Cartes Postales From Greece

by Victoria Hislop

‘It must be nice to be so appreciated,’ she said.

  ‘It is … I just wish I could have a few hours to forget it. A night without its voice.’

  They picked up their glasses and clinked them together.

  ‘Stin iyeia sas. To your health.’

  ‘Will you play that tune again … the one you were playing before. The first one?’ she asked.

  ‘Just for you,’ answered the violinist, finishing his drink.

  The exquisite notes of the Bach ‘Air’ rang out once again, sedate, unhurried, powerful.

  The people of Kalamata listened. Nobody stirred until the music ended. As people got up to go home, they noticed Magda with the violinist, their heads close in conversation.

  Eventually, when most of the tables were empty, Andreas emerged from the café with an industrial-sized tin of olives. The original contents were gone, but the tin was full to the top with coins, and he struggled to carry it even with two hands. The money had been left by customers for ‘Antoni’.

  But the violinist was nowhere to be seen.

  Magda had vanished, too. The table at which they had been sitting was empty.

  The next day, Andreas saw Magda in the street and, as she approached him, he heard her humming. It was a familiar tune. The distinctive notes lingered in his mind from the previous night.

  ‘Good morning, Magda,’ he said.

  She nodded, smiling at him.

  ‘It was a lovely tune, that one …’ he said.

  ‘“Air on a G String”,’ Magda said knowledgeably. ‘Bach.’

  ‘What a virtuoso, that man …’ said Andreas. ‘And people left so much money for him! More than three hundred euros. I need to give it to him.’

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Magda.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She nodded.

  ‘He won’t be coming back?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  Andreas noticed her fiddling with something on her wrist. As it was a warm day, she had pulled the sleeves of her cardigan up to her elbows and he saw coiled around her arm a length of what looked like silver wire.

  ‘We exchanged gifts,’ she said, responding to his quizzical look. ‘It’s a violin string. The G.’

  ‘And what did you give him?’ asked her cousin.

  She smiled enigmatically and walked on, resuming her tune. The notes of the famous Bach melody rose once again in the air.

  It seems that for one night only there was a connection between two people that made them both happy. I don’t believe that ‘Antoni’ made love to a woman in every town, but when there was someone whose response and openness to music was similar to Magda’s, perhaps it happened. I am certain that Magda was not the only one on his route to be seduced by his Stradivarius.

  I imagine that Magda will always keep the violin string. A metal G is indestructible, so there is no reason why she would not have this wrapped round her wrist for the rest of her life as a reminder of that night of happiness. She was joyful for the experience itself, rather than regretful for its transience. If only love could always be as free of pain. As I write this, love seems to be a force that has made me both sad and mad.

  Just for a while, I long to be like Antoni, travelling without a heavy heart, or cheerful like Magda and happy to stay in the same place. I will keep striving for one or the other, but it shocks me how difficult I am finding it to turn off the tap of my sorrow and regret.

  For months I avoided listening to music. It had triggered too much emotion in me. Not that you and I had any special connection through music but, for me, music (especially the violin) has a direct link to the heart. I have even left a café once or twice because they were playing something sentimental and I could feel myself beginning to lose control of my feelings. I downloaded some Bach sonatas the night after I was told the story of Antoni and Magda, and they now keep me company in the car. They include ‘Air on a G String’, of course. Little by little, I will bring some other music into my life, like a convalescing man gradually reintroducing some richer foods into his diet. I will have to be ready, though.

  My week or so in gentle, unpretentious Kalamata came to an end. I travelled north again, two hundred kilometres up the coast to Patras. It was a beautiful journey, and a perfect autumn day. I stopped at Olympia on the way and stood on the running track. Like every tourist, I imagined the roaring of the crowd.

  On a map of Greece, there are dozens of places marked as ancient sites, many of them temples and palaces which are thousands of years old but now merely skeletons of the originals. Some are recognisable structures, such as the Parthenon, but many are merely rows of stones on the ground, the only traces that survive of a wall or a temple. For some people, these remains are the primary reason to visit this country.

  Something I have noticed on my travels is that the next generation of ruins is already in the making. They are not marked on the map, and they don’t appear in guidebooks, but Greece is full of them. Empty, derelict buildings are to be found in every town and village. Some look as if they were built a few hundred years ago but others seem only a few decades old. Often they have been abandoned because inheritance arrangements left them divided an impossible number of ways and no single individual will take responsibility. But this is not always the case. Most buildings are created with optimism and an eye to the future, so the presence of a plethora of buildings with dark and often glassless windows always intrigues me. Behind each one of these strange, eerie places must be an explanation for its state of ruin.

  This story was told to me by an old couple sitting at the adjacent table in a Patras taverna. Not far away was a huge eyesore of an empty hotel and, although the couple had not lived in the town for long, they were keen to tell me what they had heard.

  NEVER ON A TUESDAY

  There are some Greeks who do not plan anything of the least importance on a Tuesday. This was the day of the week on which the great city of Constantinople, the most significant place in Christendom, fell to the Turks. It may have been more than five hundred years ago, but the 1453 catastrophe still casts a shadow. It is an event that some people think of every day, and on Tuesdays the ‘memory’ is especially stirred.

