Where mother was born, fish sing, algae dance. They say that when the waters lower you can feel the swell between your organs—liver bloated, heart submerged. Mother always goes back in years of drought. This time is Vassia’s first.

“I’m so glad you’ll finally see our home.”

It is important for mother—for Vassia not so much. But the trip is fun enough and sleeping in a moving train is a rare and exquisite pleasure.

When she closes her eyes, the world turns green as if the insides of her eyelids are covered in soft moss. Sunrays bake the dust on the car seats, on her eyelashes. The train’s buzz gobbles up every sound. The world is there, but Vassia’s underwater.

“You remember why our village was flooded, right? It’s important to remember our past. We need its memory—”

“—for where we’re going, yes. I remember.” Vassia finishes the line she’s heard so often. Even now mother worries she hasn’t explained things properly, hasn’t trained Vassia to expect this very day for years. Vassia opens her eyes and finds mother looking back at her, waiting for something. Mother’s eyes never wander outside the window. The beautiful landscape seems to not affect her at all.

“A civil war is a great evil.” For a moment, it’s as if it’s grandpa who’s speaking. “When you must kill people who live far away, in another country, you just kill them and move on. When you must kill someone you know—a neighbor from your own village—their relatives are going to hunt you down to get revenge. So you need to kill the entire family.”

This is new. This is something mother has never shared before. Kill your neighbor and their entire family. How macabre.

“But you survived,” Vassia says. “And so did the other villagers.”

“Yes. Only because most of us were in the summer lodges, up in the mountain, with the sheep. But the rest of us died in the flood the guerillas made—my own grandparents too, you know that. After the partisans took all our food they wanted to kill us too. Just because some villagers were fighting in the National Army, the entire village paid the price. The rest of us wanted no part in this war—we just wanted to live our lives. And they took that right from us.”

She has led a pretty nice life, Vassia thinks. What is she complaining about? “The guerillas were such drama queens then,” she says.

Their eyes meet again and Vassia is not sure if these are mother’s eyes or just a pair of eyes that remind her of mother.

“Yes, probably,” mother says with a smile. “Many of them were teenagers after all.”

The moving landscape around them is changing constantly. Trees are thickening and getting taller. In this place of blazing sun and in a year of drought nonetheless, how on earth are there places so green? This is the stuff only seen in pictures from other times. If Vassia squints, the world around her becomes a flash of green. In the blur, a tall dark smudge rises, so high that for a moment everything turns into dusk—then it’s gone, passes with the rest of the world outside the window. She gasps.

“Did you see that?”

“See what?” Mother wasn’t looking outside but she surely must have felt the train car darkening for a few seconds.

“Something in the woods.”

Even then, mother does not look outside. “Must have been a bear. Whatever it was, we’re already far from it.”

The train keeps moving, deeper in the mountains, and closer to the lake where the village Kallio lies submerged. Vassia still isn’t sure what she saw, but she is certain of what she can feel under her skin. A deep ache: every muscle sore, every nerve numb. She closes her eyes and the green world turns grey.

A tall dark smudge that spreads. It covers her eyes and puts her back to sleep.

Grandfather died last year. He always said: “When I die, I won’t go to heaven or hell. I will go back to Kallio.” Against all Orthodox beliefs he wished to be cremated. Vassia agreed to join this trip because it is important to mother—it is like taking flowers to grandpa’s grave. It is a meeting with dead ancestors, a Saturday of Souls meant only for descendants of Kallio.

When they arrive at the inn the sun has set. Vassia stretches her arms and feels the damp air on her skin. The beauty and the coolness of the mountains are long behind them. They have descended again, into the plains scorched by the sun. The lake is shimmering in the twilight. The waterline is visibly lower than it has recently been, having left around it traces like the print of the bottom of a glass. It is hard to imagine there are houses and churches in there, but mother says they will soon see them.

“I can’t see the village at all,” Vassia says. “How do we know the water will go even lower?”

“Oh, we can feel it. All the descendants of Kallio can feel it in their bones.” Mother seems lighter. Her skin has acquired a glow.

