Cartes Postales From Greece

by Victoria Hislop

  One night, perhaps five months after opening, the hotel’s electricity failed. It was manageable at first. Candles were fetched, and Manos persuaded his clientele that it was ‘romantic’. When the electricians were called, it seemed that there was no fault in the system. Manos had simply been cut off. And there was nothing he could do to get reconnected, apart from pay five million drachmas. The same then happened to the water, with the same fee to reconnect. The prices were extortionate. It was, as he came to realise, extortion.

  After that, there was the visit from the police. They were heavy-handed and destructive in their search for evidence of gambling, which, of course, they found. They knew exactly where to look. And they returned regularly. Manos soon realised that only a hefty bribe into the right hands could prevent these visits. There was no choice if he wanted to survive.

  To his dismay, Manos’s figures soon showed that his outgoings far exceeded his incomings. The random power cuts were atmospheric enough in the summer, but in the winter they left the rooms unheated. Occupancy dwindled during the colder months. And when the winds blew in across the Ionian, the temperatures inside could drop to less than ten degrees. The walls began to drip with condensation, and Botticelli’s muses began to flake away. Guest numbers fell drastically. As the new summer season began, the hotel, which like a true castle was meant to last for ever, began to deteriorate.

  Manos attempted to avert financial disaster. The most important thing for him was the balance sheet that he would have to present to his father in October. It was now only four months away. He had taken out several different loans in order to keep paying out for the extortions and the bribes. He knew that Kourtis was masterminding all these troubles, and that if he did not cooperate he could kiss the hotel and his future goodbye. Already, he was buried under so much debt that he could not sleep at night, and in the day the stress induced regular attacks of asthma. His weight had increased to such an extent that he could scarcely get to the second floor of the hotel where his office was based, and he could not afford the cost to fix the lift. His girlfriend of six months (a record) made her excuses and left him. Initially attracted by his status as owner of the grandest hotel in town, she had realised the price was too high.

  Manos’s desperation was made worse by news that business at the Thalassa was booming. Stephanos only had to be open for six months of the year to make his profits. Guests were given very little, but they gave a lot in return, drinking cold beer and fizzy drinks all day at the beach bar and paying inflated prices to water-ski.

  One warm June night, so sultry that every guest in the Thalassa had their windows thrown open wide, the earth began to rumble. It was around four in the morning, when dreams are deep and the sun is not yet up. The sleepers heard nothing at first, but they felt the force of the earthquake; it shook them from their beds. On the Richter scale it was not a significant quake (a mere 4.3), but the floors shifted several millimetres each way, back and forth, back and forth. There were no fire escapes and no instructions for what to do or where to go. In any case, there was no time.

  The building crumbled to powder, the fifth floor tumbling into the fourth floor, which tumbled into the third floor, leaving a jumbled heap of concrete, metal railings, beds and bodies. Some of the outer walls remained, but most floors disintegrated. It took no longer than a few minutes for the hotel to teeter and fall.

  Stephanos himself did not live in the hotel, but he was woken by the earthquake and sprinted down the road to see the Thalassa already in ruins. Like a hit-and-run driver, his instinct was to flee as fast as he could in the other direction. There were over two hundred guests staying. Thirty of them were killed. When the forensic team investigated the wreckage of the building, it was clear that it had been built without any regard for the safety of its guests. The bereaved families, along with the one hundred or so who were wounded, took Stephanos to court for negligence. Everything in the construction of the Thalassa was substandard. Only one other hotel in the area, the Pyrgos, had been affected by the earthquake. It suffered a single cracked window.

  A broken window was the least of Manos’s problems. He was finally facing the fact that his debts were unpayable. The interest on the interest on the interest was more than he could pay in one lifetime, even if the hotel remained full. On the same day that Stephanos was charged, Manos’s final guest departed and the last remaining member of staff left, unpaid for six months.

