‘You’re a fine draughtsman, Nikos,’ he told him. ‘But surely you would like your sketches to be realised?’
Nikos feigned indifference but through his work at the architect’s office he came to understand that something more satisfying was almost within reach. Athens was full of construction projects during these years. Everywhere he looked there was a new apartment block going up and most of them were in the same style, designed for speed of completion and low cost. The city was being stripped of its old character even as they watched. Nikos wanted to combine beauty with functionality and his drawings often incorporated an element of classical detail that lent them elegance and grace.
On a large drawing board that leaned against the wall of his bedroom, Nikos had conjured up a fantasy version of Athens, keeping the nineteenth-century buildings in place but sweeping away everything built since that time. In a neatly drawn schematic, with everything perfectly in scale, he envisaged an Athens reborn with a balance of ancient and modern. He had mapped it out like a chessboard with squares and tree-lined avenues and each apartment block surrounded by gardens.
He washed it over with watercolours, differentiating the buildings in various shades of sandy gold. Nikos’ ideal city was dreamlike.
‘If you could rebuild this city, it would be paradise,’ said his mother.
It was obvious to them all that his hobby should become a profession and both employer and parents encouraged him to apply for a college place. Fired with ambition, Nikos sat the entrance exams and effortlessly passed.
Themis remembered her sadness over his every failure at school but now felt a surge of joy. She was his parent, but in spite of this, she heard a phrase going round in her head: ‘Your mother would have been so proud of you . . . She would have been so proud . . .’
She had watched Nikos obsessively drawing, both night and day, for so long. Whether a picture of his family or a fantastical building, Themis knew where his prodigious talent came from.
The Polytechnic building was at the very beginning of Patission Avenue. It was a familiar landmark, and Themis’ pride that Nikos was entering the gates was immense. Her son was twenty-one when he finally enrolled and a new decade had begun.
Nikos became a serious student and applied himself fully to every assignment, approaching his work with an idealism that impressed even his professor. He was deeply motivated: by the belief that buildings should be beautiful as well as functional, and he already saw it as a mission to share his vision with his younger siblings.
Andreas was doing his homework one evening and his books were spread across the table. One of them was open at an engraving of the Parthenon showing how it would have looked two thousand years before.
‘We have the most perfect building in the world at the end of our street,’ Nikos commented. ‘It should set the benchmark for every other building in this city!’
‘Beauty is for everyone,’ he continued. ‘It’s not just for the rich. Why should less fortunate people live in cheap and ugly places?’
‘There’s no reason!’ Andreas agreed with enthusiasm.
It was in an equal society that Nikos believed and it motivated every stroke of his pencil.
Listening to her son, Themis realised that her beliefs were no weaker than they had been in the past even if the opportunity to take action had lessened with time. She saw in Nikos the same fire that she had seen in Aliki.
Four years had passed since the coup, and the streets of Athens were adorned with posters commemorating the anniversary: 21 April 1967. The slogans sickened Themis as much as the military parades put on to celebrate it, with events that included the youth movement. She went upstairs to take Thanasis some shirts she had ironed for him and glanced over at the television which, as usual, was on in the background.
The uniformed youngsters took her mind back to the days of EON and she recalled how much Margarita had flaunted her navy-blue suit. It was more than three decades earlier but the similarity of the scene struck her with force. Another decade, another dictatorship.
Themis stayed in that day and did not turn on the radio, even to listen to music. It was a day to keep the shutters closed.
Ways to express dissatisfaction with the regime were minimal. Newspapers were still censored and every time she saw the Junta’s broadsheet promoting its economic successes and reputation abroad she wanted to rip it from the stand and trample on it. Even such an action was too subversive to contemplate. Anyone who stepped out of line was labelled a communist, and those who wanted to get a decent job needed a clean record. Both Themis and Giorgos were conscious of this with their children.
Someone, somewhere, still had her records and the authorities had already sent plenty like her to prison. Themis hated the regime, but for the sake of her family she contained any expression of it. During these years, if one of her younger children complained of some new measure at school (having to keep his hair very short particularly infuriated Spiros) she responded blandly or buried herself in a domestic task to hide her reaction. At such moments, she felt a pang of shame. It was against the very same fascism that she had fought, but now she was too cowardly to voice opposition or sing revolutionary songs. Memories of marching through the mountains, a rifle slung over her shoulder, fingernails black with dirt and her stomach hollow, flooded back.
She knew she was not the only one guilty of inaction. Over time, many like her who were bitterly opposed to the Junta had lost their will to express their opposition to it. Under the colonels, the economy had continued to grow and wages had risen. When they met one night for Andreas’ Saint’s Day party at the end of November, Thanasis commented on the copious number of dishes on the table. Themis understood what he was hinting at. For many people, social stability, good schooling for children, buses that ran on time and adequate food were more than enough to keep them happy.
While the flame in Themis seemed to diminish, something was growing in Nikos. She could see it in his eyes and in his nervous mannerisms. He spent less and less time at home, working most evenings in the library and scarcely sleeping in his bed. He had grown thin and rarely smiled.
