‘But what do you have to do?’
‘Well, you know I’m working in a kafeneío? It’s opposite her house so I can keep an eye, create a distraction if it’s hard for the people she is helping to leave. It’s close to here, in another street near to Patission Avenue. I do other small things, like finding spare clothes.’
‘Is it dangerous?’
‘Yes. You mustn’t tell Yiayiá. Or the others. I am exactly the kind of person that Thanasis would arrest.’
‘Of course I won’t tell them. I swear.’
Panos knew that she was as good as her word.
‘Can I do something too?’ asked Themis eagerly. ‘I want to help. Tell me what I can do!’
‘Nothing for now,’ replied Panos. ‘But I’ll tell Lela . . .’
‘Lela?’
‘That’s her name, Lela. Lela Karagiannis. I’ll tell her that you are “with” us. And if we need something . . .’
‘I’ll do anything to help,’ Themis promised.
‘You know not to mention anything to the others. And I mean anything. This is life and death, Themis. You understand that.’
Panos knew that in the game of resistance and subterfuge, a teenage innocent such as Themis, who still looked so much younger than her years, could be invaluable. The occupying soldiers invariably picked on the most obvious young men as their suspects when the real perpetrator, an innocent girl or an old lady, might be right under their noses.
Themis was happy, first that Panos had confided in her, but even more so because she might be allowed to take some action herself. Anything would be better than simply accepting the status quo. As soon as possible, she hoped to be called on to do something that could make a real difference.
Warmer temperatures were coming and fewer corpses were seen on the street but inflation and shortage of all commodities continued to put adequate food way beyond the reach of most people. The government seemed powerless to improve their situation, and at the end of 1942, only Thanasis was optimistic when the Prime Minister, Georgios Tsolakoglou, resigned. He was replaced by Constantine Logothetopoulos, who had studied medicine in Germany and was married to the niece of a German field marshall.
‘I am sure he’ll do a better job,’ said Thanasis cheerfully when he came home from the station. Being in the police force more than satisfied his desire for order, discipline and a uniform, and the family had never known him happier.
He was smiling and eager to bait Panos with the news.
‘He is a Germanophile,’ he said triumphantly, ‘so he’ll be able to get more favourable terms from them. That’s good for everyone, isn’t it?’
With every comment he made, Thanasis drove a dagger deeper into his brother’s beliefs.
‘He’s just another bloody puppet!’ Panos exclaimed. The new prime minister had congratulated the German ambassador for his country’s success and everyone knew it.
‘I don’t even believe we’re really brothers,’ Panos continued. ‘You seem to have Nazi blood.’
‘Panos!’ interrupted Kyría Koralis. ‘Stop. You offend all of us by saying such things. Think of your mother and your father!’
She was standing at the stove stirring a pot that contained little more than hot water and lentils. Now that the jewellery had all been sold, even Kyría Koralis felt the full impact of austerity in the kitchen. When the bread was cut she swept every last crumb into a jar for later use, substituted grated aubergines for meat and boiled raisins to create a syrup.
The children all stared at her. Several months had gone by without any mention of their parents. Eleftheria had become little more than a ghost in Themis’ imagination. Sometimes she saw her in a dream, an ethereal figure in white robes in a ghostly space.
A letter had recently arrived, addressed to their father but opened by Kyría Koralis. It had taken three months to travel across occupied Greece and was the brief annual report giving Eleftheria’s condition. Themis’ image was not so far from reality. Her mother never wore anything other than a pastel-coloured hospital gown these days and she was regularly confined in a white room, but it was a padded cell rather than the almost paradisiacal situation her daughter imagined. Kyría Koralis had hidden the letter away so that none of the children would have any idea of their mother’s situation.
Themis, trying to contain the spark that had been ignited between her brothers, suddenly suggested that they should try to bring their mother back to Athens. The idea was met with little enthusiasm from her three siblings and blank refusal from their grandmother.
‘After all this time, she is better off where she is,’ said Kyría Koralis categorically, careful not to reveal what she knew about her daughter-in-law. ‘There is no chance of travelling there. And the Nazis have no sympathy for anyone who isn’t . . .’
‘Isn’t what?’ enquired Themis innocently.
‘Normal,’ said Margarita, finishing her grandmother’s sentence.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know she isn’t normal,’ taunted Margarita. ‘Don’t pretend. And maybe it runs in the family, in any case.’
She leaned towards her younger sister, caterwauling like one of the Furies, her face pulled into a ghoulish grimace.
‘Stop it!’ commanded Panos. ‘Behave.’
‘Me? You can’t tell me what to do!’
She launched at her brother, continuing to squeal like a harpy.
‘You’re heartless, Margarita. Utterly heartless.’
Without even waiting to eat the soup that had been set down in front of him, Panos grabbed a piece of bread and left the table.
Margarita stopped squawking, momentarily ashamed.
There was a temporary lull in the conversation. Their minds were on their father as well as their mother.
Kyría Koralis had been waiting for the right moment to tell the family that their father had stopped sending them money. Now that every last piece of jewellery was sold, she had to come up with a reason why their meals were increasingly frugal.
