The House on Paradise Street (4 page)

“These days most Athenians choose not to bring the deceased home,” said
Kyrios
Katsaridis. His face was smooth, almost boyish, but he spoke with a deep and soothing voice. I wondered about this young man, what he drank at bars with his friends, how he had learned his trade. At his father’s side, no doubt, in the Greek tradition. It’s hardly a job you’d dream of training for.

There was no question that it would be an Orthodox funeral. Nikitas did not believe in God, he campaigned for the separation of Church and state in Greece and he wrote articles about how monks on Mount Athos lived the high life, wiring up expensive televisions in their cells and carrying out business deals on their mobile phones. The very sight of a priest’s black robes on the street was taken as bad luck:

“Quick, touch your balls!” he’d whisper conspiratorially to Orestes. He despised the way that Aunt Alexandra, like most of the faithful, greeted a priest by kissing his hand, and his most heart-felt curses all included the figures of Christ and the Virgin. Yet like the vast majority of his compatriots, Nikitas didn’t think twice about marking his way through life with a priest as master of ceremonies. The only reason he and I did not marry in a church – as he had with his first two weddings – was that I was not Orthodox. Tig, like Orestes before her, had been baptised when she was nine months old – slathered in oil, plunged under water, hair snipped, adorned with a cross. And she was given a name; you don’t even have one until your godparent announces it to the priest.

We chose a coffin that looked like a glossed-up mahogany wardrobe with fancy handles. There weren’t any hand-woven wicker baskets or biodegradable cocoons as found these days in England, and I didn’t care.

“We found an excellent position in the cemetery. High up, in the part we call the artists’ area. All sorts are there – singers, writers, actors. Nikos Xilouris, Viki Moscholiou…”
Kyrios
Katsaridis looked pleased and I tried to be encouraging to the young man, nodding and smiling ridiculously. Later, I learned that it was Aunt Alexandra’s widespread contacts and
savoir faire
that had procured the grave. Few but the most famous and influential are guaranteed a place in the First Cemetery these days and there had been at least one unofficial payment in addition to the hefty monthly rent we would pay for the plot. Freehold prices were mostly out of the question – pushing 100,000 euros.

As the day ground on, our sitting room filled with friends, acquaintances, colleagues from the newspaper, people I didn’t even know, but who cared about Nikitas. Morena came in to help, taking time off from one of the other houses she cleaned, and brought her soothing presence to what became increasingly like what happened each September 15, on Saint Nikitas’ day. Then, the phone barely stopped ringing, the door was left open so people could walk in with sweets, flowers and presents and the whole thing usually went on late into the evening. Nikitas would cook and whip up the levels of
kéfi
(“there’s no translation – you either feel the mood or keep quiet”) with wine, stories, music and food until everyone was ready to dance or roar with laughter at his indiscreet tales about the politicians of the moment or his latest adventure abroad.

Nikitas was notoriously contradictory and could be awkward, but he had many friends who adored him, and even more people who were entertained by or interested in him. There were others who felt his influence in the media; the number of politicians of various persuasions who tried to keep close to him was remarkable. He had spent a lifetime with these people – talking, working, fighting and drinking. He used to tell me that he didn’t care about these superficial relationships, but I saw they made him feel alive.

“Athens is a village,” he said. “Wherever you go you find people you know.” And it was true. It was impossible to walk down the street, let alone go out for dinner, without meeting someone from his vast social network. And in restaurants, Nikitas always had one eye on who was coming and going: a disgraced minister, a minor celebrity, an attractive woman passing – they all meant something to him and his solid yet mercurial presence seemed to act like a magnet. He enjoyed it when someone sent the waiter over with a bottle of wine as an offering, and he’d jump up to drink the health of the admirer who had arranged it, and then do the same too, shoring up fragile social ties with these drinking rituals. Now that Nikitas had gone, I should not have been surprised that so many people wanted to be there. A heavy middle-aged woman with thinning hair and brown clothes came up and embraced me. She told me she worked at the paper and rubbed her red eyes.

“How can he have gone?” she asked, as though I might provide the answer.

Several of Nikitas’ distant cousins from the village arrived bearing food, and though I hardly knew them, they made themselves at home, making coffee for visitors, emptying ashtrays and answering the phone.

“The widow must not do anything,” they insisted and the women made me sit, cosseting me as though I was physically incapable. Men wandered in and out of the apartment, smoking furiously and talking in low voices. Even in shock, I was impressed by the Greek tendency to gather together at difficult times. A private pain like illness or bereavement is public business. When someone dies, people come together, facing Charos, the personification of death,
en masse
, as if telling him he may have taken one, but we are all still here together. Solitude is only comprehensible as loneliness and isolation is unquestionably an evil. I used to complain to Nikitas in the old days that no one understood I might want to be alone.