  Manos walked into the bar and took a bottle off the shelf. It was the only decent whisky left and, unscrewing the cap, he took long gulps straight from it. Still holding the half-empty Johnnie Walker bottle, he walked unsteadily down the corridor, his footsteps echoing on the stone floor.

  Someone was hammering on the main reception door. On tiptoe to muffle the sound, Manos stealthily made his way to a small office from which he could glimpse who was outside. It was a local police officer, the same one who had been coming regularly in the past months. He stood there, arms folded, and Manos noticed him checking the time. The watch that Apostolos Papazoglou had given his son for his twenty-fifth birthday was on the man’s wrist. Last time Orestes Sakaridis visited, when Manos was already out of funds, he had accepted the watch in lieu of money. Manos was incensed to see him yet again. He had nothing left to give, and nothing to lose. He unbolted the door and threw it open.

  Sakaridis could see the anger in Manos Papazoglou’s eyes.

  ‘What the fuck do you want?’

  ‘I think you know the answer,’ said the police officer, smirking. ‘The usual.’

  Manos lurched drunkenly towards Sakaradis, swinging the bottle towards his face.

  The police officer avoided the blow and grabbed Manos’s shoulders to contain him, but Manos wrenched one arm free and rammed his elbow hard into the man’s stomach. His entire weight was behind the punch.

  The officer was badly winded and fell clumsily on to his back, the side of his head striking the marble step. He lay very, very still.

  Manos, panting hard, took several moments to regain his breath.

  The street in front of the hotel was as deserted as the Pyrgos itself and, without touching the inert body, he turned on his heels and walked calmly towards his car. It was parked close by in the street. He took off, his foot hard down on the accelerator, along the coast road, no thought in his head except that he must get away.

  He passed through several red lights, almost losing control on a bend and narrowly missing a police car. With lights flashing, siren screaming, it gave chase and forced him to pull over to the side of the road.

  The two policemen immediately smelled the alcohol on his breath and made him get into the back of their car. As they drove along, they picked up on the radio that the body of their colleague had been found on the steps of the Pyrgos.

  Apostolos Papazoglou’s seventy-seventh birthday was not as he had imagined. It was to have been the day of his retirement, when his hotel empire would be given over to one of his sons. Instead, he had a different choice to make. His sons were both facing trial, and proceedings were to begin on the same day in Athens. Which one would he attend? His wife suggested tossing a coin.

  The people of Patras had not forgotten the date of the hotel openings. When the verdict of manslaughter was given in both cases (seven months later, on 29 May), they nodded their heads knowingly. The bill for compensating injured guests and bereaved families could not be covered by the sale of the entire hotel empire. Apostolos Papazoglou was obliged to declare himself bankrupt.

  For many years, the crumbling remains of the two hotels stood like ghostly reminders of the sack of Constantinople. The power of superstition and religious belief tightened its hold.

  Whenever they passed by, the old people tut-tutted. ‘They should have known better,’ they said. ‘That day must never be forgotten!’

  I kept thinking of the day I first met you. It was a Tuesday.

  Patras has much lovelier things than these desolate buildings. There is a very spacious square (wit
h a nineteenth-century theatre designed by Ernst Ziller), elegant, pedestrian streets with good shops, and the hustle and bustle of a port, with boats to some islands.

  When I arrived there, I had been in Greece for nearly two months, including the fortnight I had spent in Athens researching, and was beginning to learn a bit more Greek. I had got beyond just being able to exchange greetings and order food and could now even read newspaper headlines, though there never seemed to be any good news. The economy was as bad as ever and I knew I was very fortunate being able to travel so freely. As the sun began to lose its strength on those late-October evenings, I could see that life was becoming harder for most people in Greece. Sometimes the general dilapidation depressed me and the decaying state of so many buildings seemed to reflect the weakening fabric of the country. If I made the mistake of trying to interpret the graphs and diagrams on the front page of a newspaper, I could not see how this country could ever dig itself out of debt, let alone start to rebuild.

