I was born in 1991, somewhere in Athens, as the first consequence of a very controversial marriage.

           By the time I got to know my mother and father, they meant little more to me than the two bleached photographs on my grandparents’ wall, which anyway made them look more dead than alive. In their seven years of absence, I assembled them in a sort of immaculate conception. This illusion was preserved by a sweet yearning for something I neither loved, nor understood, but enjoyed imagining with an unusual obsession for a little girl. I met them later, and discovered they were not gods, but aging, insufficient, ridiculous people. 

           My school years were long and painful. Books at home sufficed. I had no idea who I was or wanted to be, so I studied Philosophy at university, and there I began to suspect that my ancestors were to blame for everything. 

           And though many years have since elapsed, it is still clear to me today that my mother and father, in uniting their lives, also united two opposing bloodlines, and traditions, and a fair share of inherited curses. From this, I imagine, was born an extravagant new destiny, with unique colossal consequences that account for the story I am about to tell. Under this disclosure, I shall attempt to make some sense of my history.

           I come, in brief, from a long and famous line of prosperous peasants and failed aristocrats.

 

           My father was the son of a shepherd and a seamstress, who lived his early years in the foggy wooded hills of Transylvania, in a small primitive town called Mesendorf. My mother was the love child of a majestic plump woman and an adulterous Russian diplomat who financed her departure upon learning of her pregnancy. Perhaps coincidence, perhaps fate moved my grandmother, Helena, from Moscow to Kishinev, then from Kishinev to Bucharest, where she soon married a decent educator who raised my mother as his own.

           Eighteen years later, on a white day in the summer of 1990, Natasya Igoraevich met my father at her anniversary party. Filip was a crossbreed between a French musketeer and a young Al Pacino, but most of all he understood the power of a scooter, and a white shirt faced with horizontal stripes. They fell in a sensual, brainless sort of love, and married after six months, with four friends as their sole witnesses.

 

           My paternal grandparents hailed from something of a clan back then, which believed blindly a legend that they descended from Alexander the Great, but the more recent founder of our line was my great-great grandfather, Philippos Prevendi, who immigrated from Greece in 1891. In the confines of his hut, he started a small milk factory. They were simple superstitious gentle folk with a fierce vocation for commerce, who could go with a pile of scat to return with a sack of money. They had a reputation of being very industrious. In the span of a few decades, they became indispensable to the surrounding county. This was not least due to their magic milk which, rumors had it, could cure impotence, mild forms of paresis, possession, and even the village alcoholics. But more than the quality of the milk, the key to their success lay in their ruthless frugality. They lived in miserably austere conditions, limited, for the most part, to an adobe house with a stable, a garden, and an outhouse in the yard. Any lacking education and financial finesse were more than compensated by simple mathematical calculations. "Today’s scarcity is tomorrow’s wealth" was the family motto, stated soberly at dinnertime, between a sigh and a cross, and passed on to the boys by the time they learned to talk. One hundred years of frugal traditions later, the Prevendi family became –what I am sure to be– the poorest rich people in the world.

            My father, Filip, sprouted as a strong earthly creature, molded by raw elemental forces, and first of his line to be afflicted by the strange, superfluous gift of intellect. Had he been plainer, truer to his nature, he might have been happier. He was supple, sharp, and quick, the possessor of an Arcadian strength –the kind that only a pure-blood peasant can own– with a speculative, frustrated mind. Part savage, part sensible. This last fact could, by all means, grant him nothing but merit, and yet, in the end, I think it brought him no more than distress. He read Western literature in his spare time and enjoyed "The Great Gatsby", "Don Quixote", and "The Count of Monte Cristo" like the first sip of spring air. He never became an aviator, but he became the next best thing a man becomes upon the dissolution of his dreams. A politician.

 

           My mother, on the other hand, bloomed in a luminous world of royal diaries, white lace bonnets, and hideous secrets. From the scraps I gathered on her childhood, it was clear to me that she grew a surprisingly contended young woman, with very little desire to probe her enormous history. She was, indeed, a well-behaved girl, untortured by curiosities.

           Her grandmother was a broke countess by the name of Bèbè Stroganov, born from the loins of a disastrous Russian pair. 

