Patriarchy and women's absence

Patriarchy and women’s absence recur as connected conditions in the novel: women are obscured in family records, difficult to find in the spaces Athanasia Malavas visits, and described as carrying domestic responsibilities while men dominate public authority. Athanasia’s search for her father’s grave makes that absence visible in both the intimate history of one family and the ordered rows of a village cemetery. Later, a conversation around Eva’s story gives the pattern a contemporary political dimension, linking gendered power to anger about Greece’s direction and the uncertain prospects of its younger generation.

Family Memory and Erasure

Athanasia’s journey to her father’s village in Arcadia begins with an absence built into her own biography. She grew up in Athens, loved the city, and had little curiosity about what lay beyond it; the village, high in the mountains beyond Kosmas, was where she had been born twenty-eight years earlier. Her father, Grigoris Malavas, died when she was two, leaving her with no memory of him. As she grew up, he was rarely discussed, and she understood herself as the only thing he had left behind.

The objects that might have established her parents’ shared life were missing too. After her mother died, Athanasia found no photographs of her father, no marriage certificate, no wedding picture, and no letter bearing both parents’ names. There was not even anything black in her mother’s wardrobe to mark a continuing material trace of bereavement. The omissions do not prove why her mother kept no records, but they make the family past difficult to recover: the dead father is not only absent from Athanasia’s memory but nearly absent from the evidence through which memory might be reconstructed.

Her mother had left the village after Grigoris’s forty-day memorial, and the family never returned for the later anniversaries of his death. The only clue to other relatives was her mother’s brief remark that his brother had done what was necessary. Athanasia knew, as a result, that she had an uncle, but not whether he was alive. Patriarchal family continuity appears here as a line of male names and obligations, while the daughter receives only fragments and has to travel back to her father’s birthplace to pursue them.

The Village of the Dead and the Living

At the cemetery, the scale of that male presence becomes difficult to ignore. Giannis Malavas had been right that the village contained many people with Athanasia’s family name and several with her father’s name, but none of the dates matched the date she believed he had died. Even a photograph would not have helped her recognize him: her mother had kept no picture. The family’s missing visual record meets a cemetery crowded with possible fathers, each name offering a lead that fails to identify the one she seeks.

Athanasia spends until dusk walking the grave-lined avenues. She is not sentimental about a father she never knew, yet the photographs, poetry, and tributes on other graves move her. Halfway through the visit, she notices that every name is male. A few graves belong to youths who died young and several to men who died in middle age, but most commemorate men who lived into their seventies or eighties. The repeated rows turn a personal search into a question about who is publicly remembered: the dead are cared for and cherished, but the memorial landscape she sees is almost entirely masculine.

As she walks back toward the square, her question about the missing women extends beyond the cemetery. The village seems to lack women among both its dead and its living. The shops that have opened offer an immediate, limited view of public work: a man chops meat in the butcher’s, two men carry bread trays at the bakery, and a male grocer serves a youth. These encounters do not establish that no women live or work there, but they reinforce the pattern Athanasia has begun to register. The village’s ordinary public spaces, like its graves, present men as visible occupants and women as missing.

The one woman Athanasia recalls seeing that day is a shepherdess. She interprets the woman’s survival as requiring her to become like a man. In that reading, a woman’s presence does not simply undo the pattern: she appears to have adapted to the terms set by a male world. Athanasia wonders whether the other women left long ago, as her mother did. The possible departures connect the village’s visible absence to a history of women seeking life elsewhere, though the narrative leaves the reasons for those departures unconfirmed.

Gendered Power in Contemporary Conversation

A later conversation with Eva and other young adults broadens the theme from a village encounter to a social diagnosis. The narrator describes a group of educated, opinionated twenty- and thirty-somethings, with some possibly in their forties, who discuss corruption, literature, capitalism, and the crisis, as well as gender and the dominance of the male ego in Greek society. The group’s account of older generations is specific: their mothers did the shopping, cooking, and cleaning even when they also held full-time jobs, and the participants saw those mothers as often subordinate to their husbands. Domestic labor thus remains women’s responsibility even when paid employment does not release them from it.

The discussion also links women’s absence from authority to the corruption under attack. Eva directs her anger at male politicians who have led Greece for decades; the narrator notes that women had not played a significant role in Greek politics up to that point, and nobody in the gathering contests Eva’s accusation. This is not presented as a detailed history of political representation, but as a pointed contrast between women’s heavy labor in private life and their limited part in public decision-making. Eva’s anger gives voice to that imbalance from within a group already marked as disillusioned and socially marginal.

Her story reflects her own experience, and the narrator senses that her anger is directed toward the destruction men have wrought on her country. When Eva sets down a tray of shot glasses, she says that the gods gave the Greeks an idyll and asks what people have done with it. The group agrees that the country is in a mess, then clinks glasses. Their exchange brings national disappointment and gender critique into the same room: women’s exclusion is not treated as an isolated domestic grievance but as part of a broader failure of public life.

Departure, Anger, and Lost Possibility

The village experience ends in a sharp physical consequence. After her car disappears, Athanasia cannot secure a taxi at that hour; in the smoky, hostile atmosphere around her, she recognizes that she must leave as soon as she can. As the moon rises, she runs. Her conclusion that Arcadia is no place for a woman turns the ideal of a pastoral paradise inside out: the landscape associated with an earthly idyll offers her neither welcome nor safety. Her flight echoes her mother’s earlier departure, though the novel does not claim that the two women left for identical reasons.

The narrator places this escape beside the prospects of Eva’s generation. He fears that young people may wake decades later having missed opportunities and lost half a lifetime of possibilities, describing alienation as widespread and visible in graffiti and disillusioned faces. Many, he observes, cannot imagine a future in their own country; if they can, they leave. Athanasia’s flight from the village becomes one concrete instance of that larger pattern of departure, while Eva’s possible future remains unresolved.

The contrast between the two scenes matters. Athanasia encounters exclusion through a family history with no photographs, a cemetery of male names, and a village whose public life appears male; Eva and her peers make the structure explicit by discussing household labor, political power, and national decline. Together, their experiences show absence not as simple invisibility but as a condition produced and repeated across private memory, public space, work, and authority. The women are not without agency: Athanasia leaves, and Eva tells her story. Yet the need to flee or to speak from the margins underscores the limits placed on their ability to belong and shape the world around them.