Dead Europe (8 page)

—Are you alright?

—Yeah. I'm in Karpenissi.

—What's it like?

—I've just got here. I'll tell you next time I ring.

—When are you planning on coming back? I could hear the hope in his voice.

—Not sure. Another month?

He went silent.

—Three weeks, then.

—Don't promise me anything. You never fucking keep them anyway.

—I love you.

—Then just come back quickly.

—I better get going.

He asked me to wait and he put down the phone. The young woman in the kiosk was looking at me. She lit up a cigarette and yawned.

—Your cousin Giulia rang me.

—Bullshit.

—Nah. She rang me up last night. She's in Athens and wants to get in contact with you. You got a pen?

I motioned to the young woman for a pen and she sullenly handed me one. I took down the number, wrote it on the inside flap of my cigarette packet.

—I love you, I told him again.

His voice softened.

—Come back soon, baby. I miss you so much. This is too hard.

 

I walked the town that day. This place, this small town high in the mountains, was where I came from. It was to this town that my mother had come down from the village for celebration and for dances; this is where she had first tasted ice-cream and bananas and oranges. They were so rare, she once told me. I was a child, lying next to her in bed, and she was in a silky heroin daze. I was wearing blue and white checked pyjamas and I was asking her about Greece. On drugs, she would answer. Fruit was so rare. But I remember my father took me to Karpenissi one morning, we had walked since dawn, and I saw an old man with a stick of bananas over his shoulder. I didn't ask for one, I knew they were expensive, but my Dad saw my hunger and he bought me one. He let me eat it all myself, did not even take a bite. Recalling her father, her face had become sad and old. She kissed me goodnight, grumbled that I did not know how lucky I was to be in a place where everyone ate bananas and peaches, apricots and oranges.

I held my camera tight in my hands and willed myself to see Greece, her home, through her eyes.

I took photographs of shopfronts, bakeries and butcher shops. I took photos of the old wooden walls of the town, of the new concrete apartments. I took photographs of the surrounding peaks and of young children playing soccer in side streets. I took photographs of a drunk old man, his teeth all gone, his eyes bruised. I took as many photographs as I could, switching film after film, so when I returned home I could ask my mother, Do you remember this? Does it still look the same?

Even as I pressed my finger on the shutter I was aware that the places I was framing through my viewfinder had changed unceasingly since my mother was born. I knew as I heard the click of the camera that my mother's hazy memories of this place she left when she was still a girl could not compete with the crisp colours and matt tones of the
photographs I was now taking. I didn't care. I wanted her to have something more solid of memory than words. I took photograph after photograph. As this was a foreign light, as I did not know this intense but delicate Mediterranean light, so different from the harsh and boundless sun of my own country, I took shot after shot of the same scene, altering the exposure to ensure that the film would capture the houses, the fields, the narrow lanes, the faces, as I wished to preserve them. I altered the aperture and attempted to capture the soul of the town.

The old men of Karpenissi stared suspiciously at my camera. The old women I did not see, they kept indoors. I took seven rolls of film and I was exhausted by the time I walked back to the bus station. The chain-smoking man behind the counter was rude and unsympathetic to my requests. It seemed that buses to my mother's village only left on Wednesdays and Mondays and when I persisted in my pathetic Greek to discover an alternate route, he told me that the village was a clump of Devil's earth and why the fuck did I want to go there when Karpenissi had everything I needed as a tourist. I realised, when he made a disparaging aside to a bus driver, that he thought of me as a complete stranger, that my accent and manner had obscured all evidence of Greekness. I gave up my efforts and decided to hitch. I paid my bill at the hotel and I rang Giulia in Athens.

—
Gamouto, epitelos.
About fucking time.

