Antonia

   A story

I returned to the place of my birth several times, and, when I did, I asked friends who knew folks whose name or personally had stuck to my memory, and, just out of curiosity, I wanted to know what happened to them. One of those folks, Giorgos, close to my age, felt like talking that afternoon, sitting his seventh floor balcony that surveyed the town, the harbor and the ocean beyond. His wife brought fruit and coffee, and he was in a talkative mood, I asked his what happened to a woman who sold sweets during the war, and her shop the most important spot in the neighborhood. But on with the story.

           Antonia was a short fat woman, who, with her husband Andreas, ran a small sweet shop in our neighborhood just before and during the war years. She was short (as I said), and fat (as I also said), while Andreas, her husband, was tall and spindly, but these two odd characters matched well, for they totally lacked what you might call personality. You don’t remember anything about them except their physical shapes (and those were noticeable!), for, in their shop it wasn’t themselves that mattered, but their sweets! You didn’t go in their shop to visit THEM, but to buy what they made, which was wholesome, artistic, appetizing, nutritious, extremely tasty, and devoutly to be wished rice pudding! Nice, this may not be saying much to a glutted with deserts American, but to an eleven year old boy (and other boys of that age) during the war, or even in pre-war days, it was the utmost of gastronomical delights, what God himself must have dumped somewhere in heaven (I don’t try to sound idolatrous here—just an exaggeration) for the delectation of boys, girls, youths, older men and women, and any individual who lived in that particular place at that particular time.

           Before I go on, let me say that Andreas and Antonia didn’t just made rice pudding, but other sweets common to Greek sweet shops, such as baklava, powdered cookies (kourambiedes), “penny cakes” (paste), and loukoumades, a Greek donut version without a hole in the middle. It was for these delicacies that their sweet shop was better known than the other two sweet shops in town, both located in the main street (the pazari or agora) that crossed the middle of town. One of those was called Katsis—that was the name of the owner—but at least young kids like us didn’t patronize it because it was more expensive, didn’t make rice pudding or loukoumades, and its owners preferred to sell in quantity. The townspeople of higher class went there, while we youngsters liked Andreas’s and Antonia’s shop much more because you could go in there equipped with only a few pennies and come out with a paper cone full of donuts, soaked in honey and sprinkled with cinnamon. Oh, the taste of it!

Another convenience, at least for me personally, was that Antonia’s place was just around the corner from where we lived then, one or two years before the war. Even when we moved to another neighborhood, it still was within walking distance, just a few short blocks, three minutes’ walk at the most. I usually did go there by myself, but occasionally I ganged up with the youths of the neighborhood and we raided the shop, spending whatever change we had in our pockets, ordering as many dishes of rice putting or donut cones as we could eat. Two or three of us would go there, each ordering one dish, then another, and another, etc., until the change in everybody’s pocket was gone. This was both an advantage and a disadvantage—for one or two of those gamins (I don’t know what else to call them and be polite) had perpetual empty pockets and lived off the contents of the pockets of the others. So when it came to sharing, it wasn’t “share and share alike,” as they say. It was “eat as eat can,” and the devil take the wealthiest. I won’t name names, but a false one for one of them will do—Kokkinos (the Red one). Kokkinos must have had a birth defect, an endless gut or something. Either because he starved at home, or because of sheer gluttony, he was never filled. And when two or three of us headed for Antonia’s, he managed to get wind of the matter, and trail us like a dog. We changed lanes, pretending we were going somewhere else, but no, when we sneaked back to Antonia’s lane, there he was standing outside. We couldn’t help but let him follow us inside, and of course he helped himself, cleaning out dish after dish of rice pudding. Antonia served those that seemed hungrier and finished their dishes faster than others. The quick eaters prevailed in this contest, but the pay was another matter. The pockets emptied—Antonia insisted that we do that inspecting our pockets personally, until she saw them turned inside out—and, if there was credit left, it was OK with her, because our fathers would be charged, and she knew how to get the news to them.

           During the war, when devastating starvation came to our island and just about all other shops closed, for there wasn’t much to sell, Antonia and Andreas managed to keep theirs open. Rumor had it that they bought sugar and flour (and other such items) in the black market, but in those days it was impossible to tell who was doing what and where things came from. Any kind of food became scarce, and anything made of sugar prohibitively so. Our mothers dissolved molasses in their afternoon coffees (read: grounded roasted chick peas), which turned out nauseatingly sweet, and undrinkable. But we kids didn’t care what the adults wanted, we still craved for Antonia’s rice pudding, and she had her dishes displayed right there, behind her plate glass window. She served the donuts too, but only evenings, and not every evening, for the Italians had placed a curfew and the evening hours were shortened; besides, who wanted to go out and risk getting arrested. Money also was scarce, and you needed plenty of it to buy even such trifles as a dish of ride pudding. It was Kokkinos who came up with plenty of that inflated currency by selling stuff he had stolen from the warehouses, or from the Italian and German trucks left unguarded at night, risking his life, but he was such a devil and hunger in his house so pressing he had no alternatives. His father was a drunken fisherman, idle now because the Italians couldn’t let him fish at night, and his mother did domestic chores for families, including ours, and she made some tiny income, enough to buy her numerous offspring greens and olive oil. Kokkinos had no filial affection for his kin and kith, and roamed the streets in search of things to steal. He was clever, sneaky, daring, and small, so he could squeeze in through doors cracked open, or windows, or creep underneath the perforated zinc doors and grab whatever he could. He stole stuff he could sell: leather shoe soles, cans of beans, small boxes with raisins in them, soap, buttons, and thread. He knew how to dispose of these things, having connections in the black market. Then he came up with stacks of banknotes (even inflated Italian money could buy some things if you had enough of it, he said), and go out, not helping his family (though he said he did), but go and spend it at Antonia’s. Slight of frame, he still looked yellow-eyed (as if he had the jauntice) and famished, and ready to eat rice pudding at any time. And since I had been his provider before the war, when I had money, he became now mine, and shared generously what he had, buying me as much rice pudding as I wanted to eat. I was not that hungry, as my father was a good provider during the war, but still craved the donuts and the rice pudding. I ate modestly, and thanked Kokkinos, who nodded in appreciation, eating—meaning a dish in three enormous spoonfuls—as if he had never seen food before in his life—his eyes bulging, and grunting like a starving dog.

           I never saw Kokkinos again after the war. When I went back to the island it was many years later, and things had changed. New shops appeared, mostly gift shops for tourists, for now the island was a tourist mecca. Most of these were in the main street, which had been re-paved and innovated. The town looked different, but the side streets still maintained some of their color. Antonia’s sweet shop at the corner was gone, and in its place a travel bureau had sprouted. I asked Giorgos, what had happened to some of the old shops in the neighborhoods, the ones we visited for sweets when we were kids.

           “They are all gone,” he said. “Now they are all restaurants, gifts shops, of coffee shops.”

           “How about the sweet shops? They were only a few then.”

           “Now there are dozens of them, and all over the place.”

           “How about Antonia’s?”

           He recalled, for he had been a visitor there himself.

           “Oh, she had a tragic ending,” he responded casually, as his wife Eleftheria brought us a tray full of luscious apricots, slices of cake, and ice cream. “She committed suicide falling into a well in her backyard,” he said, pausing. “She was so big they had a hell of a problem pulling her up,” he added.