The House on Paradise Street (19 page)

“And the beautiful sister, the warrior Antigone.” By the time we went in again, most of the men had lain down and there was already some of the snoring and grunting that continued through the night. I lay back-to-back with Storm – it was the usual way of keeping warm – and Markos did the same with Johnny, whose eyes I spotted wide open and thoughtful in the darkness. It was a strange night, where my happiness at finding myself with the man I had longed for was countered by misgivings about what he had told us. As though to bring me down to earth, we all became infested with fleas, and by morning I was covered with small, intensely itchy bumps.

My memories return like snapshots – isolated scenes, though the faces are often missing. I can’t properly remember what my brother looked like. I know he smiled a lot, but I can’t picture his features. Two days later, Markos left with most of the men to set up the ambush and Johnny made his own way – he didn’t say where he was heading. Storm and I stayed in the cave with a wounded man who couldn’t walk. We tried to make ourselves useful; we darned socks, cooked bean soup and tidied the branches into bed-shaped piles. There was nothing else to do except pick fleas from our clothes and throw them to crackle in the fire. I felt bereft.

After the ambush, in which four Germans were killed and several vehicles destroyed, Storm and I were due to meet our platoon in Perivoli. My father’s birthplace was part of the cultural programme that had been set in motion, with a view to improving the deprivations of village life. We had staged theatre performances there and the villagers’ people’s court had been very successful. It was a still, hazy dusk when we approached Perivoli and even before we saw anything we smelled the stink. However, we didn’t notice the last plumes of smoke that were still twisting up skywards until we were close enough to see the horror. The whole village had been destroyed. The houses were blackened ruins with collapsed roofs. The streets were covered in ash. An old woman came up to us moaning in shock, her face filthy with soot.

“The Germans came just after dawn.” She said she had been on the hill with her sheep. She watched it all. She could do nothing.

“First they took the men and shot them. Afterwards they put whoever they found inside the school.” We trudged with her through the charred rubble to the main square. A few bodies lay in the street, but there was a sinister silence – the pile of smoking stones and timbers which had been a school was filled with dead villagers. The murder location became a funeral pyre. Easy revenge for the ambush the day before.

I felt utterly helpless in the face of the atrocity. Even Storm appeared paralysed, and she had developed a thick skin from witnessing death in many forms. We sat on a wall and smoked in silence. Then Storm shook herself into movement and addressed me formally as though she was giving orders to dismantle camp.

“
Kapetanissa
Victory, we will search for survivors. After that, we’ll gather up the dead and wait for the rest of our platoon.” We didn’t find anyone alive apart from the old woman. Those who had escaped were up in the hills. Some returned the next day and moved about like ghosts, unable even to grieve properly. The tragedy was too great.

Storm and I allocated an area near the destroyed school for laying out the bodies and we carried the murdered villagers there. My nostrils filled with ash and the awful stench of scorched flesh. Many of the blackened corpses were people I had known since childhood, though I was unable to identify most of them. The only thing that made it possible for me to carry out the job without breaking down was the hatred I felt against those who had perpetrated the atrocity. It brought an element of coldness to my panic. In one house we found a mother with four children, all of whom had been shot, except the baby, whose head was smashed against the wall. His brains were spilt on the floor. His woollen booties had come off and I put them back on his feet and swaddled him in a rug. That is something you can never forget. Or forgive.

My clothes and hair became impregnated with the stink of smoke and burnt bodies and I couldn’t get rid of it for weeks. After some days, I washed my hair, but our thick woollen uniforms were too heavy to wash and dry in the cold winter weather, during constant changes of camp. Every time I lay down to sleep I felt nauseous from the lingering smell of people burnt to death.

Our platoon arrived with some of the men from the cave, including Father Rifle. Storm took charge of our girls, forbidding them to give in to their emotions.

“You are fighters,” she shouted. “Now let’s get on with it.” So we spent our time burying the people of Perivoli. We carried them to the cemetery and dug graves, though the bodies from the school were in such a bad state we placed them in one pit. The roots from a row of cypresses made it hard to extract the earth, but they stood by like dark guards of mourning. Father Rifle performed brief funerary rites – nobody had the heart for more. The subdued ceremonies were nothing like the funerals for
andártes
, where we had sung the
Internationale
, wrapped the body in a Greek flag and fired a gun in the air.

