If You Join the Circle, You Must Dance – by Katerina Cosgrove
ISLAND | ISSUE 162
Aν πιαστείς στο χορό, θα χορέψεις
Traditional Greek folk saying
Dance!’ he yelled at her from the centre of the room. ‘Dance, curse you!’ She was limp, clumsy, exhausted. As if she’d been dancing all night. Hours, days. The heavy drag of her womb, her groin, her inner thighs, still the same dull ache as before the baby was born. The lively folk song, once so loved, now a threnody of pain.
‘I can’t do it anymore,’ she managed to say. ‘I’m finished.’
Runnels of sweat between her breasts, under her arms, sticky on her temples and forehead.
‘Come on,’ he growled. ‘Dance, Kalliope! Fuck you, woman, just dance!’
He was onto his fourth beer. No, it wasn’t her husband. He sat in the far corner near the door, chain-smoking Marlboros, as always. Legs crossed; the sharp knife-crease of his suit trousers still freshly ironed. No, it wasn’t Yakov. It was his brother.
Thani ambled toward her, blocking out the lamplight and the others at the party, rendered insubstantial in the wake of his looming bulk, his power.
‘Here,’ he said, softer than usual. ‘I’ll show you how it’s done.’
He took her in his arms, gruff again, and led her, still dancing, into the night.
*
I think of her when I sweep my outside decks in the morning. I think of her when I scour cooking pots with steel wool at night. I wonder, when I put on a load of washing, how it felt for her to soak and wring out those heavy woollen jumpers, like the one she wore when she died, or handwash her soiled nylon stockings in the cold grey light of a Melbourne winter.
She ended up with one of those stockings around her neck.
I find a photo stapled to Kalliope’s marriage certificate. It’s the first time I’ve seen her face. Those three staples are now rusty, after so many decades. The clerk punched them in random places, without care. In this image, she still wears her dark hair braided and clubbed behind her neck, in the old style of the village. She’s chosen her best: a string of fake pearls and a diamanté brooch in the shape of a flower. Her face is full of promise. There’s a slight half-smile on her lips. She is 23 years old.
Her eyes rivet me, unblinking, as potent as those in an image of the Panayia. And now I realise why she feels so familiar and what her face reminds me of: those gilded, fire-blackened icons of the Virgin Mary you see in tiny mountain chapels in Greece. The long patrician nose. The full, sensitive mouth. Angled cheekbones, a fearless stare. The only thing missing is her Christ child. I know her baby was taken away, soon after she died.
*
On 14 April 1963, Easter Sunday, the residents of Melbourne experienced their coldest April day in six years. Temperatures were nine degrees below normal, with Antarctic air moving across the whole of Victoria on the evening of Good Friday. Kalliope would have spent her day indoors, immune to the cold, preparing a traditional Greek feast with her sister-in-law, cleaning the house. I know the Easter menu from years of witnessing my mother, sister, aunts and mother-in-law making it. A large round tray of spinach and feta pie, the filo pastry hand-rolled. Galaktoboureko, custard-semolina slice dripping with sugar syrup. The plaited, curled biscuits called koulouria and tsoureki, yeasted brioche wreath perfumed with mahlepi from the powdered kernels of the Persian cherry tree. Lamb on the spit, marinated in lemon, garlic and dried oregano. Hardboiled red-dyed eggs made the previous Thursday, rubbed with olive oil and placed in baskets and bowls around the house.
Perhaps Kalliope was tired, irritable, sleep-deprived. Perhaps her bones ached, and her nose was running. According to her husband’s statement to the coroner, she had been worried about her newborn baby’s floppy neck and her period had just resumed for the first time since she fell pregnant. Perhaps all that got her through that day were some over-the-counter painkillers and Turkish coffee. Or maybe she was as happy as she could be: mother to relatively healthy children, cherished wife, new immigrant in a wealthy land unravaged by war or famine. We will never know. What we do know is that by the next morning, Kalliope was dead.
