The House on Paradise Street (14 page)

“We need educated people like you.” It sounded like more than just a suggestion. When I told Uncle Diamantis about Johnny and the safe-houses he was dismissive.

“They say they’re our allies, but the English are playing their own games. They use us, but they don’t like us. Aris is right when he says they are spies and agents. Now they’re giving money and arms to smaller resistance groups that are against us. Leave your English spy and come with your own people.”

Uncle Diamantis knew nothing of my affections for Johnny, but he saw the disappointment on my face.

“What about the sabotage?” I asked. We had all been encouraged by the destruction of the Gorgopotamos bridge the previous year, when ELAS and other partisans had joined the English. “I thought we were fighting the fascists together.”

“Of course Gorgopotamos was a triumph! But the English wouldn’t have managed anything without Aris and without our help. We cut off the German connection for weeks, so Rommel couldn’t get his supplies in the Egyptian desert. Listen to me, Antigone – the English are not to be trusted. They are not here to help us. They want to be ready to dominate us when the time comes. It’s the old imperialist method of divide and rule – they encourage us to kill each other so they can stay on top.”

Before I left the cellar, I helped my uncle print some leaflets on the old press, which was still functioning after all these years. There was a picture of Aris with a couple of his black-capped men. He sat proud and rotund on a horse, his big beard like a youthful version of Father Christmas, a face both kind and ambitious. He looked avuncular and trustworthy. I could fight for him, I thought.

When I got home, I heard Alexandra’s voice from the back yard. I paused at the kitchen door, realising she was arguing with Markos.

“You follow her around like a dog, believing she must be right, but she’s wrong. Go back to your studies – ignore the propaganda.”

“So you’d prefer I was a fascist collaborator like your boyfriend?” I had never heard Markos angry like that. He was always the one who eschewed conflict; the easy-going baby of the family, whose smile was “a blessing” (as our grandmother said).

“Spiros is trying to help his country. He’s a patriot who wants freedom for Greece. He just doesn’t want it on Stalin’s terms.” Alexandra had put on a coaxing voice. “That doesn’t make him bad. Can’t you see you’re taking the wrong decision? Father would have told you that – Greeks aren’t cut out to be Bolsheviks.”

I waited, expecting that Markos would find a compromise and appease his older sister, but he sounded furious.

“Take his shitty soap back. I’d rather be dirty than use it.” I heard a door bang and then I came into the kitchen – a place no longer filled with tempting smells, but cold and empty. Alexandra was standing rigid, glaring at a bar of soap that lay on the bare wooden table. Without looking at me, she said, “Spiros sent that for you. He said it might help wash away some of your communist filth.”

I found Markos in his room, his face feverish with fury. When I told him about Uncle Diamantis, he wanted to leave for the mountains that very day, something that was impossible as we had to wait for instructions. Markos explained what had happened with our older sister, who had suggested that he follow Spiros’ example and join the so-called Security Battalions. That way, he could don the traditional and prestigious Evzone uniform and become a puppet for Hitler.
Yermanotsoliades
[German Evzones] we called them. Their job was to betray their own people, to track down the resistance and hand them over to their fascist masters; the lowest, most repellent form of collaboration. Like the partisans in ELAS, they also swore an oath, though it was somewhat different:

Later that evening we heard banging on the front door. When my mother opened it, Spiros came pushing his way in, panting and clearly terrified.

“Quickly, I need to hide. They’re going to kill me.” We could hear noises in the street – boots hammering, excited male voices. My mother spoke calmly, like a doctor taking charge at an accident.

“Antigone, take Spiros up to the store room on the terrace. And stay there. Nobody should know that you are here either.” Spiros was already running up the stairs and I followed him up two flights until we reached the roof terrace. As I unlocked the metal door I heard more knocking at the front of the house. I removed the key and locked it quietly from the other side. We both ran across to the store room and pulled the door shut. Spiros flinched as it creaked.

We sat on two rusting metal chairs, getting back our breath. I had not seen Spiros for a while and he had changed. His skinny adolescent limbs had thickened and he had grown a moustache, clipped and sooty black. I noticed his smell – sweat mixed with a pungent cologne. It reminded me of the nutmeg Aspasia used to grate into the sauce for
pastítsio
. His eyes were wide open and fearful. He was very proud of those blue eyes.

“Who’s chasing you?” I was almost sure what the answer would be.

