Angelica Lost and Found

Chapter 18. The Eight O’Clock to Katerini

There is a jukebox in my head. Coloured lights, bubbles going round into vanishment and reappearing to go round again. I have no choice in what songs are played. Sometimes a lissom cheerleader inserts the coins, sometimes a tattooed truck driver; the mystic arm rises and descends with the silent disc which then blossoms into song and I dance or cry or shake my head accordingly.

This time it is a woman in black who feeds the Wurlitzer. The mystic arm rises, descends, and an empty railway station arises in the November evening around Agnes Baltsa as she sings in her native Greek ‘ “To treno fevgi stis okto” ’, ‘The train leaves at eight’. The woman in black remembers, will never forget the eight o’clock to Katerini and a lost love. This is not Baltsa wearing the borrowed language of Bizet; here, giving her whole heart to this little story in the tongue she was born into, she sings me the empty platform, the gathering November night and the departure of love and I cry accordingly.