The House on Paradise Street (11 page)

The unforgiving heat of August had given way to September storms, but the day we went down to the Ilissos was warm with a sea breeze blowing up from the Saronic Gulf. The ancient river was Johnny’s idea.

“A fair resting place, full of summer sounds and scents,” he said, quoting Plato. “This is what Greece gives – we can sit in the same place that Socrates went with his pupils. We can hear the same cicadas he did.” The ancients thought that cicadas were given the gift of song from the Muses, he said. They appreciated their music so much that they would catch them and weave little cages out of grasses and asphodels in which to keep them.

It is true that in springtime the area around the Ilissos was lush and green, if unkempt. I remember seeing irises, dragonflies and, once, the turquoise flash of a kingfisher. But it was never the verdant bank described by Plato and dreamed of by Johnny. By summer, the river was a smelly trickle of mud, the grass was like desiccated straw – it was hardly “a fair resting place” for even the most forgiving person. However, I realised that we needed to match untidy reality to a fantasy – Johnny wanted the place to fit his image of nature in ancient Athens. So, we persuaded ourselves that we were in the most charming place, rather as Athenians like to think they are direct descendants of the philosophers and sculptors who walked these places in the distant past.

We went a little way up from the Ilissos near the gigantic Roman walls that enclose the Temple of Olympian Zeus. There were olives, cypresses and figs as well as wild undergrowth and we stopped by a plane tree, whose branches grew broad and low. I spread a rug on the ground and laid the picnic out: courgette pie baked by Aspasia that morning, bread, fresh curd cheese, peaches and lemonade. I watched Johnny as he lay in the shade after we had eaten. His eyes were closed, topped by eyebrows bleached blonde by the summer sun that had also burnt his face brown. He looked content. I lay down too, pretending to sleep, but looking at him between my eyelashes. The hard, warm ground below me seemed to be the centre of the universe, and I thought I could feel the planet spinning. I edged my arm closer to Johnny, not quite touching, but tingling, almost aching from sensations I did not comprehend. A romantic ballad of the times went round in my head – “Take me, take me”, though it did not speak to me of physical love but of going away with Johnny, of going to England. I pictured him in a study, surrounded by books and shards engraved with mysterious sayings. And me by his side. Neither of us said anything, but I saw him look at me and I knew he cared. That was enough. After that, the word Ilissos became my secret reference to pure happiness. Nothing was ever so simple again.

The evening before Johnny left, my parents organised a farewell dinner. Aspasia, our cook, prepared the food all day, creating the Asia Minor delicacies that she, like my mother, had grown up with. Both women knew that some of our neighbours referred to them as Turks and commented on the spicy cooking smells emerging from the kitchen. But neither cared. In fact I think that my mother liked to provoke them. She encouraged Aspasia to add more cumin, more garlic.

“If they call us ‘baptised-in-yogurt’, then throw the yogurt in! And make sure you add plenty of spearmint to the
keftedákia
.” She was convinced that the smell of these little fried meatballs was guaranteed to drive the neighbours mad with longing. I remember the menu that evening: giant tomatoes stuffed with rice, raisins and parsley; blackened, smoky aubergines on the grill; lamb fricassée, fava bean purée with capers. The memories of these tastes are like ghosts.

The best dinner service and linen was laid, and my father made a small speech to our dear friend
Yiannis
, as they usually called him. My mother wore her diamond earrings from Constantinople and they sparkled in the candlelight. Johnny said he would return the following summer to the best people he had ever met. Afterwards, I sat up all night looking out of my bedroom window at the night sky, imagining England.

When I told Tig and Orestes that I had met Antigone, they were only mildly interested.

“Did she explain why she never came back to see
Babas
?” Tig was sitting in the kitchen, eating pieces of bread dripping with honey and carefully avoiding the crusts, which she placed around the edge of the plate. Her fingernails were bitten short and streaked black with the remnants of varnish.

“She wasn’t allowed to come back by the arsehole fascists who ran this country,” said Orestes, using the tone of an irritable teacher with an indolent pupil. He was standing slumped against the open doorway that led to the spiral stairs, one arm stretched up the door frame with almost balletic grace.

“She didn’t really explain why, but we did talk about
Babas,
” I said, replying to Tig’s question. “You could tell that she is his mother – she looks like him. And she is very stubborn. But interesting. Unusual. Would you like to meet her?”

“
Eh,
” said Tig, using the non-committal Greek sound that leaves everything hanging.

“
Eh,
” echoed Orestes. “If she wants to meet us. But I don’t know what the point is. You can’t just show up after sixty years and expect a ready-made family. It’s not McDonald’s: two grandchildren with French fries and a Coca-Cola please.”

Tig looked exhausted and smelled of cigarettes and stale clothing. She had spent the night “on guard” at her school, which was under student occupation for the second time in the two years since she had moved there. The change from her private school in the smart suburb of Psychiko to the local one near home had involved much more than just meeting a wider social and ethnic group of children; she had discovered the delights of dissent. The move had occurred after both Tig and Orestes harangued Nikitas about his hypocrisy in claiming to be left-wing yet educating his offspring privately.