“It’s those arsehole communists,” Spiros hissed, leaning in too close. “We know who they are and they won’t last long. If you do the right thing, Antigone, I’ll make sure you’re OK. We know about Diamantis. You’re on the wrong side.” He stopped and listened, still as a frightened hare in the hills near Perivoli.

We remained in the dark store room some time, until Alexandra knocked gently on the door and whispered Spiros’ name. She had been out when the incident occurred and now stretched out her arms towards him like a cinema diva. She said, “My Spiros. They were kicking at our door. Luckily Mother calmed them down. You must be careful. They are animals, these communists.”

Sometimes I feared that this digging around would not help anything. I thought about how Antigone had sat in the café, smoking avidly, watching me with beady eyes, apparently worrying about what I was trying to unearth. Nikitas used to say that, like Orpheus, you look back at your peril. The old or dead objects of your desire will not come back – Eurydice was never really going to make it out of Hades, even if Orpheus’ curiosity had not made him turn around to check whether his beloved wife was following him back to the land of light and life and music. There is a danger in chasing after the past; you neglect the present and the future is no longer interesting. Like Eurydice, who was bitten by a snake on the banks of a river, Nikitas’ death had come suddenly and shockingly, but perhaps the living should not look too much towards the land of the dead.

After our first meeting in Paradise Street, over four years passed before I saw Nikitas again. By 1993 I was in my late twenties, living in London, and my fieldwork on Thasos was long behind me. The constipated pages of my thesis were filed away in the bowels of the university library and my contact with Alexandra was limited to the occasional card. I had taken on a junior fellowship at University College and was living an existence that was not unhappy. I only occasionally saw my parents, who had divorced, and were living in neighbouring streets in Twickenham (each having married colleagues from their early music milieu). My grandfather, Desmond, had recently died of pancreatic cancer, a couple of years after Lucy’s death from a stroke. I watched him wither and shrink till he was a light husk, barely inhabited.

“The mares are taking my chariot away,” he whispered from his hospital pillow the afternoon before he died. “And the maidens are leading the way.” Over the next hours, he went so slowly that it was hard to tell the point at which he was not there.

I ran into Nikitas at a symposium on the fate of the Elgin Marbles, or what we now called the Parthenon Marbles – after all, how could you name these precious sculptures after a syphilitic Lord who had stolen them, sawed them off the temple walls, sunk them in a boat, hauled them up from the depths, stored them in his Scottish mansion and then sold them to the British Museum? There was a noisy delegation from Greece that included the Minister of Culture and a group of tight-lipped British government and museum spokesmen. Impassioned speeches from the Greek side claimed the Marbles were their rightful inheritance and they would make Greece complete in a way that nothing else could. The British speakers were cautious and weasel-worded, hinting at Greek irresponsibility and mentioning pollution in Athens, world heritage and how all museum collections would be doomed if the Marbles went home. Among the audience were many British supporters like me, calling for the restitution of the treasures. We basked in the warm light of certainty, up on the moral high ground, able to discuss how the famous frieze was sawn off by aristocratic vandals, why the
firman
that was issued to Elgin in Constantinople was not valid, and why the Greeks deserve a national symbol that has not been desecrated and plundered.

I spotted Nikitas at the reception that followed and, like the first time I saw him in Paradise Street, my initial reaction was apprehension – only this time I recognised it more quickly as the fear of attraction. He was drinking red wine and appeared to be telling a story to some people at the other end of the hall; they were all laughing as he waved his hands. His face was tanned, his white shirt crumpled and he had a restless expression. I made for the door and walked out of the building into needles of November rain. I had spotted my bus coming along the street, when I heard him say my name. I turned, greeting him with fake surprise, answering in rusty Greek. He kissed my cheeks and held onto my shoulders, looking at me as though I were a young child who had grown taller since last time. I noted that he looked older, his hair more streaked with grey and his face heavier. But his evident pleasure was disarming and I found myself struggling unsuccessfully to keep my distance.

“Let’s get away from here.” There did not seem to be any question that we were leaving together. “I need to escape from the organised dinner.” Nikitas explained that he had come over from Athens with the Minister and his entourage, to cover this conference for his newspaper.

“Let the wankers get on with the banquet without me.” He was already bored with this latest campaign to retake Greece’s missing national treasure.