 

It had been twelve years since I had heard her voice but I recognised it immediately, recognised the accent of her stilted English. It sounded like the way Slavic women in Australia tried to fix their lips around the hard Australian accent. Twelve years ago, my father's family had not been kind to me. They had taken me in, they had shown me the tourist sights of Thessaloniki, they had politely paid for my meals and my drinks, but they had not protested when
I declared my intentions to travel on my own and they had been relieved to close the door after me. It had been an uncomfortable two nights I'd spent with my uncles and my aunts, my cousins—they doing their duty, I doing mine—sitting on sofas, listening to them gossip and laugh about people I did not know. It was uncomfortable because we could not talk about the one thing we had in common: my dead junkie father. Even his presence had been erased from their houses. His youthful image did not stare down from any of the old photographs that adorned their immaculate bourgeois homes and apartments.

Giulia, younger than I by a month, had sat across from me on a sofa and her penetrating dark eyes had unnerved me. She had interrogated me. Who did I vote for? Were there Greek members of Cabinet in Australia? What was my perspective on the civil war? Was I a supporter of the Velvet Revolution? Did I agree that Scorsese owed his biggest debt to Rossellini? What was my favourite Dylan, my favourite Tsitsanis? Her sharp slanted eyes had scrutinised me, and I thought I had been a disappointment to her, clumsily answering her questions and making it obvious that Australians were ignorant and naive compared to the hunger of a Europe suddenly churning through the vast ramifications of the fall of the Soviet Bloc. But she had laughed when I told her my favourite Dylan was ‘I Want You', and had started singing it, and she clapped her hands and squeezed my knees when I defended
Voyage to Italy
over
The Bicycle Thieves
. My aunt had cooked a large dinner and then I was off to the station to take the train to Belgrade. Giulia had jumped up and offered to drive me. I had said my goodbyes, received my stilted kisses, and thrown my black backpack into her car. She was driving silently, smoking a cigarette, and I remember feeling melancholy and alone. But we never arrived at the station. Instead, she stopped outside a cold grey Balkan apartment block and told me to grab my bag.

—Where are we?

—My friend Elena has an apartment here. She is in Rhodes for the summer. I have the key. You are staying here, she announced.

I laughed.

—Giulia, I have a train to catch.

—Forget it, your travels can wait. Here's my cousin from Australia, damned faraway Australia, and he's not leaving until we have a chance to talk.

We entered the apartment block, took the tiny creaking lift to the third floor and entered a cramped space filled with the fragile soothing smells of women with a balcony looking over the Port of Thessaloniki. I smoked a cigarette, breathing in the sea air and the summer wind, while Giulia fixed us drinks.

—Anyway, you can't leave yet, you've hardly seen anything of this city. She was standing in the doorway and sipping from a gin and tonic. Then, taking a seat beside me, looking out at the sea, she asked me very simply, Tell me, how did my uncle die?

 

—Where the hell are you?

—Karpenissi.

—Karpy-island, she mocked.
Nissi
was the Greek word for island. I was travelling to an island in the mountains.

—And what the hell are you going to do there?

—I'm going to visit Mum's village.

—Really? Her voice was now warm, soft and warm, and caressing. I'm coming. Where shall we meet?

I looked out of the small hotel window, down into the lazy square, across the rooftops to the mountains.

—At her village?

I thought Giulia was going to choke on her laughter.

—I doubt it will be a popular meeting spot, the Wild Forest.

Agrio Dassos
. The Wild Forest. Where my mother really came from.

—Hang on a minute, she said, I'll ask Andreas. I heard rapid Greek being exchanged and then she was back on the phone.

—We'll meet at the Megalo Horio.

—What?

—I'm serious, we'll meet at the Megalo Horio. Andreas says that's the easiest place for you to find. It's only a half-hour from Karpy-Island.

—It's actually called
Megalo Horio
? In English, the name translated to the Big Village. In Australia that could only be a name for a theme park. Where at the Megalo Horio?

—It's not that
megalo
. At the square. I heard her call out to Andreas.

—Tomorrow night. Saturday night in the village. She cackled with laughter. Baby, she hissed in delight, choking on her laughter, her accent Brooklyn via Bucharest, We are going to make some noise.

