Dead Europe (9 page)

—The E's direct from Amsterdam, we have Andreas to thank for that.

Andreas bowed his head and smiled at me.

—I prefer my Ecstasy from Holland, he explained. People swear by London and Barcelona but in my experience that is not the case at all. I think it is Amsterdam for LSD and for Ecstasy.

—And for hashish?

Andreas smiled wickedly at Giulia's question.

—Ah, hashish is best when it is directly received from the hands of a young Pakistani peasant boy.

I placed the tablet and joint in my pocket and pretended a worldliness I did not feel. They were confusing me. They obviously had money, obviously were doing well, but their conversation was bitter and cynical. Giulia's mobile phone went off during our meal and she spoke rapidly and impatiently. I looked around the square and it hit me that from table to table, dinners, dates, conversations were being interrupted by the persistent clamour of the ringing phones. Giulia switched off her phone and turned to Andreas.

—Now you will suffer, that was Antoni. He has a room for me in High Street, Kensington. Serves you right.

Andreas again arched those long slim eyebrows.

—My Giuliana, how many times must I tell you? I detest London. It is a cold, foolish city.

—Bah! Noticing that I was distracted, Giulia turned to me and again took my hand. I am sorry, my little one, we are boring you with our terrible bourgeois conversation, all about work and silly things like that. I want to hear about you. She
was searching my face, looking straight at my eyes. How is Colin? Why is he not here with you?

I tried to explain how Colin was a man uncomfortable with formality and artifice, who wanted a holiday to be time spent lounging on beaches or walking through rainforests, who detested the thought of openings, of exhibitions. My jumbled Greek sounded silly. I turned to Andreas and stated simply, in English, My boyfriend hates artists.

—A wise man.

Giulia crossed her arms in exasperation.

—He wouldn't have had to hang around fucking artists, I would have taken him places. Tell him, tell him that I very much want to meet Colin, the man who has stolen my cousin's heart.

I grinned and nodded.

—Maybe I will visit you both in Australia? Maybe I will come and live there? Yes, she insisted, I will come and live in the desert. I will take an Aboriginal man for a husband. I am bored with Europeans.

Andreas laughed at this.

—You would suffocate if you left Europe. You need this oxygen to survive. Leave the poor Australian men alone, marry a Greek, as your mother insists.

—I don't want to marry an Australian, exclaimed Giulia disdainfully. I said I will marry an old wise Aboriginal man.

—The only true Australians, I interceded.

Giulia's eyes flashed approvingly. Good, she answered, so you have finally realised you are a Greek?

I laughed and shook my head.

Giulia pointed at me and sneered.

—He keeps insisting he is not Greek, he is Australian.

Andreas looked at me and then laughed.

—That's preposterous. You are indeed a Greek. Not only physically but in your soul.

I protested that I did not grow up here, that I could not
pretend to be anything but antipodean. They both looked at me strangely, then Giulia shrugged her shoulders and picked up her handbag. I fingered the tablet in my shirt pocket, eager for the heightening that drugs would bring to this singular summer night. Giulia smiled at me.

—We have a surprise for you.

—What is it?

She glanced at her watch.

—Time we had our sweets. Giulia slid the yellow pill onto her tongue, winked at me, and leaned over and kissed me. Andreas asked for the bill, and when it arrived he slapped my hand away and placed one hundred euros on the table. You are my guest tonight, he told me, interrupting my protests. I am paying for the Australian.

 

—Your father is from here?

We were driving in Andreas' white BMW. And though we were slicing through forest, the night air was full of the music of voices, laughter and the clinking of glass.

—My mother, I answered. I looked back at Giulia, who was smoking in the back seat. My father and Giulia's father were brothers.

—Andrea is from Thessaloniki as well. Giulia leaned over from the back seat and tweaked my nose. I stilled my impulse to tell her to put on her seatbelt. I had never forgotten her reaction all those years ago when I had first jumped into her car and strapped the belt across my torso. What are you, she had screamed at me, a slave? Only a slave binds himself.