“Come on. Tell me.”

Mother pauses her fumbling with their suitcases and looks at the lake. “And of course, there’s the drought prediction,” she says with a grin. “It’s fairly accurate. Between today and tomorrow, there’s a 96 percent chance the waters will lower enough. Between today and the day after tomorrow, it’s 99 percent. How did you think we are always on time?”

“Astrology?”

Mother laughs. “Almost. Come, let’s go inside. You will meet the others.”

Vassia has no desire of meeting others—this social aspect of the trip is her least favorite. She counts on quickly going to the room to listen to music and sleep, but not before she tastes whatever pies the aunties have made. Mother says there’s always a lot of food in these meetings. A lot. And Vassia is ravenous.

At the inn, she is welcomed as if everyone already knows her. There must be at least fifty people of all ages and they are shaking her hand, touching her shoulders, her hair. “She looks just like your father,” someone says to mother. It’s an old man, skin dark and wrinkled, hair total white. Shrunken over a shepherd’s glitsa, eyes shining like glass beads. Eyes that look at Vassia as if they know her. She turns away, palms all sweaty.

Once the greetings taper off, everyone is less interested in her and more interested in mother, who is speaking in the voice she uses to talk to the pre-schoolers she teaches—several pitches high and overstuffed in enthusiasm. She seems in her element, belonging, alive. Vassia slips in the shadows, finds a chair and catches her breath. Soon a plate is poking at her ribs. The smell of freshly baked courgette pie wakes up something beastly in her. She grabs the plate—it’s not an auntie who’s handing it to her, but a boy about her age.

“This one’s the best. Try it. I’m Manos.”

“I’m Vassia, thanks. Been here before?”

He nods and sits beside her, munching from his own plate. There are a few children, but Manos seems to be the only other teenager in the room. “Every year,” he says, “since I was ten. We come here even on the years when the water doesn’t lower. Is this your first?”

“Yes. Mother said I was too young to understand before.”

“Well, you live in Athens, right? It’s a long way. We live close by. It was easier to come here sooner.” He doesn’t really comment on the too-young-to-understand aspect, but maybe he does. Vassia lives far away, the memory of Kallio simply something mother clings onto desperately, something she wants to pass down to Vassia along with genes, good manners, and grandma’s spinach pie recipe. Maybe Manos is really saying: Well, I wouldn’t expect someone like you to understand, perhaps not even now. Vassia can feel her oddness, her disconnectedness from everyone in this room, even from this boy her age.

“So, what do you do in these gatherings?” she asks. Mother rarely focuses on that—it’s usually all about what happened before the flood.

“Hah! Nothing fancy. We mostly eat and talk. Well, the old ones talk about old times. Sometimes it’s interesting to hear, but it can get really boring. Then the waters lower and we visit our houses. We set a table in the old village and have lunch there. We wrap things up before sunset and most people leave right after because they have trains to catch. That’s it, really.”

Set a table down in the mud? Sounds strange, but also a little fun. Mother was right about the abundance of food, at least.

“Is that a Walkman?” His eyes flash. He must have spotted it from afar, right when Vassia entered the room.

“Oh. Yeah. Wanna listen?”

She leaves Manos with her Walkman and tiptoes to the buffet, helps herself to another piece of pie and adds several cookies on her plate. The framed photographs over the table grab her. They’re all old photos from Kallio: vistas of the village, people working in the fields, a few weddings. There’s a picture of five men in uniform and there’s something oddly familiar in the way they’re looking at her. She studies their faces, trying to figure out if anyone of them is grandpa, but she doesn’t recognize them.

Suddenly she feels noticed. She searches the room and finds him: the same old man, the one who said she looked like grandpa. He is on the other side of the room, staring at her and not bothering to hide it.

She returns to her seat quickly and finds Manos shaking his head to the music in his ears, having a great time all to himself. When he sees her, he takes the earphones off and asks, “You do know why our village was flooded, right?”

Here it is: He knows she’s not bothered, that she doesn’t belong. And, despite her oddness, she feels no need to impress him. “My mother has explained it, yes. But tell me what you know.”