  Constantinople, still referred to by many as i poly, ‘the city’, had been under siege by the Ottoman forces for forty days. As the Greeks tried to repel the attackers outside their walls, they witnessed a series of terrible portents: a lunar eclipse, an icon of the Virgin slipping from its platform as she was processed round the city, and a violent thunderstorm. As the Turks finally broke into the city, on Tuesday, 29 May, men, women and children were butchered, but some felt that the greatest atrocity of all was the desecration of the basilica of Agia Sofia and the massacre of the priests and congregation who were worshipping inside. Even now, many Greeks cannot bring themselves to say the name that the Turks gave it: ‘Istanbul’, and on airport Departures and Arrivals boards the old name is still used.

  There are others, of course, who treat Tuesday as any other day and do not believe in such ‘superstitious nonsense’. This was the position taken by the Papazoglou family.

  On 29 May 1979, two hotels opened under their ownership. People were aghast. It was a Tuesday and the very anniversary itself.

  ‘How could they even think of it?’ muttered the old men in the city’s kafenions. ‘They could have waited just a day …’

  Over their pastries in the zacharoplasteion, the old ladies said the same. ‘Think of it! A Constantinople family, of all things!’

  Apostolos Papazoglou had been among those who fled Istanbul in 1955, during a pogrom against the city’s remaining Greek population. The violence against his community meant that Papazoglou had no choice but to leave his home and a popular guesthouse. He and his young wife, Melina, arrived in Greece with nothing but their two small sons and a handful of keepsakes that they had managed to carry.

  Papazoglou had a family to feed and immediately began looking for opportunities. He found
his way to Patras, where he and his family could see the sea from where they lived, just as they had back in Constantinople. He worked long days in a kafenion and, for a few hours each night, as a porter at the docks, earning enough to feed his family and even to build up some savings.

  During the military dictatorship in the late 1960s, tourist hotels were opened as a way to boost the economy. When the junta ended, and freedom for tourism increased, there was exponential growth in the industry. Papazoglou took his chance.

  Foreigners were flocking in to enjoy the climate and the light, and everything that the Mediterranean had to offer. Even the inflated currency had its charm, and people enjoyed paying thousands of drachmas for a beer, especially when they worked out it cost just a few pence. They felt like millionaires.

  Apostolos observed with interest as a very plain-looking hotel, the Xenia, began to thrive. It was close to the beach but offered the bare minimum in the way of comfort. Whenever he strolled past, he saw the German guests lined up on cheap sun-loungers, enjoying little more than what nature handed out for free. They were satisfied with sun, sea and sand, cold local beer and cheap meals. For a northern European who had never before tasted taramasalata, the zing of cod’s roe was a life-changing moment, as was the moment when they first bit into fresh watermelon.

  Apostolos took out a loan on a small strip of land nearby. He built a similar hotel, very plain, no frills. The beds were narrow, the rooms were small and the curtains did not meet. Sometimes the hot-water system did not work, but in the heat of summer few complained. It was part of Greece’s charm.

  By the end of the first summer, he had already made plans for a second hotel. And for five years, he built an additional one each winter. Every season, they were full to capacity, from Easter until the end of October.

  Papazoglou continued to keep up with demands from the tourist operators, who were now looking for greater comfort and higher-specification accommodation. In the space of two decades, the number of guests multiplied twenty-fold, as did his profits and financial forecasts. He had invested in undeveloped land on coastal strips before many others had noticed its potential. Most had been thinking only of urban or industrial development.

  His luxury-hotel empire spread around the coastal resorts of Greece, and to the islands.

  His two sons, Manos and Stephanos, were now in their twenties. For a decade they had spent their summers playing in various beach resorts that were part of the luxury brand their father had created, living on room service and Coca-Cola, and had never in their lives made a bed. They had no memory of sleeping head to toe on a divan in their parents’ one-bedroom Patras apartment. These days, they constantly bickered with each other.

  Their mother had always made them feel like gods. They were praised even when they did badly at school, and grew up thinking they were beyond the reach of rules. It was not their fault for being spoiled. They were simply victims of an over-indulgent mother, and an older father who was too preoccupied with making money to notice them.

  As Papazoglou’s seventy-fifth birthday approached, he was puzzling over what would happen next to his business. He wanted to retire, but he did not want to see his hotel group divided. Nor did he want to leave it automatically to Manos, as everyone expected. He was the elder of the two, but that did not make him more deserving. Papazoglou secretly believed that Stephanos had the greater charm and was better suited to the role.

  ‘Why don’t you set them a test?’ suggested Melina Papazoglou. ‘Find out who will do a better job, and decide who becomes head of the business that way.’

  Old Papazoglou agreed.

  On his birthday, 13 October, he took an old drachma coin out of his desk drawer and joined his family to celebrate in a smart restaurant in town. As a rich chocolate gateau was being served, he silenced the argument Manos and Stephanos were having about football with an announcement. He had two sites in Patras that he had never developed. One was close to its busy port and the other was outside town on a stretch of sand. The coin would decide who took which plot; whichever of them developed a more successful hotel would take over their father’s entire empire.