“It’s not chance that there’s not even a word for privacy in Greek,” I grumbled.

“There is a word but it has the same root as ‘idiot’,” he laughed. “In ancient Greece a private individual was an idiot because he didn’t play a role in public life. In modern Greece you’re an idiot if you want to be alone. Take us or leave us.”

The news of Nikitas’ death spread rapidly and people were ringing and coming over to the house in increasing numbers. Nikitas’ first wife, Kiki, arrived looking grey-faced. I knew her only from the few occasions I had reluctantly attended exhibitions of her sculptures – mostly pale, elongated female forms inspired by Cycladic figures, though hers were often slashed with black markings that represented abuse or suffering. She held my hands for longer than I was comfortable with, her skin rough from handling clay and a collection of silver bangles jangling as she moved. Kiki and Nikitas had been married briefly in the early ’70s when they were both “revolting students” (Nikitas’ joke). Their enthusiasm for each other petered out after the end of the Junta that had provided the focus of so much passion and protest and a structure for their life together. But they had both remained friendly and met occasionally for coffee or lunch.

“She’s so old,” Nikitas had said last time he saw her, as though he was not also in his sixty-second year. Her wrinkles were a reminder of his own ageing and annoyed him; he preferred youth and beauty, treating them as though they rubbed off on him.

I had scarcely disentangled myself from Kiki, when Yiorgia, Nikitas’ second wife and Orestes’ mother, arrived. Yiorgia used to provoke in me an uncomfortable jealousy, and though in recent years it had diminished, I still saw her as everything I was not. A partner in a law firm, she had a magnetic beauty with classical features, silky hair and breasts, which Nikitas once, unwisely, told me were her finest feature. She was studying law when she got pregnant, and their marriage had smouldered fitfully for a decade, until she asked for a divorce and got remarried (to “another arsehole lawyer”, as Nikitas said).

Yiorgia was crying when she came in. She hugged me extravagantly, her tears wetting my face and her musky-smelling hair smothering my nose. Her bosom pressed against me. Orestes came down from the studio, looking dazed and exuding a waft of marijuana.

“
Mama?
” He looked puzzled by our clinch and the unusual proximity of his father’s three wives.

“My baby!” Yiorgia rushed to embrace her son, whose striking good looks matched hers. It was like a scene from a bad opera and I knew what Nikitas would have said, tongue in cheek: “Pray to Zeus – the god of family love.” I left them, my extended Greek family, and went to my bedroom. For the first time, I became aware of an unfamiliar bitter taste in my mouth that stayed with me for weeks. However much I tried to get rid of it by drinking or cleaning my teeth, it always returned. Eventually I realised that what I had always thought to be a metaphor – bitterness in emotions – could be a physical reality; emotion translated into matter. Other clichés were made flesh too; my heart really ached. I felt it heavy and bloody in my chest, as if it were pumping the misery through me.

About an hour later, Orestes hurried in without knocking; he still clung to the privileges of a child.

“Are you OK?” He looked at me dubiously. “Can you come through? My godfather just rang. They are running something about
Babas
on the news. Mega Channel. It’s coming on now.” I followed him back into the sitting room where the “party” showed no sign of ending. There were about twenty people crowded around to get a view of the television. Kiki and Yiorgia had arranged themselves in the best position on the sofa and I wondered whether they were also now widows of some sort. Aunt Alexandra hissed at everyone to be quiet from an armchair and Orestes and Tig sat on the floor. I stood, holding onto the door frame, the place you should go if there is no other protection in the case of an earthquake.

The eccentric broadcast that passes as “news” in Greece was well underway and the usual half-a-dozen journalist-inquisitor-commentators were shouting raucously from their own “little window” on the screen. There was too much noise to make out which particular Greek politician they were gossiping about, but one man was waving his arms, red in the face with anger, while several others laughed dismissively.

“Coffeehouse politics,” was what Nikitas called it, though he was not averse to appearing himself from time to time. I sympathised more with the anonymous graffiti writer, who had sprayed a wall near our house with “Freedom to imprisoned TV viewers”.

