Giannis couldn’t remember the faces of other homeless people. He said he tried to keep himself to himself. He didn’t seem aware of the Chaplin routines. We thanked him and got up to leave. Pavlis left him a bag of food, which judging by Giannis’ gaunt frame, would last him a good few days. I offered him my hand. He pulled back in alarm, and then raised it timidly instead of taking mine.
“I thought that he might remember something. He’s a relative veteran,” said Pavlis apologetically as we walked away.
“I wasn’t expecting answers from the first person we spoke to.”
He nodded in agreement.
“Let’s walk up to Dionysiou Areopagitou Street, and then up towards Filopappou Hill. There’s a big crowd up there. We might get more joy out of them,” he suggested.
Pavlis, like me, was not big on conversation. He talked just enough to get by. He told me that he had already made some preliminary approaches to some of the homeless who lived up there who wouldn’t be able to see us today, but sadly hadn’t managed to get anything worthwhile out of them. One of them had told him that he’d seen Themis Raptas summon the devil and the devil had turned up; another one swore that Raptas went around in a spaceship, while a third claimed that he’d seen him under a tree making out with a gorgeous young TV presenter, who was always on, morning and evening. “They show her all the time. I see her when I go inside the electrical shops to beg,” he’d explained to Pavlis. Pavlis had spent three hours with the man, bringing up photos of all the well-known female presenters on Greek TV, irrespective of age. But they meant nothing to him. Then, this guy agreed with the other vagrant saying that he, too, had seen Raptas enter the spaceship with the young TV star and both of them turned blue as soon as they entered. Pavlis had warned me that I might get some pretty surreal responses.
Most of the time we walked in silence. The new Acropolis Museum was looking very bright in the sunlight, which showed no signs of retreating, rather like the rubbish bins that hadn’t been emptied for weeks. A politician in his sixties was standing outside the museum. I couldn’t remember his name, although I had seen his face often enough on the news because he was in the habit of triggering violent exchanges in parliament. He was making a statement: Athenians should all get out of their houses, enjoy the city and rediscover its myths, visit the museum and rediscover their own identity. His bodyguard was standing beside him holding an umbrella to ensure that the heavily gelled salt-and-pepper hair of the elected representative of the people did not get wet. Yeah, that’s right. That’s how you get to enjoy the city and have the time to think about its myths. The stray dogs of the area were wisely keeping their distance. I put it down to a sixth sense.
Our second appointment was in front of the statue of Makrygiannis, the hero of the wars of independence, and the young man waiting for us there couldn’t be more than twenty. His glasses were damaged and wonky, and he was wearing ripped jeans and an American college T-shirt which hung very loosely from his skinny body. His hair was thin for such a young man, and his bony face was full of spots. He was struggling to keep standing in the same spot, and was very nervous. Pavlis stuffed a few notes into his hand, which seemed to calm him down a little. I’d seen that before with users. The feeling that you’ve got enough money for your next hit is almost as reassuring as the hit itself. For a while.
“Yeah. I remember him – the Chaplin guy. And the kid.” This was encouraging, as up to then he had only given us one-word answers.
“How come? Aren’t you too young to have been around then?”
“I ran away from home when I was twelve. Well, I had tried loads of times before that but that was the first time they didn’t find me and take me back. My parents, the cops and other pigs.”
I knew that if I launched straight into questions about Themis and Emma he might suspect something and start asking questions instead of answering them. So I decided to show more interest in him – just like a real journalist would.
“Why did you want to run away?”
“The beatings. I’d had enough.”
“Did it happen a lot?”
“Every two to three days I’d have to stay off school. They’d say I was sick and keep me off so the teachers and the other kids wouldn’t see my bruises. I didn’t want them to either. I was embarrassed.”
“Was it your dad?”
“It was both of them. Whichever one was in a bad mood, I’d get it from them. One day when they were having a really bad argument, I took my chance. I picked up the gun we had in the house and told them if they tried to get me back I’d kill them both in their sleep. They never came looking for me after that.”
I shook my head in apparent sympathy. I knew the odds on this being a true story, or of being his story, or of being an amalgamation of many different junkies’ stories, were probably even. There aren’t many people who open up that easily, and even fewer who open up for money.
“Let’s focus on something a bit happier, shall we? Like that Chaplin guy we were talking about before. I’ve heard that a lot of people, and a lot of homeless people like you, liked him a lot and that he cheered them up.”
“Cheered us up? Yeah, right,” he said sarcastically.
“What do you remember most about his act?”
“What do I remember?”
He looked over at Pavlis with a sick grin, as though he suddenly realized that he held all the power in this situation and that we needed him.
“Is this all the money?”
“Don’t do this,” said Pavlis in a stern voice, completely devoid of emotion.
“Do what?”
“You know what. Don’t do it.”
“I’m not doing anything,” he said, realizing that extortion wouldn’t get him very far.
“So what do you remember?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation back to Themis.
“I remember … let’s see … the kid. A girl, wasn’t it? Dressed like a boy.”
“Yes.”
