Cherry Picking

by E.C. Traganas

Peloponnese, Greece 

It was high noon and the sun was blazing directly overhead, warming the air with the sweetly acrid scent of wild oregano and basil. In a cloudless azure sky, the jagged mountains of Corinth stretched out like a vast tapestried quilt in earthy patches of ochre, green and brown. In the distant valley, the ancient town of Nemea lay faintly visible in a perpetual haze of mist. Charis had been sitting on Uncle Stavro’s spare bedroom veranda for at least an hour trying to focus on her book, but as the glaring light began to blind her field of vision, she moved her chair under the awning and settled herself behind the sheer gauze curtains to shield her eyes. Below in the adjoining garden, Aunt Lidia was gathered with several of the village women, heads bowed over their work, chatting animatedly and bursting every now and then into loud spontaneous song. It was late June, the season for cherry marmalade making. 

Aunt Lidia was wearing a colorful checkered bandana tented low over her forehead and cheeks to protect her already weathered complexion from the searing rays of the sun. As she cleaned the sour cherries with a hairpin and tossed them into the central bucket for washing, the pits would ping and ricochet against the bottom of the steel pan like a volley of high-pitched bullets punching through the noontime torpor. On the balcony, the gauze curtains quivered delicately; a group of honeybees had congregated among the pots of geraniums and snapdragons and were droning noisily in the lazy summer heat. Charis got up and watched in fascination as a furry bumblebee landed on the lower lip of a pinkish floret, dancing until its full weight pried open the yellow palate, crawling itself in while the flower snapped itself shut. She waited for a languorous minute for the bee to emerge sated with nectar, but when she gently parted the lips of the flower to peek inside, she discovered that the honeybee had tucked itself into a ball for a noontime siesta. Charis withdrew into the coolness of the bedroom as the sunlight began to encroach on her shady refuge, and her eyes fell abstractedly on a large black house spider steadily inching its way upwards on the wall along a streak of sunlight.

From a distance, she could see her cousin Amalia’s cottage neatly nestled on the mountain crest. The turquoise-painted door opened and walking out the gate in a steep incline Charis could observe the young woman carrying a bundle and heading towards her parents’ house with two of her three children. Within minutes the party had arrived, and while Amalia mounted the concrete steps to the veranda, little Anya and Vasso remained downstairs with their grandmother, Yiyiá Lidia, and the village women. Charis heard their squeals of delight as they chased a kid goat frisking in the yard, feeding it mulberry leaves from the tree below. Amalia entered the room, pulled up a wickerwork chair and sat down beside her cousin. For a few minutes the pair remained silent and Charis could hear her cousin panting heavily from her steep mountainous walk, taking measured gulps of fresh air while composing herself. A tall woman of about twenty with shiny, lustrous black hair and brilliant jet black eyes set attractively in a round, clear face, Amalia was for years considered by everyone to be the village beauty. 

“Why don’t you come and visit me?” she pleaded with a good-natured but accusatory tone. “You can come right now. We have plenty of room. Please come!”

“I promise, I will,” Charis said sensing her cousin’s unspoken plea for reassurance. She had to admit, though, whenever she slept at Amalia’s cottage she felt rested and refreshed and dreamt wonderful, captivating dreams during the afternoon siestas. Somehow, it was always more quiet there at the upper ridge of the mountain. Here at her Uncle Stavro’s, something was always going on, and the villagers tended to drop in unannounced to talk and gossip, or would loiter and converse loudly on the main road below. But Amalia knew her cousin better than to unduly force an invitation, as Charis inevitably accepted sooner or later. The two had known each other since childhood, and as Charis left city life behind and came to the village every summer to visit her uncle and aunt they gradually grew to love one another and had developed a secret bond.

There was a thoughtful silence, and then Amalia asked, “What are you reading there?”

“Some poetry,” Charis said. 

Amalia had had no formal schooling, and by the time she was twelve was already working very hard pulling her weight in the household, toiling in the nearby fields and taking in embroidery work for the villagers. “Go on reading,” she said with motherly warmth. “I like to watch you read.”

Charis put the book down and turned towards her. She looked at her cousin’s hands. They were worn, rough, swollen and calloused, the knuckles reddened and scraped. Her face also seemed to have changed since the previous summer, and her mouth was now etched with a sort of silent, unspoken pain, like a faded, wasted petal. “Amalia, you’re working too hard, aren’t you?” she asked with concern. “Are you getting enough rest?” 

“Ah,” Amalia sighed expelling a hint of pent-up troubles, “with three children and a husband, and in-laws to look after, too…You know it’s not easy. Since little Kiki’s birth last year, there is so much to do. It never ends.”

“Your daughters are lovely. Beautiful—like you. And they’re so clever and intelligent.”

“You know that the big one, Anya, just started school and is the first in her class. Her papou is so proud of her!” 

They heard a shrill commotion below as Uncle Stavro suddenly burst through the gate, gathering up both his granddaughters in his sinewy arms and kissing them voraciously. “I’m going to eat you both alive!” he screamed laughing menacingly as they ran around the yard with the little buckling chasing them from behind.

“You know,” Amalia continued lowering her voice, “after Kiki was born, no one at home spoke to me for weeks.”

“What—but why?” Charis cried, inwardly suspecting the reason.