 

Megalo Horio turned out to be a little like a theme park. The village itself was perched precariously in the forested chest of the mountain, and its neat cobbled streets ran vertiginously down into the lush green valley below. In France or in Germany I would have seen nothing odd in this picturesque prettiness; but in Greece where I was used to the eroded and stripped sunburnt earth of the mainland, or the salt-drenched sparseness of the islands, this handsome cool village surprised me. I wandered its alleys, going in and out of small shops selling traditional sweets and cheeses; I watched a withered old man in a black beret carve a wooden cane into the shape of an elongated horse's head. Only the Greek language was to be heard. The tourists on the streets of the Megalo Horio were all Greek. The women's fleshy buttocks strained against the thin fabric of their Versace trousers. The men's arses were
squeezed tight into Calvin Klein jeans, their bellies bulging obscenely over the waistbands.

I found a room above a shop that sold sweetmeats and I bought myself a flagon of cheap retsina and drank myself sick. This was not the Greece I had thought I would find. When I had first travelled here, I had seen the cities and I had toured the islands, playing the tourist. Back then I had found another country. The streets of Athens were dusty, the walls were covered with slogans, and it was I who was the materialist interloper. Now, outside in the square of the Megalo Horio, it was all Prada, Gucci and Versace, and everyone sat drinking, eating, and speaking loudly and ostentatiously on their mobile phones. I drank, I got blotto, and I stripped myself nude. I took photo after photo, of my shins, my hands, the washbasin, the peeling ochre paint on the wall, my cock, my belly, the hairs on my thigh, the single bed, the quilt on the bed. When I came to the next morning, the camera was by my side, I had vomited all over my chest, and the room was filled with the toxic stench of tobacco, of wine, of stale regurgitated food.

 

It had been twelve years since I had seen Giulia but as soon as we saw each other, as soon as her arms were tight around my shoulders and her kisses were on my mouth and cheeks, it was as if those twelve years had disappeared, and I was back on the balcony, getting drunk on whisky and stoned on grass, and watching the dawn over the Port of Thessaloniki. Before her arrival I had stilled my hangover with a meal of chips and meat stewed in rich tomato sauce, and I had walked across the valley to the town of Gavros where I had drunk coffee and written letters home. The sun was setting when I found her, smoking a cigarette, standing arm-in-arm with a tall man in a lavender jacket, who smiled at me, winked, and greeted me in perfectly accented English.

Giulia introduced us.

—Andreas Kalifakis. A smart man, but not as smart as he thinks.

He shook my hand and raised an eyebrow.

—Our friend here is mad at me because I refuse to go with her to London. She is unused to not getting her way.

I turned to Giulia, who was shaking her head and flinging the cigarette butt across the valley.

—What are you going to do in London?

—Silly things. You know I work for television, now? I shook my head. At twenty-three, it had been theatre that had been her great passion. She smiled at me and touched my hand. I am working on a documentary about Cypriots in London. Are you proud of me? She hugged me, and Andreas led us to a small table at the edge of the square, where we looked down at the fading forest light, and he ordered wine, bread and fish.

Giulia had changed. Gone were the baggy denim jackets and jeans of a Communist Party cadre, replaced now by a thin silk shirt that revealed her cleavage. Her hair had been cut short and thick gold hoop earrings helped accentuate the angularity of her cheekbones and jaw. She was truly a beautiful woman but age was beginning to creep in: wrinkles, shadows and lines beneath her eyes. But her conversation with Andreas was furious and sophisticated, and reminded me a little of my previous shame all those years ago to be the naive traveller from the bottom of the earth. Andreas too worked for television, a journalist who nonchalantly mentioned his time in Sarajevo, Belgrade and Istanbul, which, in the Greek manner, he insisted on calling Constantinopoli. Giulia too had covered the earthquakes in that city and I listened fascinated to their stories. Andreas asked me questions about my profession and I found myself bullshitting, pretending that my photographic career was far more successful than it was, not mentioning the weekend job in the video shop I still had to make ends meet. Giulia looked on proudly.

—Of course, she insisted to Andreas, my cousin is a success. We are a noble family. She squeezed my fingers tightly and kissed my brow. Then taking my hand she opened it and deposited a gift. A small joint and a coarse yellow tablet lay in my palm. Her loud laughter rang through the square like church bells.