After one last look at the gate and the cemetery at Agia Paraskevi, our red jeep put a distance between us and that childhood memory. A somber cloud floated in the car, leaving each of us in our own thoughts as Lena drove closer to where we lived 65 yrs ago.
“I can’t believe we don’t remember the name of the street,” Lena said as she eased into a parking space.
Lena and I assumed an investigative air, while Charles, who refuses to use the phone to take photographs, clicked away with his Nikon. We expected that the neighborhood would look different, but not unrecognizable. We spoke to several people, but no one was old enough to remember the names we gave them. The original residents had either died or moved away. I know our landlady had sold her house and moved with her daughter Mary to the prestigious waterfront in Thessaloniki.
“Look at this! How sad. The heirs probably couldn’t agree to sell.” I stopped and the three of us stood in front of the dilapidated structure that had been a house. A home to a family. Probably a family like ours was. That home was now a sad, crumbled memory and attached to a four-story apartment building. The neighborhood, with its paved streets lined with cars and apartment buildings, is a typical city neighborhood of today.
Lena and I reminisced. “Remember the dust rising as we chased each other on the street?”
We laughed, and I added. “Invariably, there was an adult who would yell at us to stop.”
They were out in their yards cooking or hanging out laundry or airing their rag rugs and didn’t want them to get dusty. Now, with paved streets, the dust is not an issue nor are the children running on the streets. Children gather at the nearby parks to play.
The one and two-story homes have been replaced with apartment buildings and only an occasional wreck, the remnant of a house remains. Had those wrecks been on the right side of the street, we could have accepted it as the house where we lived. A vivid image of Mrs. Azat’s front balcony with the cascading flowers over the railing was in the background of my mind. Although we did not find the actual house, besides the photographs we left with the satisfaction of having been in our childhood neighborhood.
Once again, silence enveloped our threesome as Lena navigated through the old neighborhood and down to Vardari Square. Instead of going through the square to the new highway, we picked up the old road our taxi had taken in 1958.
Thessaloniki was behind us, and after kilometers of undeveloped land with an occasional village, we came upon the village of Makrochori. “This is where we had noticed the people standing up and crossing themselves when our taxi was going by,” I said to Charles. Gone are the small cottage-like houses with their vegetable gardens. Now new buildings take up the entire lot and are attached to their neighbors. They are in the typical European style of having storefronts on the street level and apartments above.
We parked in front of a café to sit and take in the view and see it with different eyes. “This could very well have been one place we had seen people stand up, watching us drive by with the partially exposed casket in the taxi.”
So much had changed. The main street in Makrochori did not look like a village. More of a Main Street in a town. However, there is something that has not changed at the café. I had to walk through the café to the detached bathroom, and to my surprise, there was an updated version of a Turkish toilet.
You will find the details of this ride in Chapter 1 of Taxi to America.
Our next stop will be Kostochori, my yiayia’s village. Come back for Ep.3.