“They seemed dead close. Like they really loved each other. When they finished their act, I saw them a couple of times going off together, holding hands. I remembered that because it made me jealous that he didn’t hit her. But you never know, do you? He might have beaten her when they were alone.”
“Anything else?”
“No, not really. Like what?”
He looked uneasily at Pavlis and stuffed the money into his pocket. Perhaps he was worried that Pavlis would take it back because his information wasn’t up to much.
“Did they have any friends, for example?”
“Friends? People who live on the streets don’t have friends.”
“Enemies, then? Did you ever hear about anything? Anyone going after them?”
“No. No. Nothing like that. Can I go now?”
Pavlis looked at me. I nodded, and the lad walked off without saying anything.
We kept walking down Areopagitou Street till we got to a place that means a lot to me, but there’s only one person who knows why. That’s the way it goes; if more than one person knows something about you, that something probably isn’t very important. It was the tiny church of Agios Dimitrios the Bombardier. Tradition has it that the church took its name from an incident that took place hundreds of years ago, when a lightning strike took out the Ottoman powder magazine up on the Acropolis just as they were loading their cannon ready to fire it at the Christian faithful in the church below. A solution of this kind would be very welcome to me now. If all the people who wanted to do harm to Angelino and Emma could gather in one convenient spot, along with whoever it was who killed Themis, and be struck by lightning – now that would be a miracle. That would free up all the time I’m spending charging around the city talking to the homeless to see if anyone remembers a bloke who died three years ago. That would free up the time I needed to destroy my own life at my own pace.
If I was going to lose Maria permanently, I’d have to move away, because practically every corner of the city reminded me of her.
It was in this pedestrian area outside the church twenty years ago that we first kissed. We had climbed up the hill to see the sunset and looked at the illuminated Acropolis, which seemed so close that if we only stretched out our hands it would be ours. Not that we needed it. We had each other. After that we had walked back down the hill in silence, both waiting to see who would make the first move. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. The only experience I’d had at that point was with a prostitute who’d refused to let me touch her when I was inside her. When we arrived outside the church, Maria had kissed me, stopped to explore my face with her fingers, and then carried on kissing me. But between then and now were all the years she had been with Drag, while I begged inwardly that of all the intimacies they might have, that she wouldn’t touch his face and kiss him like that. I wanted that to be mine, and mine alone.
“We’ll be there in a minute. We’re not going to talk to them all at once. I thought about gathering them together but decided that one-to-one would be better,” Pavlis said.
I turned to look at him almost in surprise. He had fallen so quiet that I had almost forgotten he had been there all the time I had been tormenting myself with memories.
“Why?”
“They aren’t good at sharing space. They tolerate each other spread out across the hill, like any neighbourhood, I suppose, but they rarely make friends. Not just because a lot of them will steal anything they can get their hands on, but basically they want to fend for themselves. They’re here because they’ve wanted to get away from other people, not to forge new connections or a community. What did our young friend back there say? ‘People who live on the streets don’t have friends.’”
Although Pavlis had tried to prepare me for it, words could not begin to describe what I saw there up on the hill. The worst thing was the smell. The stench was overwhelming, and when they opened their mouths to speak, with most of them I really had to struggle to hold the voice recorder close enough to their mouths and resist the urge to step away from them. The ones who drank had slightly better breath – at least it was a vaguely familiar smell. As for the rest of them, it was otherworldly, a combination of rotting food pulled out of rubbish bins and many weeks’ build-up of body odour, urine and excrement because they often soil themselves and can’t wash it off afterwards.
Next to the smell, it was the sight. A lot of them had let themselves go to the extent that they couldn’t even string together a few sentences that made any kind of sense at all. While they were talking to me, their minds would wander and they would either fall silent or make weird noises, as though attempting to clear their heads in the way that the rest of us clear our throats. Some of them started to talk about completely random topics and were incapable of returning to the original question, as though each piece of recent information had been permanently erased. One of them, who was younger than me, looked familiar. He had appeared in a lot of reports and documentaries and his picture had appeared in a number of newspapers because he had dug up his dead wife’s body a couple of years ago and kept her at home with him because he couldn’t live without her. The Hellenic justice system in its wisdom sentenced him for disrespecting the dead. Then there was the bloke who asked me to make a point of saying he was happy, just in case his son read the article.
Then there were those who were in a slightly better state. They actually seemed to think before they answered my questions about the Chaplin act, but even they had nothing useful to tell me. Apart from Argyris and Sonia, that is. I didn’t get their surnames. Nobody up on the hill seemed to have a surname.
Argyris was about sixty, and had a fine head of long silver hair and an even longer beard, which looked pretty well groomed to me. He received us in his home, a construction made of plastic sheeting to keep the rain out. Inside was a threadbare sofa which he had rescued from the rubbish and a makeshift cooker he had built out of a camping gas stove. He told me that he did have a saucepan until fairly recently but someone had stolen it. Theft was a fact of life, and it was only the young ones who still had the will to get into fights over it.
“From where you sleep at night, you can see different shadows inside your space. It’s usually just junkies who don’t really expect to find anything but are so desperate that they keep looking.”