He is trying to find the pause button on the Walkman, but it feels a little like he’s trying to avoid her eyes. “It was after the war. They were doing developments and had to move streams, to make a lake. That sort of thing. The artificial lake was designed to take up a certain space in the valley and that included Kallio. So, they moved everyone out and flooded the valley without even bothering with the houses. It’s sort of lucky that the waters lower enough for us to see the village again and even walk part of it. Because that was not the purpose of the lake, right? It was to keep the water there.”

Manos says everything so naturally—a tale he’s been obviously told many times, which sounds a lot more grounded compared to the chilly one mother always told her.

“They moved everyone out,” she repeats. “Did they reimburse them for that? Losing their homes, I mean.”

“No, not a penny. Some are still trying to see money from the government, but it’s not happening. That’s what my dad says.”

Vassia sits still for a while, feels the wooden floor under her feet. The guerillas flooded our village. Because some of us fought with the National Army, they punished the entire village. Was mother the victim of grandpa’s own little fabrication? Surely, all these years of reunions with the villagers, someone must have told the different tale.

Or did mother herself simply make this up? But she said she was there, that she was up in the mountains with the sheep. It was the Civil War—but maybe “after the war” meant after World War Two? She realizes she knows nothing of Kallio, nothing really. She never asked mother any questions about it. She was never interested.

“Are you listening?”

“Sorry. Manos, you said you’re from around here? Are there bears in the woods? Or other, uhm, scary things?”

He laughs. “You must be really tired. Things live in the woods, yes, but why would this bother you? My advice is to get ready for the tons of mud in the lake tomorrow.”

“I’ve brought wellies.”

“And a second pair?”

She looks at him in horror and he laughs again.

“Alright. Here’s your Walkman. If you’re done eating, you can go to auntie Sophia over there and ask for the key to your room. No need to stay here with all the old people—I always excuse myself quickly like it’s no big deal. I’ll see you when the waters lower.”

“Thanks.” She gets up, walks through the crowds in a trance. Picks up her backpack, finds auntie Sophia. The inn owner, greeting people at the reception bar. Vassia suddenly wants to stay, ask more questions, figure out what’s happening, what happened. But she always planned to go upstairs early, to not really engage. She can hear mother in the room, talking really, really loud. Let her enjoy this, she thinks. Whatever the truth, her mother really likes being here. Her mother belongs. Let her have this.

But does Vassia? This is a strange place, full of strangers. She can’t feel a single bit of Kallio inside her, drawing her, like mother said she’d feel. And now truth is a blur and Vassia doesn’t even know how to care. All she knows is that it unnerves her.

“Come on, love. Let’s get you upstairs.” It’s auntie Sophia with a key in her hand.

The stairs creak under their weight. Auntie talks and talks but Vassia can’t hear a thing; it’s as if she’s underwater again, the world around her muffled.

“Mrs. Sophia. I need to ask you something. Why was our village flooded? Was it for water developments?”

Auntie Sophia stands startled for a moment, key hovering in front of the keyhole. “Well, yes. That and—and something else. Some people say it was payback.”

That sounded more like mother’s story. Vassia’s heart beats faster. “For what?”

“For Kallio helping the partisans, for giving them food and shelter. The government didn’t kill us, but they took our homes away. The lake design could have been different, you know. Could have spared the village. But they chose not to.”

Kallio helping the partisans? One more story—and the complete opposite of the one mother always shared. “But mother said…”

The old woman smiles as if she knows already. “What did she say?” she asks softly.

“That the guerillas flooded the village. Because some villagers were fighting with the National Army.”

Auntie Sophia does not seem shocked. “Yes, that’s her version of the story. And her father’s. That’s the thing with that war: always two sides and both are real at the same time. It’s like magic. A bad kind of magic, I’m afraid.”

“Both are real? I don’t understand.”

Auntie Sophia pushes the key in and turns it. “What you need to do is rest. You’re here for the first time—it’s a lot to take in. When you see the village, when you feel it in your bones—ah!—you will see then. What happened decades ago won’t matter. What matters is that it flows in our veins. Always.” She gently pushes Vassia in and, after pointing out where the light and hot water switches are, she closes the door behind her.