“Even the hard-line communist politicians in Greece send their kids to private schools,” said Orestes. “None of you have any principles – it’s all just theory.”

It didn’t take much to make Nikitas flip.

“OK, go to the state school,” he said to Tig. “Why not? I was educated there and turned out fine.” I raised no objections and the following September, Tig stopped taking the school bus up to Psychiko and began walking through the neighbourhood to Athens’ Thirteenth Secondary School.

Although Orestes had only ever attended private schools, he advised Tig about how to make a success of the occupation and was well versed in the language of protest. I imagined that he was behind the school children’s most provocative slogans, though some were more charming than angry. I particularly liked,
Walls have Ears and Ears have Walls.
Banners were painted and hung from the windows, classrooms were smashed and adults were forbidden to enter the grounds. A milder version of the repeated student occupations that paralysed universities throughout the year, they were a peculiarly Greek hybrid, combining the pleasure of a rave, the anger of a protest march and the satisfaction of a riot. I had given up asking why; the children’s “demands” were normally a pretext – a “lack of facilities” or “lack of teaching staff”, but I suspected they were mostly a vent for pubescent anger.

Most parents I spoke to viewed these rebellions indulgently; the young are expected to rebel in the name of freedom; it’s almost like a rite of passage. And it never entirely goes away. Protestors who regularly block the city’s main arteries are quite often elderly men and women concerned about their pensions. Nikitas was pleased that his children were rebelling, but he criticised their lack of organisation.

“Yours is a soft generation,” he said to Tig and Orestes last year, when they were making plans for breaking into the school at night. “You haven’t been up against the tanks or beaten by the Junta’s police. You must get organised – you need aims and demands.” He explained over and again the significance of the asylum law and its origins in the massacre of students at the Polytechnic. The law forbidding police from entering universities had become a basic tenet of young people’s freedom after the Junta’s downfall in 1974. It went along with the referendum to get rid of the monarchy and the end of right-wing rule. As a consequence, when adolescents took over their schools around the country and placed new padlocks on the gates, they had little fear that their gatherings would be forcibly broken up. All sorts joined in. Tig told me that friends arrived with pizzas and drinks and then rough elements would smash the place up, until the party eventually fizzled out. And then school started up again, much as it had been before. It was one of those customs that was now almost as accepted as the official parades for national holidays that forced pupils to march through the streets to military music carrying the Greek flag. Two sides of the same coin.

The truth was that this year, Tig’s absorption in school politics suited me. Her distance allowed me to leave behind the weight of grieving and busy myself with ideas of research and writing – this time for myself and not some demanding academic who needed statistics on Greek abortion rates or archive work on nineteenth-century poets. But now, seeing my daughter at the kitchen table, she looked terribly young and vulnerable. I was reminded of her as a toddler – eating her bread and honey in much the same way, with fastidious delicacy. She was still a child.

Aunt Alexandra’s reaction to Antigone’s return was completely different. I went down to her apartment after 5.30, knowing she would have finished her regular two-hour nap – a non-negotiable habit to which she attributed her lasting health and beauty (though she didn’t put it like that).

“Here? Back in Greece? She can’t be.” Her breath came loud and scratchy. She had already applied her regulation powder and lipstick – the bold red of her youth – but her lips now looked livid against a chalky face.

“Wait,” she said, removing her hearing aids from both ears, thus becoming almost entirely deaf and unable to hear any more of the undesirable news. It was a useful ploy that often gave her time to think. She adjusted something on the pink, snail-like devices that produced a squeal, and then fitted them back into place. She patted her bouffant hair as though checking it was still all there and tucked her hands into the waistband of her skirt – an unusual but characteristic gesture of hers that I associated with intransigence.

“She can’t just come back. I made a promise that my sister will never enter my house again. I cannot let down Spiros. Before he died, he reminded me of that.” Alexandra’s face had sagged from shock.

“I won’t go back on my word.” She looked at me severely. “Antigone destroyed our family. She led my brother Markos to his fate and she wanted to destroy Greece. Before she left, she sent a burnt letter to me and Spiros.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the worst thing you can do to your family. I’ll never forget opening the envelope and pulling out the letter. It was charred ash around the edges. Pieces came off in my hand and left marks on my clothes. She wrote that she would never see us again. Spiros said it was black magic, a curse, and that my sister was a witch.”

Gradually, as I filled her in on the details of Antigone’s return, Alexandra regained some of her control and poise. She asked about her sister with a formality that came of using a word that is normally taboo: Antigone, the unspeakable name, the disgraced person. I understood better why it had been such a bitter experience for Alexandra when Nikitas and I named our daughter after her younger sister. Looking back, it was perhaps an uncharacteristic decision to follow the conventions of Greek naming, where grandparents are honoured in their grandchildren’s names (paternal side first), but I liked the name and Nikitas apparently wanted to commemorate his missing mother. Despite Alexandra’s love of propriety she had been appalled. Even after fourteen years, she was still unable to bring herself to call Tig by her baptismal name, preferring
Beba
– Baby – or any number of endearments (my gold, my eyes, my lamb, my love, my bud) rather than pay tribute to her sister in this way. She had always been
Yiayia
Alexandra–Granny Alexandra. And in spite of the tension that persisted between her and Nikitas, it was Granny Alexandra who had taken Tig out for walks around the neighbourhood when she was little, who had had her to stay when Nikitas and I went away for a few days, and who had provided a solid sense of extended family for our trio.

