Cartes Postales From Greece

by Victoria Hislop

  Evangelia’s French rapidly improved, and her father could not object to their conversation as it was clear that Franz offered some kind of protection to the bar.

  Three years after they had marched in, the rumour began to circulate that the Germans were defeated and were to leave Greece. There was quiet celebration at the news, but many would not believe it until they saw the back of the soldiers. One night, Evangelia learned that it was true.

  The café was empty. Something was definitely taking place. She stood alone behind the bar, polishing glasses. Her father had not yet come down from the first-floor apartment for the evening. She replaced the glasses carefully and straightened the bottles on the shelf, her back to the door. The bell gave a brisk ting as someone came in.

  Evangelia span round. It was Franz. In his hands was a small pile of books. He advanced towards her.

  ‘They are for you. You know we are leaving?’

  Evangelia came out from behind the bar. He held out the well-worn books to her and she took them from him, glancing at their spines and blinking back her tears.

  Balzac, Flaubert, Racine, Poèmes d’Amour.

  They were all the books that he had been reading in these past months. She looked down at them and then up at him, her emotion undisguised.

  ‘I can’t take these with me,’ he said.

  Evangelia spontaneously put the books down and threw her arms around him, feeling the metal buttons of his uniform through her thin dress.

  Franz instinctively tried to pull away, aware of what would happen if her father or another soldier appeared, but her innocence and the flowery scent of her hair intoxicated him. In all these years, they had never even stood close and the human contact and sweetness of a feminine embrace were unfamiliar. As she looked up into his face, he bent down to kiss her.

  Evangelia’s feelings for this young soldier poured out in her response. This was the last time she was ever going to see him and great waves of sorrow, even of grief, washed over her.

  For both of them, there was a sense of discovery but also of panic.

  ‘Vous allez revenir?’ Evangelia asked, barely concealing her desperation. ‘You will come back?’

  Franz did not answer.

  They stood in the middle of the café looking at each other, until Evangelia took his hand and led him into the shadows. Her need to kiss him one last time was urgent.

  Gone was the timidity of their first embrace. In its place came the raw passion of a farewell kiss. This fair-haired soldier had never been her enemy and, now that his country had been defeated, there seemed nothing more natural than to show him her love.

  In the darkness of a small storeroom, Franz laid down his jacket for Evangelia to lie on and, until the sound of her father’s footsteps disturbed them, they made love in the darkness.

  Wordlessly, but holding Evangelia’s fingers until the final moment when he had to let go, Franz left quietly through another door. This moment in both their lives passed as quickly as any other.

  Having straightened her clothes and tidied her hair with her fingers, Evangelia went out into the bar. The books were still lying on the table.

  ‘Whose are those?’ asked her father gruffly.

  ‘They’re mine,’ she said, quickly picking them up and holding them tight to her chest.

  Over the following months, Evangelia’s family struggled, as did every other ordinary family in Greece, to rebuild their lives. There was great joy that the Germans had gone but, as the Greek people surveyed the devastation they had left in their wake, there was little celebration. It was a matter of survival and reconstruction. Evangelia’s brothers were swept up in a new wave of fighting between Left and Right, and it was several years before either returned to Thessaloniki.

  Greece was in chaos. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks had died during the occupation, many of them from starvation. Everyone was undernourished. Perhaps for this reason, it was only in her seventh month that people outside the family noticed Evangelia’s pregnancy. Both her parents accepted it (they had no choice), and it was easy for the family to fabricate the story of a fiancé who had never made it back from the front – and, in any case, a fatherless baby was not so unusual during these dark days of loss.

  When the baby was born, she was adored by everyone around her. To have new life in the midst of the dust and the rubble was a blessing, they all said.

  Efi was never told the identity of her father. She grew up in a period of relative peace and, in time, had her own children, naming her eldest daughter after her mother.

  Nature kindly made the decision that Efi should look exactly like her mother. There was not a trace of her father’s blond, Teutonic looks and it was in this way that the secret had been kept.

  Later, on the afternoon of 25 March, Evangelia went to church, as she always did on her name day, and lit a candle to her lost Franz. He had not promised to return but she had always hoped that, one day, she would see him again. Whenever she saw a party of German tourists she scanned their faces, looking for his sapphire eyes and gentle smile.

  After her ritual, she went by taxi down to the port and stood outside the now abandoned café. Just as she did every year on this day, she took an old and battered book from her handbag and silently read a particular poem. Even now, she longed to see the man she loved. Even now, she dreamed of his return.

  Présence de Dieu

  Max Jacob

  Une nuit que je parcourais le ciel amour

  Une nuit de douce mère

  Où les étoiles étaient les feux du retour

  Et diaprées comme l’arc-en-ciel

  Une nuit que les étoiles disaient:

  ‘Je reviens!’

  In the Presence of God

  One night as I surveyed a lover’s sky

  A gentle mother night

  When the stars were lights to guide a homecoming

  Dappled like a rainbow

  I read into the stars these words:

  ‘I will return!’

  I looked up Max Jacob as soon as I could. He was a Jewish poet and painter, a friend of Apollinaire and Picasso, and he died in March 1944 en route to Auschwitz. I imagine Evangelia found that out, too.

