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nature (what does nature care about people’s troubles, anyway?) is dolled up in its Sunday best; she turns to Salome and says, I’m going to celebrate, and blow off a hand-grenade. Been carrying them all this time, never once heard one of them go off. So she climbs up the hill, pulls the pin – that’s what she called it – and heaves the grenade down the hill. All springtime echoes with the explosion. In fact, one of the strings on Salome’s mandolin pops. Then two German soldiers come dashing out of the swamp at the bottom of the hill, underpants down to their boot tops; they must’ve been performing some unnatural act or other when the grenade went off. The Germans officers wouldn’t let the soldiers go with local women, that’s why they had to satisfy each other, so people said.
    Mrs Kanello’s front window was bright and sunny all day long. Later, when our Fanis came down with adenoids because he grew too fast and had to spend most of his time in bed, Mrs Kanello would invite him over and sit him down in the window, The sun’s full of calories, nothing like it for what ails you, she said. We gave him a medicine called antipyrine, something like quinine powder but bright yellow and bitter. Our front window got no sunlight. We only had one floor and it was behind the church.
    That’s when Mrs Kanello got it into her head to bring Aphrodite over for some sunlight. But Aphrodite didn’t care about anything any more, all she did was smile that faint smile of hers. She didn’t even care that she wasn’t getting any news from her father in the partisans. Plus in addition we had some unseasonal rain storms. Aphrodite would sit for hours on end at her window, with the curtains half-drawn, staring off into the distance, seeing nothing. As her condition got worse, her mother had to lift her up and carry her over to her chair. For hours on end she would draw invisible shapes on the window glass with her fingertip. I waved at her from the street as I went by, but I don’t think she even saw me.
    In the meantime the Tiritombas family left town, on tour, believe it or not. I’ll get around to that in a minute, it’s a whole story in itself. If you can imagine. A whole company going on the road on account of a goat!
    We weren’t hungry any more. Not that we were living like royalty, mind you, but with what little Signor Alfio brought us every week we managed to stay on our feet, and little Fanis got over his adenoids. Signor Alfio kept on seeing Mother: better for him than going to some streetwalker not to mention no worry about venereal diseases. Besides, he was married back home plus he was shy, he couldn’t have made it with a whore, also he loved his wife, and praised her to the skies whenever he talked to us. So that’s why he preferred to satisfy his sexual needs with a nice clean-living little housewife.
    Leave the house? Mother wouldn’t hear of it – except maybe the odd evening when Mrs Kanello invited her over for some chit-chat, or maybe to help hang out the washing. Meanwhile, the toughest regulations were lifted; the conquerors realized we were law-abiding subjects, the curfew didn’t begin until midnight . The movies started up again: now it was all German operettas, of course, with Marika Rökk, and those Hungarian tear-jerkers with Pal Javor and Katalin Karady, plus the odd Italian item.
    Fanis and me would go to the movies together. Signor Vittorio would get us in for free, he was from the Carabineria too – a replacement. Signor Alfio had gone back to his home country by then. It was cheap, general admission – only five million. Nothing, really, when you think that a box of matches went for three million, but where were we supposed to find the money? Anyway, I stuffed Fanis’s pocket full of raisins and off we went to the five o’clock show. Before we went in we asked old Uncle Grigoris at the ticket window, Any food? And if he nodded yes, then we went in.
    Because we only went to the