During the quiet after the warrior-priest’s chanting, I heard a noise coming from inside the ossuary – a moaning like an animal in pain. I opened the wooden door and saw someone curled up on the floor. She was emitting awful sounds. I thought it was an old woman – her hair was grey and matted and she was filthy. But then I saw it was Chryssa. Her fair hair was covered with soot. Initially I imagined she was wounded, but we found no injury. The damage was emotional. She was unable to speak or fully understand what we were saying, but we discovered later that her entire family had been killed. Her brothers, Panayiotis and Theodoros, had been taken off with their father and shot. Her mother had been burnt alive in the school with the others. We never found out exactly how Chryssa had escaped – her family’s house was now little more than four blackened walls. Some of the girls made her mountain tea and wrapped her in blankets, and while we buried the dead, golden-haired Chryssa lay in the ossuary among piles of boxes filled with the bones of her forebears.

The following day Markos arrived with more men. He was so shocked he could not speak. I saw him leaning against the gaping mouth that had been Chryssa’s front door, trying not to let anyone see that he had vomited. Before we left Perivoli, Markos made me promise that one day we would rebuild our house there and that wherever he died, he should be buried in the village or at least end up in the ossuary. I would break both promises. Perivoli became one more name on the list of places that were annihilated – the hundreds of villages torched and ransacked, their ruins inhabited by grieving, black-ragged survivors.

“Am I allowed to go now?” Tig spoke like a rebel mocking a tin-pot dictator. She looked the part too, having cut off her long hair the day she ran away from the Gorgopotamos trip. I presumed this act was to mark something as, after all, the choices were many: rebellion, teenage provocation, not to mention the hackneyed “stage of grief” devoted to anger. She looked younger, the roughly hacked locks giving her the painfully vulnerable look of a prisoner or a mental patient.

“I was so worried. You should have told me you were going back to Athens before you just walked off.” She looked at me without pity.

“As if you’d have let me.” She scraped the kitchen table with her fingernail.

I had expected the expedition to Gorgopotamos to be a way of introducing Tig to her grandmother, while conveniently keeping her apart from Orestes and his anarchist cronies for at least a day. But it had turned into a debacle. I heard my voice rise as I asked her again what she was doing when she went out with Orestes and his friends. The tone of Tig’s reply was a lugubrious contralto.

“Nothing. We just talk.” She looked away, as though preoccupied with more important thoughts, and when I told her she was grounded for a week with no leaving the house except for school, she barely reacted.

“You can lock someone up but you can’t change their beliefs.” It sounded like a quote from her father.

During the week of Tig’s punishment she avoided me. I recalled the same feelings of rejection when she had been about nine and she stopped speaking English. Sometime later she had reverted, saying it embarrassed her to hear me talking in Greek. Her refusal to speak her mother tongue seemed to be a way of allying herself to her father – in effect, he was her
patrída
, her fatherland.

“I hate English, it’s stupid,” she had said, as though seeking her father’s approval in a conspiracy against the outsider. Someone suggested it was an Oedipal phase that would pass.

“Electra complex,” Nikitas corrected.

“Female Oedipal complex?” suggested a friend with years of psychoanalysis to draw on. I knew consciously that it was only a stage, but Tig’s youthful dismissal of me through my language upset me. I was alienated from my own child. I wept when I could not be seen – in the shower, hot tears of frustration washed away by the jets of water. It came with a realisation that there would always be things I could not understand in Greece – that I was doomed to remain at the margins.

It only gradually dawned on me that my marginality and my lack of interest in politics was a significant lacuna in my character for my husband. After all, I was assimilated in numerous ways and Nikitas had wanted me to come to Greece and live with him when I was far more ignorant of his world. Had my innocence worn thin, I wondered. I had always been aware that like most of his fellow Greeks, Nikitas assessed someone on the basis of what he sensed or knew their politics to be. He was far from unusual in stating that he could not imagine liking, let alone being friends with someone who was right-wing. I knew theoretically that in Greece everyone cares about politics in a way that you don’t have to in England – all Greeks have a political position, probably that of their family, which determines the students’ groups they join, the newspaper they read, the coffee shop or taverna they patronise and whose company they keep. I assumed that, as a foreigner, I was exempt from this framework, though my declaration to new acquaintances that I was “apolitical” drew a blank. There was so much that was good in our marriage that for a long time it had not been obvious to me how hard it was to be a part of Nikitas’ life and not be part of this game.