The news reader eventually made an announcement about the death of “our colleague, Nikitas Perifanis”. Alexandra strained to listen, fiddling with her hearing aid, which hissed miserably. A young female reporter gave a brief résumé of Nikitas’ life, describing him as “a child of the Left”, who had battled against the Junta, showing him as a young man in the ’70s with long hair and white bellbottoms and later, more grizzled and heavier, accepting a prize for his series,
Britain and Greece.
Then there was a brief interview with his old friend, and Orestes’ godfather, Nikos Manousis, the poet. I could picture Nikitas shouting “Get the wanker out of here,” as Nikos managed to emanate eloquent sadness while flirting with the female reporter, whose make-up could have graced the stage of a second-rate bouzouki club. Nikos was regularly approached to make statements on television as he had the right amount of vanity and gravitas and, like Nikitas, the pedigree of having been inside the Polytechnic in 1973, when the Junta’s tanks rolled in. Both men had been studying law at the nearby School of Law, but joined the protests that turned a generation of Athenian students into heroes, martyrs and champions of the Left. Nikos’ wavy white mane and dandyish linen suits embellished with silk handkerchiefs had become a trademark, while his honeyed bass voice produced reliably elegant sentences: “a man of integrity… child of the Civil War who fought for freedom and justice… award-winning journalist who was constantly searching…” The reporter looked flushed with pleasure as she thanked the poet for his contribution and announced that the funeral would take place tomorrow at 11 am at the First Cemetery.

There was a moment of silence in the room. The television had enchanted us with its reverse alchemy that transforms something rare or precious into something common or base; anyone can become an item slotted into the parallel world. I was glad when Orestes broke the spell.

“
Maláka!
Wanker! He’s such a hypocrite. They’re all wankers. They talk about their own heroism, how they fought against the Junta, how they saved Greece from tyranny. All we hear about is the ‘Polytechnic generation’, but they became the establishment. They’re the ones ruling the country now – the politicians, the journalists, the professors. And look what they’ve done.” Nobody answered for a while, as though the air had been sucked out of the room. A number of people present resembled exactly the type Orestes had attacked; men who had risen to powerful positions on the reputation of being freedom fighters. They were supposedly the latest example of a noble tradition of Greeks fighting Ottoman overlords for independence or Nazi occupiers during Second World War; all part of the same impulse, merging into one another, their portraits intermingling in the public consciousness, so that flag-waving school children were unable to remember whether the heroes of the Polytechnic were fighting the Turks or whether there were tanks in 1821.

Kiki answered first – as an artist, nobody could say that she had made a grab for power. Orestes was too young, she said, to appreciate what had been done so he could enjoy his freedom. But Orestes had answered that question during frequent arguments with his father.

“What freedom?” he replied, his cheeks reddening. “What do you think my generation has got? Freedom to be unemployed after twenty years of learning set texts? Freedom to get a job earning 700 euros a month? You can keep your freedom – there’s nothing I can do with it.”

I hurried from the room, furious at them all for discussing politics when Nikitas was not yet even buried.

The rains were terrible in October and Natalya and I didn’t meet for several days due to the bad weather. When I finally managed to walk the hundred metres or so to her block and she opened the door to her apartment, I could tell immediately that she had something to say. The tang of cat hit me even before I entered and Misha sidled up and rubbed his long grey hairs onto my stockings. I make a point of appearing pleasant to him, though I never liked him and he knows it. If dogs can smell fear, then cats smell antipathy and Misha never fails to twist himself around my legs, growling under his breath.

Natalya said, “Look how he loves you.” She has always been taken in by our performance. When her back was turned, the animal enjoyed sinking his claws into my ankle and running for cover before I could kick him.

Natalya blurted it out. “I’m going to London. Lyuba needs me. I’ve said I’ll go for a while to see if it works out. Don’t worry, I’ll come back to visit, and maybe you can make a trip. I’ll have my own maid to make us tea!” She tried to smile and looked away, ashamed. I had no difficulty in acting pleased for her. Burying my emotions is an old habit. I pretended to believe she’d be back, and agreed she was doing the right thing. But as I asked her practical questions about her travel plans, my thoughts were really on the prospect of dying alone in my apartment. I was losing the last person I had.

“Oh, and I have a favour to ask.” Natalya’s expression was uncomfortably apologetic. “Can you look after my darling Mishinka for me? My son-in-law is allergic to cats, so I can’t take him. He’ll be company for you.”

After Natalya left, I was bereft. I tried to keep doing the things I did with my old friend, but even the steam sessions at the baths seemed pointless without her chatter and the fried titbits she brought. I now sit for hours in my chair, eyes blurring like the grey fog outside. Each day I retreat further within. Misha evidently shares my sense of
abandonment
and sits staring, flicking his ridiculous plumed tail with annoyance. In many ways, Natalya’s departure is harder to bear than when Igor died. After his first stroke there was time to get used to him as half a presence. I cared for him as one would a baby, cleaning and feeding him, massaging his hands like the physiotherapist instructed. Sometimes I read to him from the books he loved,
dog-eared
and broken, their pages coming loose. I lost Igor bit by bit, and by the time we buried him, I had grown
accustomed
to the idea. Naturally I wept for a good man whose morning breath had mingled with mine for half a century, but life carried on. It is what it is. But it is different without Natalya.

