TSINTESA

 

Theia Tsintesa was not anyone’s auntie but try telling her that, when she fixed you with her penetrating green eyes and twirled the hairs on the mole that adorned her left cheek. Six feet tall with biceps that put those of the most inveterate gym-junkie to shame, she did not saunter, or stroll, or shuffle but rather bound towards you, encasing your hand in her vice-like grip which has the consistency and texture of coarse sandpaper as she dragged you towards her, an acrid smell of moth-balls and coffee scroll emanating from her personage.

None of us knew her real name. When I was very young, she was referred to as a νταρντάνα, a term derived from the Italian tartana, a fishing boat, but employed in Greek to denote a large, well proportioned woman, and sometimes as an «ανδρογύναικα», a man-woman. It took many years to find out that Tsintesa, which I took to be her surname, was actually a colloquial term in her region, which meant giantess.

True to her name, her voice resembled the boom of a grandfather clock, and it was always ten decibels higher than the level of the noise around her. It both resounded upon one’s ear drum, nudging closer and closer to the threshold of pain, only to collapsed upon itself, propelling you to do her will. The reason for the increased volume was that she completely deaf in one ear and only partially able to hear in the other, meaning that she would respond to all answers to her questions and her persistent habit of forcing you to eat copious quantities of the driest cake ever to come out of an oven, with the exclamation: “Eh? Eh?”

Despite the deafness and her forbidding countenance, an invitation to enter her home, usually after being yelled at from a distance of a block away, could never be passed up, simply because it would never occur to any of us that this was in any way, an option. Pushing the rusting gate aside secured on its decayed hinges by elastic ropes, we would traverse a front garden that she would call her Volkswagen, because as she would collapse into booming laughter, what should ordinarily be in the back, is at the front. A hedge of capsicum plants of all sizes and levels of hotness fringed the path. By the fence, tomato plants catching the sun and in the centre, where ordinarily the lawn should have been, cucumbers, zucchini and broad beans. Waiting in front of the open front door, the titaness would wait, a Talos, surveying her wards, her immense brown, liver-speckled hands full of freshly picked zucchini flowers.

From the gloom behind the door, like wolf cubs emerging from cave, little faces would peep out. There was Zlatko, who called her Tetka, causing one of us in a careless moment to attempt to establish a reputation as a bit of a wag by daring to call her “Titka” an enterprise that was crushed by one withering look from behind her thick Tito-esque reading glasses. Zlatko was her neighbour’s son, and she would look after him, making him a meal and keep him company until his parents finished their factory shift. Benny and Jackie however, replaced in succession by Benjamin and Kylie, Tisha, Theo and Russell, were her foster children and it was understood that whenever we accepted her primeval call to enter her lair, we would eat without protest the fried zucchini flowers and sandpaper cake and then, keep her wards company.

More often than not, there would be other ladies there, generally younger ones, and they would always be sad, sometimes with tears in their eyes, which on occasion would appear to be dark, as if their mascara had smudged and Theia would hold their hands and raise her upper lip scornfully, muttering under their her voice, which meant the whole room could hear, dark maledictions in Greek and in another language which we did not understand, against all those who would deign to visit evil upon others in this world and then the shadows in the room would lengthen and it was as if in the dusk as if figures black and vengeful would appear, only to be dispelled by a wave of her hand.

Sometimes these ladies would be fearful and Theia would place her hand over their heaving breasts in order to feel their sobs, for she could scarcely hear them and then she would become a Cerberus, barring entrance to her world, even if on the odd occasion, someone would be hammering at her door, demanding entry in the most angry and violent way possible and threatening dire punishment. Theia would be unfazed, dismissively telling us and her terrified guests to pay the would be intruders no mind, because, we concluded, she was deaf and thus could not hear the horrible things that were being promised to her, which presumably, is also why her composure was not at all lost when bricks were thrown through her windows, she being unable to hear them shatter, nor that afternoon when she came home from the shops to find her shed smouldering, a tell-tale empty can of kerosene thrown at the backdoor, nor indeed that time when in a moment of forgetfulness, she left the back door open, giving access to an enraged intruder who rushed at her with a hammer, only to find himself, if the local gossips at the shopping centre were to be believed, trussed up in rope like a kokoretsi around the Hills Hoist in her backyard and alternating between yelling expletives and calling for his mother.

Theia was impervious to all this, because Theia couldn’t hear. One cold winter’s night, in a village high up in the mountains on the other side of the world, her father staggered through the snow after a heavy night of drinking with his friends. It was all he could to drag himself up the stairs into his home and when he tottered through the door and saw the expressionless faces of his wife and young daughter, he decided that it was not commensurate with his status as father and head of the household to be greeted after yet another carousal with a stony look of judgment. He set about beating both his wife and daughter with anything her could find: smashing chairs over their backs, throwing the pots and pans at their heads and when finally, almost exhausted, he ran out of implements to cast in their directions, he dragged them to the door and threw them down the stairs, into the snow, where the remained all night, until he sobered up. On her way hurtling down, seven year old Theia caught her head on the edge of the stair once, and then again on the other side and could never hear properly again. There were other beatings, increasing in severity  as she grew older and it was only when her father determined to marry her off to his best friend’s son that she came to hope for respite. They were going to have a new life together, in Australia, as far away from her father as possible.

The people in the neighbourhood who whispered these stories to each other do not know what became of Theia’s husband. When they came to Australia, they found her here alone, for she had arrived before everyone else. Some of the older women would hint obliquely at deeds so terrible that they did not bear mentioning: “especially in front of the kids,” and they would greet her passage along the street with sighs, the clucking of tongues, the shaking of heads and deep exclamations of sympathy, mixed in with admiration and awe.

Theia had no children, something to do with the dark secrets of her arrival in this country and so all the children in the neighbourhood became her children. She had no protector and so she became the protector of all the women in the area who were being mistreated by their husbands, ripping to pieces the shroud of silence and shame that was usually cast over them to blanket their suffering and visiting retribution upon their aggressors. Scores of foster children found in her a secure embrace, a kind, if thunderous word and the fiercest of loves, of the type that can only be given by those who have ben betrayed in love and trust it not at all.

Theia never received an award, or any formal recognition. Her photograph was never posted in any article or journal along with the most influential or important women of her time. When they found her, lying in her bed, she must have been dead for a week. By that stage, her foster children had grown up and gotten on with her lives, her neighbours were mostly dead and their offspring moved away. It was only as they went through her things, trying to find the contact details of any relative who may need to be contacted, as she lay before them, her heart broken, that they found an old, long expired passport that gave up her final secret: her name was Anastasia.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 20 April 2024