466
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
nidis family—husband and wife and five children. Together
with other tenants, they used the one bathroom below, its
door patched with newspaper. Dimitrios received some food,
mostly from America, and 2,500 drachmas a month from the
government—the equivalent of twenty-five cents. "What can
we do with 2,500 drachmas?" the wife, Eleni, asked helplessly.
"It costs us more to buy food for one day!"
I knocked on the door of what had been my bedroom. It
was opened by a woman dressed in black, Hariklia Yankouglou. Her husband had died a slave laborer in Germany, and
she lived alone. On the floor was a cheap scatter-rug, on the
table a pile of clothing waiting to be ironed. On the wall was
a gas light. The curtains were rough, homemade. An iron cot
with a soiled coverlet was in one corner. In the other stood a
squat, pot-bellied stove, blazing with a wood fire. But it gave
me no warmth. There was no warmth in my room, in the
home of my birth, in my heart, in Greece, in the Arab Middle
East, in the Old World!
Silently I walked out of the house on 8 Soulion street. I felt
an emptiness, a numb void between myself and the tragedy of
Alexandropolis. I wished I could have responded favorably,
lovingly. How does an animal—to say nothing of a human being—respond to one who beats it, and destroys it? War had
beaten and destroyed Alexandropolis, my home, and scattered
my people. Destruction and misery had spoken to me. I recalled the year we had come to America—1921—when father
had said: "Europe has been fighting for two thousand years.
It may fight for another two thousand years. Let us live in
America, the land of peace." Then I thought of my palm
branch, the symbol of peace and good will I had brought with
me, and I felt whipped and hopeless.
Back at my hotel I learned that someone from the local
police station had inquired about me. I went there, and
faced the police captain and others gathered around him. They
asked who I was, why I had come, what my political views
were, why I had spent two days photographing Alexandropolis,