The House on Paradise Street (24 page)

One day, a guard came to my cell and said I had visitors. Before I could ready myself, two people walked in. When you are not prepared, it is harder to be in control. I had never cried or even called out in pain while I was being thrashed by the policemen, but when I realised who the man and woman in front of me were, I crumpled onto my bed and wept like a child. The woman, hunched and thin, staring into my face without speaking, was my mother. Next to her, in the pristine khaki uniform of our English conquerors, was Johnny. I was both relieved and angry, comforted and hurt. My mother sat down next to me and took me in her arms, as she had when I was younger. She kissed my forehead and stroked my hair, making the soothing noises that had always calmed me as a child.

Johnny was talking, though it was hard to take in what he was saying. “Article 125 of the Penal Code… Instigation of civil war and the formation of armed bands… crimes of high treason.” He looked very clean and pink, his skin close-shaven and his hair combed. He spoke in English to keep the conversation more private from the guard lurking outside the door. “It’s serious, Antigone. But I want to help you. Don’t forget, you have a brother-in-law who is a senior police officer. If you do the right thing, Spiros will help you too. He is family now.” I looked at the man I thought I’d loved and hated him. I detested the English and their hypocrisy. As to Spiros, he was beneath contempt.

“I have always done what I consider to be the right thing. If you really want to help, you can leave.” I spoke calmly, surprised at myself. “And you can tell that to your fellow countrymen,” I said to Johnny. “You have ‘helped’ us enough. We’re not part of your empire and we don’t want to be a British colony.” My mother left some food, kissed me goodbye and went out after Johnny.

My trial was a farce, but there was no laughter. There was only one punishment for high treason: execution. I was expecting it, and yet when I heard the judge say the words, there was a strange sensation in my intestines, like lead pipes pulling me down. Although my mind could cope – there was a group of us being sentenced together and we were determined to keep our dignity – my body received the shock in its own way. In the end, though, it was my body that saved me. I was taken to Kalithea Prison and at the medical examination, I was found to be pregnant.

When Nikitas and I moved into Paradise Street with Tig, I was happy with our new existence. I loved the house, which somehow managed to be both solid and decorative: floors of grey marble, filled with small fossils that Tig traced with her fingers; the sturdy terracotta sculptures of Athena, standing sentry at the corners of the terrace and gazing out across the city; the heavy green shutters, which filtered strips of light into the bedroom; the old bath with 1930s French chrome taps. The whole place was redolent of Petros, Nikitas’ grandfather and the journey he made from village boy to
self-made
businessman; it was his monument to a successful life. I liked being part of the continuation of the Perifanis family. Practically too, it was good to have Alexandra and Chryssa, the two “grandmothers”, downstairs, and I appreciated their company.

Having been brought up by people whose formative years had been during the Second World War, I found it easy to relate to the two old women. I remembered how my grandparents had valued peace for its own sake, and how careful they were with food (half a tomato saved on a plate in the fridge, leftovers recycled into new meals). Chryssa often cooked for us and both she and Alexandra were happy to take Tig for hours on end if I was busy. I enjoyed sitting with Chryssa in the kitchen, taking the role of
sous-chef
, cleaning vegetables or cutting onions (Greek style, in one’s hand rather than on a board) and talking with her while she rolled out feta pies with scalloped edges or made
dolmades
–vine leaves stuffed with rice, onions and pine nuts.

“It’s like embroidery,” she said, as she folded them into parcels, like small presents, and then smothered them in egg and lemon sauce.

Despite my hopes for a domestic idyll, I admit that this was when Nikitas and I began to have problems. Or rather, the problems began to show. Nikitas was plagued by nightmares about earthquakes. I would wake to find him dragging me from the bed so we could escape from the collapsing house. Sometimes he’d shout for Tig, until I soothed him into waking properly and then going back to sleep. Perhaps the return to a childhood home associated with unhappiness was harder for him than I realised. Spiros cast a long shadow even after his demise and Nikitas continued to belittle his uncle whenever possible, mocking and criticising him, and harping on about his last moments. He argued that the manner of a person’s death changes the perspective of their life.

“When I think of how Spiros spent a lifetime lecturing me about the value of the family, of Christianity, of telling the truth… all a great pile of shit in the end. If you die in a ridiculous way, you will be remembered for that. It reveals your essence, much as dying resolutely makes you a hero. Imagine if Jesus hadn’t ended up on the cross, but had died of flu – maybe the world would have turned out quite differently. Or take our King Alexander, who died from a monkey bite that got infected. Almost a hundred years later he still isn’t remembered for anything else.”