“Who gives a shit about those old rocks locked up in the British Museum?” he smiled, pleased at his own subversion. “The English approach is to tell us to ‘stop making a fuss’. They say we’re ‘crying over spilt milk’. I love their expressions. But making a fuss is what we are best at. Don’t think that the Greeks who visit London care about seeing the sculptures – they are far more interested in going to Selfridges. And imagine if we did ever take them back, what would we have to complain about then? It would be like Cavafy’s poem about the barbarians: what would we do if the problem disappeared? We need the barbarians.”

Later I realised that Nikitas was provoking me and that he could argue the Greek case with equally passionate eloquence, but at the time I took him seriously enough to launch into arguments about the sculptures needing to be seen under Greek light, about the central symbolism of the Parthenon with its missing pieces, and the unjustness of the whole story. Nikitas laughed even more.

“They should get you to fill in for poor old Melina Mercouri,” he said. “You could take over from our ageing goddess of cinema and politics and fire us up with rhetoric.”

We walked through the rain to a small Japanese restaurant, where we ate sushi and drank sake. Nikitas assumed an intimacy with me, speaking as though he knew me, recounting the latest news from Paradise Street.

“It’s as you left it. Everyone a little older. You’ll see when you come.” He said it as though he was sure I would and I could not think of the right response. “Aunt Alexandra is still the perfect lady, though she can’t quite manage it with me. I’m still the fly in the milk for her and Spiros. I have always spoiled their tidy life. Spiros hates me as much as ever and when I see him I feel the rage of a small boy who can’t stand up to a bully.”

“Surely he doesn’t bully you now?”

“Of course not. He may even be afraid of me. But whenever I see him it’s as though I lose my strength, as though I become a child again. I feel the same pain in my stomach that I felt when he came to my room when I was young.” I asked Nikitas to tell me what happened, but he was reticent.

“Spiros was careful not to go too far, not to leave bruises – it was more what he said. He enjoyed the power of provoking fear. Once, he caught a large fly in my room and pulled its wings off. Then he placed it on my desk, on top of my open grammar book and gripped my wrist till it hurt. He said, ‘Watch out, my boy, and you’ll be fine. You don’t want to lose your wings, do you?’ After that I had visions of myself growing wings, of flying and falling, of Spiros with a knife. It was a twisted sort of sadism.”

Nikitas swigged his sake with enthusiasm, ordered another bottle and changed the subject. He was travelling a great deal, he said, writing pieces for his newspaper, and had made a couple of documentaries for television. Yiorgia had asked for a divorce – something he’d been expecting. He showed me a photograph of his young son, Orestes. I told him about the university, and mentioned Austin, attempting to give my boyfriend’s presence in my life more weight than it had. I mentioned his job at an advertising agency, his science fiction film-script and his family home in New York. I didn’t mention the evenings of ready-made meals or sex as impersonally athletic as Austin’s daily work-outs at the gym. In any case, Nikitas didn’t look very impressed. His smell was familiar, and now mixed with the steam from our drenched coats and damp hair.

I agreed to meet Nikitas the next day. We walked by the grey Thames and took refuge from the cold in a pub where we drank Guinness and had lunch. He drank much more than me and became voluble, speaking a tone louder than usual. Later, I realised he was proud of being “a strong glass” – a drinker who could hold his alcohol. That day was the first time I noticed his need for an audience and how he took the time to tell a joke to a group of men at the bar while he ordered more drinks. They roared with laughter and he returned looking satisfied, as though these London men were proof of the excitement and pleasure he provoked wherever he went. I realised it was a performance, but at that stage I thought it was for me. In the afternoon we visited the British Museum, almost as a joke, walking through the echoing halls to inspect “our looted past”, as Nikitas put it. His cynicism peeled away as we stood before the
extraordinary
sculptures; furious centaurs, draped goddesses and naked warriors fighting to the death.

Over the next days, Nikitas’ persistence was steady, as though he had made up his mind that he would be with me and it was just a matter of waiting for me to realise it. My resistance had the frailty of a besieged city whose walls are being breached on every side. I lied to Austin the evening I invited Nikitas to my flat, saying I had to work, and Nikitas arrived like an old-fashioned admirer with flowers and wine (he had managed to find some heavy, red Nemea – “what Hercules would have drunk before he strangled the lion”). We talked until dawn and, when we did end up in bed, it was as inevitable as if there had never been any choice or question. While the light of the London morning slunk its way in through the window, I lay in the crook of his arm as he slept. My cheek rested against his chest, where a solid bass drum thudded reassuringly, like something eternal.

