Greece was humiliated on a daily basis in the European press. We had suffered before, but back then we had the sympathy of our fellow human beings; right was on our side. The situation was completely different now. I saw cartoons that reminded me of the posters Dr. Goebbels had distributed all over Greece back in the day, depicting the Greeks as long-armed apes. My heart bled. Once more I thought of my father.
“We didn’t win our freedom in order to become slaves to our habits.” That was what he used to say when he was trying to get my brother and me to give up smoking. He didn’t succeed. Instead we seduced our mother into our bad ways, and she would smoke the odd cigarette.
This time Greece was not paying for its old habits, but selling itself in order to hold on to them.
It was taking some time for the minister of education to make a decision on the school’s change of name. I could understand that. Who had time to deal with that kind of thing when the whole country was teetering on the brink? But the teachers in the school would be pleased if I paid them a visit. The students read my books, and this summer they would be staging a tragedy by Aeschylus.
“Dear stranger,” wrote the principal, “if for no other reason, please come to hear beautiful Greek.”
It sounded like an invocation. I couldn’t resist such an invitation, so I promised to go.
I lay beside my wife on the bed in which my mother had died, totally unmoved. I have become utterly soulless, I thought.
As always Gunilla read for a while before switching off the light. She kissed me gently in the darkness and we said good night.
Everything was just the same as usual, even though nothing was.
The following morning I was woken by a noise that sounded as if someone was trying to start a reluctant engine. It was the doves. It wasn’t even five o’clock. I made myself a cup of coffee, then went and sat in my magical place—on my mother’s balcony—and listened to the city waking up.
I remembered the first time I met Yannis Ritsos, one of the great Greek poets. I was working with Bengt Holmqvist and Östen Sjöstrand on a translation of one of Ritsos’s later poems, almost all written during his time on the island of Leros, to which he was exiled by the military junta that seized power in 1967. He had been seriously ill, yet still he worked nonstop. He didn’t have much paper, so he wrote very short poems, sometimes only a few lines.
I loved those poems. Bengt and Östen, who had seen a very rough translation, loved them even more and promised to produce a polished version.
That was also why I went to see Ritsos as soon as possible. He welcomed me into his three-room apartment in one of the unremarkable blocks behind the train station from which I had begun the journey toward my future in Sweden, once upon a time.
The room where Ritsos worked overlooked a schoolyard. During recess you could hear the wild shouts of the children. But you could hear all the other sounds too. Trains slowing down or laboriously starting up, cars, street traders, particularly one selling watermelons, who roared like a latter-day Stentor: “I will slaughter them all, I will stab them all!” It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. The point was that he was prepared to split open his watermelons so that the customer could see the ripe red flesh.
I asked Ritsos if he wasn’t disturbed by the noise. No, quite the reverse, he liked it. Particularly in the mornings when he would sit on the balcony to see and hear his city wake up.
That was the time for his poetry—the early morning. The rest of the day was given over to the prose writers. He didn’t put it that way, but that was how I remembered it as I sat on my mother’s balcony. Maybe that was what I ought to do. Start again from the beginning. Find the very first morning.
I learned a lot from my encounter with Yannis Ritsos. A great deal was forgotten over the years, but not what follows. After much agonizing, I dared to ask him, “Dear master, are you sure we say it that way in Greek?”
He didn’t take offense but looked at me pensively, then said a little sadly, “But it’s not Greek that’s saying it that way. It’s me.”
What confidence he must have had to come out with such a response. I’m not sure I’ve ever had it, but even if I did, I lost it when I started writing in Swedish—constantly unsure of myself, worried that I was making mistakes, that you didn’t say it that way in Swedish. I wrote for over forty years with this sword of Damocles hanging above my head. And I would feel the same even if I were to write for another forty years.
This feeling was preserved and reinforced by the fact that one of the most common arguments is that you don’t say this but that in Swedish. No logical, syntactical, or grammatical reasons were put forward; instead, use of language was invoked. You don’t say that in Swedish. Simple. But you can’t learn an entire language by heart, I would object with increasing resignation. I am not a monkey. I want to understand why it’s på Gotland—on Gotland—but not på England, which would actually be pretty cool. However, no one has ever come up with an explanation other than that’s the way it is in Swedish. I should have followed Ritsos’s example. It’s me who’s speaking. Not Swedish.
The question was what would happen if I tried to write in Greek. What did I remember, what had I forgotten, what had possibly been lost forever? Rediscovering my Greek seemed even more difficult than continuing to live an uncertain life with my Swedish.
Yannis honored me with the gift of a pebble from the shore on which he had written a poem when he was exiled to Leros. He couldn’t help saying what he had to say. I treasured that pebble like my own eyes, and yet it was lost when I moved out of my studio. It felt like an omen.
Greek is no longer yours.
Gunilla got up with shining eyes and rosy cheeks; she always sleeps well. She was wearing the blue robe that suits her better than the red one.
