THE REFUGEES
As I have previously said, I slept on the balcony and there I would meditate upon everything under the starry sky, until finally sleep would take me. Due to the fact that I slept out, I would be the first to awake in the morning and for that reason I saw much of what transpired in our neighborhood.
I awoke around five one morning, due to the loud conversations in the street and as it happens below our very balcony.
Upon opening my eyes and looking towards the street, I was struck by the scene in front of me. Starting from our house and running the length of the road for some two hundred meters, was parked a very large caravan of oxen-carts.
They were placed one behind the other, and the oxen that were tied to them seemed like elephants; the reason for this being that these were twice the size of the work oxen that we were familiar with. There were some forty or so of these oxen-carts, and upon each one were crammed the members of the families to whom they belonged. On as many of those carts as I could count, the family members were in excess of ten; all in all together they constituted an entire village.
I wasn’t able to comprehend what was happening and I heard the people who were below our balcony saying to me, “tell your father to come outside, because we want to talk with him”.
Half of what I heard was Turkish and the other half the ancient Greek dialect from the Pontós. I understood from Συνέχεια
Άλλαξα βέβαια θέση, αλλά για μένα δεν άλλαξε και τίποτε, αφού ούτως ή άλλως είχα προνομιακή θέση. Η διαφορά που μου προέκυψε με το λεωφορείο, ήταν ότι μπορούσα να πάω όπου ήθελα μέσα στην πόλη του Κιλκίς και να μένω έξω από το στρατόπεδο όσο αργά ήθελα, χωρίς αυτό να θεωρείται παράνομο.