           Oleg and Irina Stroganov led a short exhaustive life and established a prominent couture company in 1909. According to the nanny’s journal, Bèbè had a Russian cook, a French butler, a housekeeper, and spent much of her time crawling and falling in the twelve rooms of the residence. Her parents, like all hypocrites, were fanatics of exotics and little repetitive things; and in place of an intellect, they had acquired a fetish for eating, and abstract conversations. Their appetite was like a whale, and they always fed it full. It is a long story, but I shall make it short. They ate, they drank, they smoked, they talked. They screwed themselves to madness, with their satin-vested sycophants and their daintily-groomed dandies. In the end, they conceived the unconceivable, and not only the house went mad, but also their baby. Bèbè was often found sedated in a cloud of smoke, chuckling and cooing – much to her parents’ amusement – in an unknown terrible tongue. She later developed a nasty form of schizophrenia and, on the morning of her thirtieth year, flung herself in front of a freight train.

           Consider now, that in the exact same period my provincial predecessors herded the cattle, and carried the dung, and from the Earth erected a respectable fortune, the Stroganovs achieved something of related magnitude, but opposite, and wiped a respectable fortune off the face of the Earth. Still, they were revered within my mother’s family as a sort of mythological animal – and for all their failures – founded the inherited delusion that the very familial ruin they caused had, all the same, a “great and noble origin”!

           In 1920, at the age of 10, Bébé was the last Stroganov heir on Russian soil, after her father was sent to a concentration camp during the Red Terror. Her mother, Irina, shot herself in the face – a feat linked not exactly to her husband’s fate, but rather to the confiscation of the last crumbs of their wealth. She did not die, instead remained terribly unsightly for the rest of her life.

           My great-grandmother, Bébé, was raised by her nanny Anya, a devoted lifelong servant who had loved her father, Oleg. In 1931 –nine years prior to her death– she met Sergei Igoraevich at the Moscow University. They married shortly after, and from their marriage came my grandmother, Helena.       

   

           Helena Igoraevich was the link that broke a chain. Like all motherless girls, she had only half a personality, and sought to fill her void with cruel men that seasoned her. This, and a dramatic sense of romance, mixed with adultery and a little game called consequence, is usually a ticket to disaster. In her case, the disaster was Romania. She arrived in 1969.

           A fascinating feverous woman was my grandmother. She never worked a day in her life, could eat a small cake in three mouthfuls, and refined the art of sloth to an optical perfection. She had strange exaggerated habits. She especially enjoyed propping her milk-white beefy thighs on the blue walls of the living room, smoking with her head suspended from the sofa until her face bore the expression of a tortured tomato. At the sight of her, my mother and aunt would scream and cry in anguish, thinking she had died of some unnatural embarrassing cause, until she snorked out of the blue, and chased them through the house, and then they all revelled in laughter. 

           Her living was owed to a gipsy concrete worker who initiated her in the observational art of psychic readings. This career proved very profitable in the food-rationing system of communist Romania, but not for economic reasons. She was, I imagine, some sort of feared and revered oracle. The type of woman who would kill for a cookie. None dared to deprive her hunger. And yet, the general atmosphere in the eighties was rather barren as a result of Ceausescu’s rising tyrannical measures. The entire population starved. All of them, but one. Because at ninety constant kilograms and no taller than a chimney, my grandmother was –doubtless beyond speculation – the fattest woman in Romania.

           She never spoke about my mother’s biological father and referred to him occasionally by nicknames such as 'The Rotting Rat', 'That Slimegut Slug', 'Pimpled Cockroach', and 'Wart-faced Worm', uttered with a warm, tender kind of hatred. He was, as I later learned, a poet, a diplomat, a patron of the arts, and a father to three children, who closed his career as Russian ambassador to Rome. My mother eventually discovered, hidden in a fig pot, a small case comprising seventy-four letters, all plagued by that loathly cancerous grief, typical of only the rejected ego.

           Altogether, Helena Igoraevich loved her daughters in a singular manifestation. What motherly tenderness might have evaded her was more than recompensed in ladles and spoonfuls of boiled cabbage, moussaka, liver stew, papanash, and similar culinary affections. She was a great maker of meals. She never drank much, only the occasional rum. She perished one violent night, into a rather deep and black water, by her own able hands that assembled and knotted a belt of gravel to her waist.

