Israel, and Going Home
465
HOME
IT WAS only a block away, on 8 Soulion street, and I hurried there with quickening steps. I came to a fountain around
the corner from our home where the boys used to fill their
mouths with water and douse the girls. I remembered pulling
the pigtails of a little girl one day, not noticing her enraged
mother sneaking up behind me. Gripping me firmly by my
own hair all the way home, she deposited me, squealing, in
our backyard.
I was standing before what was once the yard in which I had
played. It was a wreck; the iron fencing was torn off, and everywhere were crumbling stone and rotting wood. Our beautiful
grapevine was gone. The fig trees had disappeared. A shanty
had been built here, with a straw roof. I looked at the house
where a midwife had delivered me, and I could not help weeping. One side of it was whitewashed, the other a drab, peeling
plaster. Its window frames were sagging and cracked; broken
panes had been replaced with boards. The lower half of a
second story window was barricaded with mud-bricks. Everywhere the laths showed. Two narrow rusty stovepipes protruded. The balcony on which I had so often played, looking
out on the AEgean, was now in such a dilapidated state that I
saw a woman cross herself before stepping under it to go inside the house. I heard a gobbling sound behind—a flock of
turkeys prodded on by a peasant in a beret and rawhide slippers came down Soulion street. A lone white lamb followed
him, its tail drooping.
Again I asked myself: Was this my home? Stunned, I
stepped through the iron gate, now rusty and unhinged, into
the yard. I walked through it and entered the house by the
back door, looking for my bedroom. It was now occupied by
refugees who had fled Markos's bands. Four families lived in
five rooms. The largest of these was the Dimitrios Damaski-