Between the Orange Groves Read online

  ‘When I grow up I will marry Ali,’ she told Hatiche the first day he peeped up her skirt.

  ‘Not sure your mama will agree,’ Hatiche replied, having heard her parents more than once say that Greeks and Turks could never marry.

  The two families were on good terms and their mothers would often have coffee together to read the coffee grounds, but unlike their children, the friendship between the women only went so far. Hatiche’s mama had a special gift for fortune telling and many of the Greek women in the street would join them to hear what she had to say.

  ‘They are good people,’ Maroula’s mother would tell her when Maroula seemed to spend more time in her friend’s house than theirs. ‘But they are different from us, we are Christians and they are Mohammedans.’ The last word rolled from her mouth with a certain disdain. ‘They do not believe as we do in Jesus Christ. Maroula mou, they have their own religion which is not ours!’

  She was always trying to convince her daughter of the difference between the two families, but apart from the religion that everyone always mentioned and the funny way Hatiche’s mother spoke Greek, Maroula could never understand what set them apart. What she and most people saw were two girls who resembled each other, not only physically but temperamentally, too. When they were little they were both skinny and wiry, running around the countryside like two little mountain goats. Then when puberty set in they filled out in all the right places, which drove the local boys mad.

  Plump and full-breasted, brown-eyed and pale-skinned, Hatiche and Maroula married for love, unlike the marriages arranged for most girls in the village. Maroula’s childhood infatuation with Ali had long passed and her attentions turned to an older Greek boy who made it his aim to win her heart. Each of the girls fell in love with a young man from their village and both caused a scandal by choosing their match.

  ‘She’s stolen my heart, that little Hatiche,’ Hassan, the son of the village tailor, would tell his friend every time he saw her collecting water from the spring in the village square. ‘She’s plump and ripe as a tasty peach and when she turns her eyes on me I lose my head.’ Hatiche’s eyes were all Hassan ever saw of her face, which was modestly covered with her scarf whenever she went out to get water, but for him it was enough to feel the thunderbolt of her gaze strike him.

  ‘Her friend is a beauty too, and I aim to make her my wife one day,’ Andreas, who worked in his father’s grocery shop, told Hassan. Love’s arrow had pierced his heart, too.

  The girls were well aware of the attentions of the two boys, who miraculously always seemed to be in the square whenever they went to fetch water at the communal tap or when they sat outside each other’s houses to do their embroidery. But meaningful looks were all that were exchanged between the four of them; no words were ever spoken.

  The first time that Andreas summoned the courage to speak to Maroula was at the Easter Midnight Mass. He searched for her among the throng of people packed into the small church of Agia Ekaterini and seized the opportunity to stand near her without causing offence. He fought his way through the crowd and stood silently by her side, listening to the liturgy and breathing in her fragrance while waiting for an opportunity to speak to her. That moment came after the priest pronounced the Kalos Logos, the words proclaiming the good tidings of Christ’s resurrection. Christos Anesti, he announced in a joyful melodious chant to the people, who responded in unison as each in turn lit a candle from his blessed flame.

  The church was now lit only by candles, which bathed the congregation in a warm glow. As the room reverberated with the jubilant Easter singing of Christos Anesti, Andreas leaned a little closer to Maroula to light his candle from hers.

  ‘Christos Anesti,’ he whispered in her ear.

  ‘Alithos Anesti,’ she replied softly, confirming the resurrection in the customary response above the chanting of the service, and edged a little closer to him.

  Although there was a small chapel in the centre of the village, most people chose the steep climb to the church of Agia Ekaterini, built on the summit of a nearby hill, in order to hear the long-awaited announcement of Anastasis, the glad tidings of life’s victory over death. Those who arrived early were able to gather inside, but as the crowd increased many had spilled out into the churchyard and stood under the stars, their singing resounding across the hillsides.

  Outside the church, in a far corner of the churchyard, a huge pyre had been assembled, built during several days beforehand by the entire male population. It was to be set alight towards the end of the service in order to burn the effigy of Judas. This ritual could only take place after the priest had spoken the words of Christos Anesti, whereupon the fire would be lit. Soon the flames would rise into the night sky, followed by a series of explosions from the lighting of fireworks which would echo round the hills and mountains, signalling the start of two days of celebration.

  After Andreas’s success at approaching Maroula, Hassan was eager to do the same with Hatiche.

  ‘I need to speak to her but I can never find her alone,’ he said wistfully when his friend described how he had managed to be with his love without anyone noticing. ‘The trouble is, I can’t think of any time when she could be alone for me to approach her,’ he complained. ‘There’s always someone around. Her father watches her like a hawk.’

  ‘You could try speaking to her when she’s with Maroula,’ Andreas suggested. ‘They’re usually alone.’

  Eventually Hassan found his opportunity one hot July day while Hatiche was outside her house buying some figs from an old man who passed by every week with produce from his trees. She was bending over to choose figs from the basket, examining each one before placing them on a tray as carefully as if they were eggs, when Hassan walked by and stopped, on the pretext that he too wanted to buy some fruit.

