Word: erato
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...week, sat an aged woman, her chin bent low over her hollow chest, her hair in untidy wisps around her wrinkled face, her sharp black eyes lost in memory. She had no need to be dressed for company, for hardly anybody drops in to pay a call on Mamma Erato these days. They are too afraid. Her only friends are the rheumatic old cobbler just down the street and the kind, ugly butcher next door. Sometimes Mamma Erato slinks out of her room to make her way to the church and light a candle to St. Mary...
Twins on the Right. Many of Erato's Greek countrymen would answer that question with a violent yes; Mamma Erato's son is Nicholas ("Nico") Zach-ariades, leader of the Communist guerrillas who harass Greece from the north. But the butcher is gentler. "There are no real Communists in Greece," he says, "only misery...
...Mamma Erato has other children. Her pretty twin daughters Fofo and Sasa married rich right-wingers and live comfortably in a fashionable quarter of Athens, where they do their best to forget their relationship to the rebel chieftain. Another son, 34-year-old Mimi, lives in the dingy room with Erato, but he is a poor substitute for Nico. Vacillating, weak-chinned Mimi is often sullen and bitter because the government kicked him out of his longtime job in a local bank when he refused to sign an anti-Communist affidavit, but Mamma Erato has no use for his tiresome...
...Water & Beatings. Erato Zacharia-des calls herself a liberal, but she prefers to forget politics and dream of earlier, happier days when she had her son Nico with her. Often her face lights up when she talks of him. "He used to break up blocks of ice in a bucket," she recalls proudly, "and use the water for showers every morning. 'I've got to be tough,' he used...
Restless, adventurous Nico was not to be home for long. At 17 he wanted to join the army, but an uncle took him in hand and put him to work loading at the Black Sea port of Zonguldak. That, says Erato, "is where the worm got him"-in Zonguldak, among the Communist seamen who lured him off to Russia...