‘He is sorry that he can’t provide for you, but his situation in America is not very easy now.’
The explanation was so vague, so flimsy, that there was nothing they could say.
The only income now was Thanasis’ police salary, Panos’ tips from the kafeneío and some meagre earnings of Margarita’s from her dress shop, more and more of whose customers, as time went by, were German officers buying for their mistresses.
Their meal finished, Thanasis and Margarita left the table. Themis continued to sit there, musing over the absence of her parents, who had never seemed more distant and uncaring than at this moment.
‘Does it really make any difference who your parents are?’ she mused out loud. ‘And how come we are so different, us four, and yet we have the same mother and father?’
‘It’s a mystery to me too. I only had one child myself, but you four . . .’ Kyría Koralis shook her head. ‘It baffles me. I can see a resemblance between you and Panos – you’re as similar as two drops of water – but the other two?’
‘It’s hard to see what we have in common.’
‘I don’t know, agápi mou, I really don’t know,’ Kyría Koralis said, reflecting on how little anxiety Themis gave her compared with Margarita.
Margarita’s comings and goings were always a source of unease but more so was the presence of perfume and fine stockings in her bedroom. Kyría Koralis knew that there was a need for her granddaughter to dress smartly for the shop, but her ready access to luxury goods was unusual for an eighteen-year-old.
The turning of one year into another usually brought a moment of optimism, but the beginning of 1943 was not marked by the prospect of any change. The Koralis family was hungrier than ever now that their table was bereft of eggs, meat and oil. While all of them were slimmer than in the past, Kyría Koralis suddenly and dramatically lost weight. The three flights of stairs to the apartment almost defeated her and when a fever set in she could not leave her bed. Thanasis acted quic
kly, finding a specialist doctor to come and see her. As they all feared, the diagnosis was tuberculosis. There was an epidemic in the city and hospitals were overstretched, but he exploited every privilege he had now that he was in the police force and a bed was soon found for her in the Sotiria Hospital.
In the first weeks of her hospitalisation, Thanasis drew up a rota so that one of the children went each day to see their grandmother but the conditions were unhygienic and patients so densely packed that the chances of infection for visitors were high. They heeded her plea to stay away.
Without Kyría Koralis’ influence, there was nobody to mediate, moderate, or ensure that there was any fairness at the table. Themis undertook to cook, but her attempts to produce a meal from a few shreds of offal or a piece of root vegetable failed miserably.
Now that Kyría Koralis was not there keeping a watchful eye, always questioning, always fussing, all four of her grandchildren had greater freedom to come and go as they pleased. It would have grieved her to know that Panos was out of the house most nights and she would have fretted even more if she knew that he was drawing Themis on to what she thought of as ‘the wrong path’.
The success of ELAS, the military arm of EAM, had, during the previous year, encouraged more people to join them. They had combined forces with their non-communist counterparts, EDES, as well as the British, to sabotage German and Italian transports, and managed the spectacular and disruptive destruction of a bridge near Gorgopotamos in the north. This triumph was a huge boost to morale, and the confidence of many Athenians was further boosted by the growing realisation that the Germans were not unassailable.
Many thousands, including Themis, displayed a new boldness when Kostis Palamas, a poet whom she and Fotini had admired, died at the end of February. They saw his burial service as an opportunity not just to mourn but also to show that their love for their homeland was uncrushed.
When she saw Panos grab his coat and leave, Themis could not restrain herself from following. She felt guilty about abandoning her duties at the soup kitchen but the compulsion to bid farewell to Palamas was overwhelming. It was several kilometres to the First Cemetery where the poet was to be buried and they linked arms as they walked, heads down to avoid eye contact with any soldiers, police or other civilians. They trusted no one these days.
On their route, they avoided Syntagma and took a detour through Plaka. It was a long time since they had felt its ancient paving stones beneath their feet and Themis was happy to glimpse the Parthenon above her, gleaming brightly against a chilly blue sky. She had not seen it this close up for many months.
Thousands of people were walking in the same direction, past the Temple of Zeus and up the hill. There was a gentle, steady flow. People were mostly silent, all shabbily dressed.
A few soldiers stood at the cemetery gates, watching nervously.
As they arrived, all that Themis and Panos could see were the backs of people’s heads. They moved into the dense mass and were soon immersed.
Themis was too small to see what was happening at the front but occasionally caught a note of the service. It was, for her, a farewell to Fotini too. Many times in the past weeks she had reread her friend’s exercise book and now, beneath her breath, she muttered the lines of one of the many Palamas poems that her friend had copied out. They had never meant so much until this moment:
O young life, wiped out by the blow of death
As you were dreaming in the rosy dawn . . .
The funeral of one person was always a reminder of other deaths. Themis would never forget Fotini, nor the terrible injustice of her early demise.
Then somewhere in the great throng, one person began to hum a familiar tune. A second joined in and added the words. Within moments there were four, eight, sixteen, exponentially on and on and the sound spread like a wave through the crowd and swelled into a display of patriotism that the onlooking troops could not silence.
