The boys were growing more physically alike than ever and were often mistaken for twins. In ways other than physical similarity, the differences between them became ever more exaggerated.
The teachers knew that Nikos was capable of doing everything he was asked, but he chose not to. He preferred to sit and draw. When all the other children were writing or doing science or mathematics, he was covering the pages of his textbooks with doodles. He was equally unco-operative with his classmates and deliberately picked fights with them. If Angelos saw a scrap going on in the school-yard, he knew that his brother would be at the centre of it.
As time went on, far from growing out of it, Nikos became more disobedient. By the time he was twelve, Themis was regularly being called in to see his teacher.
Kyría Koralis often came downstairs to help out with the children and was there one day when Themis came back from such a meeting with Nikos’ teacher.
‘He’s a rebel,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we’ll ever change that.’
‘You say that proudly,’ observed Kyría Koralis. ‘But a child needs to fit in . . .’
‘Perhaps that’s the problem, Yiayiá,’ she responded. ‘He doesn’t want to fit in. He spent so much time when he was very small being disciplined and he is reacting against it now.’
‘So you blame the paidópoli?’
‘He was forced into a uniform when he was tiny.’
‘And that’s why he still hates doing what he is told now?’
‘He detests anything regimented.’
Thanasis was in the apartment too, setting up a game of soldiers with the boys in their room. He overheard the conversation, appeared at the door and limped over to sit down with them.
‘You need to persevere with him,’ he whispered. ‘Otherwise he’ll end up like Panos or his father, whoever he was.’
‘Thanasis! Don’t say that! For pity’s sake! Don’t say that!’ Themis said, terrified that the boy would hear.
Kyría Koralis, calm as ever, scolded her grandson.
‘Thanasis, Giorgos is the boys’ father now, so please don’t refer to those things,’ she continued.
‘Those things’. This was how Kyría Koralis always referred to long swathes of the past: the years of her daughter-in-law’s decline, the departure of her son, the occupation, the civil war, the loss of Panos, Themis’ imprisonment. All of them were ‘those things’ and she did not like them brought into conversation.
‘Don’t worry, Yiayiá,’ said Thanasis, patting his grandmother on the arm. ‘It’s a secret between us three and it’s in no one’s interest that anyone should know more than he needs. It was just my private thought that there might be a bad streak in him. From his father.’
‘Thanasis!’
Themis so rarely raised her voice, but Thanasis still had the ability to provoke her.
‘Agápi mou,’ urged Kyría Koralis. ‘You’ll wake the little ones!’
Three-year-old Anna and a newborn, Andreas, were sleeping in the next room.
Themis understood that with his body progressively weakened and wasted, her brother sometimes felt the need to exert his power with words. It was the only effective faculty he still possessed, but he could use it viciously. She knew he was speaking the truth when he admitted that it was ‘in no one’s interest’ for anyone to know of her past. The stigma would affect his reputation too.
Themis could not help wondering if Thanasis was right about Nikos having a wayward streak, but she thought it probably came from his mother. In some ways his father was the conformist. It was Aliki who had had a streak of audacity that had led her almost fearlessly to execution and a stubbornness that stopped her signing the dílosi.
‘Perhaps it was his time in the paidópoli,’ Kyría Koralis said firmly. ‘Disciplining a very young child, putting them to sleep fifty in a room, without the love of a mother . . .’
‘Well, there’s no telling what really lies behind his behaviour,’ said Themis.
‘And you will probably never know,’ the old lady answered. ‘Perhaps he’s just jealous of his new brother?’
‘I don’t know. But what matters now is to get him through school.’
Themis and Giorgos continued to do their best with Nikos. He behaved well at home, played happily with Angelos and even got on the floor to entertain his little sister, pretending to be a sleeping lion that would unpredictably roar and send her shrieking into a corner. He was still enthralled by Giorgos’ card tricks and began to learn how to do some simple ones himself. It created a bond between father and son. For hours each day, he practised the sharp moves that were invisible to the average eye.
One day Giorgos struggled up the stairs with a new record player. Themis had her doubts about this cumbersome new piece of ‘furniture’, as she described it, but when he brought in a dozen or more long-playing records the following day, her attitude changed. Along with some light music and songs, he had bought ‘Epitáfios’ set to music by Mikis Theodorakis. Nana Mouskouri was singing and Themis could hardly wait to listen.
‘Wasn’t he sent into exile?’ said Nikos, who knew nothing of the composer except for this. Themis said nothing. She knew that Nikos had no idea what this really meant. He just liked the word.
Themis often thought of Makronisos. She had not seen Theodorakis when she was there but wondered if Tasos Makris had ever crossed paths with him. Perhaps he had even been his torturer. Each time she thought of the boys’ father her mood darkened. Recollections of tender moments when they had slept under the stars had long since evaporated. What lived in her mind was the image of the expressionless eyes that had stared into hers at that last meeting.
The obsessive repetition required for learning card tricks occupied Nikos’ restless energy and seemed to calm him. Whenever he was ready to perform a new one for the first time, he went upstairs and showed Thanasis. His uncle always expressed genuine appreciation of the boy’s skills.