Below is The Melbourne Age from Tuesday 16 April 1963. Kalliope’s date of death, according to the coroner, is given as 15 April, the day after Easter Sunday. The body that the police frogmen fruitlessly searched for that day was most certainly Kalliope’s.
“I’m not yet ready to confront any of the people involved in her story, not ready to put them on high alert. I don’t want them to close up. And I know that in the Greek community once one person knows, everyone ends up knowing.”
I’m not yet ready to confront any of the people involved in her story, not ready to put them on high alert. I don’t want them to close up. And I know that in the Greek community once one person knows, everyone ends up knowing. Even in my initial chats with my husband’s maternal aunt (recently deceased), she was onto me.
‘Why are you asking all these questions? Are you writing a book about this? Tell me, come on.’
‘No,’ I protested. ‘I’m just curious.’
She wasn’t buying it. I was counting on her to be discreet, mostly because she didn’t speak to anyone much outside her close family in her later years.
She was a close friend of Kalliope’s. They both disembarked from the Patris, the immigrant vessel which brought them to Australia. They lived next door to each other. They walked to the park together at twilight, tasted each other’s food.
Her version of how Kalliope died is watertight and rich with detail.
*
It was the evening of Greek Orthodox Easter Sunday, the holiest and most celebrated festival in the religious and cultural calendar. Kalliope, her husband Yakov, his eldest brother Thani, their sister and her husband lived together, as newly arrived migrants often do, in a one-storey terrace house. It was a liver-brown-brick worker’s cottage, dark and ugly. The house was owned by Thani, the same house my husband’s parents later lived in when they married, the same bedroom in which my husband was conceived and where he was brought home to from hospital after he was born. A transient stopping point, welcoming waves of economic migrants from north-western Greece.
The living quarters were cramped: three small bedrooms, one shared by husband, wife, child and baby, the other belonging to his brother, the other to their sister and her husband. The walls were thin. Thani could hear the baby crying, the little girl’s tantrums; the couple talking, fighting, having sex.
The two men decided to host an Easter thiaskethasi, a gathering of fellow Greeks over dinner, the customary lamb on the spit, drinking, music and dancing. They were dressed in dark skinny suits, white shirts and neat, narrow ties, no doubt washed, dried and ironed by Kalliope. She went into the bedroom to change out of her house clothes, putting on clean silk underpants, a bra, a brown woollen jumper and another red one on top. She was cold; also, blood red is the customary colour of the Resurrection. All the women would be wearing a touch of red. She pulled on a calf-length skirt and her husband’s blue bed socks with slippers. She planned to change into sheer nylon stockings and heels when the guests started to arrive.
The party unfolded as many had over the course of her short years in Australia: Yakov’s brother the centre of attention, their younger brother who lived next door, quieter, more reserved. A staid, serious cousin, an ex-policeman who lived on the same street. Their wives, young children. Much drinking, folk dancing and waltzes, where they knocked over lamps and ornaments in their enthusiasm. Tables strewn with bottles of VB. Thani handed Kalliope a lemonade-and-beer shandy, which she accepted. She was not used to alcohol. After her second drink, she began swaying with tiredness. She took Elly with her and went to bed early, as she knew she would be woken multiple times in the night.
In the early hours of the morning, she heard someone in the room. She didn’t switch on the bedside lamp, not wanting to wake Elly or Gion, but she could see it was Thani, backlit by the bare overhead bulb in the hallway.
‘Where’s Yakov?’ she whispered, but her words were drowned out by Gion’s screaming. She half-sat, took him from the pram by her bed and latched him onto her breast, even though she had hardly any milk for him, even though she knew she would have to get up and fix a bottle.
Even in the dim light, she could see Thani was drunker than before. A stocky, broad-shouldered man, he seemed even bigger and wider in the dim light. He rocked from side to side, clutching at the doorframe to steady himself. In one hand he carried a large, brown glass bottle of beer. As he stood there, looking at her, he threw his head back and took a long swig, then eased the door shut behind him.
