The House on Paradise Street (20 page)

There were moments in Nikitas’ office that were agonising for other reasons, when my rage at him mutated into pure sadness. One day, I found a file innocently labelled Notes 1999, in which Nikitas had described some of the torments he suffered with Spiros. The pages were handwritten.

I remembered clearly how, soon after Nikitas’ documentaries were broadcast, he had this “breakdown”, though that is such a polite, contained label. I found him in the middle of the night lying naked on the bathroom floor, sobbing and unable to speak. He had been drinking heavily recently, and waking before dawn, but this time I could tell it was more serious. Afterwards, he could hardly speak for days. When he did talk, he told me how he had once tried to see his mother in Moscow, on a work trip. It had been some years before I met him. She had not turned up to their rendezvous, and it was after this that he had his first “collapse” of the sort that I had witnessed.

“Perhaps something happened to prevent her. Maybe she was ill?” I had suggested, realising that this maternal rejection in adulthood had been a deeply painful experience. “Did you not try to contact her to see why she didn’t come?”

“You can’t imagine what the Soviet Union was like then,” he said. “We had KGB minders, and there wasn’t the opportunity to go hunting for mothers. Anyway, there wasn’t any point. I got the message – it was too late for both of us.”A psychiatrist gave him some pills and Nikitas kept a stash of tranquillisers “for emergencies”. He didn’t want to discuss it further with me and rejected the idea of therapy (“My story would be much too stimulating for the psycho-analyst,” he joked bitterly). I never saw Nikitas like that again, but after he died I was tormented by wishing I had taken the event more seriously.

I went over to the wooden-framed sofa and lay down, pulling one of the scratchy blankets over me against the November chill. Holding the two keys in my hands, I tried to imagine Nikitas’ last hours here in his office: drinking the whisky, making the decision to drive somewhere. Why did he go to the sea? What was troubling him? I was unable to make sense of it. There was so much I wanted to ask him now and the frustration and misery at not being able to felt like a raw wound that would never heal.

After the Germans left we walked from Lamia to Athens and I was given time off to go home. My brother was in a separate unit and we had not yet met up when I hobbled into Paradise Street on blistered feet. My hair was cut short – like many of the girls in the mountains, I had left it untouched until the Germans left. Then we had celebrated with scissors. The old woman who opened the back door didn’t recognise me, nor I her. Then my mother let out a small cry and we embraced. But she hardly spoke, apart from asking where my brother was. Behind her came Alexandra, who greeted me coldly, kissing me with distaste.

Alexandra filled the space with her hostility and it was very clear which of the two women now had the upper hand. Laying down the law came naturally to my sister. I was informed that she was now engaged to Spiros Koftos, who was back in Athens after his stint with the “German-Evzones”. He had given up his
foustanélla
for the uniform of the Athens police force and was helping the British army on the streets of Athens.

In other liberated countries like France and Holland they were rewarding the members of resistance groups and punishing the collaborators. In Greece it was the reverse – the British appeared perfectly happy to arm those who had sided with the Nazis. Each night there were fights as our boys tried to locate traitors like my future brother-in-law, and fascist louts hunted down anyone associated with the resistance movement. The city resounded with guns each night as skirmishes and ambushes took place – Greek against Greek.

Alexandra said, “Either you renounce your links with the Stalinists or you find another home.” She sounded as though she had prepared her ultimatum. Naturally there was no choice. I was given the time to collect a few things from my room, and it was Chryssa who came to help me. She had been living at Paradise Street for the previous six months, since we sent her there from the mountains. After her traumatic experiences in Perivoli, we had taken her with us to begin with. She didn’t speak but made herself useful, helping with chores, and marching with the rest of us when we were on the move. However, we saw that she was too disturbed to remain close to the fighting, and as she had nobody to care for her, we arranged for her to go to Athens with a message for my mother. From what I saw, she had become a part of the family that was now rejecting me.

My mother’s parting words were harsh.

“You can come home when you bring me my son.” That is what she said. As though I wasn’t her daughter. Grief changes people. The tree in the courtyard was covered with unripe green lemons.

It was unlikely that I would run into Johnny in this surreal and dangerous atmosphere, but I did. We came across one another by chance at Zonar’s and though I thought of ignoring him and leaving, he came to speak to me. It was early evening and he offered to take me to dinner, as though that were a quite normal thing to do. The city was once more almost starving. You had to fill bags with billions in paper money to pay for a loaf of bread, and they kept devaluing the currency so that one drachma had become the equivalent of 50,000,000,000 old ones. Johnny had heard of a small restaurant in Kolonaki that had previously been popular with the occupying forces. He thought you could eat well there if you paid in gold sovereigns, and he was one of the lucky people in the city to have this reliable currency. I think Johnny was as shocked as I was by the experience of choosing food from a menu in French and then eating fillet steak and meringues with cream. I have never felt greed and revulsion in such equal measure and Johnny admitted that he too felt nauseous from the meal.