Now that Nikitas was gone, I recalled his words, pondering on what his death revealed about him. The fact that he had died alone, in the small hours and away from his family, holding onto secrets, was a bleak reminder of how the gap between us had been widening. The shift in tone started gradually, like an invisible disease working its way through the body. It’s not that we didn’t love each other, but that certain things started to rankle. I began to believe that at least part of his veiled hostility was due to my nationality. When he made his documentaries about Greece’s relationship with Britain, each new scandal he uncovered was like a black mark against me personally. I began to feel shamed and humiliated, as though I was being smeared with mud and cinders, as the Byzantines used to do to miscreants, after parading them sitting backwards on a donkey. I understood better why the Greek
moúntza
gesture of splaying the hand (as though to smear) has, ever since those times, been the nastiest insult in this country. The outstretched palm of the hand, sometimes paired with the other hand for emphasis, goes beyond the power of curses and offends an individual’s honour.

“Do you know what you English did to the resistance fighters after the end of the Second World War?” he asked, using the second person plural when speaking about British politicians who had been in power decades before my birth.

“And don’t forget Cyprus – your handy little colony in the Mediterranean. Of course, it was such a useful stop-over on the way to India, but even after the Indians were given their freedom, England clung on to Cyprus. Who in England remembers that long after India became independent, you went on executing Cypriot Greek freedom fighters for being terrorists?” Nikitas’ film on Cyprus had interviews with old men in village coffee houses, who spoke of the British as unjust oppressors. They were still haunted by their lost comrades and convinced that their cause was just. Two of the respectable-looking pensioners stood up to recite the oath they took in the 1950s:

“Naturally, the English tourists who fill the charter planes and go to sweat like pigs on Cyprus’ beaches have absolutely no idea,” Nikitas said, revelling in his outrage. “They’re like the Germans who drive past Cretan villages, ignoring the signs listing how many civilians were shot there by the Nazis. Forgetting is very useful when you’ve committed atrocities.”

I had not known these things, or at least not in detail. And, to tell the truth, I felt aggrieved by what felt like wrongful accusations, rather than remorse – these episodes had occurred well before I was born. I suppose my outsider’s innocence ceased to be refreshing to Nikitas. I believed that I was not part of any grand plan, mass political movement or colonial conquest; I was an individual, a human, who happened to have been born in one place and lived in another. That didn’t convince him.

“Our history is inside us,” he said. “It’s in our cells, just as our grandparents and ancestors live on in our DNA. We cannot escape from what went before, from what our countries have experienced.”

The more Nikitas laid into me as though I were to blame for Churchill or the brutality of British troops in Cyprus, the more I began to find fault with my adopted country. What had previously been exotic became annoying, starting with the details of daily life. What sort of country expects people to put their shitty toilet paper in baskets instead of down the drains? Why couldn’t they install normal drain pipes like everywhere else? Why is it considered normal to have power cuts for hours on end during summer
heat-waves
and winter storms, as though we were living in Gaza and not twenty-first century Europe? Why are seatbelts seen as an infringement of liberty (even for children), when they know that the roads are the most dangerous in Europe? Why is the Greeks’ idea of freedom interpreted as the freedom to park across the pavement, blocking women with pushchairs and pensioners, or the freedom to smoke incessantly, everywhere? Of course, once I started down this slippery slope, the questions came faster and more furiously. Why was it considered normal when we handed the surgeon a “small envelope” containing 3,000 euros cash when Nikitas had a minor operation in a state hospital?

There are times, especially after a roasting hot night in summer, when even a cotton sheet seems to burn the skin and the whine of dive-bombing mosquitoes drives you mad, that I long for the soothing North, the subtle shadows of grey London light and cool summer nights where you sleep with a duvet. “Moaning Maud” – that is what I am, or at least what I became. Even worse than “Bored Maud”, as an old boyfriend used to say. At least I wasn’t “Maudlin” or “Mordant”, as Desmond, my grandfather, called me affectionately. He would make up limericks that made use of all the words that rhymed with my name.
There was a young lady called Maud, who was always incredibly bored…
I remember flawed and ignored, but there was also roared, gnawed, clawed.

Above all, the thing I had tired of was the Greeks’ obsession with themselves, with the nature of Greekness, with how they are viewed and how unfairly they are judged. Beware of saying even the slightest critical thing about Greece to a Greek as they will take it as though you have said their mother is a whore and their father her pimp.

“Everything has to revolve around your suffering,” I once told Nikitas in frustration. “You
like
being the victims. You blame the Turks for keeping you as slaves for four centuries, the British for their political meddling, the Americans for supporting the Junta – anyone but yourself for the mess.”