“Oh, you know what they’re like here. My in-laws wanted so much to have a boy. At the hospital, when I was in labor, Yanni said to me ‘give me a boy and I will give you all my money!’ It was bad enough for Anya and Vasso, but the last one—that did it. The trouble they gave me. I cried and cried until I was exhausted, and then they accused me for having another unwanted girl. They blamed me, calling me the ruin of their family.”

“My God, Amalia! I didn’t know all this. What fault was it of yours?Someone should tell them the facts of life. Didn’t you have the doctor clarify that to your husband—you know, ‘as you sow so shall you reap’?”

“Yanni doesn’t believe that. He would never believe that. It would be a blow to his manly ego. And when the doctor went to speak to my mother-in-law about it to reconcile her to the fact that the gender was determined by her son, and not me, that she has a third beautiful granddaughter, she stopped speaking to me again and gave me the silent treatment. I can’t stand this anymore!”

“But what is the matter with them?” Charis said, feeling a rising gorge of anger. “It’s not as if the girls will be a financial drain, right? Hasn’t the dowry been banned already? What are they worried about?”

“Not here—no. It’s still recognized. Barbaric, isn’t it? No one marries a girl without a proika. My worth is valued in gold necklaces and shiny bracelets, property, and embroidered linens. You remember when I was fifteen, Yanni gave me such a fuss because my dowry was not big enough for him. He wanted to have an extra house built in the metropolis, but I just didn’t have the money.”

“Well, he should have been proud to have someone like you with absolutely nothing! To tell you honestly, Amalia, I don’t like the way they’re treating you. And if they don’t want your daughters, fools as they are, tell them that I will gladly adopt them!”

There was a rush of air followed by the creaking of floorboards in the hallway. Amalia covered her mouth as if in warning. Aunt Lidia entered the room quietly and placed a silver salver tray lined with a lace doily on the bed. Two little platefuls of dark glossy preserves and two matching glasses of cool water glistened invitingly. She grinned at her daughter and niece while her broad white teeth and black eyes flashed with enthusiasm. “Try it,” she exhorted them. “To petíhame—we got it right this time. The best we’ve ever made!” She patted them both on the back and was on her way out when the cousins were startled by a loud thud. A broom handle cracked and whipped against the plastered white ceiling. “Out with you, you little devil—not in my house!” Lidia beamed, exposing her one gold tooth. “See, Charis! You can sleep soundly tonight—no spiders here,” she said on her way out. The cousins waited silently until they were safely alone again. 

“But, Amalia,” Charis continued, “shall I go and speak to them myself?”

“Oh, my God—please don’t! That will create even more trouble. This morning as our neighbor Kira Katina sat with us in the kitchen preparing cherries, my mother-in-law suddenly sighed and burst out crying, saying ‘a woman who doesn’t have any sons is a worthless woman!’”

“How insulting! And what did Kira Katina say to that?”

“She has to be careful. You know that Yanni supplies her family with their meat and cheese. And so she answered, ‘Well, let’s hope Yanni doesn’t take after your side of the family. Don’t forget that your mother had seven daughters!”

“I’m sure she didn’t like to hear that!” Charis replied, and they both collapsed in laughter.

Amalia seemed happier now. “My mother-in-law didn’t talk to her for at least an hour after that, and sat with her arms crossed pouting sourly.”

“Amalia, I’m going to your place to tell everyone off this very afternoon,” Charis said resolutely.

“No, stop! I beg of you, don’t say anything. They can’t help it. They’ll change over the years when they realize what kind of girls they have. Everything is all right—really. I’ll just have to embroider more pretty things for them to sell, that’s all. I want to tell you something—honestly, though.” She hesitated and looked at her cousin intently while twisting her worn hands with their stained, blackened nails in her apron. “If I could do it all over again, I would never have married, ever. I would have gone to school again, and then maybe worked as a dressmaker in town, but I would never have married. No—never.”

There was silence after this unexpected confession. The sun was at its zenith, rippling in the streaks of light on the whitewashed wall with wavelike bursts of heat. Nearby in Kira Katina’s yard, a donkey began to bray hysterically, the noise echoing into the mist-covered valley in endless reels of derisive laughter. There was a thin muffled knock on the bedroom door. Anya and Vasso slipped in quietly and tangled themselves around their mother’s arms.

“Yiayiá says that we can all eat now,” said Anya, who was wearing a checked apron embroidered at the hem. She flashed her nut-brown eyes on Charis and then, stealing conspiratorial glances with her mother, said cheekily, “Amalia brought some fresh rabbit that babá caught yesterday.”

“Your daughter is on a first-name basis with you?” Charis asked in amazement.

“Tell me, then—could you resist her?”

Anya crawled onto Charis’s lap and boldly began to hug her, running her hands along her cheeks, unraveling and tousling her hair. “What does that book say?” she asked looking cross-eyed at it upside down, mimicking what she imagined to be a foreign, exotic tongue in girlish accents.

“Come on. Let’s go and prepare for dinner,” Amalia laughed. When the children had gone downstairs, she went to a corner of the room, and from a little cloth caddy hanging on the wall, pulled out a broken wide-toothed comb, grimy and padded with old hairs, and began to groom herself quickly. Through the chipped mirror, she focused her eyes on Charis. “Cousin, what you are doing is right. Promise me, for your own sake, that you will never marry. Never!”

Charis thought for a moment. “I’ll be ready in a minute,” she said rearranging her hair. Reaching down at the bedside tray, she sampled the spoonful of ruby-colored preserves and marveled at their robust sweetness.