‘Your boy never comes up to see me these days,’ complained Thanasis.
‘We hardly see him either,’ said Themis. ‘He’s such a serious student. I worry that he works too hard.’
‘It’s good that he’s so determined to succeed. After his start in life . . .’
‘Thanasis, please don’t mention that,’ reprimanded Themis.
Thanasis said nothing more. Occasionally, when it was just the two of them, he brought up the long-distant past. He reminisced about their family: their mother, father, Panos and Margarita. Decades had gone by since their mother’s departure, but Thanasis liked to revisit the bad times and Themis was the sole member of the audience. He had no surviving friendships from childhood and he had formed none in the intervening years. His sister and her family were the only people he ever saw these days and their familiarity with his scars made them blind to his disfigurement. The lines that marked his face had never lost their colour or depth, and each time he ventured out people looked away or crossed the street to avoid him. Thanasis would feel the rest of his face redden with anger and shame.
One warm spring day, he was walking towards a small group on Patission Avenue. A woman with a child was talking to a soldier on the street. They seemed familiar with each other, smiling and laughing, flirting perhaps. Generally, he avoided looking at people of the opposite sex, but this woman was arrestingly beautiful and he found himself staring. She had long glossy hair, the colour of chestnuts ready to fall from the tree, her full lips were painted scarlet and she wore a vivid green coat, tightly belted to emphasise her waist and short enough to show her knees. The three of them occupied the middle of the pavement and Thanasis could not pass.
For a moment he stared at this vision of a modern Aphrodite but was suddenly brought to his senses by the scream of the small boy. The child then proceeded to bury his head in his
mother’s skirt and began to wail with such volume that other people in the street hurried to investigate. A small group formed around mother and child and the young corporal turned towards Thanasis.
‘You! Get away from here. Now,’ he ordered. ‘Keep away from these people. And don’t bother them again.’
Thanasis, his legs shaking with fear and fury, turned away, his ability to walk almost failing him. His stick fell from his hand and clattered to the pavement.
He knew the danger. If he bent down to pick it up, he could easily topple but equally he knew he could not get home unaided. He hesitated. A second later the soldier was standing before him, nose to nose and Thanasis could feel his breath on his face.
The younger man gave him the merest push and Thanasis fell heavily to the ground. He lay still, remembering more than one occasion in his own career when he had kicked a defenceless man and braced himself for a boot in the ribs or the groin. It did not come and then he heard the muffled sound of footsteps. They seemed to be getting further away, not closer.
Thanasis tried to manoeuvre himself into a position to get up but had no leverage and realised that his shoulder was in the wrong position. It was only then that the pain overwhelmed him. Several people stepped around him as they passed, though he had no strength to cry out. Someone nudged his stick closer with their foot but he could not reach out for it. They must think he was some drunk who had passed out in the street.
He could not measure how much time had passed because his watch was on the same side as his twisted shoulder, buried beneath his body. Was the soldier still standing by, mocking him with his eyes?
Suddenly there was someone bending down close by. The voice was familiar.
‘Uncle Thanasis! Are you all right? What happened? Let’s get you up!’
Thanasis did not reply. He was dazed, disorientated.
‘Your head is bleeding!’ Nikos said, seeing the pool of magenta that had already dried on the pavement. ‘We need to get you home.’
It was only when Nikos tried to move Thanasis that he cried out in agony.
‘It’s my shoulder,’ he said weakly.
Nikos immediately thought of the butcher, Hatzopoulos, in a nearby sidestreet. He once heard his great-grandmother say that she had never bought meat anywhere else.
‘That man kept us alive during the war,’ she would say, and once described how he had sometimes given them offal and offcuts during the occupation. Now the family’s help was needed again.
‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ Nikos whispered gently to Thanasis.
Soon, with the help of the butcher’s burly son, Thanasis was being carried very gently towards the square. It was only two hundred metres away but it took them ten minutes at least to reach the front door and another five to carry him up the stairs. Thanasis had become very thin as he aged and each could have lifted him single-handedly but they were determined to minimise his discomfort and bore him like a porcelain figurine.
Themis had begun to fret about Thanasis when he did not appear for the evening meal. He rarely went out for longer than fifteen or twenty minutes and he was now an hour late. She went on to the balcony and looked out over the square. Perhaps he had gone to sit in the early-evening warmth.
‘Should we send one of the children out to look for him?’ she asked Giorgos. ‘It’s so unlike him.’
‘I’ll t-t-take a stroll up the street,’ he answered, as ever sensitive to his wife’s concerns.
As he opened the door to let himself out, Nikos appeared with the Hatzopoulos boy. Giorgos did not see Thanasis at first but then gasped as his brother-in-law came into view.
Themis hastened to his side.
‘Thanasis! Nikos! What on earth . . .?’
The younger children had gathered round, all asking questions at once. Thanasis was pale but clearly conscious and they knelt in a row along the sofa where he had been laid out. Themis was fetching warm water and antiseptic to bathe his head, and one of the children was told to fetch the doctor who had moved into the neighbouring building. Against his corpse-pale skin, Thanasis’ scars shone out more vividly than usual.
