The House on Paradise Street (10 page)

Naturally they were not alone in their troubles. Within a year there were over a million Asia Minor refugees. They were classified as “Greeks” because they were Christians and sent “home” to a country they had never seen. Many didn’t even speak Greek. They were just numbers, little people, pawns for political ambitions and international treaties. As usual it was down to the whims of the Great Powers – the British (of course), the French, the Americans. One day they told the Greek army to invade Turkey, saying they’d be there to help, the next they had disappeared. The foundations of a tragedy were set.

My mother and her young brother, Diamantis, had been brought up in the kind of sophisticated, cosmopolitan milieu that did not exist in Greece. Life was as gay and cultured as in Paris, they said, but with a better climate. As a girl, Maria had attended the
Kentrikon Parthenogogeion
[Greek Girls’ School], had taken lessons in dance, piano, botany and drawing with private tutors, and had gone to the latest charity concerts. She was a keen amateur actress and singer and belonged to an acting society, so when they set up home in an Athenian theatre she was young enough, at twenty, to be amused. During her explorations backstage, Maria came across some costumes and extracted a suit. She still had it in her wardrobe when I was a child – a reminder, she said. It was made of grey striped wool and had a matching hat. My father liked describing it in later years, as absurdly out of fashion, but, with its close-fitted cut, deeply flattering.

Realising that she was the only person who could do something to help her family in its dire situation, Maria decided to find work. This was something she knew nothing about, but she pinned a flower to the actress’s suit, cleaned her boots and set off to an address in Psyrri. Inside her bag was an advertisement from a magazine that someone had left on one of the seats in the theatre. The half-page spread had a picture of an elegant woman and proclaimed that Perifanis [a name related to the word for pride] was the only place for a lady to go to be proudly well-dressed.
Perifanis: yia perìfano styl.

My father fell immediately and deeply in love, and although he was not educated as she was, I can see why my mother was attracted to him. He was confident and full of energy. And he was a good man. He took her for a drive in his motorcar and she lost her hat when it flew off. They had lunch in Faliro at a restaurant overlooking the sea – it became a family favourite and we always heard about their first meal there with the best, most orange red mullet that had ever swum in the sea. Within a month they had married. The wedding photographs showed Maria holding orange blossom and lace, and Petros so proud by her side. Next to them were the two widowed mothers. I remember them as life-long friends, despite their different backgrounds. Each recognised the other’s suffering.

My father instructed an architect and by the time Maria gave birth to their first child in the winter of 1923, the new house in Paradise Street was ready. Alexandra was the first, blonde and blue eyed, followed a year later by me and finally by Markos. We sang English nursery rhymes with our Smyrna grandmother (who lived up in Kaisariani with our Uncle Diamantis) and heard village tales of evil spirits and mountain brigands from the other.

When we were young my father was determined to give us everything he lacked as a child. We were proof of how far he had come. He loved that my mother wanted Alexandra and me to be proper bourgeois young ladies, with music lessons and dancing and French. In the evenings my mother used to light the candles on the piano – an upright Imperial – and she’d sing Italian songs she learned as a girl with her teacher, Signor Robini. We all thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

My father had our clothes made up by his seamstresses – white sailor suits in summer and blue in the winter. And he made sure that the table was overflowing. In those days if you had meat twice a week you were a
pashá
, and we always did, although my mother used to tease my father because he still loved the plain Greek cooking of his childhood, especially
bobóta
[maize porridge], which he insisted must still find a place on the table. My mother thought it was tasteless “peasant food”, but she loved him and went along with his wishes.

“My Bobóta
,” she used to call him, and he didn’t mind. He’d call her his Smyrnian girl.