I am haunted by all the people I have lost. When my mother died twenty years ago, I didn’t even think of going back to Greece for her funeral. I had made a promise to myself. I remembered my father coughing out his last words, reduced to half his original size by Nazi
humiliations
. Then two years later, my brother, still only a boy despite his uniform and gun. Later there were so many others who died that their names pile up like heaps of rocks. Some went suddenly with a stray bullet and others went singing and dancing to their execution in the name of justice and freedom. We believed it was worth it with every cell in our body. I often wonder why I was saved from Charos’ teeth. He had so many opportunities. I, too, could have found my “bridegroom” in the earth, and had a heavy “mother-in-law” of a tombstone weighing down on my chest.

There were other losses. When Stalin died, I had to read the report on the radio. It was 1953 – less than a year after I started the job – and we were all terrified. Stalin had been everything. At one point in the broadcast, my voice wavered and I had to stop to compose myself. I was worried that I might lose my job, but then I heard the sobs of other journalists on air and saw the mass mourning that took place. I realised it was only appropriate that we should weep. Nobody ever remarked on my lack of control. A few years later, when Khrushchev told us what Stalin had really done, it was even worse. I felt a huge bitterness, realising I hadn’t even known that friends’ and colleagues’ parents or siblings were in the Gulag. Losing one’s faith is the hardest thing of all, but it was too late to regret what I had done. I still know that what I believed in was right. How could it be wrong to fight for a world without war and hunger and exploitation?

What remained was comradeship and knowledge. I kept on with the broadcasts and paid lip service to the rules. Igor had the Russian’s inherent pessimism and scepticism, so perhaps it was easier for him to bear another dose of disillusionment. I thought if I kept giving out the message on air every day it might help make it truer, though I knew I was sometimes helping the authorities weave a blanket of lies. At home, with Igor or with Natalya and Arkady, I would often unpick what I’d said, like Penelope dismantling her woven cloth at night.

Now I think the old flawed system was better than what came later. I try not to go out and witness the parody of America that the Muscovites are establishing in their city, with boutiques for millionaires and restaurants where most of us couldn’t afford the bread. At this rate they’ll soon be bringing back the Tsars and turning the rest of us into serfs. In my opinion, we’ll all go back to Marx at some point and see what sense he wrote. As he said, we must doubt and question everything.

* * *

The first snows fell. The caretaker came to tape up the windows and told me they had forecast a bitter winter this year. I leave home only to take the bus for my
twice-weekly
shopping trips. I feed Misha the imported Finnish cat food that Natalya specified, but he has given up trying to provoke and ignores my presence. My only worry is what would happen if I died. My heart is no longer strong and though I take the tablets, I feel it flipping and pulsating like a trapped animal. I try not to imagine Misha eating me. I still read and I keep my notebook going, but mostly I just sit and stare out of the window at the rows of neighbouring apartments growing whiter. It is hard when nobody needs you.

My thoughts run through all the people who were important to me, but I am most preoccupied with my son. Every September I mark his name day in some way. Sometimes I baked a cake without explaining why. Igor would be pleased at this unusual burst of domesticity. I have some mementoes in a small suitcase – a lock of hair, a scribble Nikitas made when he learned to hold a pencil, a pair of babies’ booties knitted by
Kyria
Frosso, the oldest prisoner. I take them out and sniff them, trying to recapture the scent I thought I could never forget, but it had been replaced by the neutral whiff of leather. I was always convinced I did the right thing in giving up Nikitas. The hardest sacrifice, but the right one. I decided from the beginning that I should have no contact with him – a clean cut is best. It would have been unfair to him to have held out some promise of maternal love when that was impossible. Better that he should have his own life, free from me. But after Natalya went, the decades of
justification
retreated. I am left with a bitter realisation that I abandoned the one person who needed me. And to what purpose? In support of ideals that I’m not sure I
understand
any more and that nobody else holds?

Alone in the apartment with Misha, I have begun to fantasise about going to my son. If Lyuba needed Natalya, perhaps Nikitas needed me too. You are still a mother, even if you don’t see your child. At least that is what I always thought. I have followed his progress from afar. Dora occasionally sends me news of Nikitas – she was the only person from my old life who kept in touch. She managed to maintain some contact with him, even when he was young and it had to be secret. She promised me that. Skinny as a scrawny fledgling, Dora had the strength of a buffalo. We met in the mountains, where she taught me how to share blankets when we slept out in the freezing cold.

