The House on Paradise Street (5 page)

After the friends and relations drifted away I took a blanket up to the terrace and lay down on one of the old wicker recliners that were beginning to disintegrate, covering myself from the evening chill. It was something I often did with Nikitas, whose life was a constant movement towards the open air and away from the confines of a room or house. Whether it was to eat, talk or sleep, he considered it to be improved if he had the sky overhead instead of a ceiling. He enjoyed dragging a mattress onto the terrace so we could fall asleep under the stars, stumbling drowsily to our bedroom when the sun rose high enough to wake us. We both loved the terrace and though it was also Orestes’ domain, next to his studio, we had turned it into a beautiful roof garden, full of plants. Each year, on Nikitas’ name day, I gave him a tall olive tree in a pot and there were now fifteen up there, marking our life together, their trunks growing sturdier as my time in Greece lengthened. The oldest were starting to acquire what Seferis called “the wrinkles of our fathers” on their bark, while the newest was a spindly sapling still tied to a cane. The older trees produced a crop of large Kalamon olives each autumn. They fell, making wine-coloured stains on the floor, until Chryssa taught me how to preserve them and I gathered jarfuls each year.

Athens looked peaceful with its orange glow and rumble of traffic. I could see over the green expanses around the Zappeion and the National Garden to the looming mass of Lycabettus, with its white church on the summit. I was reassured by the familiarity of this scene, less ravaged by the terror that had gripped me earlier on. But it was hard to believe what some of the visitors had said, trying to be comforting, referring to their own, older griefs: “It will get better.” “It will pass.” Before long, Orestes came out of his studio smoking a joint, and tried to disguise his discomfort by offering it to me with a casual air. I suppose he assumed I would refuse – I had told him that the stuff didn’t agree with me, and years ago, when Nikitas and I first noticed that Orestes was smoking, we tried arguing that weed is bad for the brain, in the hope of putting him off. This time however, I took the handmade cigarette from him and inhaled.

“My cousins brought it from the village today,” said Orestes. “That’s why it’s so sweet. They’ve got plantations hidden in the fields – it’s becoming quite a crop for them. They’ve found their ‘medicine’.” Blowing out the smoke, I tasted the bitterness on my tongue as warmth spread through my limbs and gravity weighted me down. Neither of us spoke. Orestes lay near me, his long hair spread across the dusty tiles, and we shared the joint until it was finished and I felt as immobile as the terracotta figures at the corners of the terrace.

Orestes reached his hand over and stroked my arm, then held it. I sensed his grasp as a sort of possessiveness in the vacuum left by Nikitas’ death. The king is dead, long live the king. Nikitas adored Orestes, but he could not help trying to dominate him. He would never admit it, but he envied his son for his youth and freedom – the sound of Orestes’ motorbike arriving at the back gate in the early hours of the morning was a provocation, the confrontation of the new to the old, the fast to the slow. If Nikitas liked to see himself as the anti-authoritarian rebel, he knew his son saw him as the system itself.

We stopped speaking and as I drifted in and out of sleep, I thought of myself twenty years earlier, like a foreign but well-known country. I was younger than Orestes when I first came to Greece. In 1988 Athens had been full of young men with wolfish expressions and black leather jackets, drinking Nescafé frappé and trying out their English on foreigners. “Europe” was thought to be a long way away. The city smelled of the
néphos
pollution cloud and Camel cigarettes. I had recently arrived and was preparing to go to the northern island of Thasos for my year of fieldwork.

I managed to acquire a room at the British School, an academic institution supporting British archaeological research in Greece, which also accepted a few anthropology students. The place was like a bizarre parallel universe. Outside the stone walls was fashionable Kolonaki, with its expensive boutiques and restaurants and the spill-out from the
neighbouring
Evangelismos Hospital – white-coated doctors smoking and groups of gypsies waiting on blankets by their vans. The school itself, however, was an Anglophone oasis with scented shrubberies, grand olive trees and tennis courts. Old stone buildings stood defiantly amidst the cement city’s impermanence. Redolent of boiled vegetables and waxed parquet, the school was home to visiting scholars with tight, bookish features, who spent hours in the panelled library amongst busts of bewhiskered dead men. It felt like a cross between an English boarding school and a Greek convent, and was rumoured to be a hotbed of undercover agents – the glamorous Minister of Culture and former actress, Melina Mercouri, had called for it to be shut down.

