Dido Sotiriou Says Farewell Anatolia, Over and Again
[T]here are no evil Greek and Turk, but only people who are victims and pay dear for it
—Dido Sotiriou
Let’s say two million Greeks were never expelled
from Asia Minor. That her protagonist, Axiotis Manolis,
could stay in Turkey and quietly farm
what he was certain would be his small plot
of everlasting life. Wind ached in her throat. In Dido’s
throat. As if it could never quite say the rain
and make things right. All the ancient Greek tragedies
emerged in her novels but in different ways —
the Greek-Turkish population exchange, the Greek
Civil War, the Communist Resistance against the Nazis.
Was it realism or just another cut of blood
in the hummingbird’s throat? Did André Malraux really fall
in love with the sway of her hips that summer in Paris?
Or was it André Gide who once told her, Fold your two hands
in prayer but be sure to only pray with one. Paradox perplexed
her, as if Louis Aragon was right that evening in the café
when he told her to blow her nose if she wanted her bones
to glow. Dido knew enough to beg for the crop milk
of cranes. To cough up the goldfish from her throat
as phlegm onto the hanky. Was somehow convinced
that the pneumonia that would eventually take her
at ninety-five was remnants of ash from bodies burned
decades before in Syntagma Square at the outbreak
of the Civil War. We can only leave so much behind,
she said, and it is always in front of us. Waiting
to swoop. She loved eagles. Owls. Any raptor, really,
as its talons told tales of hello but mostly of goodbye.
Goodbye my darling, she drooled onto her sickbed.
Farewell to Ephesus. Athens. And especially
Anatolia. Farewell Anatolia, she said over and again
into her pillow. Citing the English translation of her novel
Bloody Earth. They’re not nearly the same thing, she gasped.
There is no farewell in the blood moments we become.
So she lay there, in Athens, in old age,
with a bag of fluid pumping antibiotics into her vein.
Convinced — still — there was no evil in either the Greeks
or the Turks, as her lungs tried to clear the debris
of atrocities people continually bestow upon their sisters
and brothers. Even upon their brethren, the birds. Farewell
Ephesus. Farewell Athens. Farewell Anatolia. Farewell. Farewell.