Old Mrs. Karafilis

The Greek grandmother of Demo Karafilis, one of the neighborhood boys. She survived the Turkish massacre of her village as a young woman and hid in a cave for a month eating olive pits. She now spends her days in the semi-darkness of the Karafilis basement, remembering Asia Minor. She waits to die, uninterested in all self-important suburban dramas except for the plight of the Lisbon sisters, which saddens her but does not seem to surprise her. The boys suspect that she and the girls secretly communicate, sharing the same deep knowledge of the world's pain and reading the same signs of tragedy in the clouds.