20

Evangelia

Turks and Greeks at Loggerheads

August 1974

Tasty coffee, delicious sweets – there’s a lot to thank those new Australians for! But it’s not all fun and games at the newly opened Consulate General for the Republic of Turkey, with Greeks descending en masse to protest what they refer to as the illegal invasion of Cyprus by Turkish soldiers. The long disputed Mediterranean island is now the scene of chaos and confusion as the United Nations seeks to broker a ceasefire between Turkish forces in the north and the recently installed pro-Enosis government in the south. Bolstered by signs in Greek that this reporter was unable to decipher, protesters donned head-to-toe black as they hurled abuse and rotten fruit at the locked consular doors.

Northcote resident Andreas Georgiou told reporters that the protest was to voice the concerns of Melbourne’s wider Greek community at the treatment of their fellow Hellenes, as reports emerge of Cypriots from both sides being expelled across the buffer zone that has split the country in two since the early 1960s.

‘The whole community is here,’ Mr Georgiou said. ‘My whole family, even the babies. We are here in solidarity with our people.’

A counter protest is rumoured, with suggestions Turkish-Cypriots will stage a similar action against the alleged mistreatment of their own compatriots. With many of the protesters taking time away from their day jobs working the fruit and vegetable stalls at the markets, if there’s one thing this reporter is certain of, they won’t be wanting for projectiles.

Representatives from the consulate office said that services would continue as usual, but to please telephone first.

Evangelia pulled the faded newspaper article closer, squinting at the grainy image accompanying it. She could make out her father, his face grave, and she supposed the infant in his arms was her. A small child grappling with a little Greek flag was most likely Lydia, her pudgy cheeks beaming for the camera in complete discord with the severity of the rest of the group. She recognised a number of people, faces discernible from the muddy waters of her memory, people she’d called aunty and uncle despite them having no real familial ties. Where was she? She scanned the faces again, then pushed herself back in the rickety library chair, her eyes tracking upwards to the great dome of the state library. Her mother was not there.

It had been Carole’s idea to approach the library and seek out any place her mother might be mentioned in the clutter and collections of the state. They’d returned to her with a long list of suggestions: well-known broadsheets, Greek language newspapers, things – so many things – that had been donated by people who, unlike her, had discovered boxes of memories left behind by departed parents. And this, from a university student newspaper, cloistered by articles about controversial lecturers and the unwinding of the Vietnam War. She had spent days sifting through them all, bent over the desk as around her present-day university students jabbed at their mobiles and napped over their textbooks. She had pored through them with an eagle’s eye, but still she could not find her. Her mother was not here. Her mother was not anywhere. Maybe she was out of shot, a slight outlier the camera had failed to capture. Maybe she was somewhere nearby, with the other women, preparing food as Evangelia always seemed to remember. Not quite a part of anything but off to one side, slicing up halva or waiting patiently over a briki. She’d made coffee while the world grew wings, Evangelia thought, but there wasn’t a story in that.

Lydia might know, her memory blessed with the advantage of her slight seniority, but the sisters had not spoken since the meat platter incident and Evangelia refused to be the one to broker peace. They’d set up their buffer zone, somewhere north of Bell Street, and both were abiding by the terms of the dispute. There was no phone contact, no commenting on the Facebook posts of mutual acquaintances if the other had got there first. If they were to cross paths at school pick-ups, they looked away, either to their mobiles or at some distant curiosity, until they were no longer within speaking distance. The children were to follow this protocol too, proxies in a conflict they did not quite understand, though Evangelia sometimes arrived at the school gates to find them huddled together conspiratorially. She would call their mobiles, watching as they shrank guiltily from their cousins in a way that made her feel both vindicated and sad, and she would blame Lydia for this too.

It was strange, this not talking to each other, and for the first time since she could remember Evangelia felt something like freedom. For hadn’t she always been there, Lydia of the raised eyebrows and judgemental lips? Stabbing a finger at all the ways Evangelia was getting things wrong. The way she’d worn her hair as a child, the fear that kept her from shaving her legs well into high school. All the things her mother had loved in her, but that made her too embarrassing for her elder sister. Lydia who had somehow succeeded in having her last name changed on the school roll so that she was Lydia George, exotic and gregarious, and nothing like stubby little Evangelia Georgiou, whose name confounded everyone and whose moustache sparkled in the schoolyard sun and who couldn’t shake the woggy accent everyone teased her for. Who kept the lunches their mother made for them instead of throwing them in the garbage bin like Lydia did each morning. Who said somethink instead of something and practised her kalamatianós by herself in the backyard while Lydia was off pretending she wasn’t related to them. Who had spent weekends helping pickle olives and turn the buckets of backyard tomatoes into saltsa while Lydia was off at university learning from textbooks how exciting it suddenly was to be multicultural, then returning home to tell them how they were doing it all wrong. That they were meant to be having parades and linking arms with all the other cultures of the city instead of shuttering themselves away in their diasporic little community and failing to learn the language properly. Who had never quite been exactly the person Lydia expected her to be because this person changed, constantly, and she could never work it all out even from the youngest of ages. Who had woken night after night as a child to the sight of a dragon, ferocious and startling, slithering through the bedroom towards her, only to disappear into the shadows when her shrieks sent their mother scurrying into the room again and again. And there had been Lydia, laughing in the bed beside her, taunting her sister about her nightmares. The matáki her mother strung up above the bed didn’t seem to work and each night the dragon returned, silent and serpentine, its eyes on Evangelia alone. That Evangelia – that Evangelia felt free and she felt angry and she couldn’t for the life of her work out where the hell her mother was supposed to be.

Evangelia collected her things and walked to the photocopier to make copies of the article. At least she would have something to report back to Carole and the rest of the class, proof of the gaping nothingness of her mother’s life: a vacant newspaper clipping and a fraction of a factory story. She laid the page face down in the machine, closed the lid, then watched it spit out the reproductions. The pages shot out of the machine, and each time, her mother was still not there.