The room smells clean. Here, the pictures on the walls are few: a Panagia with baby Christ, a framed cross-stitch of a shepherdess, someone’s ancestor in their Sunday clothes. The twin beds have embroidered spreads over them, stretched carefully over each mattress. There’s a patch of moonlight on one of them and Vassia lies on it in her clothes. The chatter is distant now but still goes on and on. She’s underwater but, perhaps, it’s the world below the floor that’s submerged.

She stares at the darkness outside and a glimmer of the lake waters reaches her. She thought mother was wrong, that she was lying. Now it seems like, even if she was lying, it doesn’t matter. As if the truth is a slippery thing not to be trusted—only the unifying solitude of the lake is. As if, underwater, all truths are equal because all truths are false in the face of the single truth below the surface.

Her eyes are slits, her mind already floating like seaweed—her mind already coming up with all these strange thoughts that aren’t hers. A shape forms outside, a shadow within shadows. She jumps, eyes wide open, heart beating fast. It was there; now it’s gone.

But her eyes are heavy and soon she sinks back into her slumber.

“Vassia, wake up. It’s time.”

Her skin is clammy. Bones ache. She realizes there’s a damp, a terrible damp everywhere—she noticed it when she first arrived, but now, having slept in it, it’s as if she sank in a lump of cotton soaked in water. It makes her heavy, her own body unfamiliar.

“It’s still dark outside. What time is it? I thought we were going in the morning.”

Mother’s shape is uncertain in the shadows. “The water has lowered,” she says. Her voice seems to be coming from far away. Is that really mother or is Vassia still sleeping? “We’re going now.”

“I…I need to put something on. It’s chilly.”

“No need. We’re wearing these.”

She shows a strange sort of cape, grey and matte in the moonlight, woollen perhaps. It’s looks very warm but Vassia is uneasy about it.

“Uhm, no thanks.” She reaches for her backpack in the dark and pulls out a red sweater. At the last moment, she remembers to take her wellies too.

Mother watches her without a word. “As you like. Come,” she says eventually and near disappears in the darkness.

“It’s too dark! I can’t see the stairs!” Why aren’t the lights on? Where did auntie Sophia say the switch is?

By touch alone she stumbles forward. Her mother is already past her, gliding down gracefully in the darkness, swift as if she’s made of light and Vassia is a newborn lamb just learning to walk. When Vassia reaches the end of the staircase, she can feel a warm gust of air. A quiet hum. There are several breaths around her, going in and out. There’s a shallow ray of moonlight and her eyes adjust to the dimness.

The room is full of people. Everyone is there, standing in silence, wearing those hideous grey capes. Why aren’t the lights on and why is everyone so quiet? Then auntie Sophia talks.

“Right! We’re all here. Off we go. Follow the light.” There’s the sound of a match and a flash of light. The warmth of the lantern soon makes faces glow: Sophia’s first of all, then a cheek or a nose of those around her. There’s mother—Vassia catches up with her as the crowd shifts, following Sophia’s lantern.

“Hey, Manos said we usually have lunch at the village. Are we going to do that now?”

“Yes,” mother says quietly. “It’s gonna be a midnight lunch, I suppose.”

They are already outside in the cold damp air and the nice red sweater suddenly feels inadequate, but she hates to admit it. They walk, following the ant trail, catching a glimpse of the cape of the person in front of them, because the only light—Sophia’s lantern—is clearly not enough. The moonlight too is their guide, and the backs and breaths of everyone else around them. A river. Vassia just flows in it.

But the hike seems endless. She is getting thirsty and when she complains, she’s reassured that they’re close and there will be plenty of food and refreshments waiting for them. Two or three times she sees something in the woods. Some shadow, perhaps, like the thing she saw while on the train, but the forward motion of the crowd is more powerful than the engine of the train: She has soon forgotten it. Kallio, we’re reaching Kallio, a voice in her whispers and she wonders why, why am I feeling like this. The pull, the pull mother always said. Is this the pull?