We laid out our breakfast on the balcony. Our next-door neighbor was talking to the neighbor on the balcony opposite. We drank coffee between their voices.
* * *
A couple of hours later we were enjoying another cup of coffee in the square. Children of all ages were running around in the play area. Once upon a time I played there too. I thought about the gang. Diamantis the First, whom we always called “Rain Shield” because his hair grew straight out from his forehead like a sheet of metal. Diamantis the Second, who was permanently in jail and was known as “Tiger.” And Karakatsanis, of course, the equally permanent captain of every team and every game. Doughball, who couldn’t even get on the team as goalkeeper. Then little Kostas, the expert dribbler. But that was the end of it. I remembered more friends, but not their names or what we called them. We all had nicknames. I could find them, because they were included in one of my earlier books, but what would be the point of that?
Forgetfulness is a part of life.
Gunilla sat beside me, writing postcards to send home.
I wondered what had happened to all those boys and girls who were still somehow within me like perennials. How many were still alive? Which ones had left us?
The square had changed too. The cozy cafés were now sophisticated coffee shops and bars. The simple restaurant with ready-made food was gone. The barber with his neat black mustache was no longer there. Every time I had visited Athens in the past, I had gone to him for a trim, just for the pleasure of watching him juggle with the scissors as he pondered how to deal with my hair. His fingers were as nimble as those of a top-class pianist.
I wanted everything to be just the same as it used to be. That is the emigrant’s drama. The reality he left behind is gone, yet that is what calls to him.
“You can’t go back.”
My wife looked at me uneasily. “You’re talking to yourself.”
I denied it.
“And you’re crying. Why are you crying?”
“I’m not crying.”
But I was crying, without being aware of it. My eyes were being given a thorough watering.
“You can’t go back.”
Maybe I ought to write about that. It was a fleeting thought, but very comforting.
After a while we took a walk in the stone pine forest of my childhood around the Military Academy. The buildings were now used as courthouses. The first thing that struck me was the smell. I remembered the sharp aroma of pine resin, light and airy, present but not intrusive, like a fleeting caress. Now it stank like an outdoor toilet, a hot, sickening stench that made us recoil. Old newspapers were scattered everywhere, a sign of the homeless people who spent the nights there, impoverished Greeks and refugees. There were empty food cans, used needles and condoms.
The country’s economic crisis could be seen in all its nakedness. Terrified stray dogs growled if anyone approached them, while frightened cats scavenged among the piles of rubbish.
The few people who cut through the forest in order to reach the courthouses on the other side moved as quickly as they could. Here and there I saw the type of group I recognized. I had seen them in the square at Medborgarplatsen in Stockholm, often made up of several men and one woman, all equally wretched, sharing a cigarette or a bottle of booze or some kind of narcotic. I had seen them go into the public toilet and lock the door behind them; a little while later I would hear screams and cries for help, or sometimes groans of pleasure.
Poverty, including extreme poverty, was nothing new in my life. I had seen it before, even as a child. On the other side of this forest were the barracks where the Greek refugees from Asia Minor or the Black Sea lived back then. Their camp was poor, but it wasn’t dirty, it wasn’t wretched, it wasn’t disgusting.
Now poverty was exactly that—disgusting, both in the stone pine forest of my childhood in Athens and in Medborgarplatsen in Stockholm. A war was being waged against these people, and that was something I hadn’t understood.
“We’re poor, but we have our dignity,” my mother used to say. That dignity no longer existed. The poor were no longer people but “problems,” a sanitary inconvenience.
I used to say the same thing as my mother. I insisted that both I and everyone else should pull their socks up and get on with things. It appalled me when people allowed themselves to go into a decline; they had a responsibility. That was what I thought.
I was wrong, which was a painful realization. I condemned those who were drowning because they hadn’t learned to swim, instead of those who stood by and watched without lifting a finger.
I was one of them.
In the afternoon, quite late, I went out to buy pistachio nuts from Aegina, which are probably the best this earth has to offer, particularly if you eat them with an evening glass of ouzo.
I headed for the usual store, but the good-humored old man who owned it wasn’t there. He had been replaced by a short, slim woman of indeterminate age. Her hair was fair, her eyes sparkling with life.
As soon as she saw me she called out: “Welcome—what a handsome young man you are!”
She was overstating the case somewhat, but I can’t pretend I wasn’t happy with this greeting.
I wanted some pistachio nuts; it would take three minutes at the most. I was there for almost an hour. She told me all about her life. She had emigrated to America when she was young, she had had twenty-five different jobs, she believed in God, the family, and rest. “You have to learn to rest,” she said over and over again.
She had four younger sisters and had married them all off while remaining unmarried herself. When her father was dying, he had written to her, “You must marry, otherwise my body will never be received by the earth. I will not turn to dust”—a terrible, harsh fate for an honorable old man.
She left America, came back to Greece, and met the man she married. He was much older than her and a widower, but he was a good man and the earth received her father.
In the middle of this tale, her cell phone rang. It was her elderly husband, who needed oxygen.