‘Thani,’ she persisted. ‘Where is my husband?’
He ignored her and came closer, sitting wearily on the bed. Kalliope was uncomfortable. She slid down further under the blankets, clutching them around her with one hand; told him she needed to get up and make a bottle. She made the mistake of touching his upper arm, a little too hard, to make him move. But it was too late.
He fell on top of her now and she could feel his heavy, solid, beer-and-ouzo-smelling weight bearing down. He raised the bottle above her like a weapon. He ripped the sheets and blankets out from between their bodies with his other hand and dumped them onto the floor. She flailed and struggled. Her feet, in their blue bed socks, slid up and down his calves, accomplishing nothing. She was afraid of him crushing the baby. She bucked, and he flopped to the side. But he came at her again and put one big, coarse, reddened hand around her neck. He tried to kiss her, his tongue both familiar and strange in her mouth. He ripped her flannel nightgown from her throat to her waist, bit hard into her breasts. She found the breath to scream but she couldn’t – she would wake Elly. He had her now, like a bird in a trap. She turned her head to look at her baby. His face was purple with screaming.
One final effort. She spat at Thani, dug her nails into his cheeks, tried to kick. He raised the beer bottle above him and bashed her in the head with it. Then he stopped. Swore. Shook her. She was floppy. A slow surge of blood oozed out of her hair and trickled into her open eye. He wiped it away with a corner of his shirt. He poked her. Pliant, radiating heat like a hot water bottle. The baby still wailing. Surely someone in the silent house could hear? His brother, his sister, his brother-in-law? They were all passed out, in a stupor on couches and beds. He placed the baby back in his pram and dragged Kalliope’s body into the bathroom down the hall, peeling off her blood-flecked nightgown and lowering her into the cold, narrow bath. He ran into the kitchen to fetch ice and tried to revive her, throwing chunks of it into the bath, sprinkling water on her face from his cupped hands. Behind the latched door, he heard shouts, shuffling feet. ‘Thani! Ti kaneis ekei? Are you all right?’
It was his brother. He could also hear the voices of the others, wondering what he was doing in there.
He opened the door a crack, smiled at his family.
‘It’s nothing. I’m just trying to sober up.’
He opened the door a little wider, bade his brother come closer.
‘She fainted in the bath. I’m trying to revive her.’
When Yakov walked into the bathroom, he knew she was dead. He stood there, holding Gion, barefoot on the freezing tiles, blinking in the harsh light. The baby’s mouth a black hole, an open maw, giving voice to their disbelief.
They changed Kalliope back into the clothes she wore that evening and bundled her up in some old towels. They couldn’t find her skirt. Ignoring the still-crying baby, they tied one of her flimsy nylon stockings around her neck, to make it look like she had tried to choke herself in the bath. Thankfully Elly was still asleep. Or was she?
Their sister was waiting in the hallway, listening. She folded Gion into her arms, her face pinched, averted from them and what they were doing. They picked Kalliope’s body up between them, loaded her into Thani’s panel van and took her to the Anderson Street Bridge section of the Yarra, where they threw her in. Before they left, Yakov placed her bedroom slippers neatly side by side near the water’s edge.
*
“Why would a husband do this? Why would he choose deceit above truth and his brother’s reputation over his wife’s life? Did Yakov and Thani actually do this? Why didn’t they call an ambulance? The police? An undertaker?”
Why would a husband do this? Why would he choose deceit above truth and his brother’s reputation over his wife’s life? Did Yakov and Thani actually do this? Why didn’t they call an ambulance? The police? An undertaker? Were they shaking, arguing, hysterical? Or did they dispose of Kalliope’s body calmly, with swift movements, without panic? What were the other members of the family doing at this point? Why did they tie one of her own stockings around her neck, to make it seem as if she’d tried to choke herself, then dump her in the river?
Where is the unassailable truth in this story?