“It’s more important to have one underneath than on top,” she explained, as we lay back-to-back to conserve body heat. She had married young and had borne two children by the time she was twenty. After her husband was killed by the Germans, she went to fight in his place, leaving her babies with her mother in Athens. She never made a fuss. When Nikitas began working as a journalist, Dora collected some of his articles and sent me the cuttings. Her letters described my son’s progress, but she was never a great writer and I wanted to know much more. She didn’t mention Alexandra; she knew I wouldn’t want to hear about my sister. Or “Him”, the monstrosity. Dora did tell me when “He” died, and though I used to imagine I would be pleased, too much time had gone by for that.

Occasionally there would be a photograph of Nikitas – dark haired and with the good looks of my father as a young man. I heard about his marriages – he is evidently a restless soul. He is on his third now. And he has two children, so I am a grandmother, though I wonder if they even know I exist. If not, I only have myself to blame. Sometimes, my mind rolls idly over an image I have of the children – one is already in his twenties – and I imagine sitting with them, telling stories about their father as a baby, about their great-grandfather and the house he built in Paradise Street.

* * *

It was nearly ten o’clock when the phone rang and I had long since fallen asleep in my armchair. I almost forgot I had a telephone, it went so rarely, and I jumped with fright at the unfamiliar sound. Perhaps it’s Natalya, I thought, calling to tell me about London. Then I heard Greek words. A woman, but she didn’t sound Greek.

“
Kyria
Antigone?”

“This is she.”

“I am Mod. Nikitas’ wife.” Before she went any further I had already fantasised that she would ask me to stay, that Nikitas needed me, that they had a room ready for the children’s grandmother. Then the news came out quickly. My son was dead. All these years when I thought I’d lost him, he was actually within reach. But now he was gone.

I stayed awake all night, pacing the small living room, trying to make a plan. I had no right to mourn, but I wept and raged. I smoked cigarette after cigarette and hit my fist against the table, until the cat hid under the bed. How had I been so stupid to wait until he was no longer there? By the time dawn arrived, I had made my decision. I had waited far too long. On the metro, a young woman gave up her seat so I could sit down and I spotted my reflection in the dark windows of the rattling train. What I saw was a skinny old Russian woman in a brown fur hat and mohair shawl, clutching an empty shopping bag from habit – in the old days you never knew what you might find and we always went out prepared to join a queue or snap up an opportunity. I got off at Arbat and walked steadily, so as not to slip on the ice.

I arrived in Leontiefsky Lane at nine o’clock and waited by the tall gate of the Greek Embassy and Consulate. It was not a place I had ever wanted to visit and, for most of the time I’d been in Moscow, this sentiment was perfectly reciprocated by those on the other side of the railings. A Greek communist was
persona non grata
for officials and diplomats. By the time the prejudices fizzled out in the 1980s, it was too late for reconciliation. I had made my decisions long before. I watched a caretaker inside the railings slowly sweeping the snow in the courtyard. When he stopped for a cigarette, he looked at me, sized me up and then came over, speaking in accented Russian.

“If you’re wanting the consulate, Grandmother, it doesn’t open till ten.”

“I need a visa for Greece. I must have it today,” I replied in Greek and he moved closer.

“Where were you born?” he asked, speaking his native Greek. “If you’re Pontian, you need proof of your origins and then it’s at least ten working days.” When I told him I was born in Athens, he said then I wouldn’t need a visa.

“I lost my Greek citizenship long before you were born,” I told him. “Along with my home and the right to return. I will travel with the only passport I have, which is Russian.”

“Ah, a political,” he said, looking at me with mild
curiosity
. “Well, that’s all long gone now. We don’t see your kind these days. I thought most of you went back years ago.” What with the cold, the sleepless night and the thoughts that were filling my empty stomach with adrenaline, I didn’t feel too well. Sometimes my heart jumped about, speeding up and missing beats, and it was starting to play its disconcerting games.

“Young man, is there somewhere I can sit down? I’m a little weak.”

They were kind to me inside the consular building, bringing me a glass of water and some sweet coffee with a sesame-covered
koulouráki
, like my parents had at breakfast. I told them my son had died and they knew Nikitas’ work. They said, “A highly respected journalist. Condolences.” The Consul said he could arrange a
temporary
visa within the day, and then I heard them whispering in the next room.