  The German occupation left the country completely stripped of resources and money. The troops (perhaps Franz Dieter included) destroyed as much as they could on their way out of Greece when they retreated in 1944. I met plenty of people on my journey, old and young, who believe that Germany should pay what they still owe.

  The ‘unpaid’ cost of Nazi war crimes, damage to the infrastructure and the forced loan extracted from the Greek banks are said to amount to the equivalent of nearly 300 billion euros today. Such a figure would help pay off the debt that cripples Greece now.

  Thessaloniki itself is particularly scarred by the Holocaust. More than fifty thousand people, the majority of Greece’s Jewish population, were forcibly deported by train to Auschwitz. Very few escaped this horror. Perhaps some of them might have met Max Jacob, if he had not died on his way there. The hardship that Thessaloniki faced is almost impossible to imagine on a sunny day in spring, but the memories still linger.

  I stayed in Thessaloniki for many more days than I had planned. It is a beautiful and fascinating city, lively from dawn until dawn. The huge university fills it with vibrancy and youth. I became friendly with a curator in the Archaeological Museum who invited me to a series of lectures and events, and I was even asked to give a seminar. I was rejoining the world, and even had the energy and inspiration to finish the first draft of my book.

  One afternoon, when I was ambling through the cobbled alleyways of the Ladadika (an area of the city full of old olive-oil warehouses), I heard a sound that took me back in time. It would have been very familiar to the teenaged Evangelia, before the German jackboot marched in.

  It was somewhere between piano and stringed instrument, with the occasional ting of a bell, like the chime of a triangle. It reminded me a little of rebetiko, the music that ori
ginated in Asia Minor, and I felt the stirrings of a strange, deep nostalgia for an era that I had not even lived through, a homesickness for somewhere I had never been.

  As I turned into the square, I saw the source of the music. It was a big, decorated wooden box on wheels, with a handle that its player was turning to make the noise. A laterna. The player was around seventy years old and very smartly turned out. Once I had dropped five euros into his upturned tambourine, he had all the time in the world to answer my questions.

  Tassos was his name, and he told me that laternas, barrel pianos, had been ubiquitous in the days before the gramophone and were the first mechanical way to produce music. For a century, they were glamorous and popular. The first ones were crafted in Constantinople by an Italian, hence La Torno, ‘the thing that turns’. Production more or less came to an end after the 1950s, and now they are a less common sight.

  He lifted the lid so that I could see the mechanism. As the handle was turned, a wooden cylinder pierced with hundreds of steel pegs rotated. When a peg came into contact with one of a row of spring-loaded hammers, the hammer rose, before falling back on to a string to sound the note.

  It was finely crafted, but what intrigued me more than anything was the black-and-white photograph framed by carnations on the side of the box.

  ‘They always have a picture,’ Tassos told me. ‘But this picture is very sentimental. It meant a great deal to the owner …’

  ‘So you aren’t the owner?’ I asked.

  ‘I am now,’ he said. ‘But originally it belonged to Panagiotis.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘The happiest man I ever knew,’ he replied. ‘The story really begins in 1954, but I’ll start in 2010. Our country’s finances were already in a mess. I was going around the tavernas selling packets of tissues and cigarette lighters and, suddenly, people didn’t even have cash to spare for those. The only person for whom the coins kept flowing was my friend Panagiotis – the sound of his laterna always got people to dip into their pockets.’

  ‘LATERNA, POVERTY AND HONOUR’

  ‘Λατέρνα, φτώχεια και φιλότιμο’

  The streets of Thessaloniki thronged with people, but the salep seller was doing very little business. Only a few tourists stopped to buy the thick, sweet drink that he served from his wheeled cart. Most of them couldn’t get through a whole cup of it. Made from orchid tubers, it was an ancient recipe and an acquired taste, only bought to satisfy curiosity.

  ‘The young these days,’ the seller muttered, ‘they just want their frappé.’

  Watching the streams of people strolling hand in hand along the esplanade, the salep man had grown bitter. His father had given him the trolley with its big metal container forty years earlier. It had been a family business, but he felt ever more certain that it would end with him. Nobody wanted his drink any more and, year by year, sales dropped. Coffee had always been a rival, but the culture surrounding it these days was obsessive. Hot in the winter, cold in the summer. He had no chance.

  ‘They need three hands here, these kids,’ he said. ‘One for the cigarette, one for the girlfriend and a third for the coffee.’

  The chestnut man did slightly better. A cheap snack of freshly roasted chestnuts appealed to almost everyone. With a seeded koulouri bun from the seller on the corner of Aristotelous and Niki Street, a handful of warm chestnuts had always been considered the perfect breakfast. Nowadays, though, the huge student population of the city preferred fast food.

  Greece seemed to be going through a period of transition, as far as the older generation was concerned. They moaned about the way their country had changed, how traditions were disappearing, how they didn’t recognise their own patrida or the people who lived in it.