Looking back on my disillusionment with Greece, I realise that I had forgotten to place it alongside the extremes that mark so much of life there – a ratcheting up of intensity so that each experience takes you further than it might elsewhere. It starts with the senses. Colours, sounds, smells and tastes are richer in Greece (the tang of lemons off the tree or spearmint in salad, tomatoes or figs that taste of the sun). But these extremes continue so that emotions are stretched to breaking point in all directions. The lack of safety precautions is all part of the thrill; political correctness will never catch on. After Nikitas’ death, I had started to see these things more clearly. And now, it seemed not only obvious but understandable that the Greeks have a tendency to create tragic myths out of their experiences, with the Civil War being one of the most powerful and long-lasting. The almost magnetic lure of calamity here was simply the other end of a spectrum on which the closeness of family and community has bound people together so tightly.

While I was clearing and sorting things in Nikitas’ office, I had come across a book called
The Incurable Necrophilia of Radical Patriotism.
The title alone was enough to make me take it home. It was filled with comments Nikitas had written in the margin – angry disagreements (
Ochi!
) and scorings-out in heavy biro. One day, Orestes came in to find me lying on the sofa reading what turned out to be a critique of the left-wing Greek obsession with the glory of defeat, especially in relation to the Civil War. He laughed so much when I showed him the book that I feared he was going to cry. It was as if the spasms of laughter had drawn out emotions prompted by his father’s death that he had been successfully controlling. When he quietened down, he sat on the arm of the sofa beside me.

“It’s true – we love our martyrs in Greece,” he said. “It’s better to lose in the name of honour than to win.
Babas
and his cronies clung onto the resistance story for so long because they got off on that masochistic shit. It excites the wankers – the pleasure is knowing they held the moral high ground. It applies even more to his mother’s generation, which was practically wiped out. It doesn’t matter if everyone was imprisoned or killed. As long as it was in a good cause. What a fucking mess.” Orestes groaned in contentment. “Incurable necrophiliacs! That’s what they are.”

When my son was born, he did not cry. He just looked at me as though he knew something. His body was like that of a tiny, wrinkled monkey, with black down over his back and a thick head of hair. They washed him, swaddled him tightly and handed him to me like a package ready for posting. I had no idea what to do. I had never seen a newborn or cared for a baby. Ironically, my life in the mountains meant that I was more, not less, innocent about the functions of the female body than my contemporaries in the city or the countryside. I knew how to clean a gun and gut a hare, and I was not afraid to walk up a mountain at night. But I had not really known what was involved in childbirth and had no idea how to change a nappy or hold an infant. Confronted with this new life, I was bewildered. Thankfully, babies are efficient teachers and I submitted to the powerful urges of nature.

The staff in the Elena Hospital were not unkind, though they did whisper and stare. After all, I had come in wearing handcuffs. They made jokes.

“He’s a patriot,” one nurse said.

He had certainly chosen a triumphant day. He arrived on October 28th, when we all remember our “No” to the Italians.

“This boy won’t let anyone trample over him,” the nurse went on. “He’ll be a fighter.”

I often thought of those words over the years, hoping they would be a form of blessing for my son.

Although I had haemorrhaged badly and there were complications I didn’t understand at the time, I went back to jail after three days. But instead of being returned to Kallithea, I was taken to Averoff Prison, entering through the front door on Alexandra Avenue. The sun burnt my face and a Cyclops eye peered through a hole in the door. Bolts and bars screeched and I passed through several doors, before I was stopped and searched by a hag. She pawed at my clothes and thrust her hand between my legs.

“Careful, I’m bleeding,” I said. “I have given birth.”

She muttered, “May it live for you!” as though it was a curse. Then she led me out to the courtyard. Hundreds of women were gathered like a flock of crows, in black and grey clothes and dark headscarves. There were old crones and teenagers, virgins and widows, strong village mothers and pale city intellectuals. Over by a large palm tree and the prison chapel, dozens of little children were shouting and playing. From the other side of the high walls came men’s voices from the male section. My head spun from the sun and from some lingering weakness, and I looked for somewhere to sit. Before I could find a space, familiar voices called my name and Dora almost knocked me down with her embraces. Behind her was Storm. My old comrades shouted over the noise of the people who had gathered around to watch.

“What happened? The baby? Are you all right?” Storm and Dora had been transferred to the Averoff a couple of months before and had heard nothing of me since then.

They both looked well – Dora as small and springy as a rubber ball and Storm standing solid and dignified.

“I have a son. He is well.” My voice was like somebody else’s. “They say they’ll bring him.” I swayed, ready to pass out, and Dora sat me down on a step. She placed a hand on my forehead, while Storm fetched water.

