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Volume 25, Number 1 & 2 (2001) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum THE NAME, KOZONIS LOWELL B. KOMIE A few months ago they had retained me as their lawyer to obtain a change of name decree. Their family name had been Kozonis and they had it changed to Chase. So the cocktails also celebrated the new name as well as the new job. I liked both of them. They weren’t pretentious people. The wife had worked as a teacher in Chicago for many years while the husband went to DePaul business school at night. This was his first real promotion. He was being transferred from Chicago to Phoenix as division sales manager for a hardware manufacturer. They were very excited over the prospect of the new job and a move to the Southwest. So we talked quietly with each other and watched the snow falling outside the window and sat in front of the fire to drink a special bottle of retsina that the husband brought to us as a gift. I thought of the day they had first come to my office to discuss the change of name proceeding. They had brought their little girl with them. Her name was Tina, a very delicate child, with huge black eyes. The parents were quite anxious about the role Tina would play in court. I told them it wouldn’t be necessary to bring her along, but they regarded the hearing as an event requiring the participation of the entire family; the change of name was to be their secular baptism. They had deep feelings of regret for the severance of the old name and yet the new name, Chase, promised assimilation and acceptance in their new life, far removed from the sanctuary of Chicago’s Greek community. On the day of the hearing they had arrived in my office with Tina, all naturally quite excited. I remember the wife had a small new fur cape and the husband wore a dark suit, the little girl in a lacy dress with puffed short sleeves and a tiny cross on a thin gold chain on her chest. The hearing took only a few minutes. The judge asked them if they had ever been in bankruptcy or convicted of a crime. When the wife shyly shook her head, the judge stamped the decree and wished them luck. “Good luck to you, Mr. and Mrs. Chase,” he said. The husband and wife smiled and Tina showed the judge how she had learned to curtsy. I remember the wife whispering to the child, “Tina, make your bow for His Honor.” The child looked up at the judge with her dark eyes and then taking her lacy dress at its corners, stepped back with a tiny foot and gravely bowed. The logs in the fireplace were very dry and quickly flamed up, filling the living room with sudden light. My wife turned the lamps off and we sat and watched the fire. The young couple sat on the floor, the husband propping up two pillows against a chair and the wife, carefully spreading her skirt, sat next to him. The fire played its shadows against their faces. My wife went into the kitchen for some cookies that she had baked and I joined the husband in another drink of retsina, both of us beginning to feel the warmth of the wine, the husband’s face flushed with the wine and the heat of the fire as he filled my glass. We talked about the neighborhood and about their regret at leaving Chicago and their friends. Then my wife came back with the cookies and little paper napkins to keep the crumbs from falling on the carpet. I asked the husband about his parents. I remembered once being introduced to his father. I had been walking the children to Lincoln Park and across the street I had seen Tina and the husband and wife. We all went over to say hello and walked together to the park where the husband’s father was waiting. He was sitting on a park bench, his hat pushed down over his eyes, dozing in the sunlight. I was introduced as the lawyer who had procured the change of name for the family and the father reacted to me coolly, barely acknowledging the introduction. Tina climbed on the old man’s lap and he stroked her fine hair with his rough hand and squinted at me in the sunlight. “So, you the fella,” he said. The old face was hidden from me by the child’s face, the child’s face was mute and accusatory, and her dark angelic eyes seemed to project her grandfather’s anger. He bounced the little girl on his knee and held her serious face up to me, pinching her cheeks up above the ridges of her cheekbones so that she looked like a furious little owl. “The name, Kozonis, good enough for me,” he said. That was the end of the conversation. Then the old man took the child and hand in hand they walked down the sidewalk toward the park zoo. Tina skipped to keep up with her grandfather and then she ran out ahead of him, looking back at him shyly, until she hovered at the rim of a covey of walking pigeons. When the old man caught up with her the pigeons burst in frenzy all around them and the grandfather lifted Tina upon his shoulders, the little girl reaching for the birds, her arms joyously thrown up to the sky. I reminded the husband of the time I had met his father in the park and I remarked that the old man had seemed quite angry with me. The husband looked up at me and then reached in his pocket for his pipe. He said his father was indeed very angry and had not really forgiven them. Then the husband told us a story of a trip that he had made with his father to Crete as a young boy. It seemed that when the husband was about ten his father had taken the boy with him on a journey to Crete. The boy was his only male child and the father yearned to return to the father’s native village with his only son. The mother and the little sister were to be left at home. So during the summer of the boy’s tenth birthday, the father and son flew to Athens and then went by ship to Crete where they were met by one of the father’s friends from the village. The young husband leaned back and put his arm around his wife as he continued with his story. They drove by car from Khaniá along the coast to Rethimnon and then inland to Spili. He pronounced the names of the Cretan towns carefully and exactly, lingering over the syllables that required the slight lisping sound of the Greek language. Then they proceeded by donkey-back to climb the high mountain range that led from Spili to Idhi and he told of the tinkling sound the bells on the donkey’s halters made in the wind that came down the mountain trails. He remembered the excitement of his father, how the old man would kick the donkeys and pull and heave the beasts through the narrow gorges and mountain passes. When they arrived at his father’s village they were told that they had come in the middle of bandit warfare. That there were bandits up in the hills around the village who had been terrorizing the villagers for months and that some militia from Khaniá had come in just before them with orders to kill the bandits. The husband refilled his glass and tapped his pipe into an ashtray. He was quite serious with the storytelling, his eyes growing darker, resembling the dark fierce eyes of his child and his father. Then he told of how he had been awakened one morning by his father. The old man was wild and laughing. He took the boy to the village square where the men of the village had assembled in a small crowd in front of the coffeehouse. He pushed the boy through the crowd. Some militia men were standing there and they had the severed head of the bandit chieftain on a stick. They passed the stick proudly from man to man, then to the father and then to the son, and then around the full circle of men back to a soldier who drove the stick into the ground and took his red militia man’s throat scarf and wrapped it around the bandit’s bleeding throat. Then they left the head on the stick in the village square for a week to burn in the Cretan sun. There was no more trouble thereafter with bandits. The rest of the trip, the young husband said, had dimmed in his memory, except that he remembered that he had slept in a hut on earthen floor and drank goat’s milk. He also mentioned the beauty of the cypress trees. He had finished his story. He looked at me to see what understanding I had reached of his father’s anger over the change of name and the young couple’s decision to move away from the family. I nodded my head. The young husband was pleased. Then gracefully he stood up and gestured to his wife. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a clean white handkerchief. Then seriously, snapping their fingers with great dignity, looking into each other’s eyes, Mr. and Mrs. Chase began to dance a traditional Grecian dance, in front of the fire, as the snow fell on the Chicago streets and in the wind outside the windows came the little tinkling of donkey bells as a proper farewell to the name, Kozonis. “The Name Kozonis,” first published in 4 (1) Karamu 40 (October 1973) (Eastern Illinois University) and collected in The Night Swimmer-A Man in London and Other Stories, pp. 67-71. Lowell B. Komie © [1999] |
