The House on Paradise Street (17 page)

“You’re the only girl for me, Maud,” he half-joked, when yet another relationship was on the rocks. “It’s obvious,” he said. “I mean, what goes
miaow-miaow
on the roof tiles?” He liked that expression, perhaps because things were often clear to him. It’s something like asking “Is the Pope Catholic?”

Sometimes I talked to Nikitas about the possibility of moving into the first floor apartment in Paradise Street; it would have been very convenient for me to have family support with Tig. When I was working on a research project, I’d often drop Tig off with Alexandra and Chryssa, who doted on her until I picked her up some hours later. And after all, I argued, the place in Mets was his, unlike the rented house in Plaka, where the picturesque facade and charming courtyard could not disguise the cramped interior that was damp in the winter.

“Given all the battles you fought with your aunt after your grandmother died, it’s a pity not to be able to enjoy the place.”

“I won’t even consider it if Spiros is there,” he said. “The man is poison.”

In the end we didn’t have to wait long for things to change. It was a warm day in early September 1998, when Tig was four and Nikitas had been writing all night at his office. He showed up in the late morning, tired and unshaven, but triumphantly bearing several bags of vegetables and a large red fish.

“I got it at the market and want to cook it straight away while it’s fresh,” he announced. “I’ve already called Nikos, who is bringing a couple of friends. I’ll set up the barbecue.”

I had left Tig at Paradise Street earlier that morning and was finishing off some notes for an English academic, having waded through piles of documents relating to the policies of Eleftherios Venizelos. Wafts of burning charcoal and roasting fish made their way in the first-floor window as Nikitas got to work on vast quantities of food; there was always too much – even if he was cooking for two, he would fill a baking tray for ten.

“That’s the Greek way,” he’d say if I questioned it. I heard him singing snatches of dissident songs from his heyday, by Theodorakis or Savopoulos, then forgetting the words and humming to himself.

By the time I came down, Nikitas was in his element – at the centre of a small but enthusiastic group of people who didn’t have to be at work on a Tuesday afternoon: two journalists, one poet, a university lecturer and a young woman with waist-length hair who didn’t speak. Nikitas was engulfed in smoke and garlic fumes, making toasts, hugging new arrivals, and distributing pieces of a rare Cretan
graviéra
cheese and glasses of eye-watering
tsípouro
from the village. The big fish spluttered and spat on the grill.

I noticed Nikitas stumble before I felt the paving stones in the courtyard tremble. In the time it took for a jug to fall from the table and shatter, I felt regret that Nikitas must have drunk too much – again. But then there was a noise like an approaching army of stomping boots and our guests were quick to recognise what was happening.

“The gods are sending their greetings!” said Nikos, the poet, with bravado. But an unfamiliar subterranean roaring was soon accompanied by the disconcerting sound of roof tiles smashing onto the road and distant screams. Car alarms began wailing as we stood frozen. When the juddering stopped and it was obvious that we had not been swallowed up by the earth, the guests began calling their family and friends on mobiles (“Where are you? Yes, we’re fine”). A thin crack now snaked its way down the front of our house.

We quickly established that everyone at Paradise Street was unhurt and Nikitas went over to collect Tig. However, a couple of hours later we received a phone call from Chryssa. It seemed that Spiros was dead, though he had not yet been formally identified. At that stage, it was unclear what had happened. He had been out when the earthquake struck and seemed to have had a fall. To be fair to Nikitas, he showed nothing but concern for Aunt Alexandra following her husband’s death. But gradually, as the details emerged, he became obsessed by Spiros’ demise, intensely gratified by what he saw as its natural justice. He dined out on it for years.

“First we heard that Spiros had fallen down some steps,” Nikitas would say, grinning. “Then it turned out that he’d fallen from a window somewhere in Metaxourgeio (“Silkworks”) – not exactly a neighbourhood you’d expect his sort to frequent. ‘Business’ was what my aunt said, but I soon found out what sort of business when I went to the address and found a light bulb hanging outside the door. Apparently my uncle was a regular. I drank coffee with his favourite – a Bulgarian called Franka, with a
motherly
manner and enormous tits. They’d been together in a room on the first floor when the earthquake struck and the ceiling collapsed, along with a chandelier. It turned out that the plaster ceiling had been rotten, but Spiros thought the whole building was collapsing. So he rushed to the window and jumped.