She wants to wait till they’re alone to ask, but she can’t help it. “Mom. I wanted to ask you something. Have you told me the truth about our village?”

“Why are you asking that?” Is that alarm in her voice? Did Vassia really catch her lying?

“I heard a different story about it. About what happened to it.”

“Ah.” She almost sounds relieved. “There are many stories. They don’t matter.”

“I always thought they mattered a lot to you.”

“Not tonight. Have patience.”

“You always said it’s important to know our history.”

“It is. This is what it’s all about. Shh. We’re close. Get ready.”

The descent begins. The ground grows soft, feet sink deep in mud. They’re in the bed of the lake, but no sight of the village yet. Then she sees it. A wall, standing erect, the unmistakable cut of a window. Soon they’re moving through a neighborhood. No one speaks. Vassia stays quiet, like she’s supposed to. She doesn’t want to insult anyone—this is too important for them.

“Have you heard it yet?” mother asks. She has stopped walking and she is looking into the distance between the dilapidated buildings.

“Heard what?”

“Our home. It calls to us. Want to see it? We can walk there. It’s in the part that re-emerges. Not everyone is so lucky.”

They separate from the crowd. She notices others too are cutting loose, walking their own paths to their houses and the places they knew. Those grey capes make them look like shadows. They blur with the blue-black darkness and even the silvery moonlight seems to be swallowed by that surface of thick lambswool.

“Here it is.” Mother is framed by a door—surprisingly, a door that is still there intact, paint long gone, wood long rotten, most of the wall around it collapsed. Only then does Vassia notice mother holding the urn—grandpa’s urn. She’s brought the ashes here, as promised. Finally, something that makes sense. Vassia gets closer: This is why she came here. The rest doesn’t really interest her.

“Are you ready?” mother asks.

She nods and together they put the urn in the mud and leave the lid open. When the water rises again, it will take the ashes with it, take them everywhere in the lake, where Kallio’s essence has poured itself in its waters.

Something moves at the corner of her eye—a strange, disjointed motion, like a puppet. She lifts her eyes, looks around, sees motion everywhere. Shadows, all clear shapes, the edges of people, standing inside the house and outside, staring back at her from non-existent eyes. They’re perfectly still, but she can see their perfect airless breathing, their shoulders going up and down very, very slowly.

She screams and takes a step back. Mother catches her.

“Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“Shadows! Shadows of people!”

“There’s nothing.”

Mother’s right. There’s nothing there. “Maybe…maybe I…”

As if nothing happened, mother kneels down and puts two hands on the ruined wall. “Do you want to touch its stones? I always do. It gives me energy.”

Vassia can’t figure out why, but no, she doesn’t want to. She thinks she might puke if she does so. She just wants this to end soon. “Not this time,” she shakes her head.

“Alright. Let’s go eat something.” Mother puts her arm in hers and Vassia lets herself be guided, feet simply responding to directions, to whatever pull her body receives. She dares not look back at the house.

The table is set at the main square, in what used to be the church’s courtyard. Perhaps there are saints in there still, sleeping in their icons. Vassia doesn’t want to know. She just wants to finish this dinner and then leave.

People arrive at the table, they eat, chat, laugh. Her eye catches Manos, who is munching on something while listening to someone’s story. He looks amused. No one seems unnerved, not even slightly, so it must be just her who’s seeing things. The image of the human-shaped shadow against the wall keeps returning to her. No, no, forget it. Vassia takes her place beside mother and she suddenly comes face to face with the old man. He is eating slowly, eyes fixed on her.

She focuses on her plate, hoping he will forget about her. There’s something in the food, something she hasn’t tasted before. A sickly sweetness and a certain…muddiness? She chews and chews until her eyes find again the old man’s and now she can’t run away.

“Have you seen them?” he asks.

As he speaks those words Vassia notices something beside him—someone. The person sitting next to him: It’s a shadow. Contours perfect, hair puffy, like a lady of decades past. It’s sitting there, perfectly still, one more guest at the table. Vassia looks first at one side of the table, then at the other: There’s more of them, sitting between them, shadows and echoes of people past.