  As Papazoglou tossed his drachma in the air, the waiters eavesdropping on their conversation muttered quietly. No such decisions should be made on the thirteenth of any month, they said. The number was unlucky the world over, but even more so in Greece. The digits of 1453 added up to thirteen. Choosing tonight for the coin toss was not merely ignorance. ‘It’s pure stupidity,’ said the maître d’, under his breath.

  The coin decided that the elder son, Manos (heads), should have the site close to the port, and Stephanos (tails) would have the beach plot.

  ‘Both of these have great potential, so let’s see what you can do,’ said Papazoglou. ‘In two years’ time, I’ll look at your balance sheets. Whoever is ahead, even by ten drachmas, will take over.’

  Both boys had left school at the age of sixteen and done no further studying. What was the point in pushing themselves to the limit at university when they had a rich father and knew what business they were destined for? With the poor grades they had achieved, few universities would have admitted them in any case.

  Each had assumed that half the business would eventually slide into their hands. They were shocked by the test their father had decided to set them. It was daunting, and it put them in a vicious, all-or-nothing competition with each other.

  Manos, being older, felt he had one up on his brother. He was the one with his late grandfather’s name, so he was inevitably his grandmother’s favourite and had been even more spoiled for that reason. It annoyed him that Stephanos always had prettier girlfriends, but he was scornful of their low level of intelligence. Manos constantly fought with his weight (he had inherited his father’s short stature) but at the same time prided himself on being a gourmet and a lover of fine wines.

  Stephanos was indisputably better-looking. He had inherited his mother’s perfectly proportioned features and had a physique to match. Sport was his passion and he played football and water polo for the town. As Manos jealously observed, there was always an adoring woman clinging to his arm.

  Manos decided that tourists were not going to be his main clientele. He wanted to make money twelve months of the year, and in order to do this he focused on businesspeople, commercial travellers and even the men who worked in the docks. These were all people with cash to spend, and Manos decided to attract them with something more sophisticated than they were used to in this workaday town.

  On his site, there was already a vast, empty office block. It was like a huge box, with holes cut for windows. There were no other architectural features. He was faced with a choice, either to demolish it, which was a huge and costly process, or to convert this existing building into a hotel. The latter was by far the best option: faster and cheaper.

  With a ruler, a set square and a large, blank sheet of paper, it took him twenty minutes to draw up his vision. It was a mediaeval castle. As a child, he had been taken on a visit to the old castle at Nafplio, and this was his inspiration. It was solid and square, and had turrets and crenellations. Hotel Pyrgos would be his own personal fortress.

  While the outside was being adapted and balconies added, he started on the interior. Old office spaces were divided and subdivided with thin partition walls and bathrooms were installed. The most important spaces were on the ground floor. This was where his profit would be made.

  A focal point of the reception rooms would be the murals, pseudo-classical but with an erotic undertone. As well as ensuring that the hotel had the best ‘fine dining’ in Patras, there was to be a series of small bar areas for music and dancing, and one for a ‘private’ club, where gambling would take place.

  Manos commissioned copies of Botticelli paintings (more pastiche than facsimile) for the gambling room, and he asked for the figures to be even more scantily clad than in the originals. The hostesses would be similarly dressed (or undressed, as he joked to his friends).

&nb
sp; The exterior of the hotel was solid-looking and the ground-floor rooms were luxurious, with no expense spared. Manos was satisfied that he had got his market just right and also that he was winning in the race against time.

  As a very keen swimmer, it seemed appropriate that Stephanos should build a beach hotel. He was starting from scratch and needed to get to work as soon as possible. He had just over six months, until the beginning of summer, to construct a building and get it fitted out in time for the start of the tourist season.

  Using the model that had first inspired his father, a very plain, unadorned style, with simple rooms all overlooking the sea, his beachside hotel, the Thalassa, would soon be ready to open. The building went up in record time. The foundations were shallow and the walls made of little more than a single sheet of plyboard, but everyone who came to stay would spend most of their day on the beach and their evening in a local bar. He had spent the minimum on construction, and this would be to his advantage on the balance sheet.

  As soon as he knew his brother was planning the opening of the Pyrgos for 29 May, Stephanos aimed for the same date. Two rival launch parties took place on that night. Apostolos Papazolglou went to the Pyrgos first, and his wife to the Thalassa. Then they swapped locations.

  The first summer seemed to go well for both sons. In terms of profit margin, their father was impressed and surprised by what they had both achieved and, to his sons’ relief, did not look any deeper into their businesses.

  Manos always hid from his father the truth of what was taking place behind the scenes. He almost hid it from himself. But a few months after the opening, he had a ‘visit’. Giorgos Kourtis had been an occasional customer and seemed to enjoy what he found. He had even slipped into the private room once or twice to do some gambling and had spent the evening there with one of the girls. However, it soon became clear what his real interest was. Kourtis owned a rival hotel in the centre of town, and Manos heard that he was losing some of his business to the Pyrgos. He was also a man with powerful connections.