“It vasn’t zo far down. I sought he’d be OK.” Nikitas provoked hysterical laughter with his increasingly outrageous imitations of Franka’s imperfect Greek, as she crossed herself, saying “God forgive him.” For Nikitas it was the perfect end, that someone as pompous and uptight as Spiros should breathe his last outside a brothel on an insalubrious street in Metaxourgeio, surrounded by a group of prostitutes in
dishabille
. To add the final touch, he impersonated the curious Chinese men from the cheap clothes shop next door, who lingered in groups on the pavement, observing their
neighbours
, making comments in their own language. It became Nikitas’ party piece – cruel, but sweet in its vengefulness.

After the earthquake, our place in Plaka needed extensive repairs and Nikitas gave notice to his tenants in Paradise Street. Within a month we had moved in. It suited me. There was more space, a roof terrace, the magical lemon tree and two willing babysitters on the floor below. It should have been a new beginning, but this was the point where I began to notice an increase in tension between Nikitas and me.

Dora woke me before dawn and for a moment I thought I was back in the mountains and jolted with a fright. But no, it was November 2008, my son was dead and Dora wanted me to go on a day-trip with a bunch of old has-beens.

“We go to Gorgopotamos every year for the commemoration,” she said the day before in reply to my grumbles. “It’s important to remember anniversaries – you keep the events alive. And there’ll be people you knew.” I didn’t want to see people I had known but, while Dora may be small, she doesn’t accept a “no” without a fight. She said, “It was only in the 1980s that they recognised the fact that we fought in the resistance. Now they’ve actually admitted we did something positive for our country, we can’t go letting them forget.
Eh
, Antigone?” So we drank a first coffee and took a bus through the quiet Sunday streets down to Omonia. It was chilly and we had our coats buttoned up and bags hung across our chests like school satchels. We didn’t speak much.

Neither Dora nor I had yet joined up in 1942 when the
andártes
helped the English blow up the Gorgopotamos train bridge, but it had marked a point for everyone in the war. The joy was indescribable. It was the first success in fighting back at the Germans and our youth groups organised various events to celebrate. We were shown the pictures of huge viaduct arches collapsed in the valley, and felt the intoxication of having stopped the Nazis in some way – that they were not unbeatable. Sixty-six years later, those who had fought the fascist occupiers were still celebrating, even Dora and her friends, who were not members of the Communist Party any more. Like many of my Greek comrades, they’d left the Party after 1956 and Khrushchev’s revelations, but they remained committed socialists, part of the Left until death.

A chilly November sunrise had lit up the city by the time we found the coach parked at Kotzia Square, apparently now re-named National Resistance.

White-haired comrades were murmuring in groups on the pavement, or hauling themselves slowly up the steps and into their seats. Several people came up to me.

“Welcome back, Antigone. It’s me, Dimitra Papakon-stantinou, from Volos. Do you remember?”

I didn’t.

“We listened to you on the radio all those years. You were our secret – ‘the voice of truth’. You kept us going.” So many secrets, so many truths.

“Condolences, Antigone. You never lacked courage.” What a shock to see beautiful Artemis as a heavy granny with wobbling jowls and dentures that clicked. She had been sent away from the mountains on account of her looks. We called her Beauty, but she never did anything to provoke. Of course that made her all the more attractive. They said she distracted the men just by being there. The ELAS ethics were very strict – a Spartan code, with relationships strictly forbidden. There was no place for romancing, let alone pregnancy. Normality was suspended.

Mod had said she might come and arrived with a teenage girl I realised must be my granddaughter. They both looked exhausted and I marvelled at this woman’s persistence. She said, “I thought you would both like to meet. After all, this is her history too.” The mother presented the child, who looked at me suspiciously, with large, black eyes, and kicked her shoe against the kerb. I say child, but I could see she already had a woman’s body. I didn’t know how to greet her and was saved by Dora, who rushed in saying, “Welcome to
Antigonaki
– you look just as your grandmother did.” It was true that she had the same unruly black hair I had, and her direct eyes were familiar. You could see that we were family. Dora kissed her and cooed and fussed as though the girl were her own granddaughter, which allowed me time to gather myself and do the right thing. I wanted to be like Dora but I am not. I’m out of practice with family matters. I said, “I am very, very pleased to meet you,” and gave her a kiss on each cheek, which didn’t feel enough. A piece of metal pierced her eyebrow – an unnerving contrast with her lovely face.

