew into a quiet and controlled existence. When her parents finally decided to allow her to go shopping again or visit the city, we would spend quiet afternoons at the movies or trawling through clothes shops. Krystina would always talk about travelling and escape. Such big dreams for someone so restricted.

I always hoped that her dreams would carry her away from the prison she was in. I hoped that she would find it in herself somewhere to rebel against the path her parents had planned for her and break out to a new life. How hard did you have to hope before something came true?

By the time high school came to an end, Krystina had been back to Greece for a holiday and her parents had arranged a marriage for her to a 30 year old Greek man who couldn’t speak English. He arrived two months before their wedding, during which time I hardly saw her at all.

The wedding itself was an elaborate affair with 300 guests. I remember crowding into the Greek Orthodox Church with the other guests and watching as Krsytina and Vasilli exchanged crowns and their vows. I wandered as I stood at the back of the church, whether or not she understood anything the priest was saying. The service was entirely in Ancient Greek. I wasn’t sure whether to know what one was committing themselves to was better or worse in this situation. Maybe to not understand was a blessed relief. Maybe she was standing at the altar dreaming of being far, far away.

After the wedding and a short honeymoon in Crete, Krystina seemed to retreat into a world of Greek suburbia. She was no longer available for an afternoon at the movies or a shopping trip. In fact it was as if I had never known her. Our worlds moved as far apart as it is possible to imagine and I left the town in order to find my own way in the world.

As time passed, I heard from family or friends that there had been sightings of her. Someone saw her in the mall once, she appeared in the society pages of a local newspaper, a guest at a Greek christening and once my father said he saw her getting into her car at the supermarket. But she was lost to me.

Years later in another city, I was walking through a mall, when I saw her. Head held high, she was striding towards a boutique dressed fashionably in a suede skirt and jacket. Gone were the drab clothes of Greek housewife that she had started to wear after her marriage and gone was that look of the hunted that I had come to equate with her.

I stopped in the middle of the street and stared. It was her trade mark ringlets that had caught my eye and something about the spring in her step that had reminded me of the person I had known in our early school years. As I hurried across the mall towards her I smiled. I wasn’t just meeting an old friend, I was greeting an escapee.

posted by Fiona McNally @ 8/09/2005 01:57:00 pm