On Saturdays, my father went to the patisserie and bought a huge basket of chocolates and sweets that would sit on the hall table all week and we could take whatever we liked. On Sundays we went to church down the road at Agia Photini, where the Judas trees flowered bright pink in the spring. I was afraid of the pigeons that gathered to peck at crumbs from the sweet holy bread that was often handed out. The birds fluttering sent me into a panic, made worse by people’s laughter. Perhaps I was allowed to be too sensitive, but I was also always the rebel, the middle child caught between Alexandra’s haughty ways and Markos, the baby. I was much closer to my brother – we were almost like twins. Neighbours called us the little gypsies, for our dark complexions and also for our wild streak. While Alexandra used to sit and listen to the grown-ups or read a book, Markos and I would play in the street and climb trees on Ardittos hill. We rubbed dirt on our faces, put leaves in our hair and picked the gluey scabs of resin off the pine trees, coming home like “wild creatures”. But nobody was really angry. We were just taken out to the washroom and bathed, then given clean clothes and a bowl of warm
trachanás
porridge.

Markos and I both wanted adventure. Sometimes we would follow the Ice Man after he left the daily lump for the ice box on our front door step. He had a large, beaked nose and smelled of sweat. But we liked him for the frightening stories he told us in a hoarse voice. From him we heard of murders and missing children and he handed out small pieces of ice for us to suck. Or we would visit Kyrios Yiorgos at the bakery, hoping for a piece of steaming bread fresh from the oven or a misshapen sesame ring. Everyone liked Markos for his wide-open dark-brown eyes and easy smile that got us out of trouble so many times. He never lost that shimmer of innocence, whereas people assumed that I was leading him into trouble.

When we were quite young, my paternal grandmother gave me and my siblings three small icons. She had bought them on a trip to Tinos, at the shrine to the All-Holy Virgin, after climbing the steps to the church on her knees. “Till they bled,” she said. “Nothing without sacrifice.” We children obediently kissed the silver-plated haloes of the
Panayia
and
Christouli
, curled asleep in her arms. We said our prayers as instructed and placed the wooden icons under our pillows to protect us from harm. I liked the solid outline of mother and babe jutting into the soft pillow. I suppose I always appreciated the absence of doubt.

Later, Uncle Diamantis began to talk to me about injustice. He taught me about workers’ rights and hungry children, about capitalism’s inevitable demise, and I swapped the icon for a copy of
Rizospastis
, the communist paper that I bought in secret. It cost one drachma. It was made illegal under Metaxas, at the time when the dictator began rounding up the communists. But it only went
underground
. Diamantis took me to the shacks and shanty towns where it was still available. Most of his friends were people like him, who had come over in 1922 as young refugees. They had moved from tents into huts and gradually into small, mud-bricked houses on dirt roads. There were whole new neighbourhoods like New Smyrna and New Philadelphia. These places were chaotic and the people were shockingly poor, but the houses I visited with my uncle were always clean and well kept. Naturally, most did not have bathrooms or what we would now see as minimal necessities, but they turned them into homes. Oil cans with basil and geraniums made miniature gardens, and fences and walls were whitewashed each year in time for Easter. The older generation clung to dreams of going back, or politicians’ empty promises of compensation, but the younger ones saw there was no return. They knew it was up to them to fight for their future.

Diamantis and several of his comrades were sent to prison during Metaxas’ petty fascist regime for being communists (the law against “communists and subversives” had been in place since the ’20s). But I went on buying
Rizospastis
on the quiet – my parents would have been horrified. I was a youthful but committed convert, and when Diamantis was released he fed my faith with certainties. He showed me suffering that was so obviously wrong that it was impossible not to adopt his belief in an earthly, socialist paradise. Diamantis often took me out “for ice-cream” and we’d attend meetings with his union friends from the Papastratos cigarette factory where many of them worked. They were hardened by relentless work, strikes, arrests and imprisonment, and they laughed at my pretty dresses and teased me for my “bourgeois manners”. Still, they welcomed me to the basement off Piraeus Street where they met and made their leaflets on a rusting printing press. Diamantis wanted me to learn. He showed me his worn copy of
Das Kapital
and a small bust of Lenin, kept in his bedroom. And he sang with his guitar – romances from Asia Minor and stirring socialist anthems, including a few in Russian. It was from him that I learned the
Internationale
:

When he took me home, Diamantis often made ironic comments: “Run off now, back to Paradise.”