My days were divided between reading in the library and attending Greek classes. One evening, having nothing better to do, I attended a lecture on an archaeological dig, followed by drinks at the director’s house. I was introduced to a soignée Greek woman in her sixties, who spoke good English and wore pillar-box red lipstick that conjured up stars of the 1940s. She had a long association with the School, she explained. At the end of the party, she asked me to tea the next day and gave me a visiting card.
Alexandra Koftos
, it said, in swirling copperplate.
Odos Paradisou 17, Mets, Athina
. “I adore English tea.” She smiled
conspiratorially
, as if admitting some more sinister vice.

The following day I arrived in Paradise Street at 5 o’ clock as instructed. The road was quiet and tree-lined with
pastel-coloured
houses of varying ages and styles – quite different to the apartment blocks that dominate Athens. Number 17 was a solid, neo-classical building, painted cream, with dark green shutters, white pilasters and pretty terracotta roof decorations in the shapes of women’s heads and two female figures at the corners. Alexandra greeted me like a friend, kissing me and asking me not to call her Mrs Koftos as it reminded her of her long-gone mother-in-law. She drew me in through a shadowy hallway and into the ground floor apartment. I looked around, admiring the spacious
proportions
and the combination of light and solidity. The floors were covered with shiny, dark-red stone containing the pale remains of fossils (that years later, fascinated Tig: “ammonites and belemnites” she learned to chant when she was small).

“My parents built this house,” said Alexandra. “I’ve lived here all my life.”

We sat in the formal sitting room, with windows shut and layers of beige curtains thwarting sunshine and curious passers-by. The furniture was an inconsistent mix of heavy wooden pieces that Alexandra had inherited from her parents and the gilded reproduction Louis XIV that she preferred. Silver ornaments shone from dust-free occasional tables and cut-glass bowls were filled with Gioconda chocolates. It is still the same, with its aroma of polish and floor cleaner mixed with lemon sauce and cinnamon. She told me how she liked the English, indeed had a little English blood herself, from a grandmother.

“We owe a great deal to the English,” she said, as though I had contributed in some way. “After the war, they saved Greece. If it hadn’t been for them, we’d have ended up under the thumb of the communists. We’d have become a Soviet satellite like Bulgaria – God forbid!”

Alexandra led me through to the kitchen by the back courtyard to help her prepare the tea. A round-faced woman in a dark cotton dress sat at the table crocheting, not watching the small television that blasted out a religious programme featuring an aged priest. Chryssa spoke in Greek and though I didn’t understand very much, I thought I knew what she meant, with her kind expression and genuine smile. She brought out a syrupy lemon preserve, placed a thick coil of yellow peel on a saucer and poured me a glass of cold water from a bottle in the fridge. They seemed like eternal gestures of welcome to the stranger.

I carried the tray back to the sitting room and while Alexandra poured the tea, I looked at the silver-framed photographs placed here and there. One showed a family in what looked like the 1930s, with three children standing outside the house in Paradise Street. The father was sleek as a seal, in an elegant dark suit and waxed moustache; the mother graceful in pale silks, with hair styled into an angular bob. They looked content, though none smiled in the manner of modern photographs.

“This is me. The oldest.” Alexandra pointed to a girl of about twelve in a white frock with curling, light-coloured hair. She had an authoritative air and was holding the hand of a pretty young boy in shorts and white ankle socks.

“My brother and sister were lost years ago. Markos was such a darling. He died so young. A terrible waste.” She didn’t tell me anything about the serious, dark-haired girl leaning at an angle on the other side of the parents.

I also met Alexandra’s husband that first day. He came into the sitting room with the jaunty air and freshly combed hair of a man who has just woken from a long siesta. Taking in his sharp-creased trousers and slackening jowls, I guessed he was a well-preserved seventy.

“Spiros Koftos.” He introduced himself and I caught a blast of his aftershave as he squeezed my hand too tightly, and leaned in towards me. Alexandra told him about me in Greek and he looked me up and down, nodding in approval, as though inspecting a prospective purchase.

