YANNIS KARKANEVATOS
Father didn’t talk about them
ed. Hestia, page 146

We don’t talk about what really hurts us out of respect for what life has brought us and made us who we are.

He wasn’t talking about them. Actually. But now he’s sitting in front of his nephew’s camera, next to his brother, in a suit and tie, talking. He describes what it is like to climb a mountain at the age of twenty in 1942 and climb it again in 1947, so that after 49 you will find yourself, like everyone else like you, in the countries of people’s democracy, you yourself in Romania. What it’s like to hide, be afraid, sleep in the woods, stay awake and fight. What is it like to suffer from hunger, from thirst, not to have open doors to help you, to be eaten by lice and greed. What is it like when you are threatened with prison or exile and torture, to flee from your homeland so that your father dies, and then finds out about it, to lose citizenship, as if you were not born a Greek, like ideas, values, let your beliefs deprive you of blood and land uz. What is it like tossing and turning in a dream for years, but for now everything has already passed, the soul does not give rest, the memory is chasing you, as “others”, civilian enemies were chasing you. What it’s like to be Andreas.

And your brother Socrates. Where is the relative of the politically noted, the one who always, for life, must protect the family, support his brother as best he can, hide what he knows, and be silent, lean and beg. All that they experienced and did not confess to anything is a wound for both of them, a wound that does not unite them, it separates them deeply and inexpressibly, two worlds that converge nowhere except in brotherly love. The only one who managed to keep them together, despite the fact that it took decades to meet, to feel the power of an existing relationship, so difficult to maintain, so unbreakable. Between two brothers, son and nephew, videographer, author. In their narratives, he inserts his own stories, which are his attempts to learn about the past of the family and face it, discover facts, explain behavior, understand his uncle and his parents, gradually come of age, maturity. Position yourself professionally, achieve what you want, become a director, get to know the unknown world of women.

It fills us with emotion. With what he feels for his family, with what he expects from this story of his father and uncle, with what torments him and appears in his sleep, not like nightmares, but like movie scenes full of longing and sadness. This breath of liberation he manages to do now, taking out the respirator that his father forcibly and persistently put on him in his youth and forced him to “dive, beating like a fish caught on his father’s hook.” It’s also his way of getting his parents off the hook. Now that he’s gone, that video footage of the two is all that’s left of him alive, his voice and words, his look and expression are still there.

We don’t talk about what really hurts us. Not out of pride and secrecy, not because hidden pain and the scattered words that accompany it exalt us in the eyes of others. But out of respect. In what life has led us and made us who we are and after respect for others if we care about them why should we create embarrassment and sadness why should we ask them to walk the same path as we are in order to feel us? There are, however, moments when everything can be said softly and gracefully, quietly and humbly. In the manner of Karkanevatos. And to accept, like the author, that this suitcase among the many before us, which we must carry as our own, although we did not choose it, belongs to us.