“Yes,” she says, breathless. “Who are they?”

“They’re us. Everyone who came before. Everyone who comes after, if they hear its call. It’ll be your grandfather too, now that he’s back.”

“You knew grandfather.”

“Yes.” He suddenly seems sad. “He was my friend. We’re bonded. There are two kinds of blood bond.”

Unsure of what this means, she tries to look away. She turns to mother, to ask her if she sees them this time. She is there, drinking her soup, with the shadow of a grown man perched on her shoulders. Suddenly the shadow is huge, looming over Vassia, and so, so empty. Vassia is looking inside it, is almost sucked by this black hole. She shrieks.

“Mom can’t you see it? It’s on you!”

“Hush. You’re making everyone nervous,” she says, embarrassed. “Of course I can see it.”

“Back in the house…you said you saw nothing.”

“You weren’t ready. We hadn’t eaten yet.”

Eaten? This food. This strange food. She looks down: not a thing on her plate she recognizes. No roast, no salad, no soup, no pies. Just a muddy thing that smells foul. Did she just eat that? “What’s going on?” she shouts and everyone stops, forks and spoons midair.

“This shadow,” mother says quietly, cutting up the mudfood with fork and knife, “is someone your grandpa killed.”

“Killed?”

“At the war. A neighbor.”

“My cousin,” the old man says. He smiles faintly and it’s not a smile of joy.

She looks around: Everyone is staring at her, everyone knows. Then it dawns on her, as if the words are spoken directly to her brain: members of these families have slaughtered some other family’s relatives. The chain of blood is too long to matter.

“It’s the village.” Auntie Sophia’s voice. “It wants peace. But it can’t find it.”

Vassia is sinking. Something is drawing her. Pulling her.

“So we come here to provide it,” Manos says. “To give it to our dead.”

The world grows more distant, but the mud, the water: It draws closer.

“We give them ourselves,” the old man says. “We let them feast on our pulse, our dreams, our memories. And then we carry them back home. A little bit of them with us, always. Never forgotten.”

Her mouth is full of mud. She screams, but her voice sinks in the marshy softness and melts.

“We are the food here tonight, Vassia,” mother says. “We are the feast.”

Is this the pull? Is this the calling? Everyone is looking at her.

“It’s alright, honey.” Mother’s voice is softer now. She is holding her hand. “This is who we are. This is our legacy. If we forget it, then who are we?”

One by one, they fall asleep on their chairs. Gorged on mud, they join the lake in its dreams.

Her eyelids close and the world turns green.

There’s another story about Kallio, mother said—or maybe she didn’t. Isn’t that her voice?

Vassia went to Kallio for the first time last summer. She met mother’s distant relatives, even made friends with teens her age. They hiked to the place where their grandparents were born and ate together. They all seem to believe the same thing as grandpa: That when they die, they will not go to heaven or hell, but return to Kallio. “It’s both heaven and hell!” auntie Sophia joked.

A story that claims its streets were so full of unholy blood—the blood of brother shed by brother—that the sheep could not walk them. Their hooves would stick in the bloody mud and they would cry, helpless, for hours.

Vassia went on about her life as normal—school and friends and music and dreams. Life goes on, but something has changed. She promised mother they would go together from now on. She connected to her roots, didn’t she? Even if these are people she’d meet once a year, Vassia will always have a sense of belonging with each visit. A return.

A pull.

A story about our village that says all this sadness, all this bloodshed, all this evil, could never be washed away, not even if all survivors fled and the entire village was forever submerged in water.

Because all survivors would have stayed submerged in water with it, their hair flowing around them like jellyfish. Water would run in their veins instead of blood. Blood is thicker than water, but what if the water is blood?

So the village brings them back. Not to forget, but to remember.

Vassia breathes and no air comes in.

She closes her eyes and the muted world undulates, as if all the children of Kallio never left, as if the bottom of the lake is their one true home.

 

(Editors’ Note: Eleanna Castroianni is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2025 Eleanna Castroianni