So Long, Marianne by Kari Hesthamar

Author:Kari Hesthamar
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781770905016
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2014-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

GOOD DAYS

One of the foreign couples that had settled on Hydra was Magda Tilche, who was Czech, and her Italian husband, who was nine years younger. Fleeing from Czechoslovakia, Magda had made her way to Paris with a French doctor. In Paris she opened a little club and met her Italian husband. Their son Alexander was a few years older than Axel Joachim. Magda was tall and gorgeous, with flaming red hair and colourful clothing. She wore exquisite stone jewellery around her neck and clinking silver bangles on her arms. The first time Marianne saw Magda she thought, That’s what I want to be. The Czech woman became like an older sister to her.

Marianne and Leonard spent many mornings and evenings sitting around the crooked tables at Katsikas’ with Magda. Leonard sometimes played his guitar while he and Magda sang beautiful Russian–Jewish songs. Leonard had played guitar for as long as he could remember and had collected and studied folk music since he’d been a teenager. He’d learned to play the songs himself and loved them. In high school he and his friends formed a country and western band and music became the centre of his social life. They played in churches and schools, in bars and town squares.37 On Hydra he played for Marianne and the little group of expatriates.

Their café table and its cloth were protected by a sheet of white paper. Leonard could spend nearly the whole night covering the paper with poems. One night Marianne took home one of the paper sheets. She read the line “Nancy wore green stockings” among the doodles and half-baked poems before she folded up the paper to the size of a napkin and tucked it away for safe-keeping among her diaries and other small valuables.

When Magda decided to turn one of the old boatbuilding workshops into a bar, everyone pitched in. They painted and sanded and sewed cushion covers, washed and polished and sang along as the radio blared and the workshop was transformed into the island’s newest bar: Lagoudera. Two dinghies, left behind by the boatbuilders, were hoisted up to the rafters as a reminder of the building’s former purpose. With Magda’s savings used up, Lagoudera was at last opened to great fanfare. The nightclub became a regular gathering place for foreigners and Greeks.

When they wanted a break from little Hydra Marianne and Leonard took brief trips to Athens and the mainland. They drank coffee at Zonar’s Café and at local dives, and let themselves be immortalized by the old photographer whose head disappeared under a black cloth as he snapped them with his big old-fashioned camera. Marianne and Leonard, smiling, arm in arm at Syntagma Square.

They collected their mail at the American Express office. Met Greek friends at a bar and stayed at their regular hotel, Niki 27, in Nikis Street, a simple and sparsely furnished hotel with two or three rooms on every floor. They picked up the key in the little brown reception area that reeked of sweat and rode the elevator up to their room, with its grey sheets that never saw the sun.

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