“Not as good as the springs on Mount Iti.” Storm handed me a tin cup. “The fight continues, wherever we are. Your health, Antigone.”

Dora said, “May your son live for you. May he have health, happiness and be a brave revolutionary. He’ll get a good training in here with all his aunties. But the godmother has to be me or Storm. You’ll be with me in the mother-and-baby dormitory. It’s noisy and crowded but it’s all right.” Dora glanced at Storm and paused.

“Don’t worry – it’s no secret.” There was never any compromising with Storm. “I call figs, figs and troughs, troughs,” she liked to say. “I’m down in the dungeons – on death row. I can’t say it’s cheerful – we’re in single cells without windows, but we manage. We sing together, even if we’re twenty steps underground. It’s good practice for the time we’ll soon be spending beneath the earth.”

Two small children ran up to Dora and pulled at her clothes. She told them, “Give a kiss to your Aunt Antigone.” Then she introduced me to Panos, her three-year-old, who jumped and shouted and refused to come near me. His sister, Evdokia, who was quiet and serious, kissed my cheek with such sadness that I felt faint all over again. Later, I met
Kyria
Tina, Dora’s mother, a woman even smaller and more energetic than Dora.
Kyria
Tina had been imprisoned for supporting her daughter and supplying other “bandits” with food and shelter. So, with nobody else to care for Dora’s children, the “poor mites” – as their granny called them – had been brought into prison too.

A few hours after I arrived at Averoff, my baby was brought from the hospital. They told me to feed him and the older children gathered around to stare at the tiny creature. When I changed him, they pointed and laughed at his “fur”. After the feed, the nurse took him away. Three hours later, he was back again. This rigmarole continued for eight days, after which they said he could stay – I was allowed to keep my parcel. By then, my son had changed from the silent, questioning infant he had been at first. He wailed like a demon for hours on end. The only person who could help was Dora, who took him in her arms and calmed his raging. She boiled up camomile and fed him from a spoon when he had stomach pains. And she sang him songs to distract him.

If it wasn’t Nikitas crying, it was another child – we were at least a hundred mothers and children in the special dormitory. Averoff had been built for two hundred inmates and now housed about twelve hundred. We were almost all “politicals” (criminals were kept separately) and we were locked up for nineteen hours of the day. There was nowhere to go but the triple-layered bunks in which the children were squeezed, two to a bed. Washing was strung along the bars over the high windows and a large bucket in the corner was used when the guards would not come to take us to the toilet. The smell of physical life was overwhelming – hair, skin, feet, and all that flows from women’s and babies’ bodies: dried milk gone sour; infant vomit; menstrual blood seeping onto rags; urine darkening in the bucket and soaking into nappies; and sweat from the constant struggle to keep ourselves and our offspring clean.

Our confined existence settled into a regular pattern that contained all the joy and sorrow of life anywhere else. We all believed in the same thing so, if anything, we became more determined to keep our fight going by becoming better organised. We instituted morning gymnastics, and anyone with a profession or talent used it: there were four doctors, several lawyers and various teachers and artists. The seamstresses were the only ones who didn’t do general housework as they were so busy. Although there were restrictions on books and paper, we started reading and writing lessons. Some of the older children attended these, including Elpida, the youngest prisoner. At the age of twelve she was a political enemy, who had been through a court martial and been convicted of high treason. Her crime was handing out pamphlets – others were in for painting slogans on walls. She was a good girl, Elpida. She helped look after the babies and did her lessons, and as her name [Hope] suggests, she helped us stay optimistic with her sweet nature.

We had a special programme for the “black cloud” – the group of old grandmothers who normally dressed in mourning clothes. Many were illiterate and we taught them to write so they could send letters to their families. I particularly liked
Kyria
Frosso, an ancient crone with a kind, wrinkled face, who must have been in her 80s – I never imagined I would reach that great age myself. Sometimes she would hold the baby for me when I was busy and I would write letters for her when she was too tired to spell out each word by herself. Of course, much of our day was spent dealing with the practicalities of living in cramped quarters with so many people. Apart from trying to keep ourselves and our children clean, we had rotas for chores. There were the “floor Marias”, “corridor Marias”, “canteen Marias” and so on. The “yard Marias” had to scrub the whole courtyard and the “washroom Marias” made the fires to heat cauldrons filled with water, which they then distributed: first to mothers and babies, then to death row prisoners so they would be clean if they were taken for execution, then to grandmothers and those with TB, and finally to the remaining inmates. Then the “canteen Marias” took the cauldrons and used them to cook food for over a thousand mouths. We had songs for different chores. The “washroom Marias” sang the
Kalamatiano, Three boys from Volos
. We were determined not to let the system beat us.