 

        This procession of both accomplished and attempted suicides was –needless to say– not well taken by my father’s family, and whatever bliss my parents sampled on their wedding night lasted only seven days.

           Though she smiled and embraced him when my father visited to bring the news, Elena Prevendi suffered a nervous breakdown in the pantry and sought immediately the counsel of the village witch. Thereafter, at the next black moon, a fist of soil was procured from a grave, and a chicken met its fate by cleaver, gushing blood into the steamer. Then the steamer boiled the bloody brew, mixed with dirt, salt, rosemary into a stew. For two weeks, Elena fed my father in a bowl, praying furiously for her sweet boy's soul! Exasperated and sick to the stomach, Filip took the plate one afternoon, threw it in the yard, and said:

           “Enough, woman! I am going back to Natasya. She makes better soups.”

           “If you go,” she warned him in a calm, emotionless voice, “gone you shall remain, and we shall give you nothing.”

            My paternal grandparents came from the most unglamorous of stock. Hardworking, reasonably well-off, but perfectly unremarkable. They were never the seducers of anything. Theirs was not the story of some dazzling decline. And if being plain and passionless was an Olympic sport, they would have won the gold. None of them received a formal education and their talents lay solely in milk production and trade. Be that as it may, Elena and Atanasi Prevendi possessed something however distinguished and unique to them – prudence, a kind of rustic grace that ennobled their origins, and a duty to family above all individual itches.

            As it was, they emerged from a long line of wanderers, an obscure and unknown ethnic people whose roots traced back to the ancient Macedonians. They kept their songs, and they kept their ways, and married their own, carrying the lineage forward. In the absence of structured governance, it was solely within each family that their legacy endured. Babies and children graced their homes abundantly. Matters of money and importance were subjected to democratic vote, and the familiar order was sacred, adhering to the command of the Grandfather. In this simple parochial world, everything was cyclical– a closed chaste, clear rules, lots of money, few expenses. They were keepers of the future. Caution marked their every step.

           So on that fated day in December 1990, when Filip brought the news that he had married a Russian with no family and a long-standing practice of suicide, Elena Prevendi understandably succumbed in the pantry, when two millennia of tradition –her life's purpose– met their expiration in a randy boy.

 

           Back then their milk business was booming, sustained with many gifted bottles and tips under-the-desk. They owned a big patriarchal house on the Main Road constructed by their own two hands of soil and brick, which after many years, they decided to renovate. Small adjustments here and there spurred a complete modernization. The outhouse was no longer a pit in the ground, but a veritable salon tiled with brilliant white squares and a mammoth toilet in the middle that exuded a heavenly aura when the light filtered through the window across. Inside, the outcome was a general feeling that the once dignified provincial abode had been hijacked by some expensive teleshopping marathon. When the renovations were complete, gossip spread in every corner market that the Prevendis had taken their business to the next level.

           Outside, the stables sheltered a hundred Holstein cows, two hundred Friesian sheep, sixty Speckled chickens, six Belgian horses, and twenty Hungarian pigs, of which the fattest luckiest one they hanged, flayed, slayed and chomped on merrily on Christmas. Some hundred kilometres away, in Bucharest, their wealth included three apartments. In one my father resided, with the other two leased to fund his college tuition and personal allowance. For his eighteenth birthday, they had gifted him a 1987 Mercedes Coupé, reported to be one of the ten in the country at the time. They managed the feat through a government official whose mother lived in the village and claimed their milk had cured her ulcers. And, in one last act of precocity, somewhere between the confidential folds of pantyhose lay an extra eighty thousand German marks, patiently accrued over the years as a prospective wedding gift.

           They disowned him on the spot.

 

           In the wake of his disinheritance, Filip entered a self-imposed silence that spanned twenty-eight days. During the stern stretch of the January cold, I was told he neither spoke nor partook in the rituals of sustenance or sleep. Mornings found him spread out on the balcony, buried in a heap of snow, staring into the sun with exploded yellow eyeballs, like a martyr in the ecstatic vicinity of death. My mother watched with growing desperation as he floated feebly through the rooms, his once beautiful bronze face now skeletal and pasty, his body writhed in a sickly noodle shape.