“English? Very nice. Very good,” he said to me in heavily accented English. “Welcome to Greece.” Spiros told his wife he was going out and swung around, leaving in military fashion, not quite clicking his heels.

“He’s going to the coffee shop,” Alexandra explained. “All his friends go there – in the morning for coffee and newspapers and in the afternoon for a little whisky and cards. At least it keeps them out of trouble.” She laughed, shaking her head slightly, as if the male sex were a
conundrum
it was not necessary to solve. Then she told me about her business – a clothes shop in Kolonaki called En Vogue (she pronounced it like “envog” and it was only much later that I realised what she meant). She was still involved, she said, though she no longer went in every day.

“I started off using my father’s old premises. Perifanis was known for making the best women’s clothes in Athens before the war and when we re-opened in the 1950s, it made sense to use the name, but in the ’60s we started bringing in ready-to-wear from Milan and Paris and when we moved to a better location I changed the name. We have a loyal clientele and we’re still making money.”

I liked Alexandra, though I couldn’t imagine what this
comme il faut
Athenian lady saw in a scruffy English student. With her tailored clothes, perfect manners and forthright opinions, she was not like anyone in my social circle. I was accustomed to doubt and questioning. Perhaps that is why I appreciated her certainties. She invited me to visit her several times, the last occasion being one morning shortly before I was due to leave for Thasos. Alexandra wanted to give me a tome about folklore in the Aegean written in the
undecipherable
formal Greek that was now defunct. It had fuzzy, grey photographs of men dressed up as goats with bells hanging from their clothes and women in headscarves gathered in circular threshing floors, performing obscure rituals.

Chryssa handed me a bulky, oily package containing pieces of cheese pie and a jar of sour cherry preserve, to keep me nourished in my island exile. She was just kissing me goodbye, when I saw a man’s face looking in through the kitchen window. Alexandra did not quite gasp, but her features became rigid as Chryssa unlocked the back door and welcomed him. I guessed he was in his early 40s, thick-set, though not fat, with a solidity that looked as though it came through will-power rather than exercise. He moved with an incongruous lightness that made me imagine he had just crept into the courtyard like a cat or a burglar. His almost blue-black hair was broken with grey at the front and dark brows ran in straight lines, giving him a somewhat piratical aspect. I saw him focus on me as he hugged Chryssa and she rubbed his back as though soothing a nervous horse.

“Aunt. How are you?” he asked without feeling. “I just came to collect some things from the store room.” Alexandra walked over and kissed the man on both cheeks, while he submitted to the greeting like a sullen boy. I was intrigued.

“Mond, this is my nephew Nikitas,” said Alexandra, without enthusiasm. “He has the apartment upstairs, but he doesn’t live there. He rents it out.” I shook Nikitas’ hand, finding the physical contact disturbing in a way I didn’t immediately recognise. I felt young and awkward and to disguise the fact, started to give a slightly formal account of why I had come to Greece. Nikitas looked amused.

“So, you’ve come to study us. Well, don’t believe anything they tell you and only half of what you see.” He laughed and I blushed. “Whatever you think you understand, the opposite will also be true. We Greeks won’t fit tidily into anybody’s scheme. It’s our nature. We’re a mess.” I wasn’t sure if he was mocking me.

“I was just leaving,” I said, wanting to get away from my confusion. He was close enough for me to smell him – something like cedar and green leaves.

“If you can give me five minutes, I’ll give you a lift. I have the car outside.”

“We could always call you a taxi if you prefer,” said Alexandra, a little too eagerly. Chryssa, too, was looking at me as though I was making a decision that would have repercussions.

Nikitas bounded up the fire escape, which twanged and rattled, returning a few minutes later with some books from the store room.

“Are you ready?” He smiled at me as though he had won when I said goodbye and thanked Alexandra and Chryssa, and left from the back door with him. We passed under the lemon tree and through the yard, emerging into the alleyway, where two cats were locked in urgent thrusting. They paused, looked at us briefly and then continued, pulled by a far more powerful force of nature than fear. The male was pressing down the female’s head with one paw and emitting a strange throaty sound. I avoided Nikitas’ eye and he got out a packet of cigarettes and lit up. He was just unlocking his car – a beaten up Lada jeep – when he stopped.