The rapport that existed between the two of them was a mystery to everyone. Themis knew already that things could defy logic and comprehension, but the friendship between the son of a communist and a man whose life had been devoted to persecuting the left reaffirmed it. It was always Nikos who cut up Thanasis’ food for him, who picked up his stick if he dropped it or went to buy his newspaper if he had forgotten it.
It was undeniable that they shared one particular quality: anger. Perhaps they recognised it in each other.
As he moved into teenage years Nikos became increasingly argumentative at school. When he was still fifteen, Nikos and his headmaster said a polite farewell. The pleasure was mutual, especially after the discovery that Nikos’ parting gift to the school was a series of life-sized caricatures of the teachers he disliked most on the walls of the urinal.
For his sixteenth birthday, which was not many days later, there was a family dinner. Kyría Koralis and Thanasis both came down to join them at the old dented table.
When she finally sat down to eat, Themis cast a glance around at her family. They seemed a homogenous enough entity. No one knew of the complexity beneath and there were enough likenesses to dispel any thoughts that father and mother were not the same for each child. Nikos, who had grown even more handsome with adolescence, was sitting at the head of the table and Uncle Thanasis was next to him as usual. Angelos still looked like Nikos but was much thicker-set and sat between Anna, who was arrestingly pretty with fair hair and full lips, and Andreas, who had the biggest brown eyes of them all. Kyría Koralis, who was ninety-three, sat with the youngest member of the family in her lap. Spiros had been born a few weeks earlier. The old lady had made Nikos’ favourite apple cake but Themis had prepared all the rest.
In spite of their different interests and school results, Nikos and Angelos got on well and joshed with each other throughout the dinner. Themis marvelled that the evening was noisy but harmonious, a combination that would have been impossible at this table when she was sixteen.
Nikos himself did not seem very
ambitious and Themis and Giorgos worried about what he was going to do now that he had left school. He spent most of the time in his room, drawing, and he told his parents that he wanted to be an artist.
‘That’s not a proper job,’ Giorgos muttered to Themis.
‘Let’s at least give him some time,’ she said.
Not long after, as if to accentuate the contrast between them, Angelos announced his desire to go to university. The way he studied reminded Themis of herself when she and Fotini had spent every afternoon together diligently writing their essays after school. Everyone said that Angelos had his father’s brains, which both amused and annoyed her.
Giorgos had been promoted and was running a department in the central tax office, his quiet brilliance with figures being more than enough to outweigh his social awkwardness. The children were well fed and clothed and the family lacked for nothing.
In the fifteen years since her release, Themis had tried to take less interest in what went on in parliament. She made sure that she was never in the centre of the city when there was a demonstration, only occasionally read a newspaper and avoided the news on the radio. By contrast, she made a point of seeing every film featuring Aliki Vougiouklaki as soon as it came out, leaving the little ones with her grandmother and going to the nearby cinema. She was greatly enamoured of the exuberant, independent character of the actress, and then of course there was her name, an appealing echo of her old friend’s.
Giorgos maintained a similarly neutral position. He had not had great political conviction even as a younger man (his time on the ‘front’ had only come about because of conscription) and, once his father had died, he was no longer obliged to murmur anti-communist views to please him.
If a political theme crept into the conversation at mealtimes, Themis skilfully diverted it towards a neutral subject. She did this with such cunning that no one even noticed. Memories of the fury that so often raged round the table all those years before easily returned. It was like standing in the path of a galloping horse and she had to avert the blows of its hooves, at any cost. She could not risk a repetition of the fighting that used to take place with the previous generation: the bang of a fist, the splintering of a glass overzealously put down, raised voices. Such gestures had translated into real violence, brother against brother, which had destroyed not just her immediate family but the whole country.
Regardless of Themis’ fears and desires, politics were still a focus of constant debate in the country and there had been five elections in less than a decade. She had been excited when women were allowed to go to the polls back in 1956, but the frequency of elections since then was an indication of instability. Going to vote had become a routine that caused her anxiety rather than pleasure, and even now it seemed that the system did not offer either fairness or the results that she had hoped for.
The children, from Nikos down to little Spiros, had no notion that their mother cared for anything other than their wellbeing. This was mostly manifested in her desire to feed them and keep them looking neat and tidy for school. At different times, they had all been teased for having such highly polished shoes. None of them questioned if she had ever harboured any other ambitions or had any other role in life. These days she cared for the nonagenarian Kyría Koralis too and also cooked for Thanasis. The gemistá and spanakórizo now came from Themis’ kitchen.
In the eyes of all their children, Themis and Giorgos were kind parents. They all had friends whose fathers often used a strap to beat them, or mothers who constantly nagged and scolded, and were secretly proud that this never happened in their own family. None of the three younger ones had the distinctive curly hair of the eldest two and they imagined that the now-balding Giorgos may have had such curls when he was a child. Little Anna looked exactly like Margarita and it was with feelings of charmolýpi that Themis watched Andreas grow up to look increasingly like Panos. Spiros was a carbon copy of Giorgos.
