A Bridge Between Two Worlds
Nigel Fox and Elizabeth Katsanos in London — Cassette №5
Jim Jacobson fell asleep at the end of Cassette №4, but as it had been every morning for months, he awakened at 3:15 once again from the nightmare about the train wreck. He sat up on the bed with his hands on his knees. He didn’t know how to process what he had heard from Nigel’s narrative. He didn’t know how to deal with the dreams. He took cassette №4 out of the player and replaced it with Cassette №5. He pressed play and began to listen, hoping that focusing attention on something else would calm his anxiety from the nightmare.
When I saw Elizabeth walking away after she got the news about the death of her brother Demetrios, I felt an intense sadness for her, but also for myself because I was certain I would never see her again. I couldn’t get out of bed to catch up with her at the door, and I never felt so helpless.
Leonard came to see me the following afternoon, and I could see the anguish and his face, even before he said, “I’m sorry, Nige. If I hadn’t borrowed from a loan shark, we’d still be in New York. If there is anything I can do to make it up to you, just ask me.”
“There is one thing you can do for me.”
“Yes, Nige.”
“There was a young woman here yesterday, Elizabeth Katsanos. See if you can find her for me.”
“Why?”
“Don’t ask me, just try to find her.”
“Alright, I’ll try.”
He offered me candy and a few magazines he had brought with him. We talked a little about radios and then I asked him, “What happened with Lieutenant Jamison?”
“He’s gone back to the States. His father pulled a few strings and got him out of the navy.”
Before he left, I reminded him a second time to look for her. “I’ll do what I can,” he responded.
I really didn’t expect him to find her. When he returned a week later with no success, I was not surprised. “You can’t find a young woman in the city the size of London with just the name,” he told me, “Especially not with the bombings.”
“You’re not falling for this girl, are you? A greek refugee girl in London in the middle of a war. Two completely different worlds apart and you think this is going to happen? What you should be thinking about is healing yourself. Not some impossible relationship that takes a miracle to work itself out.”
I knew in my gut that what Leonard spoke was reasonable, but she was the most extraordinary human being I had ever met!
“We all like the mysterious, the exotic, but it is all just curiosity,” he ended.
But for me, it was much more than just curiosity. She was all I could think about that first week. I kept looking at the foot of the other bed and imagining her praying there. I didn’t know what I could say to her if she showed up again. There was a language barrier between us. Each day she remained away, the more I yearned to see her.
Doctor MacGregor came in almost every morning at about ten o’clock and would ask me how I was doing and every morning I would give him the same anguished answer, “Terrible.”
“Cast will be coming off in a few weeks,” he would remind me. “You should begin walking after that.”
A young nurse named Agatha who came in on the day shift would occasionally speak to me. But for the most part, my days were spent quietly in bed. I began to read again, at first popular fiction, because that was what I could easily get my hands on, but then I asked the nurses to bring in books for me. One of the younger nurses whom I had flattered, brought me a copy of Dickens’ Oliver Twist, which I read almost continuously for 3 days. I was at the part of the book when Oliver left Fagan when the unexpected happened. I looked up and standing in the doorway of the ward was Elizabeth Katsanos. She smiled briefly when she noticed that I noticed her. She was wearing a beige and brown dress that loosely fit her slender frame and she carried a bag in her arms. After seeing her say a few words to one of the nurses, I watched her as she walked toward my bed.
It deeply surprised me that she had come to see me, and I still find it difficult to understand what she found desirable in me during those years. Perhaps because I had shown kindness to her, but she stood nervously before my bed and in the best diction she could master, she told me, “I came to see if you okay. I brought you something to make you feel better.”
She reached into the bag and retrieved a small package. “It’s baklava,” she said and handed it to me.
I opened the package and removed the pastry from the paper. I placed it in my mouth and it was the richest and most delicious pastry that I ever tasted, much better than the baklava I had eaten in New York. I don’t know if it was so good, because she had made it that way or if it would have tasted the same for someone else, but the wonderful taste of it still lingers in my mind.
“You like it?” she asked me.
“Yes, It’s wonderful.”
“Good,” she smiled. “I make you more next week.”
“Why did you come to see me?” I asked her.
“I like you. My English is not so good. I want to see if you okay,” she struggled through the English words.
“Thank you.”
“Efcharisto.”
“Efcharisto,” I struggled to pronounce.
“I read the book,” she said as she pulled the Bible from her bag.
“My English getting better.”
“Yes, it is.”