“Stay here, I’ll be back soon,” she said, and hurried off.
Five minutes later she returned, and we continued our conversation. She was eighty-two years old but planned to live to one hundred and eighteen.
“Why one hundred and eighteen?” I wondered.
“First of all, I have to wait until all those who boycott my store because I’m a woman are dead and gone. Look at the bastards!”
She pointed to a group of old men sitting outside the café opposite.
“They grind their teeth every time they walk past this place. They’re waiting for my husband to die so they can take over my business, but they’re waiting in vain. I’m going to stand here until I’m one hundred and eighteen. It’s only fair that I enjoy my pension for a couple of years before I reach one hundred and twenty. Then I’m going to travel around the world. Not to have fun, but to find out what the world smells like in the east and west, in the south and north. Then I shall die happy.”
“Where have you been all this time?” Gunilla wanted to know when I got back home.
“I’ve been learning that people never give up.”
The following morning we picked up the rental car. Needless to say they didn’t give us the Volvo 40 we’d ordered and paid for, but a Nissan. I said nothing, because I’ve had the same conversation many times before. The company reserves the right to provide the customer with “a Volvo or a similar vehicle.” This similarity refers to the engine capacity. I had protested before, insisting that I was hiring a car, not an engine, but clauses are clauses all over the world. The majestically slow assistant handed over the Nissan as if it were a Jaguar.
We drove into the center without any problems—it was impossible to drive any faster than around three miles an hour—but when we reached the main road and set off toward our destination, Gunilla noticed that the car wasn’t changing gears. I pressed my foot down frantically on the gas pedal. Nothing happened. Irritated motorists sounded their horns or gave us the finger or hurled insults. I was called “a stupid old asshole,” for example. The moped riders were the worst. They came right up beside me and advised me to “get a fucking move on, Granddad.” Gunilla was getting more and more upset.
I used to enjoy this kind of thing once upon a time. I became energized, I fired insults back, I made the international gesture for masturbation and metamorphosed into a different person before my wife’s astonished eyes.
“We have to do something,” she insisted. With great difficulty I managed to find a place where I could stop for a while, and I called the car company. The majestic assistant picked up the phone, assured me that I wasn’t the first customer to encounter this problem, and explained that I needed to move the stick shift from one position to another before the automatic system came into play. He informed me that this applied to all modern cars, and I could tell that he was finding it difficult not to laugh.
I shot away with a screech of tires, and asked Gunilla if we should go back and strangle the majestic assistant, which made her laugh. We decided to continue our journey without murdering anyone.
Why can’t the Greeks calm down? I thought, as if I weren’t a Greek myself.
Things settled down when we took the road for Elefsina, although I was always a little tense when I drove past the small town. That was where Athens ended, and we began to approach my home area of Peloponnesos, or the Peloponnese. My homeland within my homeland. Then came my village, the heart of my homeland. The cradle of all my longing, all my dreams.
My wife was absorbed in a magazine. I had spent almost a year of my military training near Elefsina, and I remembered the endless twilights. There and on the hills all around, dusk fell more slowly than anywhere else. One day I mentioned this to my friend Little Kostas, and I have never forgotten his answer.
“Ah, Elefsina. That was where Procrustes ruled the roost. He mutilated or stretched the bodies of passing travelers in order to make them fit his iron bed. That was also where D
emeter wept because her beautiful daughter was kept in the underworld. How can night fall in Elefsina?”
On all our previous trips I had told Gunilla tales of the military training facility where I almost lost my mind because of the monotony and oppression, but this time it all felt so distant. It no longer had anything to do with me. And Little Kostas was gone, the crazy boy who taught me to draw Tarzan, and the first person I ever heard talk about antimatter.
I could have said a great deal, but I said nothing.
I was a foreigner in my wife’s homeland, and she was a foreigner in mine. Perhaps it was because of this mutual foreignness that we had grown so close. It felt completely natural to have her sitting beside me. So once again I said nothing.
If this was to be the last time I saw my village, I wanted Gunilla with me. She is the only one who has shared my alienation, she is the only eyewitness.
I stole a glance at her as she read, twisting her left ear as usual. I wanted to say something to her, but I kept quiet. She already knew what I wanted to say.
Some hours later we reached Epidaurus. There are few places on earth that I love as much. We clambered up to the back row of seats of the amphitheater, in spite of the fact that my wife’s knee was hurting and I was as out of breath as a fish on land.
The reward was immediate. The old theater looked like an enormous flower growing in the hollow between the hills. A choir of middle-aged women were singing in Dutch and received enthusiastic applause from the other tourists. I also clapped, as if I were a tourist too. In a way I was—a tourist in a country that was once my homeland.
A group of Polish students was sitting next to us. They were exceptionally polite toward one another and everyone else, including a weary old dog that lay panting at their feet. They started talking to him and tickling him, and he livened up considerably. He lay on his back with his legs in the air, then rolled over onto his stomach and pretended to be asleep.
Another Life Page 7