I understood that the Civil War had left Greece wrenched apart, so that allegiance to one side or the other was still often based on wounds inflicted almost a lifetime before. However, it was impossible for me to feel that pain. I sometimes wondered why Nikitas had chosen a wife who cared so little about things he believed to be crucial. I would never experience what it meant to be born into such a small, powerless population that had suffered so much but whose members knew they belonged right at the centre of the universe. It took me a long time to realise that it also helped him that I was an outsider, that I did not belong and therefore did not have to become part of the mess. Nikitas’ own conversion from the highly conservative milieu in which Alexandra and Spiros had brought him up was like a religious rebirth. It had gone along with the discovery of what had happened to his mother – she was the martyr at the heart of the story. And simultaneously, it was the most effective rejection of his adoptive parents he could have made.

By the time Tig was nine she was already imbued with a sense of political values I would never have. It had come as naturally as the ability to cross herself when she passed a church – a habit instilled by Alexandra and Chryssa when she was two and that had shocked me when I had first witnessed her pudgy, pink hand make the movements from her pushchair; she had only dropped the habit in recent years. But Tig’s reaction against me went further than customs. I wondered whether she had overheard Nikitas’ increasingly frequent and negative comments about the English, ostensibly due to the research for his documentary series. He had even included a section about British anthropologists who travelled “in the footsteps of their colonial forebears”. These “so-called scholars” objectified and patronised the Greeks as they did the Africans or the Papuans of New Guinea.

“Greece was hardly a British colony,” I retorted. But that seemed to be beside the point. I still smarted from what I had taken as a lightly veiled insult to my own well-intentioned research on Thasos. I might not have inherited the suffering of generations as Nikitas (and presumably Orestes and Tig) had merely by being Greek. But I was far from immune to feeling wounded by my husband’s slights. I remembered his words exactly.

“These anthropologists generally avoid the complexities and contradictions of Greece’s more sophisticated urban populations. They focus instead on remote rural communities, which conform more easily to ready-made clichés of simplicity and tradition.”

During the week after Tig cut off her hair, I noticed that she was sneaking out with Orestes, but I didn’t even try to question her. Several times, she returned late in the evening, pretending she had been up in his room on the terrace, though her breezy manner and cool cheeks indicated otherwise. I began to realise that it was not only my daughter who appeared to be avoiding me. Orestes rarely came into the apartment and didn’t pause to wave any more from outside the kitchen window when he bounded down the external spiral stairs, or come in with a lemon blossom he had picked on the way up. Even Antigone announced that for the next days she was going to stay in at Dora’s house and write. I started to think that maybe she knew I had not told her the truth about the packet of Johnny’s letters. I wasn’t even sure why I had lied and said I only saw one. One evening, overwhelmed by loneliness, I decided to go and see if Orestes was in his studio. Pausing at the top of the metal staircase, where it joins the terrace, I took in the ambient sounds – two dogs barking, the Lambakis’ television blaring bouzouki songs from next door and some teenage boys I could see smoking and muttering in the back alley. Approaching Orestes’ studio, I stopped again, making out the unmistakable noise of people making love – a rhythmic beat of hushed voices and the bed or something hard tapping softly against a wall. I stayed a few seconds more than I would have done if someone had been watching me, wondering who was in there with my stepson, then crept down the metal stairs, trying not to make them creak too much.

Later, as I prepared to go to bed, I saw the shadow of an unknown woman letting herself out of the back gate into the alley. It brought on a wave of envy and grief that, at forty-two, I was no longer young, that I was left on my own, that I had nobody to hold me. I pictured the frightful image of Nikitas’ body that I knew so well, disintegrating in the earth. My awareness that Phivos might be waiting, choosing his moment to move in, like the inevitable hero of a story, only made me feel worse. I thought again about the point, some years ago, when something might have developed between us. I had been miserable, suspecting that Nikitas was involved with someone else. Instead of confronting my husband, I had turned to my old friend and, one evening, Phivos and I had gone out to dinner and drunk too much. I was tempted. And in different ways, we both said things we regretted. It was hard to forget some of his phrases: Nikitas was “a fake, who used the superficial charms of a Zorba to pull the girls,” Phivos had said. I’d be better off with someone my own age. I can’t remember if he said: “someone like me,” but the implication was obvious. Although I was still close to Phivos, I could not get involved in the way he wanted. It was too late.