Andreas was looking at my cousin in his rear-view mirror.

—You are wrong, my Giuliana, my family is not from Thessaloniki; they're from Kozani.

—I've been there, I said quietly. Last time I came.

Andreas turned and looked at me. He turned back to the road.

—My family were peasants. Unlike yours, he said.

Giulia groaned. She leaned over and butted out her cigarette angrily.

—Look, Andreas, it's not as if our family were aristocracy. Our grandfather was a successful merchant, that's how he managed to educate his sons. But he himself was a dirt-poor refugee from Anatolia.

—From Trebizon, I finished, remembering Dad's stories. I looked over at my cousin. She smiled at me and nodded.

Andreas offered me his cigarettes and as I took one I touched his fingers. He wrapped one of his fingers tight around one of mine, then quickly glancing in the rear-view mirror at Giulia, he let go.

—Why did your father leave Greece?

I looked out into the darkness. When I was six, my father had given me a map of the world and asked me to find Thessaloniki. He had told me nothing about where it lay on the planet. I had taken the map into my room—it covered the length of my single bed—and I had pored over mountains and oceans, desert and sea, until I found the magic word. I was excited when I took it back to Dad. You see, he told me, it's not hard to find where you come from.

Giulia answered for me. Her voice was sad.

—My uncle was furious when Lambrakis was assassinated. He was involved in the Party, at university, and our grandfather feared for him. Our grandfather sent his son to bloody Australia. And probably a good thing. Her voice was faint. He would have not have survived well under the Colonels.

Andreas had his eyes fixed on the road ahead. His next words surprised me.

—And why did he give you a Jewish name?

Isaac, my father would bellow at me when I had made him angry, interrupted his reading, when I was full of boisterous energy. Isaac, I will sacrifice you to bloody God!

—My father liked the name. He just liked the name.

Giulia turned to me.

—Andreas hates the Jews. She tapped him on the shoulder. Be careful, Andrea, my cousin is a friend of the Jews.

—I don't hate them, he protested to me, I simply distrust them.

I was feeling the drug begin to surge through my body. My belly was fluttering and my voice, when it emerged, was low and soft. I turned to Andreas.

—Why are you anti-Semitic?

He did not respond, he was searching the road.
Gamouto,
he muttered, I think I've missed the turn-off.

—Why are you anti-Semitic? I repeated.

—I told you, he replied, I do not hate Jews, I simply distrust them. For their wealth, their power. That they dropped the bombs on Belgrade, that they are forcing my country to be something it is not. That they want to enslave us.

—I think you are mistaking the Americans for the Jews.

—They are the same thing.

Giulia touched my hand in warning. Andreas, she said carefully, is a fine man in many ways but he is a filthy racist.

—I simply dislike their obsession with the past, their moral righteousness. I was sure he was aiming his words at me, not Giulia. I dislike their masochism.

Giulia laughed.

—Of course, she said, their obsession with the Holocaust is a sickness. I agree. But perfectly understandable.

—Have you read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? he responded.

I laughed out loud.

—That was Nazi propaganda.

—The Protocols predate the Nazis, he replied.

—Alright, then it was early fascist propaganda! The fact is
that they are not true; the Protocols are fiction.

I was amazed that this educated man was using the Protocols to defend his hatreds. But the insidious chemical was playing in my blood and I could not muster any outrage. I was warm and happy.

—You are both ignorant fools, shouted Giulia from the back seat. It was the Russian czar who published that racist slime. I win, she added, in English.

We were approaching a town floodlit with electric light. The taverns and bars were full of people eating and drinking. The music surged through my body and as Andreas parked the car his hand slid across mine. He squeezed it, then he opened the door for Giulia. I was weak as I slid out of the car. Giulia took my hand and we followed Andreas through the crowds, into the music.

—Come, he said, turning to us and smiling, let me take you to a museum that celebrates
our
sickness.

Giulia squeezed my hand.

—I hope you are still interested in museums, my beautiful cousin.