She sat beside me and we struggled to talk for an hour. It must have sounded odd as she struggled to give English words to her thoughts and I struggled to fill in the blanks, but what I discovered about this beautiful young woman brought tears to my eyes.
“How long have you been in London?” I asked her.
“Five months, maybe six. I live with, how you say, aunt and uncle.” Her diction was slow and deliberate. “My family is all dead. Killed by Nazis when they march into our village.”
“And how did you escape?” I asked her.
“We hid in cave outside the village. After three days, we escape in small boat out into Mediterranea,” she struggled to pronounce each word. “We drifted for week until Arab fishing boat pick us up. Take us to North Africa. We walk into French Morocco. From there we take freighter to England.”
“How long?” I asked her.
“Penta menas. Five months.” She finished. “My English no so good.“It’s fine,” I tried to reassure.
As she had struggled to explain what had obviously been a nightmare for her, the images of her ordeal became as vivid to me as though I had shared them with her. Afterwards, she sat quietly and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I had never known anyone of such courage, and I felt totally unworthy to even be talking to her. I asked her how she could have endured so much, and she simply me simply, “My faith in God.” Then I thought about myself and how close I had come to suicide over Melissa, and I never felt so foolish in my life. After we talked a little about the farm, and about my mother, she told me, “I’m sorry. I must go.”
“Thank you for coming, Efcharisto,” I told her. Then with an awkward smile, she told me goodbye, Yasou.” The time seemed to rush too quickly while we were together and I was deeply sad that she had gone.
For the next few days, I kept replaying the conversation in my head. I had never known anyone like her. I considered telling her about my dreams, but I did not want to dredge up bad memories, so I decided if she should come back, I wouldn’t talk about it.
Dr MacGregor came in the following morning and spent some time explaining to me how he had repaired my leg. I can’t remember all that he said, but I remember him telling me, “It hasn’t healed as well as I would like. I am sending you back to the States to have further surgery.”
He also showed concerns about bone fragments that had been dislodged in my leg. He showed me a diagram of the leg and where he felt the danger lay. Though I didn’t understand all of what his concerns entailed, I was worried when he said, “They must be removed, if possible.”
It was during this week that I wrote home my first letter, describing what had happened and spending several pages alone describing my conversation with Elizabeth. I also began having sporadic and intense flashbacks about my missing 16 hours in the Channel.
In the first and most vivid of the flashbacks, I remembered clinging to a piece of debris that resembled a cross, while my leg throbbed in the most agonising pain I had ever felt. It hurt so much I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and I began to hallucinate, which I believed was from the pain.
I saw a man standing o the debris in what looked like a white painter’s uniform. He looked down at me from what seemed like a great distance and he said to me in a voice that cut the air, “It looks like you need some help.”
“Yes,” I answered.
The waves rocked his head back and forth and I had difficulty keeping focused on him.
“I suggest you pray.”
“But I don’t believe in God.” I started to lose my grip on the wood and began to slide into the water.
“It’s not time for philosophical reservations, PRAY!”
“My God, please help me,” I said softly.
“Louder.”
“My God, please help me,” I spoke much louder.
“Louder!”:
“MY GOD, PLEASE HELP!”
I must have been shouting at the top of my lungs, and then my eyes closed. When I opened them, he was gone. I clung to the wood with every sinew of my being and shouted with all the breath my lungs could hold, “My God, Please help me,” over and over again as though I couldn’t stop myself. Psychologists say that the human mind in self-protection will suppress the memory of traumas that it can not easily face. When this memory would return to me, I dismissed the whole incident. i never spoke about it to anyone for fear of being ridiculed or called crazy.
Leonard came to visit me again several days after my visit with Elizabeth. He again brought magazines and candy.
“I see you are looking much better, Nige.”
“I feel a little better.”
“How’s your leg?”
“It hurts like hell. But it’s better.”
I could sense he was trying to tell me something, but what it was I couldn’t guess. Then he blurted out in one breath, “I’ve got bad news. I’m shipping off to the pacific tomorrow.”
“It’s okay, Leonard, I’ll survive.” I tried to alleviate the anguish I saw in his face.
How many anguished hours did I spend in my life trying to understand life’s injustices? I could not even guess.
“Remember that young woman I asked you to look for?”
“Yes.”
“She came to see me a few days ago.”
I don’t think he knew what to say about it.
“She may come back in a few days to see me again.”
“That’s good news,” he responded.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m okay,” I told him. I was far from okay.