Naturally, it was never quiet. Everyone wore wooden clogs and clattered up and down the stairs and stamped across the concrete yard like charging cavalry. Women calling, singing, arguing, children playing and crying. The noisiest person of all was
Kyria
Tina, Dora’s mother. I loved her like family and she became an honorary grandmother to Nikitas, despite being in a different dormitory to us. You could hear her voice all over the prison. In fact, she was chosen as the primary “caller”, who shouted out our names when there was a roll call or when we had visitors. At night, things were quieter, but the noises were more upsetting. Not so much the babies, but the women weeping, many of them crying out from nightmares, remembering the horrors that they had been through. Everyone had a story to tell about how they had been beaten or tortured.
Kyria
Tina had had salt put in her wounds and Storm had several fingernails pulled out. Dora told me how they took boiled eggs from the pan and pressed them under her arms. Her armpits were left scalded and weeks later, they were still tender. We all had worries that grew worse in the dark hours.

Sometimes I envied the death row women down in their dungeons for the peace they had – I yearned for some relief from the constant swirl of humanity. The only time there was a moment of sudden quiet was when men from the isolation cells started singing before they were taken away for execution. Whenever we heard them we froze – we would stop dressing a child or mopping the floor, listening out for the sounds of their departure.

In the darkest, coldest part of the year, when Nikitas was still only a few months old, I had a visitor. It was raining and I had been with the “cauldron Marias” that morning, so I was wet and dirty. I heard
Kyria
Tina yelling out my name for the visitors’ room. Prisoners went in ten at a time and had five minutes in which to exchange news and to get what we called “free air” from the outside. I had never been before, as nobody from my family had visited. I knew they would not be impressed by the arrival of a bastard – plenty of babies were pushed through the hatch at the foundling hospital for lesser crimes. It was dark and I couldn’t see well in the small room, though I did notice two windows covered in bars and wire mesh. The guard motioned me over to the far window and I peered through, wondering who had come for me.

When I saw Johnny on the other side of the bars, I almost walked back into the rain. This was the second time he had come to stare at me as if I was a caged animal and I hated him for it. There was no place for an English oppressor in my country or my life. But I couldn’t turn around. I was weak.

“How good of you to come.” I hoped I sounded like my mother at her haughtiest. He didn’t answer, but stood close to the bars, looking at me. I felt ashamed that he should see me with my hair like rats’ tails. I knew my face was red from the steam and I noticed how shabby my clothes were. Johnny was in uniform, his hair slicked down and his face so closely shaved it was like a boy’s.

He said, “I am going home. I can’t stay in Greece any longer.” He paused and I waited in silence until he found his voice. “Markos… I’m so sorry.” He struggled with the words.

I said, “You are a murderer, Johnny. Why did Markos have to die?”

It was evident that he wanted me to believe him. He said, “You can’t hold me responsible. I wasn’t there. I only found out later. I loved Markos.” His face contracted and I wondered whether he was going to cry. “I’m leaving, but I would like to help you. I know you have a son. There must be so much he needs.” Time passed as slowly as water turning to ice while I stood there, hearing Johnny’s words but saying nothing. I shut out the memories of the joy we had experienced before all this – the Ilissos river, the poems and picnics. Another life. The bell rang and the guard shouted for prisoners to withdraw. The five minutes had passed.

“Send me soap,” I said, thinking of my son. “And wool, for knitting.” Johnny nodded, but said nothing.

“Everyone needs paper and pencils, so anything like that is useful.”

He put his hand up to the window, but the wire between us prevented any contact even if I had reciprocated.

“Goodbye, Antigone. I hope your country’s misery will soon end.”

I nodded and left the room with the other prisoners. I was disoriented by the visit, but my friends were delighted when, on the next visiting day, a large parcel arrived. The guards confiscated the coffee and cigarettes, but we were left with generous quantities of tea, sugar, soap, dozens of balls of wool (blue for a boy), and twenty notebooks and pencils.

“Ask your Englishman to come again,” they begged. “Ask if he can send more. Never mind if they are royalist, colonialist pigs.” And he did. I must give him credit for that.

* * *

We baptised my son just after Easter. Storm insisted she should be godmother. She said, “I will die a virgin and never have a child of my own. At least let me have a godchild.” She teased me that, when the priest asked her for the name, she would say “Anaximandros” after her beloved father. But when the moment came, she called out “Nikitas”, so that even the crowds in the courtyard heard her from the chapel. We all understood she was talking of victory and hope. The baby watched quietly as Storm held him, wrapped in a towel, and the elderly Father Philippos got on with the service.