  The only person working on the streets who never complained was Panagiotis, the laterna player. The one consumer habit that did not change was a desire to recapture the past, and what he was selling was like an aroma, something intangible, a glimpse of the ‘black and white’ era. He lived in the past himself and reminded other people of theirs, and passers-by were very happy to toss him a coin. Many coins, in fact.

  Most thought he was simple because he seemed happy travelling from the old town to the new, from square to esplanade and back again, trundling his precious laterna, but he regarded himself as an artist, a kalliteknis. This belief sustained him in his solitary life, along with the coins that people left in the upturned tambourine at his feet.

  His passion for the laterna was born when he was ten. It was in the early 1950s, when the country was learning to live in peace again. The sun seemed to shine every day and Panagiotis and his friends could hang around in the streets of Athens, disappear for hours in a game of hide-and-seek and take over an alleyway to play football. They never tired of these activities, but one day in the summer of 1954, their routine was interrupted.

  ‘They’re making a film!’ Panagiotis’s best friend said gleefully. ‘They’re shooting round the corner in the square now – but next they’re coming here!’

  The five boys, all in short trousers and around ten years old, stopped their game and sat on a wall waiting, swinging their skinny legs in time.

  Eventually, two men came, both in suits and trilbies, one of them fatter and older with a handsome moustache. The younger of them had a laterna strapped to his back. Behind them came a group of more than twenty, burdened with cumbersome equipment. Three men carried a huge camera, and others had heavy lights and microphones. In addition to the porters required to carry all of these, there was a team for costumes and make-up, and then of course the director himself.

  The children looked on, instinctively keeping quiet while the filming took place. Two men talked, then a man near the camera shouted, then they talked again. This process went on and on, with one repeat after another. The children kept hearing the word: ‘Cut!’

  When they finished filming the scene, the actors and crew strolled away, presumably for lunch, leaving the street empty. The boys all simultaneously leapt off the wall.

  As well as all the other filming paraphernalia, Panagiotis noticed that they had abandoned the laterna. It was lavishly painted, decorated with flowers and, in pride of place, there was a black-and-white portrait of a glamorous couple. He ran towards it. He could not resist. As always, the other boys followed their ringleader.

  Panagiotis reached out and touched its wooden case, which was warmed by the sun. Then he grabbed the handle and began to turn it. Music rang out, sweet and melodic, its notes ricocheting off the walls and filling the little sidestreet. The other boys pranced around, jigging up and down to the tune.

  The actors and crew were returning from their break.

  ‘Hey! You!’ shouted the cameraman. ‘Leave it alone.’

  The director had seen them, too, but his momentary irritation vanished when he realised the potential of this mischief on film. He wanted to capture the boys’ childlike delight in music.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ he called, as the boys tore off down the street. ‘Wait!’

  He sent his assistant to run after them, and he soon returned with the five boisterous children. For a whole afternoon, they shot and re-shot the scene of the boys gathered round the laterna, with Panagiotis and a younger boy turning the handle before being chased off like street urchins.

  During a break, Panagiotis lifted the lid to see the working mechanism of the laterna. It was more complex than anything he had ever seen. He was spellbound by the minutely coordinated set of actions that resulted in the magical production of music.

  The film Laterna, Ftohia kai Filotimo – Laterna, Poverty and Honour – was released the following year and was an enormous success. It told the story of two itinerants who meet a rich girl on the run. They forego the chance to gain a huge ransom by handing her in, preferring to help her rather than betray her.

  On a warm summer’s evening in 1955, Panagiotis and his parents went to an open-air cinema to see it. They were full of anticipation. There on
the screen they saw the familiar sight of Plaka, their neighbourhood. Every door, every step, every window was glamorised by its transition to the screen.

  When their son’s face appeared, Panagiotis’s parents burst into applause. He blushed with equal measures of embarrassment and pride.

  At that moment, he realised that this was what he wanted to do with his life. After the film, he told his parents that he had something to tell them.

  ‘I know what I want to do when I grow up,’ he said.

  They held their breath. An actor’s career was not really what they wanted for their son.

  ‘I want to be a laterna player,’ he announced.

  From that day on, Panagiotis lobbied his father.

  ‘This is what I want to do,’ he said to him. ‘You won’t have to worry about my future!’

  ‘A life on the road?’ said his mother, wringing her hands.

  ‘Making people smile and making them dance!’ said Panagiotis. ‘What could be better? I’ll need a laterna,’ he added.

  The charm of the film lay in the combination of the actors’ exuberance, the images of Greece and a happy-ever-after story. Panagiotis wanted to inhabit the world it portrayed, where people needed little to be content and honour prevailed.

  A laterna cost far more than his parents could afford, but over a period of three years, they kept aside everything they could. Panagiotis’s father had always hoped that his son would help him in his foundry when he left school, but you could not make a boy who wanted to play a laterna solder iron for railings. He respected his son’s strong sense of vocation.

  Eventually, he and his wife had saved up enough. They covered it with a blanket and, that night, they waited up for him to come home before the great unveiling. He was as thrilled as they had hoped. It really was his dream. As was the tradition, Panagiotis dressed up in a tailored suit and put a flower in his buttonhole. He was aged seventeen and ready to go on the road.