           Such a long shadow his silence cast, that Natasya swore –though met with scepticism– that their once orange-shaded habitat of love was permeated by a ghostly grey, and she could only see in color outside of it. And, just when all seemed lost; when his eye sockets sank, and his gums started receding, when his first molar fell, and he looked as if he could die any minute –around the time my mother suffered a paroxysm while violently packing her bags, and flung the steam iron at him – only then did Filip speak with a holy clarity, as if touched by prophecy:

           “Natasya, I do not want to be a milkman”, he stated in a solemn ancient voice, followed by the suspenseful succession of three slow breaths. “I want to be an American!”

            My mother’s response failed to articulate the depth of her understanding, but she told me she knew, at once, that her life with him awaited as much troubles, as immensity.

           “Well, good luck then,” she scorned. “With that face, you won’t even leave the country.”

           They conceived me on that divinatory night that would shape our family’s destiny for years to come, and my father –though he’d aged half a century and smelled like a raccoon– became himself again.

 

           A month later they were in Greece. With much reluctance and some disdain concerning their intent, my father accepted the hospitality of the Avgerinos family, an old aristocratic Greek clan, and friends of my maternal kin. They housed them for a year in Athens which, in the nineties, was one of the few transitory havens toward America.

           I have two pictures of this time, each with its respective beholder.

           My father slept most nights in a bakeshop and woke at three, to begin, at three-thirty, kneading the dough till noon. He rested until four, and washed dishes through midnight in the taverna next-door, while hallucinating of winning the presidency and shaking Reagan’s hand. Every fifty dishes or so, the old mageira smacked him hard across the face, reinstating his surroundings: ‘Agóri, wake up, my boy, I don’t pay you to sleep.’

           Meanwhile, Natasya attended to the gentle respectable art of religious cross-stitches, to which the Avgerinos family owed their celestial reputation. In what proved to be a generously over-compensated effort, she sat, sowed, and chatted for six scattered hours, with customary cappuccino breaks. Much distressed my mother was at the onset of her pregnancy with me. It was indisputably agreed that I was to be a boy, but secretly she knew that to be wrong. Once this intuition was established, she began a feverish rigmarole – something about a woman’s life, and her husband’s ambitions, about her ruined belly, and the will of God, and a chosen child, until she convinced herself doubtless that it all bore a supernatural meaning. Seven months into their Athenian refuge, I was born with a racing heart and eyes the size of quarters.

           Perhaps it was my inherited unrest, perhaps the traffic was too long, but I came into the world with force in a sumptuous white limousine, on the way to the maternity ward. In the end, an unnatural amount of blood and secretions coated the slick biscuit leather, with dangling placenta from the sunroof, and resembled more a crime than a ritual of life. Still, the delivery was considered a success, and in lieu of a cradle, they stuffed me in the champagne bucket. I smirked with a smooth cherubic satisfaction, and my father got out at the next intersection.

           Pallid and atrophied, he staggered through the streets until he reached the Acropolis. There, the guard took pity on him, after sharing his working toils and futile hopes to have a son. Nine months he had dreamed of holding his boy above the city, and instead of a heroic scene amid the sun-draped temple pillars, he got a girl and a gory telenovela. As if united in a congenital pain, the guard patted his back sympathetically, and when the dusk fell on the marbled city, Filip started weeping on the steps.  

           Later that night, my mother’s Greek barons threw an outrageous party.

           In what I’ve pieced together as a sort of lavish dinner carnival, they frivoled away three kilograms of caviar, thirty bottles of champagne, a blizzard of truffles, a mistral of oysters, two whiskies in their fifties, ducks, squids, and lobsters galore, and a rare 19th-century collection of Rothschild Bordeaux. Having reached a climax after which ensues a definite collapse, they smashed themselves senseless, which brings me to the point of this genealogical account. As the feast came to its end, on behalf of a jocular proposal, together with their mental state of scraps, they convinced my mother that my life should honour –in a sense of propriety that has always escaped me– the three most devastating women of the century.

           Allow me to introduce myself.

 

           My name is Irina Bébé Helena Igoraevich, and this is my story – a family story, a love story, a tragedy of sorts, and an intimate vision into the farcical art of human disaster.