The Greek Wall

by Nicolas Verdan

  They depict the dances that show how King Pentheus was torn apart by maenads, they describe the death of Orpheus: women with hair flying loose and ivy wreaths on their heads, dancing, carrying the nebride, brandishing the thyrsus as the laughing god looks on: there he is, enthroned in the centre of the scene, Dionysus offering them a cup; they cannot take the wine, it goes to their heads; they whirl and whirl, the wreaths fall forward over their burning faces; they chew a leaf, then another, the juices spurt in their mouths, bittersweet; six, seven, eleven bacchantes, forced to chew it all to the end, spitting nothing out, laughing! laughing! green tongues, vegetable breath, belches, laughter, laughter as the juice spreads through their veins. What has possessed them? They are drooling, contorted, eyes turned upward in the sockets, they are pale, enraged, hurling stones and then the thyrsi, aiming at the tree in which Pentheus is posted; they form a circle round its trunk; they make levers of oak branches to uproot the pine in which he is hiding, helpless, the overcurious man; they grasp the tree with many hands and rip it from the earth; Pentheus has fallen, and his mother Agave, sharing in the maenads’ trance, his mother is the first to throw herself on him; she doesn’t recognize him, he is guilty of having seen and learned. She is unable to feel as a mother should, and with Ino and Autonoë, her aunts, using the god’s strength, she tears his shoulder away while Ino does likewise on the other side; the maenads finish rending apart the man who failed to understand the Dionysian power. Now Agave takes his head and sets it on the spike of her thyrsus.

  With Pentheus torn in pieces and Orpheus beheaded, his inconsolable head continuing to weep for the woman whose very name enrages Bacchus’s companions, the maenads become bacchantes; but it is Vergil reciting, Orpheus chanting eternally, a decapitation, a head falling, rolling in the river Evros, yet continuing to call the name of his Eurydice, rolling on the icy billows as it mourns the lost quintessence of its being to the river’s mouth, where the sea jumbles the Thracian landscape.

  Agent Evangelos allows his imagination free rein: the sound of the chants that precede the libations, then the dancing, the violent embraces, the cries, the howls, the ripping of cloth, the cracking of bones. Were it not for a sudden presence, he could have witnessed the entire scene: the hysterical girls writhing on the ground, on the floor of the Eros, their senses cruelly sharpened by the drug that delivered them abandoned to the excited men and their coarse laughter. But on the edge of the invisible river, Agent Evangelos discovers that he is no longer alone. Someone is coming towards him; he can hear the ballast crunch under a light tread. ‘It must be a woman.’ Evangelos is sure: ‘It’s a woman walking towards me.’ She too is following the railway track, she too is walking in the open, close to the invisible meanders of the river. ‘I’m not alone any longer; there are two of us following the Evros,’ whispers Agent Evangelos. ‘Does she even know that the river serves as a long wall? Does she sense its compact presence, the density of its current?’

  Evangelos holds his breath. He keeps quite still, looking for the woman who will soon appear ahead, but the sound has stopped. Evangelos takes a few steps forward and stumbles against a doe. Taken by surprise, the animal looks at him for a fraction of a second, then bounds off into the thickets alongside the track, heading for the marsh.

  With his heart thumping, Evangelos laughs to himself and resumes his nocturnal walk. Then his mobile vibrates. Evangelos answers. “What is it, Lieutenant?”

  “Almost an hour ago a patrol found a woman wandering in the military zone along the frontier.”

  “A woman, alone?”

  “Yes, and something tells me it’s one of the girls from the Eros.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In my office.”

  “I’m coming, I’m quite close.”

  Leaving the railway tracks and returning to the first houses in Orestiada, Evangelos overtakes a column of migrants advancing in single file that he fails to notice. Like them he is making for the most brightly lit street in the little border town, which leads from the railway station to the main square, passing the school and the police station.

  At the entrance to the latter, twenty or so women and children are sleeping on the poorly lit terrace, in a row on the bare ground. A stray dog sniffs at the feet of a young boy whose running shoes are covered with mud. A putrid stench of wet earth and mould floats in the air.

  “How many this evening?” asks Agent Evangelos.

  “Twenty-six, all women and children,” replies the orderly. “But more are coming.”

  Evangelos doesn’t turn around. He enters the corridor, where he encounters a member of the Frontex police with the Danish national insignia on his shoulder. The door to Lieutenant Anastasis’s office is open, and he spots the girl right away. His young colleague is in his chair, facing the young woman, and motions to him to enter.

  “She’s refusing to talk.”

  Evangelos takes a step forward and sees the girl shrink back on her chair and make as if to shield her face.

  “She’s scared,” says the lieutenant, who looks worn out. “Yet I’ve been as gentle as a lamb with her.”

  Evangelos takes a chair and sits down beside the girl, who looks down at the floor.

  “Don’t be afraid, we’re not going to hurt you.”

  Evangelos tries to meet the young woman’s gaze. “I’m not going to hurt you, do you hear? Do you understand what I’m saying to you? You don’t speak Greek, is that it? You’re shivering. Here, take my jacket.”

  The girl doesn’t reply; she sinks a little bit deeper into her chair. Evangelos looks at her: she is holding her head against her knees, he observes her delicate hands, resting on her skull, and her very fine blonde hair. Her false nails, painted a pale green, are broken, and her pale skin is covered with scratches. She doesn’t answer.

  Agent Evangelos turns towards the lieutenant, who passes him a cup and points to a thermos of coffee.