Just before the bus set off we took our places, with “the young ones” in front of me and Dora. I looked through the gap in the seats at their heads – young Antigone’s tangled lengths of black next to her mother’s reddish brown curls. I imagined how it would be to stroke it, but didn’t. Twice, my granddaughter turned to take a quick look at me, trying not to catch my eye. A tape of Greek and international revolutionary songs was playing too loudly through speakers. A large, laminated photograph of Aris had been stuck to the coach’s windscreen. He looked just as I remembered him, with his clever gaze and black beard. He was wearing a leather jerkin, a bandolier and a surprisingly ornamental sword. Aris Velouchiotis was tubby and shorter than many of the girls, and he was never very polite to us – in fact he was a bit of a misogynist. But he commanded respect and was strict with everyone in ELAS. Nobody doubted that the punishment for disobedience would be harsh. He was from my father’s parts and though he took the name Aris from the god of war, his surname honoured Velouchi, the snow-capped peak that dominates the landscape. He was like a prince of the mountains with his guard of
Mavroskoufides
[Black Caps]. The story was that their black sheepskin hats were taken from Vlach collaborators up in the north after Aris and his men destroyed them. Whatever his failings, Aris was the right man to lead us and, like an archbishop, he inspired us to take the oath and to hold no doubts.

Across the aisle, some comrades were complaining.

“Why is it that there are so many roads and squares around the country dedicated to other resistance leaders like Zervas, but not for Aris? We should have a Velouchiotis Street in every town.” And so on. Having seen all the recent changes of street names in Russia and the tumbled statues of Lenin and Stalin, I have seen how meaningless these cycles of history and memory can be.

After about an hour on the coach we stopped at a large service station and were told to be back at the bus in ten minutes, but my granddaughter disappeared. We all sat waiting while Mod ran around the place calling “Tig, Tig,” until she returned saying that her daughter had finally answered her mobile phone. The girl announced that she had walked over the Autogrill foot-bridge to the other side of the National Road, found a bus heading back to Athens, and was now on it. Mod looked shattered.

She told me and Dora that she’d been trying to keep her daughter away from her older brother, Orestes, and his friends. She said, “Orestes is getting her involved in things she is much too young for.” Apparently my grandson belongs to an anarchist group. Someone saw him taking Tig into the Polytechnic, which has become like a headquarters where they meet, and plan their fights with the police. They even make petrol bombs there. I watched Mod through the gap in the seats, weeping as the bus set off again towards the north. So much for any rapport with my namesake. It seems she was not so impressed by her long-lost grandmother.

The rest of the comrades were in a good mood and didn’t notice the small family drama. They shouted jokey comments across the aisles.

“The English Ambassador is going to be at the ceremony. He’ll give us all a gold sovereign!” How ironic that even though blowing up the Gorgopotamos bridge was the most successful of Anglo-Greek collaborations, we still feel betrayed by the English. Later we learned that Churchill had forbidden the BBC from even mentioning Aris and his
andártes
. So when they reported the triumph on the radio, nobody heard that we had been there, let alone that ELAS boys had been in the majority. We were useful to the English – they let us help them – but they were against us from early in the war. That sense of injustice never goes away. It is true what they say about the victors writing history, but those who win have the luxury of forgetting. It’s the losers who remember – those who experienced the humiliation of defeat.

* * *

The day-trip to Gorgopotamos shunted me back in time and the soothing grumble of the coach’s engine coaxed out memories. We sped along a large, new road, which I presume followed the same route I had taken sixty-five years earlier, when Markos and I went to the mountains. “To the mountains” – that was our dream, as it was for so many who dreamed of freedom. The landscape felt familiar, though as children we used to travel from Athens by train, rumbling slowly northwards to Lianokladi, on the plain outside Lamia. There was no road up to the village then, and one of my earliest memories was being in my mother’s arms as we rode up the winding track by mule. It was dark, and she had pointed into the distance.

“Can you see the lights up there? That’s Perivoli.”

When Markos and I went to those parts, in 1943, we had hidden in the back of a transport lorry driven by a friend of Uncle Diamantis. We couldn’t see anything as we were pressed in among a load of canvas rolls. Icy rain rattled like stones on the metal roof and I leaned against my brother. I remember noticing how wiry and strong he had become, even though he still looked young for his age. He put his arm around my shoulder and his hands were grimy from the floor of the truck. His breath smelled of lemon – we had brought one from our tree to suck against the travel sickness we both suffered from. We didn’t think about our mother. We had left her a note saying: “We have gone to do our duty as Greeks.” Markos said: “If I see a German I’ll kill him.” He showed me his knife in its leather sheath. We were both fuelled by youth and hatred of the enemy that was destroying our country.