Nikitas took this night to be the sealing of a pact.

“Come back to Athens. Come and live with me.” Later, he said it had been very clear to him. He enjoyed how my calm exterior masked the complexities below, my earnestness about establishing the truth, and how I didn’t know I was beautiful (I didn’t). I thought he might be mocking me when he said that with me it was like making love for the first time. As to my own feelings, I would not admit to myself how much I wanted him; I could not imagine that we had a future. At forty-seven he was “old”, he lived at the other end of Europe, and he dragged around the legacies of former marriages, disappeared parents, and any number of family feuds.

A few weeks later I went out to Athens for the Christmas holidays. We stayed at the small house Nikitas rented in Plaka. I knew my grandfather would have told me to “watch the horses” at this point. Once, when I was telling my grandmother about the charms of a teenage boyfriend, my grandfather butted in, “If you get on like a house on fire, it’ll probably burn down and all that’s left is ash. Mind how you go, Maud.” Nikitas gave himself over to making sure I would find it hard to leave or at least that I would soon be back, making his country my suitor as much as he was himself. And he succeeded; while I had felt affection for Greece when I had lived there as a student, this time it became the only place I wanted to be. My grandfather’s pessimistic warnings were irrelevant – a damp, English blanket of gloom, to be shrugged off in favour of bright Mediterranean skies. We drove to the sea and lay in the wintry sunshine on a beach made of tiny pebbles, then went to a shack where they served small pink cockles called ‘shinies’ – which we ate raw, followed by fried red mullet and retsina that tasted of summer pine trees. We visited a
Rembetika
club in Piraeus, where the young musicians sat in a row on the stage, singing songs from the 1930s and ’40s. They told of prisons, oppression and painful addiction to love and drugs, as though they had lived those lives themselves.

Nikitas became like a teacher, determined to inspire me and make me love his subject. I saw the pleasure he took at his success.

“It’s as though I’m seeing things from a new perspective – from your eyes. It makes everything fresh and new,” he said. We went up to the hills that hem Athens in on three sides, and from where you understand that the city seethes and boils in a cauldron, bubbling up the mountain slopes and spilling down to the sea.

“You think the buildings are white, but when you see them from here they’re creamy, like piles of old bones,” he said. On Penteli, we picked up pieces of its famous marble and on Hymettus, we gathered wild greens as the old women do, using a kitchen knife and a plastic bag. Afterwards, we sat among the trees near Kaisariani Monastery, on slopes where the best honey in Greece was produced for millennia, and watched the sun go down over the Saronic Gulf.

“This is the most perfect light in the world,” said Nikitas. “There is something about Attica that produces all the right ingredients for the light to create beauty. It is the catalyst that transforms whatever it touches.” We looked across at the gilded mountains and the wide expanse of gleaming sea.

“You can see why people needed to create the concept of the divine in these circumstances – even humans can seem like gods in this light. And the best thing is that it cannot be spoiled, however hard we Greeks try.” Whether it was the luminosity or not, we both felt like gods, at one remove from the rest of humanity, obsessed with one another so that everything else appeared mundane.

I had not thought that I would be the sort of woman to give up her job and home to go and live with a much older, twice-divorced man in another country. My life had not been characterised by recklessness. Nevertheless, that is what I did. I gave my notice to the university, agreed to finish the academic year, and ended things with Austin. He was what my grandfather would have called “a good sport” about it and kept in touch, asking my advice about his subsequent girlfriends and later on, sending me email jokes.

When I returned to Greece for Easter, Athens was being ravaged by an amorous spring – like a plain bride made beautiful with flowers and veils. Drifts of camomile sprang up on waste ground, producing visible clouds of scent. The bitter-orange trees lining the pavements exploded with outrageously perfumed blossoms, and house-martins and swallows returned to their nests among the city’s human inhabitants. Nikitas took me to see his village, in central Greece: Perivoli, the place he associated with the greatest happiness of his childhood. His grandmother, Maria, used to take him there for the summer holidays and she rebuilt the family house after the war. She told her grandson she had always loved the place because it reminded her of where her family summered in the hills near Smyrna – both places had mulberries, plane trees and mountain breezes that cooled you even in August. For Nikitas, the rural pleasures of his youth were amplified because they were enjoyed without Alexandra and Spiros.