  For the first time, I had the experience of someone coming up to me asking for money and realising that they were not a newly arrived immigrant (though that happened, too) but an elderly Greek whose pension had been slashed to below subsistence level, or someone with a family and no money to feed them with. Such a moment always jolted me out of my self-pity. I could eat and drink any time I wanted, but this was not the case for many people. The frequency with which I saw a Greek person going through a bin was increasing. How could I wallow in my own situation? There were moments when I despised myself, knowing that other people had much bigger problems than mine. My affliction was an emotional one, but I could at least survive.

  Something that never seems to be affected by the economic crisis is the Greek Orthodox Church. I saw whole rows of shut-up shops but never a closed-up church. Large, medium, small, they are open, gleaming with treasure, and never without priests and the pious. There is a vast one in Patras. It was consecrated in 1974, and I found its exterior so off-puttingly vulgar that at first I did not bother to visit. Then a local person told me that the inside was well worth seeing.

  Beforehand, I went into a nearby shop to see if I could find a guidebook. It was a huge shop selling icons of every saint you can imagine, and the woman who ran it was friendly and cheerful, asking my name and then insisting I buy an icon of Agios Antonis.

  Everything about her was exaggerated. She was like a Disney cartoon character, with big red lips, a tiny waist and enormous hips, and she told me the story of the church. Apparently, when the apostle Andrew arrived in the town two thousand years ago to tell everyone about Christ’s resurrection, he learned that the Roman governor’s wife was sick. He healed her and, as a result, she became a convert to Christianity and tried to persuade her husband to turn his back on the Roman gods. She told him that they were false.

  The governor was furious that his wife was preaching this new and dangerous religion to him and had Andrew tortured, before executing him on an x-shaped cross. The apostle’s remains disappeared but, years later, some parts were brought back to the city, along with relics of the cross on which he died.

  The shopkeeper described the church with such joy and enthusiasm that I left the shop with high expectations of what I would find inside. Just as I shut the door behind me, she rushed out on to the pavement. I had forgotten to pick up my icon. ‘And I must tell you one other thing!’ she said breathlessly. ‘Saint Andrew still performs miracles! The power of his church changed my father’s life. It made him a new man. ‘Itan thavma! A miracle! A miracle!’

  ‘LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION’

  ‘ME EISENENKES EMAS EIS PEIRASMON’

  Some people still preferred the nearby Byzantine church that had housed a relic of the saint’s finger. This tiny building was now in the shadow of the brand-new church, about which some of the elderly ladies were far from enthusiastic.

  The basilica was huge and white, like a giant cake, and its dimensions alone were impressive. It was one of the biggest churches in Greece and bore no comparison with the intimate space of the older, darker building that had originally been built to honour Saint Andrew.

  When it was first consecrated, older people saw only the drawbacks. Even before they got to the entrance they complained; it took them an age to get from the street and across the marble forecourt. Once inside, the journey from the candle box and then to the icon seemed to take another five minutes. It was very time-consuming, but they felt obliged to do their duty to the new church.

  For most, the moment of opening the door and going inside was one of surprise and wonderment. Visitors, who came from all over Greece and further afield, were amazed. The interior was breathtaking.

  The architect had wanted his cathedral to embody ‘the Light of the World’ in every sense. Sunshine flooded in from every side of the building, from windows cut into the huge dome above, and on the lower levels, too, and through the glass in the doors. On every wall, the gold leaf of the mosaics reflected the light and brightened the church. In the centre hung a mighty candelabra on which more than five hundred bulbs burned, sending out a dazzling brightness.

  As well as light, he wanted to convey the life of the world and the glory of creation. His ambition, faith and budget for the church had no limitations. Dazzling images of birds and beasts adorned every gleaming wall, fronds and flowers embellished pillars and arches, and images of the saint’s life decorated myriad surfaces with colour and movement. The very city that had martyred Saint Andrew now welcomed him back with open arms and glorified him. The whole building seemed to cry out: ‘Forgive us!’