We talked for a few minutes longer and then he told me, “I have to go.” He shook my hand, wished me luck and then he left me.
I couldn’t have described all the feelings and thoughts that raced through my mind as I watched him walk out the door. He had been an angel of mercy in one of my most desperate hours, and we had shared so much together. But I had the strangest sense that the path that my life was taking would not be his, and like Elizabeth before, I wasn’t sure if I would ever see him again.
I received a letter from home the following day. My mother was saddened by what I told her, But the general tone was one of cautious optimism. She mentioned briefly what everyone was doing. Reginald was still saying Mary Parker's sister. My father had begun planting again, And my cousin Mathias had been helping with the small chores around the farm. It was the first letter in which she had not asked me to write Mary Parker. All that she said about Elizabeth was that it was nice that I had someone come to visit me.
On a Saturday afternoon shortly after that, Elizabeth came to see me again period when a green dress with a ruffle at the collar, she smiled again as she was standing in the doorway, And this time she waved her hand in a brief hello. I could see from the distance that she had no make-up on her face, something I had not noticed on her first visit. She tied her hair back again, but this time her a green elastic headband that across her scalp.
“I brought you some Baklava,” were her first words and she had another package that she opened in front of me.
“Dolmadas,” she told me, “stuffed grape leaves.”
The thought of it frightened me, but she put one in her mouth and then she handed me one. It tasted unlike anything I had ever eaten, both bitter and sweet at the same time, but after a few bites, my palate grew accustomed to the taste, and I began to like it. When she handed me another one I found it quite delicious.
“You like?” she asked me again.
“Yes, They are very good. Did you make these?”
“Yes. My aunt Sophia helped me.”
“Dolmadas,” I pronounced.
I learned more about her living situation during this second conversation. She lived West London with her aunt Sophia and uncle Petros Aristides. Her uncle was a medical doctor who had trained in Athens, but who had left Greece shortly after the Great War. Your family here on the farm north of Salonica, in a village called Arnos. I learnt she had five brothers, four older and one younger, The youngest Demetrios being the one who had died in London. She said that Costa, Pavlos and Markos had all been killed when the Germans came into her village, But her oldest brother Nicholas, who was much older than she was, had left the farm when she was a child, and she barely remembered him. “He went to Holy Mountain to become a monk,” she told me.
Though her culture same this far removed from mine, as mine in Wisconsin was from New York, we found we had much in common. We both had raised pigs and we had risen early in the morning to milk cows. When we talked there was an electric charge in the air. We laughed, we cried and in the end, I focused on her more than anyone I had ever known.
“You like to read?” she asked me.
“Yes, a little.”
“I bring you the book next time. What you like?”
“Anything would be fine.”
“I asked uncle, Petros. He give you something.”
When she left at 4 o’clock that afternoon, again I was deeply saddened. The time rushed so swiftly when she was with me and moved at a snail’s pace when she was away.
It never occurred to me what a strange paradox our romance was, with me captive to my bed and she like a beautiful butterfly drifting on delicate wings to see me. We came from such different worlds, and sometimes I envied her world which seemed so full of life and hope. Through her, I had begun to realise that it was not so much where I live that mattered, but how I lived.
She came to me again on Tuesday night after work and she brought a copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov for me to read.
“My uncle thinks he is best writer,” she told me. “It is long but good.”
She didn’t say much that evening, but she listened to me as I talked about everything from my trip on the train to the zebras at the zoo. She laughed when I told her about the zebra who ran in circles.
“It is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. Every time I sprayed him with water he’d run in circles.”
“He sounds like circus zebra,” she told me.
“You know that never occurred to me.”
I was falling so deeply in love with her that it frightened me. She came to see me often after that, sometimes 3 to 4 times a week. We’d talk. I would help her with her English, but she was learning so much on her own that what I could add seemed inconsequential. I could see the improvement almost every time we talked.
I can’t tell you what she saw in me. I don’t know. I first I thought it was out of sympathy that she came to see me because I have given her the bible, but I began to realise it was much deeper than that. I had never received such undeserved kindness in my life.
Soon weeks had passed and it was time for the cast to come off. Dr MacGregor came one morning as he did often, but this time with a nurse, carrying a large pair of scissors.
“The time has come,” he greeted in his Scottish brogue. “The cast comes off today. I’m sure you will be happy to be rid of this thing.”
“Jubilant,” I responded. That was the first time I ever used that word.