There was a German checkpoint at Thermopylae, where the mountain cuts down steeply to the road and where Ephialtes betrayed his fellow Greeks to the Persians. Interesting that his treachery should be memorialised by using his name as the word for nightmare Is there a perverse pleasure in remembering our traitors? Why else should we burn effigies of Judas each year before Easter? Fortunately for us, the weather was abysmal (it was raining chair legs, as the driver commented), and there was not a thorough search, so the truck was soon on its way again. After a few kilometres, the driver turned off the road onto a track that ran through trees. He stopped and came round to the back. He said, “Kids, this is where you get out. You can make your way to Perivoli – it shouldn’t be more than a few hours. Keep in among the trees. This is your area, you must know the way.”

Markos did know and he led me like an agile goat, passing the sulphurous thermal springs and up into the oaks and firs that cover these slopes. We both loved this area, where Mount Iti looms dark indigo and the Sperchios valley opens out green and fertile down to the sea. Markos had walked and bicycled all over it. Already, he had changed on this journey from a boy who follows his older sister, to a young man of almost eighteen who leads her. Sometimes he waited, playing the gallant, holding out his hand to help me up a difficult slope, or pressing back the branches of a tree so I could pass. We don’t always change gradually in life; sometimes it happens all at once, like a chrysalis opening or an egg hatching. Markos’
metamorphosis
was like that.

As you travel away from the sea in Greece, you enter a more solid, darker, rougher landscape, peopled by quieter, more serious characters. Our father used to tell us that we should be proud to be
Roumeliotes
, from Roumeli – central Greece. We were children of the mountains, who meant what they said, who had their feet on the ground, but were always independent. The contrast was with the instability of the sea and its influence; frivolous, dancing islanders who were as unreliable as their weather, or the Asia Minor Greeks with their cosmopolitan ways (“except your mother, of course”). My father instilled in us a love of this forested terrain, so we felt we belonged there, “in the mountains”, even though we lived in Athens. He used to say, “This earth is made up of the bones of our ancestors and we have this earth in our bones.” Over the years, Father had given back to his small village, paying for the restructuring of the main square, and helping many of its families with financial and other problems. Whenever he returned to Perivoli he was feted as “one of ours”, and though he was dressed in fashionable suits and town shoes, he was as comfortable sitting in the coffee shop with the shepherds and
smallholders
as though he had never left their ranks.

By the time Markos and I arrived at Perivoli we were wet through, but happy to be in our beloved village. I always liked its winter scent of wood smoke, distant snow and sheep shit and the last chrysanthemums wilting in gardens. We had been instructed not to go to our house, but to the next-door building, where the Kallos family lived. Christos Kallos took care of our property and tended the vegetables and fruit trees. The tallest man in the village, with a slow, booming voice and clear grey eyes, he welcomed us into the house, calling for his wife,
Kyria
Lukia, who was much smaller but equally forceful a character. “Give the guest food and a bed, and then ask who he is” was their policy and in any case, we were welcomed like family.
Kyria
Lukia took us to the fireplace and told us to undress, giving us blankets to wrap up in. Chryssa, their golden-haired daughter, who had her father’s eyes and her mother’s stature, brought us mountain tea. A little younger than Markos, she had played with us every summer when we were children, but she had turned into a woman since our last visit. I could tell that Markos was awed by the mysterious transformation, taking her in with quick glances. Chryssa’s two older brothers, Panayiotis and Theodoros, were the village’s most handsome bachelors, known for their dancing. They had fought up in Albania, walked all the way back and were now signed up with ELAS. They said, “There are lots of girls now. Soon everyone will have joined.”

Kyria
Lukia dried our clothes and cooked
bobóta
in the outdoor oven. After the meagre city rations, the cornmeal baked with goat’s cheese and the wild greens in olive oil were the most delicious tastes. There was no bread as all the wheat had been taken by the Germans and the villagers had to make do with a sludge of acorns and potatoes. Afterwards, we cracked walnuts by the fire. I slept for a few hours in Chryssa’s bed before being woken by her brothers, whispering that we must leave. Panayiotis and Theodoros walked Markos and me all the way up to Karpenisi. We travelled only after nightfall, stopping at Palaiovracha and several safe villages along the way. It was a difficult journey, walking through wet woods and along goat tracks obscured by snow, avoiding dogs and people. We tried not to slip or trip in the darkness. Even the crackle of fallen oak leaves was a possible danger. In this region where Aris was loved, there were still those who would hand you over to the Germans. It was the same when people had betrayed the old klepht bands to the Turks – the
andártes
used some of their old hiding places, as well as a few of their techniques. By day, we hid – once in a shepherd’s hut and once making a shelter from branches in a wood.