  ‘I hope I am not intruding,’ he said politely, gazing at the girl’s face for the first time. In her haste and in the summer heat, when she heard the old man calling outside the kitchen window, Hatiche had run out of the house without covering her face. The sight of her naked features made Hassan’s heart soar with desire and love for her. Unable to tear his eyes away from her, he tried to memorize every detail lest this was the last time he might see her uncovered.

  ‘She has a beauty spot in the middle of her left cheek! You can’t imagine how lovely she is,’ Hassan told his friend, bursting with excitement later that day, ‘and her lips are full and red like the ripe cherries on our tree. How can I find a way to make her fall in love with me?’

  ‘Going by how I’ve seen the girls look at us, I think it might not be too difficult, my friend,’ Andreas replied with a cheeky smile. ‘I’m sure we can find a way.’

  Andreas was not wrong; every time the girls went to the village square to fill their pots with water their hearts fluttered with anticipation at seeing the young men. Aphrodite’s little love child had done his job well on them, too.

  ‘Have you seen how he smiles?’ Hatiche whispered into Maroula’s ear once she realized she was in love with Hassan. ‘He has the most perfect teeth! He’s so handsome.’

  ‘I have, and he is!’ Maroula murmured. ‘But have you noticed Andreas’s eyes? I’ve never seen eyes that colour. Are they green, or are they brown? I just don’t know . . . they’re the colour of olive oil after a first pressing,’ she went on in a whisper until she spotted her mother pushing open the back door into the yard. They were sitting with their needlework in the shade of a trellis covered with jasmine, daydreaming and talking about love and the boys when the appearance of Maroula’s mother put an end to their secret conversation. Both girls agreed that each other’s love was as handsome as could be but their own choice was the best. Besides, a Greek girl or boy would never have entertained romantic notions for a Turk or vice versa, no matter what Maroula had thought when she was nine.

  ‘It’s mainly our religion that sets us apart,’ Maroula’s mother had told her, not for the first time, when she announced at the age of seven that he
r new best friend was the Turkish girl Hatiche who lived three houses away from them. ‘Their customs are different to ours,’ she continued when Maroula asked her to explain the differences, but without much success.

  ‘What customs?’ Maroula asked.

  ‘Their faith, what they believe in, who they pray to . . .’ her mother tried again, aware of the quizzical look on her daughter’s face. ‘We go to church, we pray to our Agia Ekaterini and we cross ourselves, they don’t.’

  That much Maroula knew, yet it still didn’t explain what divided them.

  ‘They go to church, too,’ the little girl replied. ‘Hatiche told me they do.’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ her mother answered, ‘they go to the mosque . . . it’s not a church.’

  Hatiche had told Maroula that the place they went to pray was a church – their church – so why was her mother now telling her otherwise? She really didn’t understand; as far as she was concerned they were neighbours who lived in the village like everyone else. In her friend’s house she had even spotted an icon of the Panayia, the all-holy Virgin Mary, along with a blue evil-eye stone on top of a chest of drawers, just like the ones they kept at home beside her mother’s shrine to the Virgin Mary. So, she wondered, what set them apart? Hatiche’s mother, Ayşe Hanoum, seemed just like her own; like any Greek mother, apart from her asking them to take their shoes off when they entered the house.

  At seven the two girls were inseparable best friends, recognizing no difference between them; not until later, when they were older, did Maroula become aware of a few disparities. For her part, she found most of them inconsequential, such as not eating pork, which she didn’t like anyway. But some of their customs she found interesting and appealing, especially the beauty preparations which Hatiche’s mother concocted to use on herself and her daughters once they came of age. One of those was the use of halaoua. When her daughters reached puberty, Hatiche’s mother decided that her girls must start depilating as she had at their age, and her mother and grandmother before her – she came from a long line of hirsute ladies.

  ‘When you marry, your husband will expect you to be clean without too much hair,’ she told her girls. This was around the time when Hatiche and Maroula fell in love with Hassan and Andreas. Although she had no inkling of this – the girls kept their secret well hidden – she realized the time had come to think about preparing her daughters for marriage.

  The most effective and clean way to remove hair, Ayşe Hanoum explained, was with halaoua, a mixture of sugar and lemon juice which was heated over an open flame then left to cool off before it was kneaded into a gum-like paste. Once the correct consistency and texture was reached, she would apply it over the skin, pressing down with her palm onto the patch of unwanted hair before peeling it off with a swift action of the hand to leave the skin, as if by magic, smooth and hair free. There was only a little pain involved for just a moment or two, she reassured them, but the final result was so miraculous that it was worth the discomfort.

  ‘So . . .’ Hatiche whispered to Maroula conspiratorially, trying to explain about the ritual of halaoua one day, ‘my mother thinks we have to start preparing for marriage! She says it’s time to make our bodies look beautiful!’