Everyone from the front to the back opened their lungs and sang at full volume. It was the National Anthem and the words, if only they had understood them, could not have expressed a stronger message to their German and Italian enemies. They recounted the misery of the Greeks under the Ottomans and their struggle to be free. At this moment all those singing yearned for similar liberation.
From the Greeks of old whose dying
Brought to life and spirit free,
Now with ancient valour rising
Let us hail you, Liberty!
As they came to the end, there was silence. The crowd seemed stunned by its own act of rebellion, conducted under watchful German eyes. Their spontaneous outpouring of grief had not just been for the great poet, but also for their wounded country and countless personal losses. Such emotion had long been repressed and for a few moments they remembered how freedom had felt. Many who were there that day began to dream of liberation. Like many others, Themis had the sense that this defiant act of collective singing had suddenly made everything seem possible. From that moment her own boldness grew.
Shortly after Palamas’ funeral, Kyría Koralis’ health improved.
‘I’m not ready to leave this world yet. Not like Mr Palamas,’ Kyría Koralis said to Themis, who had resumed her visits despite Margarita’s histrionic protests that she would catch tuberculosis and pass it to her.
‘You look much better this week, Yiayiá,’ said Themis, encouragingly, observing the colour in her grandmother’s cheeks.
‘I hope they’ll discharge me soon,’ said Kyría Koralis.
Themis talked to the nurses, who confirmed that her grandmother would be able to leave within a few weeks.
At around the same time, the forced mobilisation of the Greek civilian population was announced. Famine and desperation had already caused several thousand Greeks to sign up for work in German labour camps, but now men between the ages of sixteen and forty-five were told they must fight for Germany. The descriptions that filtered back home of the cruel conditions in the labour camps meant that this threat of more general German conscription was greeted with fear and horror. Panos struggled to contain his rage and told Themis that he would do everything to avoid it.
Some days later Themis set off to visit her grandmother again. When she got to the city centre, she found her way blocked by a massive demonstration. Panos had warned her that this might happen. People were protesting against civil mobilisation. She tried to find another route but eventually gave up.
That night Thanasis was annoyed that Themis had been prevented from visiting their grandmother. He objected to such protests.
‘Is it surprising that people object to the idea of being taken off to Germany?’ Panos demanded of his brother.
Thanasis did not answer, but even his silence was calculated to provoke.
‘You would go and work in Germany in a labour camp? You would be happy doing that?’
‘I already have a decent job,’ answered Thanasis smugly. ‘Otherwise, why not? At least it’s work.’
‘You listen to all this propaganda and believe it. That’s the problem.’
‘Propaganda! You’re the one that swallows the propaganda, you bloody communist.’
Panos did not immediately respond to his brother. He was proud of his beliefs and would not deny his communist leanings. Surely it was correct to support the poor and oppressed?
As Thanasis saw it, Panos was following the pernicious Soviet path.
‘Why can’t you see any benefits in the new order of things?’ he shouted with frustration at Panos.
Themis shrank slightly into her chair. She was much looking forward to her grandmother’s return, knowing that such violent outbursts between the brothers would be at least partially contained.
‘Do you really want to know why?’ Panos retorted. ‘So that there are rights for everyone in this country. Not just for the rich. Not just for politicians and Nazi sympathisers. The poor have a right to eat and the left has a right to free speech. If you want to live under German occupation for ev
er, that’s your choice. But unlike you, I’m not submitting to the Nazis.’
Thanasis lifted his arm to take a swing at his brother, but Panos was expecting it. He expertly dodged the fist as it came at his face and moved behind the back of a chair, picking it up to defend himself. Panos was lean and nimble. He would always lose in a physical fight with his brother, but always won the game of ducking out of one.
On 5 March there was a bigger anti-government rally, with banners demanding a ban on mobilisation and attacking the Prime Minister. Seven thousand people gathered in the centre of the city, among them wounded veterans from the campaign in Albania, government workers and students. Shops were shut and businesses stayed closed. It was tantamount to a strike.
When the crowd was fired on by the police, seven people died and dozens more were wounded. Thanasis had been on duty that day elsewhere in the city, but some of his colleagues were responsible for the deaths.
The brothers did not speak for many days. The event had been a victory and a defeat for them both: the Prime Minister blamed the communists for stirring up trouble and provoking violence, but also announced that there would be no civil mobilisation after all. Greeks would not be sent to Germany to work.
When Kyría Koralis was finally discharged, she arrived back after months of absence to find a great and burdensome silence in the apartment. The old lady walked slowly from room to room. A few items of clothing lay around in the bedrooms and she glanced at the photos of her son and the various portraits of his children on the dresser. Only their images reassured her of their existence. Everything seemed to have changed.
This wretched war, she thought, as she made a feeble attempt to light the stove, it’s taken everything away.
Thanasis was regularly required for overtime and Panos was away for long hours in the kafeneío. Margarita spent all her waking hours in the shop, and Themis now ran the soup kitchen. It was rare for them all to sit around the big mahogany table now. It was as if those past noisy years had never happened.
Those Who Are Loved Page 11