—I am.

I laughed out loud, remembering.

Andreas looked at us quizzically.

—What is so funny?

—It's our secret, my cousin answered firmly, and pulled at my hand, dragging me ahead of him.

 

—Take me to the Jewish History Museum.

I had been drinking coffee with Giulia at a small table under an awning across from the Port. It was my first trip to Europe and we had danced till dawn the night before and were fortifying ourselves with caffeine, nicotine and Greek pastries. I was absolutely in love with Europe.

—Why do you want to go there?

—My father used to say that Thessaloniki is a city of Jews.

—Once, she answered. A long long time ago. There are no Jews now.

But there were. There were phantoms, and I had found them in the Jewish History Museum of Thessaloniki. The museum was a cavernous warehouse, with black partitions dividing the space into a maze. As we entered we had nodded to the middle-aged man smoking behind the front desk. Above him, a large dusty window framed the gloomy Salonikan sky. We were the only visitors and we walked slowly and reverentially past walls and walls of photographs. They had not been unfamiliar to me: the stark black and white images of destitution, of misery and death. The gaunt, desperate faces of women and children and men being herded into the death-camp trains. The tortures, the experiments, the annihilation. The history of the Holocaust.

It had been a relief to turn a corner and face life. Old sepia photographs from the
fin de siècle
portrayed the Jewish world of the city that had been erased. Families smiled for the camera, dressed in their best finery, the men in suits, the women in fur coats and hats perched on their carefully arranged hair; they were walking the same city streets that I had just explored. On another wall, there was a large photograph of a group of young men and women lying on grass. They wore army coats and had rifles at their sides. They were smiling, laughing, teasing the cameraman. The caption underneath the photograph said that they were Jews of the Resistance; they had taken to the mountainous border between Greece and Yugoslavia to fight alongside their Gentile partisan comrades. I had taken the camera from around my neck, stood back from the photograph and was ready to shoot.

—No photography. The man had risen from his desk and was walking towards us. He spoke in broken but clear English.

—Why? My cousin asked him in Greek.

—What do you want here? He spoke English again.

—My cousin is from Australia. He is interested in your history.

Every time my cousin had spoken in her own tongue, he had answered in mine. He held his right hand over my lens. Ignoring Giulia, he spoke to me again.

—There will be no photographs.

I could tell that Giulia was about to answer him rudely and I interrupted her.

—My father was from Thessaloniki, I explained. He told me about the Jews who lived here. I had been about to continue, to tell him that I wanted to acknowledge the Hebrew past of this city, to make recompense—I knew it was pitiful, hopeless, that nothing I could say or do could make amends for the terrible history hanging on the walls—but he did not let me finish.

—I am not interested in your father, he said firmly. All I ask is that you take no photographs. And with that, he had turned, sat back at his desk and lit another cigarette. He refused to meet my wounded gaze.

 

—How did you feel, Colin later asked me. How did you feel when he said that to you?

—Hurt.

—Why?

—Because I thought he was making no distinction between me and an anti-Semite. Jesus, I went to his museum, I wanted to learn, I wanted to ask questions, and he treated me like dirt.

—What did you say to him?

—Nothing.

—Why?

—I didn't think it was my place.

—What would you have liked to say to him?

—I don't know.

—Come on, what did you want to say to him?

—I wanted to say, Fuck off, you paranoid Jew, I have nothing to do with this history.

 

I put down my camera and indicated to Giulia that we should leave. She'd been loudly whistling a tune and the melody had danced and bounced around the high ceilings and walls of the museum. Just before taking the stairs leading down to the street, I turned back to look at the man. He was still ignoring me. In seconds we encountered the loud traffic and human shouts of a living city.

—What was that you were whistling?

—A Palestinian Resistance song.

—You shouldn't have done that.

She playfully grabbed my nose and tweaked it.

—You are so polite—you Australians have that English politeness. That man was rude and so I was rude to him. You must learn, dear cousin, that politeness will not get you far in Europe. Even in England, she added.