The doctor came running in and examined his head and then his arm.
‘I think we should take you to hospital,’ he said.
‘I don’t want to go to hospital,’ Thanasis said quietly. ‘Can’t you fix it here?’
The doctor had passed the time of day with Thanasis when they had met in the square so their acquaintance was superficial, but the former army surgeon understood his reservations. He expertly splinted the arm himself and later brought in some strong painkillers. The head wound was superficial, a graze but nothing more, and he was satisfied that Thanasis was not concussed. He would come in and see him on a regular basis.
Thanasis spent a few days sleeping in the crowded family apartment so that Themis could keep an eye on him. The children fussed around him, enjoying the novelty of having their uncle so close. On the first day, Andreas picked him some flowers from the square, a gesture that so profoundly touched him that he felt the unfamiliar sensation of tears meandering down the creases in his face. Eight-year-old Spiros took over the job of cutting up his uncle’s food and Nikos entertained him with card tricks.
During his period of convalescence, Thanasis resolved never again to leave the building. Once the perpetrator, he had become the victim. Everything he needed was here: family and food. There was no need to go out into a hostile world when he could see what he wanted of it on the small square screen of his television. Thanasis watched news bulletins, but most of the time lived in the gentle world of domestic comedy or American musicals and romances. At least he could watch people falling in love even if he had never experienced it himself. It would be enough. He found all the fresh air he needed on his balcony where he sat each afternoon reading. Even he had lost his appetite for newsprint and had begun to devour books. This need was satisfied by Nikos, who borrowed what he could for him from the university library.
‘I have never known him happier in all my life,’ Themis commented to her husband.
‘He seems contented enough,’ agreed Giorgos.
The recent past seemed forgotten and Thanasis no longer felt vulnerable. Everyone within the family circle accepted him, loved him, tolerated him, looked after him. The scars on his face that had always throbbed were calmer now. It almost seemed as if they began to fade.
Chapter Twenty-Four
WHILE THANASIS WITHDREW from the world and isolated himself from the fetid air that permeated the streets of his city, Nikos became more embroiled in an increasingly tense political situation.
In his first years at university, he had focused on his assignments, determined to excel. Once he had proved to himself that, despite his late start, he was equal to his fellow students, Nikos became more sociable. With his quick wit and strong views, he was always at the heart of conversations.
With his new friends, he found himself in underground bars, away from the constant scrutiny of security police who were ever-present in all their lives. His card tricks further broke down barriers with his new paréa, as they smoked, drank and listened to rock music. In whatever way conversation began, it always returned to the same theme: the Junta.
Several of Nikos’ fellow students were members of a communist underground movement, Rigas Feraios, named after an eighteenth-century revolutionary. Many of its members had already been arrested. In this company, Nikos felt himself on fire. He was learning the skills that would help him to revive the beauty of his city but now he had the chance to revive something more significant: the civil liberties of its citizens. Their fundamental rights had been completely suspended.
Surrounded by groups of young men who were all similarly passionate, he quickly formed friendships and grew close to a group of law students. Their views opened Nikos’ eyes ever wider. Their studies in another faculty made them all the more aware of the injustices of the military regime and they talked angrily of the emergency laws that had been
instituted. The colonels had given themselves random and unchecked powers. How much longer would they tolerate this? The Americans were said to be supporting them. What action were they going to take?
These past months Nikos had grown a beard and his wild curly hair had grown almost to his shoulders. His generally unkempt appearance meant that he was often a target for security police checks. Each time it happened, they took his name and had once even taken him to the station. Their motivation seemed purely to harass him but he refrained from telling his parents. He did not want to worry them.
‘Law under the Junta is a travesty,’ Nikos told his mother one evening while she was preparing their meal.
She nodded in agreement, but said nothing.
‘We’re sleepwalking, Mána. All of us. It’s more than half a decade now,’ he said.
Themis carried on with what she was doing, feigning lack of interest. Nikos continued too.
‘My siblings won’t remember any other way of life,’ he said. ‘And it’s getting to the point when even I can hardly recall things as they were.’
That day Nikos had come once again face to face with the authorities when he was stopped arbitrarily in the street on his way home from a class. The two policemen turned the contents of his leather satchel out on to the pavement and gave Nikos a good kicking as he stooped to rescue his papers. He was not detained but even before he was up from the ground they shouted at him: ‘Get your hair cut!’
Absent-mindedly, Themis turned on the radio. She liked to listen to music when she was cooking and thought it might soften Nikos’ anger or, at the very least, distract him a little.
Sound crackled through the speaker, but through the interference, came a voice they both recognised. It was Colonel Papa-dopoulos giving orders or issuing warnings – it did not matter which, she did not want to listen. Themis immediately fiddled with the dial to find some music, but it was too late. The sound of the harsh military barking provoked an immediate response in her son.
Those Who Are Loved Page 36