excerpt
and the boys can hardly contain their joy at reuniting with their
father and becoming a whole family again. Minutes go by that feel
like eons. Then, after the hugs and exclamations of welcome and relief,
their dad invites them to walk to his house, and grabbing the
bundle of clothes their mother has put together and their one old
suitcase, he guides them to toward Sikies, a suburb on the northern
side of the city.
Eteocles and Nicolas each carry a small bag with their own few
clothes as the happy family slowly trudges uphill way to their new
home, which turns out to be an old barn the owners used as a storage
facility before they rented it to their father for living space. The walk
has taken half an hour on a steep uphill route and the boys are very
tired now. As they sit by the table in the middle of the room, they
take in their new house, just one room about four meters by four, on
one side a small kitchen with a hearth where mom will cook their
food and warm the place by burning the wood which is stored in a
pile outside the eastern wall, in the center of the room a table and
four chairs, and on the west side of the room, a bed for their parents
and one bed for the two boys, who will sleep together, one with his
head to the south and the other to the north.
After they eat a small snack their dad has prepared in advance
for them, they go to bed at once, and sleep overtakes their exhausted
eyelids until the next morning. As they slip into unconsciousness on
their first night under the metal roof of the building, they listen to
the strange sounds the rain makes as it falls on the sheet metal and
soothe themselves with dancing songs and arias and melodic hymns
for the little time they are kept awake by the noise of the raindrops.
Their eyelids close to open only in the morning when they face the
Salonica sun for the first time, rising from the top of a huge castle in
the east, a castle Eteocles vows to explore as soon as he can.
But now the boys have their immediate surroundings to explore.
On one side of the rented house is a huge rock six or seven meters
high and on the other, the southern side, is a small garden with a fig
tree, leafless on this cold winter morning but with a promise to bloom
soon, in March, and with luck have ripe sweet fruit by July and August.
It is a windy morning. The overnight rain has stopped …
Libros Libertad 