“There are many things you should understand about Nikitas’ mother.” Aunt Alexandra was pulling herself back into control. “She betrayed us. First, the family, and then her country. She joined a band of brigands that was ruled from Moscow and wanted to turn us into a miniature Soviet Union. We’ve all seen what happened in Albania.” She was getting into her stride now and drew herself up straight. “You’d think they’d been saints from the way they talk about themselves, but they were bullies and thugs. They’ve even admitted it themselves. There are those on the Left who regret provoking the civil war and destroying Greece. There’s a book called
Luckily We Were Defeated, Comrades
, by Lazaridis, and he was a friend and fellow prisoner of Beloyiannis. I suppose you know who he was?” I confessed I didn’t and Alexandra explained about Beloyiannis being “the great martyr of the Left”, who was executed in 1952 as a traitor.

“They were wrong.” Alexandra sounded stronger as she lined up her arguments in impregnable rows. “You can’t believe what they did – the killings, the brutality, how ruthless they were. They slit people’s throats with tin cans to save on the bullets. And as for children… they were even worse than the Turks, with their ‘gathering of the children’.”
Paidomazoma
– the very word was chilling, conjuring up centuries of Ottoman domination and cruelty, when the best of the empire’s children were forcibly plucked out and sent for lifelong military service as Janissaries in Constantinople. During the Civil War, the communists had “saved” vulnerable children from warfare by taking them to the eastern bloc or “stolen” them from their parents in order to indoctrinate them abroad. It all depended which side you believed.

“They didn’t care about Greece, about their fatherland, and they saw the Allies as enemies because they were ‘Imperialists’. Such nonsense. They just wanted power. That’s all there is to it. And thank God, they lost.”

“I know both sides did lots of bad things,” I said, trying to appease Aunt Alexandra. “But I’ve never really understood why the family took it so personally that Antigone had different beliefs. She was still a daughter and a sister.”

“She took Markos.” The intransigence was clear in her tone. “He was still a schoolboy when she made him leave everything and go with her. He wasn’t even shaving yet – a baby, but they gave him a gun and he was dead before his nineteenth birthday. He didn’t deserve that. My mother begged and pleaded, but Antigone was pig-headed. She could do anything she liked with Markos and she didn’t understand that certain things come before ideals and grand plans. I don’t want to make a list of accusations.” Aunt Alexandra smiled at me. “I know we can’t live in the past. But you must be careful. You can knock all you like on the deaf man’s door. My sister will never change.”

I told Alexandra I’d see myself out by the kitchen door, planning to say hello to Chryssa in the kitchen. Morena was there with her, preparing green beans for a stew, older now, like all of us, with two children of her own. No longer the nervous immigrant I had first met before I married Nikitas, she had become a solid family matriarch, whose sons spoke Greek like natives.

“That’s nice, you’ll meet your mother-in-law,” said Morena, straightforwardly and not suspecting the degree of trouble this visit might entail after I announced the news.

“Tell me what you remember about Antigone,” I asked Chryssa.

“Antigone was a good kid. They were all good kids.” Chryssa said she remembered playing with all three of the Perifanis children during the long summers up in the village. Her father had worked for Petros, their father, caring for the old stone house when they were away, and tending their large orchard and vegetable garden. Each week he had sent a box of vegetables, seasonal fruits and fresh eggs to Athens, taking it down to the train station at Lianokladi, and it had been collected at Larissis station in Athens by one of Petros’ employees.

“There is nothing for Antigone to be ashamed of. In a civil war, everybody loses. And Greeks know better than anyone how to put out their own eyes. We don’t need help with that.”

* * *

The next day, I rang the newspaper and asked to speak to Danae. I wanted to know what she had discovered and was curious to find out more about her. I couldn’t help a touch of envy creeping through me as I dialled. Who was this woman who had known so much about Nikitas and his preoccupations? Why had he confided in her and not me?

“Surname?” they asked at the switchboard.

“I don’t know. She’s a sub-editor, I think.”

“Ah, Danae Glykofridis, I’ll put you through.” Her surname – Sweetbrow – was gratingly charming.

She didn’t sound pleased to hear from me. “How are you,
Kyria
Perifanis? My condolences, once again. I didn’t have an opportunity to speak with you at the funeral.”

So she had been there. I wondered if I’d seen her. “I would like to meet you if you had time. I’m trying to gather up Nikitas’ research and I know you were helping him.” I tried to stop my voice sounding too spiky, though Danae did not.

“Things are very busy at the paper. I’m not sure what I could tell you.”

I rose to the challenge, not wanting to let her get away so easily. “It wouldn’t take long.”

“What sort of thing are you interested in?” Her tone was neutral now, if wary.

“I’m just sorting through Nikitas’ papers, doing a bit of my own investigation into his life. I wondered whether you could tell me something about the direction he was taking his book.”