“Move your toes,” he told me and I wiggled them.
Then the nurse, with delicate fingers, began to cut the cast, beginning at the toes and moving along the right side of the cab. It felt a little like cold water touching my skin. Soon she had reached the end and the cast popped open. Then she and the doctor spread the cast open and removed it from my leg. It was then that I saw this car running 6 to 7 inches down the side of my calf.
“How does it feel?” he asked me.
“Better, but it still hurts.”
“Let’s put some weight on it.” The nurse swung my legs to the side of the bed and then both of them helped me to my feet. When I stood up on my leg, an excruciating pain shot up from my leg up to my back into my neck. I collapsed a moment later onto the bed.
“Why didn’t you tell me it was going to hurt like that?”
“You’ll walk, but not without pain,” was all that he said.
When Elizabeth came to see me a few days later, she saw the cast was off and became especially elated.
“I pray for you,” she told me. “It’s so good your leg is healed.”
“Well, it’s not completely healed,” I tried to explain to her, but she couldn’t understand all the technicalities.
“I have good news,” she told me. “I get a better job tomorrow. No longer do I work a hard sewing machine. I inspect clothing.” I think I have forgotten to say that she worked at a shirt factory in London’s garment district.
“That’s wonderful.”
“Maybe, when your leg better, we can see some of London?”
“That would be good.”
The only things I had seen in nine weeks were the grungy walls in the ward. But I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was going back to the states for more surgery before I’d ever have a chance to see anything in London.
There was a sad irony in our situation. I loved her so much that it hurt, But I knew there could be no life for us, that there could be no bridge between these different worlds. I was going back to the United States and she was staying in London. I looked into her eyes and then tears began to slide down each of my cheeks.
“Why do you cry, Neilos?” she asked me.
She wiped my eyes with her handkerchief.
“I am being sent back to the States soon.”
“No worry, I love you,” she told me as tenderly as a kiss. “With God all things are possible.” She hesitated. “I have a dream about you while I was in Arnos. I see you standing on a platform and all around you faces, so many faces they look like field of flowers, and then you cry. I come to you and tell you, ‘Do not cry, My Neilos. There will be many hardships along the way. But God is merciful. In the end, he fix things.’”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked her.
“And have you think me a silly woman?”
“I had dreams about you,” I began to explain my dreams to her. She began to cry as I described what I remembered. After I finished, I paused and then said, “I love you too.”
“I know,” she acknowledged.
I would have blurted out a marriage proposal at that moment if I had a way to make it possible. But it all seemed hopeless, as hopeless as her brothers coming back to life. There was a sinking feeling in my stomach and every muscle in my body ached. I thought the Cosmos morbidly sadistic, toying with lives like a cat with a mouse, and then she said, “If God wishes it, we find a way.” This one sentence captured her entire outlook on life. If this courageous young woman could find out, then I wouldn’t give it up as a lost cause.
We saw each other every day for the next two weeks, and then the bad news arrived. Dr MacGregor came into the ward one morning and said, “You will be leaving tomorrow for the States.” It was news I awaited with trepidation, and it brought such sadness as my heart had never known. The whole day long I awaited Elizabeth’s arrival. I was as close to tears as I could be without crying. Any stimulus could have triggered such a torrent that I would have crumbled into nothingness. But I held myself together by the force of will if nothing else. I was determined to make our last evening together as wonderful as possible.
Before she arrived, I had the nurses set up a table in the lobby, with candles and wine and the best food the cafeteria good muster. I even had them use a bed sheet as a white tablecloth. Then with painful difficulty, I walked from my bed to the table in the lobby, so that I could wait there until she arrived.
When she walked into the room and saw what I had prepared, she merely broke down and began to cry. I too began to cry.
“You should not have done all this,” She told me and she sat across from me at the table, “You will hurt your leg.” Her face seemed more beautiful than I have ever seen it.
“I am leaving, tomorrow,” I told her.
“I know you must go.”
We stared at each other in anticipation. The air was thick with silence and then I said with hesitation, “Will you marry me?” I finally found the courage. Then I said it more emphatically.
She then smiled and began to cry.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say anything wrong.”
She wiped the tears from her face and blew her nose.
“You say nothing wrong. Yes. I marry you.”
Neither of us knew how it would come to pass. It was like a heartfelt wish for a better world, a world without sorrow, a world without separation, a world without war, a world where the innocent were no longer murdered for no reason. For this moment we wanted to live in that world in our circle of two.