“And you let them?”
“What choice do I have? I’m not going to get up and wrestle with them. If they’re carrying a knife, they’ll probably kill me. If they’re not and I hit them, they’ll definitely fall to the ground, and then how do I get rid of them? Most of them can hardly stand up at the best of times. They’re like the living dead.”
“But doesn’t that frighten you? Seeing some stranger come in here at night?”
“No. It’s just a shadow. It will leave. It’s the other shadows, the ones inside our heads – they never go away. They’re full of stories, those ones.”
“Your story?”
“Are you asking why I’m here?” he said playing distractedly with the sleeve of his black sweater.
“Yes, I am.”
“Do you think your readers are really interested?”
“I hope so.”
“Well in that case, I’ll tell you. I used to run a hotel on one of the islands. I did very well, but then I went crazy and started spending three times as much as I was making. I owed the banks. They’d all lent me money without seeming to care whether they ever saw it again. All I could think of was money; I’d daydream about it and at night I would dream about it again. Then one day I picked up a book. It was the myth of Daphne and Apollo. He tells her that he is the god of the arts, of medicine and of youth and beauty. He tells her she should be with him, and be his wife. But she doesn’t want him. It’s all a bit too much for her. She just wants the simple things in life, so she goes to Gaia, her mother, and tells her what’s going on, and to help her out Gaia turns her into a bay tree. This makes her one with the earth. Forever. You can’t get much simpler than that. And then I realized that was what I wanted too. To be one with nature and nothing else. I came here five years ago and feel like I’ve been reborn. I look outside morning and night and see the Acropolis. I’m sitting on some of the best real estate in the world.”
“You’re not wrong there. I used to know someone – he was homeless too – who used to say exactly the same thing as you; that was years ago. He used to perform round the squares and on the streets with a little girl. They had a Chaplin routine.”
“Oh, yes. I remember, He was a good guy. I did hear that he was …”
He was trying to avoid the word “murdered”. I shook my head.
“Three years ago,” I said.
“So what are you looking for? The murderer? Is that why you’re here?”
“No. What would be the point? Three years – what could I possibly find out now? Anyway, I’m a social correspondent, I don’t do crime. The paper has other people for that. I just thought about him when you told me why you’d come here.”
“Yeah. Great guy. Don’t remember his name, though.”
“Themis.”
“I don’t remember. Maybe he never told me his name. He was always polite. Distant, of course. Didn’t talk to many people, but he was always polite. There was this one guy I’d see him talk to quite a lot, but that was it.”
“Was he homeless too?”
He thought about it for a while but couldn’t be sure. “Oh, no. I don’t think so. He’d come up here to see him. I never saw him around any other time.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“Never spoke to him. Wait – no. I could probably describe him to you, though.”
His description was so general that it could easily match several hundred thousand Greeks. We thanked Argyris for his help and continued on our way.
“I can’t imagine you sleeping rough, looking at you now,” I said to Pavlis.
He stopped to light a cigarette. We were standing in front of one of those massive pine trees that grow on the hill. It seemed untouched b
y all the caterpillars that had destroyed so many of the other, smaller trees. A tortoise sloped past a few yards further along without appearing to be in the least bit troubled by the extensive reduction in vegetation up on the hill.
“No. I can’t either. Any more. But that’s the only sure way you know you’ve come through – if even you can’t imagine yourself going back. Most people end up on the streets because of money, but later the life becomes addictive. Everything inside you goes numb, and everything around you too. You get used to it. You hit rock bottom and discover that it’s quite nice, knowing that things can’t get any worse. That means you don’t have to worry any more. It’s over. You get so hungry that in the end you forget you have a stomach. You get colder than it’s possible to get. You get beyond scared because you are no longer yourself; instead you look at yourself from the outside so it feels like you’re watching someone else’s nightmare.” As he spoke the smoke from his cigarette wrapped itself around him, assisting him in his attempt to reconnect with the nightmare.
“So how did you escape it?”
“It was tough.”
At that moment I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. For some reason I was sure it couldn’t be anybody except Maria. I took it out. Looked at it. It was no one.
After that we had two brief conversations with two more residents of the hill who had essentially nothing to tell us. This went on until we reached the cave where Sonia lived. Pavlis had to go inside and spend at least fifteen minutes trying to persuade her to come out. Before she agreed to start talking, she examined the voice recorder in detail, making sure that there was no camera fitted onto it because there was no way she would speak to a camera. She had her reasons.
“I’ll agree to an interview for you. Only for you. Not for Angelino. Not for anyone else. No Angelino ever helped me. When I was in trouble, only you were there for me.”
He nodded at her, showing that he knew what she meant. Sonia turned to face me. It was hard to tell how old she was. Could have been anything from forty-five to sixty. Her black hair had started to go grey and she was missing quite a few teeth. She wore a pair of thin black tracksuit bottoms and a grey jacket, which was ripped from the left elbow down to the wrist. Two buttons were missing, but the zip was still functioning enough to help keep her warm.
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