I knew better than to tell the family about what went on during my outings. Neither of my parents was interested in politics, though my mother, like many Asia Minor refugees, had been a keen supporter of Venizelos. She still viewed the old liberal statesman as the greatest hope Greece ever had. My father put his business first, preferring to stay on good terms with everyone (“They’re all the same, just looking to line their pockets like everyone else”). As for Alexandra, her alliances were with the adults and, as first-born, she took her responsibilities extremely seriously. She was determined to keep me and Markos under control and was as aloof and certain of her authority as an officer with his troops. If she found us younger ones up to no good, she would report us without hesitation. Once, Despina, our maid, found my stash of
Rizospastis
. But I swore her to secrecy. It helped that she knew I’d seen her kissing the baker’s son in the alleyway.

* * *

Johnny Fell. Strange that Mod wants to know about him. I wonder about that letter and about what happened to the rest of them. I look at my picture of Johnny – one of the few things that made the journey into exile. It sat for decades in one of Igor’s old school files that I used for my papers. The photograph is a shiny black and white one, with scalloped edges and “Ilissos, 1938” written in pencil on the back. He is tall and slim, with shirt sleeves rolled up. His hair is neatly parted. Behind him is a wall of massive stone and he is smiling at the photographer – me. I loved him. But then we all loved him. He was only about twenty when we met him in 1937, but to a thirteen-year-old he seemed quite old. My mother thought him the perfect English gentleman, like the ones she’d known in Smyrna. I think my father appreciated that Johnny was masculine without being competitive – he learned demotic Greek and drank retsina with the workmen at the archaeological digs. What started as a social friendship quickly became something more like family, and after my parents asked him to give us some English conversation lessons, he moved into the house for several months over the summer and again the next year.

Johnny brought out the best in all of us; we felt brighter under his gaze. We often had lessons outside, walking over to Hadrian’s Arch, or up to the top of Philopappos hill. We’d sit under a tree and listen to him talk. I liked the way he pronounced my name in the English way: “Antígony”, with the stress on the second syllable, as opposed to the Greek “Antigóny”, which emphasized the penultimate one. It made me special, to be someone else in English, unlike Alexandra, who was the same whichever language you said it in. Johnny got us to learn English poems by heart. I wanted to be the best, his favourite. I loved reciting Byron – “
Where’er we tread ’tis haunted, holy ground
.” I sensed the romance of Greece through Johnny’s eyes, the lure of a pure, ancient world. We learned quotes from Milton:

I still remember so much. When you’re young, it sticks. Johnny taught me the word “philhellene” and I felt lucky to be a Hellene, lucky to have been born in this special place. We Greeks were able to appreciate ourselves more because we saw our past reflected in foreigners’ admiring eyes. I believed that the English were philhellenes. That’s partly why it was so hard when they turned against us. In the end they wanted to dominate us like everyone else.

When Johnny returned the following year in 1938, I had changed. I was taller, my breasts had grown – I had become a young lady. And I was in love with him. I had absurd dreams that I would go to England, that I would marry him. Of course I was still a child. I knew nothing. But there was something that passed between us. Or so it seemed to me. I kept the memory close and secret. I called it by the code name “Ilissos”, after the day we sat by what remained of the ancient river.

It was early September, some days before Johnny was due to leave for England and I had not yet started school. I persuaded him to come on a picnic with me, knowing that Alexandra was visiting a friend and conveniently forgetting about Markos. Naturally, I would not have been allowed out with a boy on my own, but because Johnny counted as a teacher, somehow nobody noticed. It was the first time I had walked on the street with a man and I felt both proud and afraid. After all, at school there was even a special children’s supervisor, whose job it was to prevent the sexes mixing, tracking pupils if they went over to the park, checking their identities. This was one of the charming details of the petty fascist state that Metaxas was trying to impose on the country. Another was the weekly session of “national education” at the National Youth Organisation – personal hygiene and sanitising toilets. That’s what they thought was important. It was all uniforms, badges, documents with numbers. Even our black school pinafores had the school number on it, to help the snitches that backed up the regime.