“It must have been very hard for you, losing Spiros,” I said the next morning when I encountered Aunt Alexandra collecting her mail from the post box outside the front door. “Did you feel lonely?” I didn’t say that I had not slept all night, pierced by the sharpest, most overwhelming loneliness I had ever experienced.

“My girl, the only thing left for me is prayer,” she said. I had noticed her frequent visits to church and the meetings with Father Apostolos. “We all suffer, but I know God is looking after me. I’ve always known that he will protect me. Faith is what matters in the end. Faith and love, and I have plenty of both.” She didn’t add, “Unlike some people,” but it was there in her tone. The return of the prodigal sister had been a huge shock to her habitual confidence.

Even Chryssa seemed to have lost her usual equanimity and moved about in a daze.

“Nikitas was like a son to me,” she repeated, wiping her eyes with the back of her arthritic hands. “Who’d have thought it? God forgive him. And now Antigone back home. It’s true what they say: ‘Another person’s soul is an abyss’; you can never see down to the depths.”

After a decade living at Paradise Street, I had become accustomed to the bustle and intimacy of our irregular extended family. We may not have been a “normal” Greek family, but we had many of their normal characteristics. These included living with relations in close proximity; countless Athenian apartment blocks have half the doorbells with the same surname, as children and grandchildren establish their households as close together as possible or even own the whole building. In the beginning I was sometimes annoyed by the interruptions, especially on the days when Aunt Alexandra popped up to visit me three times, stayed for coffee at least once and sent Chryssa up with food. Now, with each person treading their path in isolation, I missed their company. I understood better why Greeks want noise, why they shout, play music loud enough for everyone to hear and why the television is always on like another voice added to those already raised in constant conversation. When Nikitas gave up smoking for a while, he took to using his grandfather’s worry beads – beautiful, worn pearls of amber, threaded on olive green silk with a tired tassel at the end. Nikitas tried to conquer the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal with their movement and noise, just as generations of Greek men fill pauses and silence with the incessant swirling and knocking. Worry beads mark the tick-tock of life passing, like prayer beads, though they accompany street banter and coffee shop drinks rather than communication with God and blessed wine. The implication is that you will get all the peace and silence you need in the grave; until then clamour and commotion mean life.

I spent many days in Nikitas’ office, flicking through his books, sorting his papers and filing them chronologically. It was a strangely satisfying task, though it was also poignant and disorienting to sit in Nikitas’ chair. There were times when I could hardly bear the task I had set myself, as it only emphasised how much my husband had chosen not to tell me. It was like witnessing my own betrayal, and made me wonder whether the marriage had been a sham and if I was the only one who hadn’t seen it. Perhaps Phivos had been right all along. Occasionally, my anger made me hate Nikitas; he had left me in the way he had lived with me, with distance and secrets. And I had been too stupid to realise it.

As well as the more disturbing pointers to Nikitas’ hidden interior, there were the miscellaneous objects and photographs in his desk’s drawers that took on the loaded value of relics. It is as though the elements of physical detritus we leave behind are imbued with meaning beyond themselves. I fingered the talismans, only some of whose histories I knew: a white stone we found on a beach many years before that resembled an ancient Cycladic fertility offering; the amber worry beads and two large keys, one for the old Perivoli house that burnt down during the war and the other from Maria’s house in Smyrna, that her mother had always hoped they would reclaim. Nikitas and I had loved going to the village together in the early years, but that was another of our joint pleasures that altered with time. Partly it was

Nikitas’ tendency to go there on all-male winter weekends that consisted of roasting meat on the fire, playing cards all night and boozing; women and children were surplus to requirements. I’m not sure whether the distance between Nikitas and me was something I provoked, though I found it increasingly hard to go to Perivoli. I would arrive there in the early days expecting bucolic peace and encounter a constant stream of visitors with time on their hands and a winter’s worth of bottled-up stories to recount. They’d bring biscuits and eggs and home-grown vegetables, along with requests that Nikitas help them find a job for a nephew or take a stand on some dubious local intrigue.

“Bring out the
tsípouro
, wife!” Nikitas would half-joke each time another villager knocked on our door and if I didn’t, he would pour the drinks himself, and put some cheese and olives on a plate to go with them. I felt he wasn’t sure whether he wanted me to be a classic
Kyria
Katina housewife or whether he already saw me as “an English alien”, as he said in jest. It didn’t help when he discovered that my name, Maud, means “mighty in battle”.