“I suppose this is how the Kolonaki ‘fireplaces’ still eat?” I said to Johnny, referring to the powerful families of that area, who seemed to have survived better than anyone else. “They’re terrified that ‘the mountains’ are bringing revolution to Athens.” I tried to explain that up in the mountains, we had seen how much better Greece could be – better than before the war – and what freedom could mean. We couldn’t return to a past which could no longer exist. Half a million Greek deaths should not be in vain. But I don’t think Johnny really understood. He asked about Markos and what we were going to do now we were liberated, as though he didn’t understand that our fight for liberty had to continue. Afterwards, we walked through streets where worthless bank notes lay in the gutter like waste paper. I was unhappy at the realisation that I was now fraternising with the enemy and I think we both grasped that it was impossible to be friends.

Soon after this inappropriate dinner, the December Events began. However, when I arranged to meet my brother on December 3rd, nobody could imagine that the terrible
Dekemvriana
were about to happen. The winter of 1944 was cold and wet, but weeks of bad weather now gave way to sunshine. It felt like a blessing for a day that would later be called “Bloody Sunday”. We had organised a demonstration, maybe the largest that had ever taken place in Athens – at least 60,000 of us protesting for justice. We wanted democracy and to play a part in creating it. I found Markos at the entrance to the Royal Garden and we walked with the crowd along Amalia Avenue to Syntagma Square. People were arriving from every direction, carrying banners and placards: ‘No to another occupation.’ ‘People’s Rule not the King.’ We were shouting along with the rest – proud as well as angry – and people were singing and dancing in front of the Parliament building. Markos and I were close to the Grande Bretagne Hotel when the shooting started. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but I heard machine-guns and screaming. Later they said it was from the police station. There were three people near me, just turning to leave and then they were flying – flung up and onto the road. There was a spray of blood across my coat. I heard shouts: “They’re killing us.”

We pressed ourselves into an angle in the wall of the hotel, protected from the direction of the guns, but as people ran past, Markos got pulled into the crowd and I was knocked to the ground. I would have been trampled to death if it hadn’t been for two young men who grabbed me. Then we were swept along together. It was like being in strong waves – you couldn’t push against the power of the crowd.

By the time I found my brother in Stadium Street, the protestors were slowly making their way back towards the now silent guns and the victims. Corpses lay in the road and dark pools of blood stained the marble in front of the Parliament. Nobody knew how many victims there were, though some said thirty-two dead and 148 injured. We stood with a crowd before the Grande Bretagne. The bodies were spread out all around, but we went back to where we had been – where I had seen the three people killed – a girl and two men of about my age. They were dressed respectably, their shoes clean. The girl’s skirt had ridden up her legs and someone pulled it down for modesty. British officers and journalists were looking down on us from the balconies of the Grande Bretagne.

They say that nobody knows who fired the guns into the crowd. Perhaps it was the police, perhaps the English. People have argued ever since about this spark which lit the terrible fire of our Civil War. But the truth is that nothing was done without the support of the English. I saw young girls making shrines of twigs and flowers around the patches of blood into which people dipped their
handkerchiefs
. Later, these were used as flags and banners by the crowd to confront the murderers.

That evening, I was among a number of ELAS girls who shouted messages and announcements across the streets using a megaphone. We called members of ELAS to their barracks and the following day, we organised attacks on police stations across the city. There was also a general strike. We marched into the centre again – this time with hundreds of thousands. I helped two other girls carry a banner reading: “When the people are in danger from tyranny they choose either chains or arms.” After the funerals, the crowd was fired on again by supporters of the fascist X group. More citizens were killed. The sense of betrayal was physical – like being savaged by an old friend.

Later, we learned what Churchill had said to General Scobie, holed up in the Grande Bretagne: “Do not hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.” Churchill wanted control “without bloodshed if possible,” though he added, “with bloodshed if necessary”. If it seems long ago or unbelievable, just look at Afghanistan or Iraq.

The next time I met Antigone was at Zonar’s, the recently reopened, historic café in University Avenue that used to be a gathering place for so many Athenians. Gone were the dark corners, the intellectuals, the retired men in hats and hand-made suits and the mix of seedy, old-time glamour that I remembered from my first visit to Greece in the late ’80s. Now the bright, plate-glass-fronted space was filled with women of a certain age with expensive suits and hairdos, and businessmen with mobile phones at the ready. I put my arm around Antigone when kissing her hello and for a brief moment she looked quite flustered and pleased – so much so that she then spent more time than necessary digging about in her bag to find her cigarettes. She asked me to go and borrow a lighter for her and I watched as she sighed in pleasure with the first inhalation and thanked me.