It was the spring of 1967, and yet more parliamentary elections were due in May. As ever, Themis was hoping to keep politics away from the dinner table, but was secretly excited when she heard that a more radically left-wing party might get into power. Conversation was drifting towards a discussion about the new party and Nikos and Angelos were beginning to bicker. Nikos was eighteen now and much more in favour of the left than Angelos. When Nikos mentioned the Nazis, stating that he hated all Germans and that their country owed Greece a huge debt, Themis suddenly thought it was time to remind them that their aunt had lived there for many years now. She wanted them to understand that they should not be prejudiced against every inhabitant of any country.
‘Margarita? Who is she?’ asked Andreas, intrigued by this new name.
Themis rummaged for an old photograph of herself and her three siblings to show them all. Even Angelos and Nikos only had a vague idea about her childhood, and when she told them that Panos had ‘died during the war’ they all assumed she meant during the occupation and did not ask any more questions. The longest conversation was about their Uncle Thanasis. They could not believe that the startlingly handsome teenager in the picture was him, and were shocked by the story of what had happened, having always assumed that his disfigurement was caused by an accident. They had heard people talking of the December 1944 events but had not realised how directly they had affected their family. There was a wedding photograph of Themis’ parents too, and she took the chance to explain that her mother had died many years before and that her father had gone to live in America, since when they had lost touch.
After dinner, Themis and Giorgos went out to sit on the balcony. It was a warm April evening just before Holy Week and the trees were all coming into leaf. They could both feel the sweetness in the air. Washing took less time to dry and Themis had not needed her winter coat that day. The older boys went out and the three younger children were upstairs with their uncle. He had a television now and as long as they had finished their homework, she did not object to them watching a film with him.
The two of them sat quietly, listening to the occasional bursts of music and laughter from the floor above. They both felt that many things in their lives had resolved and exchanged a wordless look of contentment.
By the following morning, everything had changed.
Giorgos always listened to a transistor radio while he was shaving and knew immediately that something was wrong that day. Instead of music, there were continual announcements. Just after midnight, when most of the city was sleeping, a group of army colonels had staged a coup.
They were all shocked. There had been no warning signs of such a dramatic event. In a bloodless action, Greece had been taken over by the army and lines of communication with the rest of the world had been cut.
For most of the day all seven sat anxiously by the radio, waiting for the breaks in the relentless martial music when more announcements were made. Everything had been perpetrated with ruthless efficiency, and they listened to reports of how events had unfolded. Tanks had cordoned off the palace and government ministries, and a new prime minister had been sworn in. Roads were blocked so there was no point in going out. Schools and universities were closed and money could not be withdrawn from the banks.
‘And there were elections coming next month,’ protested Nikos, who was still too young to vote, but knew which party he wanted to govern. ‘That’s why they’ve done this,’ he continued furiously. ‘They were worried that the left was going to get in.’
‘What about the King?’ asked Andreas. ‘Won’t he save us?’
‘They say he is at Tatoi, mátia mou,’ replied Giorgos gently. ‘I am sure he will help sort things out.’
King Constantine and his family, including his mother, Queen Frederika, were said to be at their country retreat outside Athens. The monarchy played a largely symbolic role, but many wanted to get rid of this anachronistic institution.
Themis raised her eyebrows and gave her husband a disapproving look.
‘He’s probably at the centre of
it,’ she muttered.
‘Themis!’ scolded her husband. ‘You d-d-don’t know that.’
Their views on the monarchy were very different. Themis still detested the ‘German woman’ and suspected that her family would be very happy to support a military dictatorship. Certainly, the King appeared to be supporting the colonels. Or at least he was not voicing any dissent.
‘It doesn’t matter what you say,’ said Themis to her husband. ‘Queen Frederika—’
‘Themis! It d-d-doesn’t do us any good.’
After a few days, Themis gathered the courage to go out on the street again to see what was in the shops. She reached the bakery she had patronised for decades and was shocked to see the notice on the shop door: ‘Closed until further notice.’
Themis remembered how Kyría Sotiriou had muttered her condolences for Panos that day after her return from Trikeri, and the look of pity and sadness she had given her as she dropped her few drachmas of change on to the glass dish. She realised even then that the baker’s wife would not have spoken with such depth of sympathy unless she was on the left.
A casual comment a few years before had left Themis in no further doubt that the baker and his wife had both voted for the centre left party (as she had herself), and she had also heard a rumour that the wife’s brother had died on Makronisos.
It was enough to put them both under suspicion and she assumed they had now been detained by the new regime.
During the following days, new government instructions went out prohibiting long hair for boys and short skirts for girls. Andreas was furious to be taken for a haircut and even crosser when Sunday church attendance was made compulsory for children.
Closer to home, some of the teachers from the children’s school were detained and there was no attempt to conceal the reason. The justification for their arrest was openly publicised: they were ‘subversives who must be prevented from contaminating juvenile minds’, or so read a notice outside the school.
Those Who Are Loved Page 34