  They had created magnificent silver reliquaries for his crumbling bones, which drew thousands of pilgrims to pay their respects and to prostrate themselves before the pieces of this man who had been in the presence of Jesus Christ. They came into contact with something that perhaps He had touched, too.

  Someone for whom life had changed for the worse when the basilica opened was Maria Leontidis. For years now, she had cleaned the tiny Byzantine church next door, knowing that the low light would reveal neither dust nor cobweb. In the summer, she spent much of the day on the little bench outside the church, enjoying a cigarette and a frappé. In the winter, when she had flicked her feather duster once or twice round the reliquary, she warmed herself in the nearby zacharoplasteion, returning to lock up again once people had finished coming for the day.

  She was invited to clean the new church when it opened that summer. At the age of sixty, she did not feel ready to stop working and it was a matter of pride to accept the new job.

  In the cool space of the basilica, a pleasant breeze kept the flames of the candles flickering and the congregation comfortable, but she found herself overheating, the heat rising and boiling over like coffee in a briki.

  When she began the ‘new’ job, it was not long after her brother’s funeral. They had never been close but, nevertheless, she was observing the protocol of wearing black for forty days. Although it was hot, all the women in the family felt obliged to honour the tradition.

  ‘It will take me a month just to polish all the candlesticks,’ she said tearfully to her granddaughter, Pelagia, that evening. ‘And it took me all day to sweep the floor, and by the time I’d gone round once, it needed doing all over again.’

  Maria already looked back with nostalgia to the old days of cleaning the small church, when she could tidy the whole place in an hour. Now it took that amount of time just to empty out the dead candles. There were three thousand chairs, and every single one of them caught the dust in its nooks and crannies.

  For a few weeks she managed, but soon the strain began to show. Her legs were as veined as the marble pillars in the new church, and her face as crimson as the strip of fresh carpet that led up the steps towards the altar. Her aches and pains intensified: knees, wrists, ankles, elbows. Every joint in her body ached. This new church was killing her.

  One day when she woke up, her back was so stiff she could not get out of bed. She called Pelagia, c
rying with pain and anxiety. If the church was unattended for a day or two, she would never get on top of the dirt again. Already she pictured the white marble steps blackened with footprints, thousands of little candle stumps sticking out of the sand in their trays and the glass that protected icons and relics opaque with lip stains.

  ‘Don’t worry, Yia-yia,’ said Pelagia. ‘You need some time off. I’ll go and clean for you.’

  Pelagia hastened to the church. She knew that there were plenty of women who would be happy to take over her grandmother’s job and she did not want her absence to give them the opportunity.

  The Leontidis family lived on the other side of the city. For Maria, the church was a long bus ride away, but Pelagia, despite the eight-hour shift she had done in a bar the night before, walked and arrived much earlier than her yia-yia would have done.

  She saw the priest leaving as she crossed the square. It was nine o’clock, and he had just unlocked.

  Pelagia found the huge church empty. Her grandmother had described to her where all the cleaning materials were kept, so she was hard at work within minutes. She started by methodically polishing the tarnished silver. Young and energetic, it took her less than a quarter of the time her yia-yia would have required. By ten o’clock, the gleam of the silver matched the glint of the gold leaf. Pelagia even had time to stand back to admire the paintings and mosaics.

  When the priest returned from his visit to a nearby kafenion, he blinked. A shaft of sunlight was coming through one of the upper windows in the dome and was falling directly on to a huge silver candlestick. It threw back a dazzling beam of almost supernatural brightness and, for a moment, he believed it was a divine sign rather than a perfect alignment of sunshine and polished metal.

  A second later the sun had moved, and the moment passed. The priest went into his office behind the sanctuary and busied himself with the church’s paperwork. There was always plenty.