“I don’t remember it like this,” she said, as though the rest of the city had remained the same. She drank a “Greek coffee” [
varý-glykó
– heavy-sweet], which had been “Turkish coffee” when she was young.

Antigone was more expansive than at our previous meeting and without my even asking, she began talking about the war. She said she was writing her story every day and had even brought me a few pages to read.

“It was here that I met Johnny Fell after I arrived in Athens in late October. There were English soldiers drinking beer, laughing like donkeys. They liked to say that they liberated us, and people welcomed them as if they had.” If she had to choose the point where her life changed irrevocably, it was not the outbreak of war, she said, nor the German occupation. “It was after we were supposedly free. Do you know about the
Dekemvriana
– the December Events?”

I told her I had heard of them. You can hardly live in Greece without knowing something about those harrowing weeks in December 1944, when the Civil War became inevitable.

“You know, Mond, there are points in life when you realise you are living history. Normally, history only exists with hindsight – at the time it’s just things happening, rumour, news.”

After our coffee, Antigone and I walked out of Zonar’s and along into Syntagma – the square named after a constitution that has so often been lacking in Greece. The sun was breaking through the low-hanging clouds producing a golden glow on the stone facade of the Parliament building. The former royal palace looked as two-dimensional as theatre scenery – a backdrop for the white-stockinged Evzones who were changing the guard with slow-motion leg swings, observed by a group of Japanese tourists. Antigone walked slowly but deliberately, peering around her as though trying to see into her own past. We stood for a moment in front of the renovated Grande Bretagne Hotel, next to a row of large cars and uniformed doormen, before crossing over into the centre of the square. Choosing a bench by some trees filled with bitter-oranges, we sat in the precarious sunshine. Crowds were spilling out from the metro station and a group of tall, slim African men were gathering up their pavement wares of fake Louis Vuitton bags into sheets and hurrying towards Hermes Street to avoid the police.

Antigone was opening up to me at last and I took advantage of this to ask her about her brother. She spoke about him warmly, retreating back into her memories of when they had been together in this very square in 1944.

“Markos had grown up so much since we left Athens the previous winter,” she said. “He had become a man – taller and stronger. He was starting to grow a beard. He had always been brave, but he had acquired opinions and dreams. He could have done so much.”

I smiled, encouragingly, but Antigone broke off and stood up.

“I can’t stand the pigeons. Can we move over there?” She shuddered within her sensible, tweedy coat and tried
unsuccessfully
to laugh, admitting that she had always hated these birds. It was a fear that went back to childhood – something about their pink claws and the way they flapped. Encouraged by the crack of vulnerability she had allowed to show in her thick carapace of theory and principle, I felt a wave of affection for my mother-in-law. I liked how this brave fighter had admitted a foolish phobia and pictured her walking around this square as a child, holding her parents’ hands, squeezing her eyes shut at the pigeons.

When we had found another bench, I continued my questioning.

“How did Markos die?”

She replied without facing me, looking instead at the splashing fountain in front.

“The English killed him,” she said quietly. “And after that, I had no family. It was the end of hope.” She turned to face me. “I need your help with something, Mond. I made a promise to my brother and I wish to keep it. I went to the place where he was buried but there is another tomb there now. He has gone and I want very much to find him.” She paused, weighing up my reaction. “I am sorry to mix you up in this, but I think my sister must know. And I can’t ask her myself. I know it sounds like the myth all over again.” She gave a grim attempt at a smile.

We parted in the square and I walked down into the metro station, past the displays of amphorae and
archaeological
finds that had been unearthed during the building of the underground. There is even an ancient skeleton, lying in its opened tomb, preserved behind glass like a museum exhibit. If nothing else, it provides a momentary reflection on the brevity of life for the passengers that hurry past.

When I got home, I looked up the story of Antigone in my battered copy of Robert Graves that often supplied me with the background to an obscure god or a myth I wasn’t sure about. I couldn’t remember the name of the unburied brother, but soon found all the tragic details.

Antigone didn’t have the best start in life: Oedipus’ youngest daughter, her mother was Jocasta, who was also her grandmother. After Oedipus discovers that his marriage was based on murdering his father and committing incest with his mother, he puts out his eyes and leaves Thebes. He orders Antigone’s two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, to share the throne in his place, but Eteocles exiles his brother, who then returns to attack the city. Both brothers are killed. The new King Creon orders that while Eteocles should be buried with full honours, Polynices is a “traitor” and should be left unburied and unmourned. This is the point where Antigone steps in, refusing to leave her brother’s body like carrion. She goes against Creon and the laws of the state and performs the proper funerary rites to honour Polynices. When Creon finds out, she is sentenced to death by being buried alive, but Antigone hangs herself before the punishment is carried out. Creon’s son kills himself for love of Antigone, and is followed by his mother, Eurydice.