Did Yakov collude in the murder of his wife? If so, why? His witness statement for the coroner sheds more shadow than light. The 32-year-old swore under oath that he had known his wife for six years and that he was a builder’s labourer. Following these bald declarations of fact, the content of his statement swiftly descends into a particularly Greek brand of tragedy – or absurdity. There is absolutely nothing in the rest of his statement that rings true.
What disturbs me firstly is the high level of English expression and comprehension evidenced in his witness statement. Yakov spoke broken English even when I met him twice in the mid-’90s. My husband swears that Yakov’s English was rudimentary at best. Yet in his witness statement he employs phrases such as: ‘There were several relatives at my house for dinner and the evening meal [sic].’ ‘My wife was in good spirits and she had a couple of shandies (beer and lemonade) during this day. She does not normally drink anything.’ ‘I then went up the passage towards the front of the house and noticed that the front door was slightly ajar.’ (The italics are mine). This is not the language of a recently arrived immigrant. And Yakov was no scholar.
The contradictions abound. Firstly, they had people over for an Easter party that afternoon and into the evening. Yet Yakov affirms he ‘went to bed about 8.30 pm on Sunday night, my wife came into the room about 9 pm and started to feed the baby. She did not appear to be upset and did not say anything to me.’ Greeks don’t usually eat their regular evening meal until 8 pm, let alone at an immigrant party in the 1960s. Most Greeks, especially my husband’s family, don’t get to bed until after midnight. So, this in itself is puzzling.
At five the next morning, according to Yakov, Gion’s crying woke him. But he did not get up out of bed to comfort his son, merely leaned over and put the dummy back in his mouth. His wife was not in the bed next to him, so he thought she was in the kitchen fixing a bottle. He then dozed off until quarter to six, when Gion’s cries woke him again. ‘I then got out of bed and went out to the kitchen to see what my wife was doing, I thought she might have been washing dishes or babies [sic] clothes.’ Strangely, when he didn’t find her, he at once made his younger brother drive him to the Royal Melbourne Hospital. Instead of walking up and down the neighbouring streets, knocking on doors, he got in a car. Why would Kalliope have called a taxi or got on a tram and gone to the hospital, without telling him or anyone else in the house?
Reading Yakov’s witness statement, it’s not hard to imagine a tired and exasperated coroner trying to make sense of a sordid tale; his assistant, Sergeant McCully, typing it out, putting polite English words into the little Greek man’s willing mouth. At the bottom of the final typewritten page is a blue scrawl, written in fountain pen by the sergeant. Something Yakov must have felt it urgent to add at the very last minute, and in no way less illogical and contradictory as his previous account. ‘At the time I thought she was in good health. She would not leave the house at night. She had not been at [sic] the Royal Melbourne Hospital before. She went there because she had a period. I went to the parks because I thought someone may have taken her away.’
*
I’m sitting here at my desk, reading through the coroner’s findings once more. And once more, I’m perplexed and even angry. ‘The body was that of a young woman,’ Medical Coroner Harry William Pascoe begins. He then goes on to outline all her injuries.
‘The lungs showed superficial lacerations … fractures of the root of the nose, right humerus (upper shaft), right ribs posteriorly … left ribs posteriorly … the spine at the upper level … the mandible in the chin region. All fractures were post-mortem injuries. There were lacerations to the forehead, the right malar region, the chin and the right arm. Asphyxia: by then and there willfully drowning herself.’
According to the Coroner’s Court chemist, KG Newton, Kalliope’s stomach contained 0.99 grain (65 mg) of Amytal, a barbiturate sedative. Her liver contained 18 ppm of Amytal. Was that enough to have been poisoned? It strikes me as strange that Kalliope would be taking prescription sedatives if she had to wake multiple times in the night to attend to a four-month-old baby.
Yet who am I to question years of expertise and experience? Nevertheless, what disturbs me is the utter certainty in Coroner Pascoe’s inquisition. Less an inquest than a perfunctory act, quickly dismissed. Were his findings too convenient? Why were all of Kalliope’s wounds deemed to be post-mortem? Could any of them have been defensive wounds? Granted, her body was found three days after she died. Correctly identifying a fatal blow to the head may have been impossible at the time.