  ‘My mother hasn’t mentioned anything like that to me . . .’ Maroula replied, wondering if perhaps this was one of the cultural differences she had been warned about.

  ‘I hope Hassan comes to ask for my hand soon, before they start arranging matches for me,’ Hatiche said, with alarm in her voice this time.

  ‘When is your mother going to do this hair removing for you?’ Maroula asked, running her hand over her leg to feel the coarse hair that she had been cultivating on both legs and arms for at least two years now. What to do about it had been quite a worry for her: how would she ever take her clothes off in front of Andreas once they were married? All was fine when she was dressed, her long skirt and underskirt covered everything well enough, but she knew there would come a time when she would have to reveal all and she feared Andreas would run away in fright once she was naked. ‘Do you think your mother would do this for me too?’ Maroula asked hopefully.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Hatiche replied, ‘you’re like a sister in our house.’

  Maroula’s mother knew all about halaoua but most Greek women didn’t practise it; this was the Turkish women’s custom. Then again, Maroula’s mother thought it was immodest for women to be concerned with their appearance. Beauty, she believed, came with piety and not vanity; furthermore she didn’t share her daughter’s hair problem.

  ‘If God didn’t want us to have hairs on our body then he would have made us smooth-skinned,’ she told Maroula when the girl first told her how Hatiche’s mother could help her.

  ‘I’d rather not be hairy like a man, whether God wants it or not,’ was the young woman’s reply, and the next time her friend’s mother prepared the sugary mixture for herself and her daughters, Maroula took her turn to have the treatment applied to her upper lip. Her facial hair, she decided, was in more urgent need of attention.

  ‘Next time we do the legs,’ Ayşe Hanoum told her. Maroula soon learned to use halaoua on herself when her mother was out of the house, although she preferred to ask Hatiche’s mother to do it for her. Maroula learned to follow several beauty rituals when visiting her friend. There were cream applications for the body and face, aromatic oils for the hair, black kohl for the eyes to make them look deep and mysterious, and mastic gum to chew in order to keep the breath fresh. Maroula’s favourite was the application of henna. Often after halaoua, Ayşe Hanoum would apply henna using a transfer pattern on her daughter’s palms, feet and nails. When the henna dried it would turn anything it touched a bright orange, leaving a pleasant aroma lingering in the room.

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ her mother shouted when Maroula turned up with henna on her hands one day. ‘These are not our customs, my girl! What will your father say, what will people in the village say when they see this?’ She turned her face to the little shrine of the Panayia and crossed herself. ‘You’ve gone too far. What’s next? Changing your faith?’

  Maroula gasped. How could her mother suggest such a thing? What harm did any of this do to anyone? Her parents knew that she loved Hatiche like a sister, but that had nothing to do with wanting to abandon her own faith or her family. That would never happen. She was a devout Greek Orthodox, as Hatiche was a devout Muslim; Maroula went to church and believed in the power of prayer, while her friend observed her own religious rituals. There was never any conflict between them concerning their religion nor did they ever discuss it, whatever their parents might suspect. She had never doubted her faith, she always felt a particular connection with Agia Ekaterini, and every Sunday without fail when they went to the church with her mother she lit a candle in front of the saint’s icon. How could her mother ever doubt her faith? When she was the one who always told Maroula that whether you were Christian or Muslim, what really mattered was to be a good person.

  Nevertheless, it was one thing to believe something, and another to put it into practice.

  ‘I’m worried for her, Kyriako,’ she told her husband that night. ‘Hatiche is a good girl but our daughter is spending too much time with the Turkish family. She has a strong head, our Maroula. What if she comes home and tells us she wants to marry a Turk one day? Eh? What then?’

  2

  So it came about that when Andreas, a Greek boy, knocked at her parents’ home to ask for Maroula’s hand and confess that the two of them were in love, instead of kicking him out of the house for his audacity, and putting their daughter under lock and key for her immodest behaviour in claiming to be in love with a boy whom they had not vetted or chosen for her, Maroula’s parents welcomed him with open arms.

  As soon as Hassan heard the good news he proceeded to do the same and duly went to Hatiche’s family to ask for her hand in marriage. There was much resistance from her father in questioning the credentials of the boy, whi
ch of course he knew were excellent – the small community was well acquainted with its inhabitants – but that was not the point. Any decent family had to be involved in the choosing of their children’s match, whether Turk or Greek. That was one custom the two communities undoubtedly had in common. Making sure they knew and approved who their children – both boys and girls – were going to marry was very important for all families. Once a match was made it wasn’t only down to the couple to make a life together because after marriage the two families would become one. Vetting and approving where a bride or groom came from was of utmost importance.

  The girls were delirious at the fortuitous outcome, despite the wagging tongues of the villagers, whose vitriol was mainly directed at them for being female.

  ‘You would never see a daughter of mine marrying for “love”,’ the women said as they gossiped by the well.

  ‘I blame the parents for letting them roam about,’ it was agreed.