What a miserable story it is, I thought, even if it does have a strong young woman standing up to male authority. What sort of triumph is it, when you kill yourself? Is there some kind of moral to this tale, I wondered in what I realise was an absurdly Anglo-Saxon approach to its interpretation.

* * *

I decided to contact Danae again. She might just spout anti-British history at me, but I hoped to pick up something about Nikitas’ preoccupations. Now that Antigone was starting to open up to me, I wanted to get closer to what my husband had been thinking about. Danae still sounded reluctant on the phone, but agreed to meet me the next day at the small garden café behind the Numismatic Museum – Schliemann’s old house on University Street. I got there early, intending to take up my position and to spot her as she arrived, but as I walked through the garden, a young woman motioned to me. She was sitting in dappled sunshine, speaking on the phone, and mouthed “sorry!” pointing to her mobile. I sat down and watched her talking and smoking. She was about Orestes’ age. Tall, slender, and somehow both scruffy and elegant. Sun-tanned legs showed through the holes in her jeans. Her shiny, dark hair was clipped up in an artfully messy arrangement. She wasn’t wearing much make-up but her lips were definitely a glossy plum-colour. I should have brought the lipstick from Nikitas’ office with me. It was obviously hers.

“Sorry,” she repeated, when she got off the phone. She shook my hand, spoke to me in the formal plural and asked if I’d like a coffee. She had a double espresso with lots of sugar. I had green tea. I felt pinched, old and unable to express myself.

“So how can I help you?” She was self-assured.

I couldn’t answer at first. A horrible realisation was dawning that her involvement with Nikitas had gone beyond reading old Communist Party records for him. She was just the sort of girl he liked – intelligent and cultured as well as attractive. And there was an intensity about her expression that spoke of experience as well as youth.

“Anything you can tell me about what Nikitas was searching for is relevant.” I tried to sound unconcerned.

She didn’t reply at first and I realised she was finding a way of giving me something without betraying her promise to my husband. Throw a scrap to the dog and it’ll leave you alone.

“I know that he felt very angry about how the English behaved at the end of the war,” she said. “He took it personally, I suppose, because of his mother. But basically, I did lots of archive work for him.”

“What sort of thing?”

She looked relieved and proceeded to tell me about Churchill and Stalin’s meeting in Moscow in 1944. I let her talk.

“When it was clear that the Germans would lose,
Tsortsil
went to see Stalin so they could divide up south-eastern Europe between them. It was like children swapping sweets. The piece of paper Churchill used to jot down his ideas still exists. It shows his suggestions for percentages of ‘influence’ in each country, and Stalin ticked them in agreement.” Danae looked at me to assess my reaction.

“I suppose that’s how politicians work,” I replied, unimpressed. “The strong always take advantage.”

“Yes, and that’s how the lives of millions of the ‘little men and women’ around the world are decided on. The two ‘great men’ divided Yugoslavia 50:50, the USSR was given ninety per cent in Romania, and Britain got ninety per cent of Greece.” She sounded quite passionate about these percentages.

“And the other ten per cent of Greece?” I said it flippantly, but she answered seriously.

“That went to so-called ‘others’. And the interesting thing is that Stalin kept his word. He never helped the Left in Greece, even though they were desperate and thought he would. He let the British and then the Americans do whatever they liked.”

I heard Nikitas’ voice emerging through this pretty young woman. And she was managing to keep everything so impersonal. I wondered what they’d had together. Did she love him? Danae lit another cigarette and went banging on about
Tsortsil
. Apparently Churchill had asked Stalin whether they should destroy the piece of paper, which was evidence of their power games. Stalin replied: ‘That was God’s first mistake – he didn’t ask us when he created the world.’

“They were playing at God, and enjoying it,” said Danae.

How enjoyable for her to feel so self-righteous, I thought. I said, “Do you think Nikitas was upset by something in particular? What about his father? Did you find out anything about
Kapetan
Eagle? He was killed during the Civil War wasn’t he?”

“Yes. I think I could send you the details about that. After all, it’s in the public domain. I’ll send you an email, if that’s OK. He died in 1947.”

Danae said she should be getting back to the office and signalled to the waiter for the bill. I insisted on paying and we had the ritualised little argument that is a matter of Greek honour before she submitted and allowed me to get the upper hand. It felt like a very small victory.