Also, there was no evidence of water in her lungs. According to the coroner’s report, ‘The lungs showed superficial lacerations, posteriorly, in relation to fractured ribs in both lungs, but no haemothorax, nor lung bleeding. Larynx, trachea and bronchi were all free from debris. The linings showed postmortem staining. Both lungs were aerated.’ If Kalliope, according to the coroner, was submerged in the water before she died, her drowning lungs would have been full of water. They were not. Thus, she was dead when she got to the Yarra River. The alveoli had air trapped in them when she stopped breathing, preventing water from entering her lungs.
I turned to a friend of mine, a GP well-versed in forensics. Over the course of many conversations, he had many questions about how the medical inquest was handled.
He said:
This whole thing really stinks of murder … A woman drowning herself has lungs full of water. She has no other injuries generally. This person has a number of severe injuries consistent with being hit very hard from behind by a right-handed person or very hard from the front by a left-handed person – multiple times. There is no lung water; in other words, she was not breathing when she went in the water.
… The coroner got it wrong. She was dead before she got the injuries and she was dead before she went in the water. She had taken a powerful sedative several hours before death. More than that is surmise at this point. But the family story seems ridiculous to me. The husband’s actions and attitude and words in particular seem unusual. Surely suicide is very shameful in the Greek Orthodox Church – yet here the family actually want suicide to be the verdict.
Harry William Pascoe was a magistrate, as well as medically qualified. He served as Melbourne City Coroner from 1958 to 1979. Unlike many Melbourne coroners who preceded him, he was not one to court controversy in any fashion. Perhaps this was why his final findings were, in bold black capital letters, hedging his bets:
CAUSE OF DEATH:
CONSISTENT WITH DROWNING AND/OR POISONING
Constable Peter William Collins still remembers the day he fished Kalliope’s body out of the Yarra. In his late eighties now, he recalls being a young, inexperienced police officer, early on in his career, though he had certainly seen drowned bodies before. He was based at the Russell Street police station and patrolling in a divisional van when he received a wireless message to investigate a body at the Melbourne City Council Electricity Supply Pumping Station on the north bank of the Yarra, just east of the King Street Bridge. He had a quick conversation with the foreman, Herbert Andrews, then walked with him out onto a landing at the back of the station, overlooking the river. The landing was to enable access to a grate, immersed in the water and covering an inlet tunnel through which water flowed into the pumping house.
‘I could see the body of the deceased lying in a horizontal position, her head was facing east and the front of her body facing the grate. The body was under the water about 12 inches. A grappling hook which is used by the employees of the pumping house to dislodge obstructions from the grate was caught in a part of a red woollen jumper the deceased was wearing.’
Today, Constable Collins remembers that he made more lacerations on Kalliope’s body in his repeated attempts to lift her out of the water. In the written statement, he affirms that ‘there were no marks on her body except around the face. There was a deep cut approximately three inches long on the right side of her chin, there was another small cut, oval shaped, on the right cheek beside the nose. Other cuts were on her left cheek and above her left eye.’
What follows is poignant in its intimacy. In his statement, Constable Collins says ‘she was attired in silk pants, brassiers [sic], part of a red woollen jumper over a brown jumper. She was wearing blue mens [sic] socks on her feet but no shoes.’ I can imagine Kalliope getting ready for the Easter party, putting on her clean silk underclothes, her best skirt and jumper, the sheer stockings her husband and his brother used to tie around her neck. I can see the way the two men may have fumbled to dress her again after she was dead. And the men’s socks she was wearing would have been on her feet the whole time: after the party when she took off her stockings and heels; in bed because it was such a cold night; when she may have struggled with Thani in that very same bed – and in the dark, ice-cold waters of the Yarra. ▼
All names except for the police and coroner have been changed.
This essay appeared in Island 162 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
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