  “Have some of this. Something tells me you need it.”

  “Thanks! Leave me alone with her for a moment. I’ll sit in your chair.”

  The lieutenant shrugs and leaves the room.

  Agent Evangelos goes over to the young woman and places the cup of coffee on the desk, within her reach. With slow, deliberate movements, he places his jacket on the shoulders of the girl, who sits up.

  Only then does her face appear: a lovely face devastated by terror.

  In the streets of Athens, late in the afternoon, printed in large black or red letters, swinging in front of the news stands from cords to which they are attached with clothes pegs, broadcast continuously on TV, mentioned every hour on the radio, and already the newly unemployed, the retired folk poking through rubbish bins, the laid-off dockers of Piraeus, the striking civil servants, the representatives of the electricity company expecting to be let go, and whose job it is to cut off the current to families who no longer pay their bills, the police in their masks, the anarchists in theirs, the shopkeepers who have lowered the blinds of their shops for the last time, the migrants who are learning Greek from the newspaper headlines, the pregnant women in public wards, the unpaid nurses, the young, underpaid interns in public hospitals concerned that the last available stocks of painkillers are dwindling fast, the heroes of the resistance to the Nazis begging for leftover scraps of chicken in the backyards of tavernas, the idle waiters and waitresses in cafés, the teachers who can no longer afford heating, the stay-at-home mothers who have maxed out their credit cards, the banker who is contemplating suicide, the young researchers working on contemporary poetry who no longer have the funds to travel to a university in Thessalonica, the schoolteachers who are asked to clean the school toilets themselves, the grandmother who no longer dares to leave home because of the addicts sleeping on the pavement, the kitchen staff in the Hotel Grande Bretagne who salvage leftovers for the old folks in their neighbourhood, the young couples six months behind with the rent, their landlords who no longer know how they can manage with all the tenants in arrears, th
e supermarket sales assistants who no longer have the means to pay for a tinting at the hairdresser’s, the hairdresser who is closing up shop, the municipal employees who no longer collect the rubbish: all of them, if they are in Athens, now have something to talk about.

  “Human Trafficking and Frontier Security”.

  “Sex Slaves to Frontex Officers”.

  “Evros: Scandal on the Schengen Frontier”.

  “A Brothel Controlled by Frontex Guards”.

  “European Agency Responsible for Outer Frontiers of Union Compromised in Sex Trafficking”.

  “The Sordid Patrols of the EU’s Border Guards”.

  “Evros, Brothel of the European Union”.

  This morning on the phone, the directorate seemed pleased: “Good work, Agent Evangelos; the European Union is in a real pickle, and we’re in a strong position to request funding for the construction of the wall. Governments are in chaos, the German embassy has created a crisis unit, they want to send their own investigators; it’s sheer panic in the Frontex headquarters in Warsaw.”

  This affair couldn’t have happened at a more opportune time for the Greek government. The directorate was jubilant: “Who, in Berlin, Brussels or Paris, can now accuse Greece of lacking vigilance on the Evros frontier?” Frontex, with its corps of European border guards, would now be the butt of all the criticism. In the circumstances, how could there be any opposition to funding the wall? To think that just a week earlier the European Commissioner responsible for security had said, “Walls or fences are short-term measures that don’t allow us to tackle the question of clandestine immigration in a structural way.” Now the proof is in: Frontex is doing a lousy job – maybe even worse than lousy. Now no one will dare to say that the Greek wall is too expensive. It will seem the only logical defence against unwanted migrants.

  Requested to return to Athens the next day for a debriefing, Evangelos couldn’t believe his ears. Back in his hotel room, he read the newspapers. He had had only two hours’ sleep the previous night, and felt like throwing up; he was swallowing pills and could still hear the directorate on the phone – the battery of his mobile was almost dead, since he’d forgotten to recharge it, so he stayed close to the outlet where his phone was plugged in, asking his directorate for an extra week in Orestiada: “Just a week, that’s all, the investigation isn’t finished, it’s just beginning; we haven’t identified the dead man yet, and a police patrol has found one of the girls from the brothel wandering on her own at night in the restricted zone, completely lost. She must surely have things to say; it may well be that she had something to do with the murder.”

  The directorate got the message: “Yes, the girl; good job, Agent Evangelos. The Orestiada police have informed us; they’ll take her statement. She’ll have to make a clean breast of everything: the frontier guards, the abuse, the rapes; it’s those bastards who are responsible. We have the guilty parties: they’re sitting ducks, identified by the girl. After that, she’ll be sent back to her own country. You’ll be able to get her to talk, Agent Evangelos, but concentrate on the human trafficking, stress the fact that Frontex is involved: that’s all we need to make the case for the wall.”

  The directorate insisted that the matter of the decapitation could now be handled perfectly well by the local police, since it was likely some underworld settling of scores unconnected with the scandal of the European frontier guards, the proof being that not a single evening newspaper was going to mention it: “Yes, yes, the media are on to it, but there’s still not a word about the head, no, as far as the head goes they’re still in the dark, and you deserve our thanks for that, Agent Evangelos, yes indeed, congratulations on your discretion; yes, that’s right, no one has found out about the head. You’ve done a good job!”

  “Yes, but the girl was scared stiff,” Evangelos replied. “She hasn’t opened her mouth. I tried to get her to talk yesterday evening; she probably knows something, I even think she may be involved. We still have to analyse her clothing, to see if there are traces of blood. I’m not going to drop the case just like that, and the Frontex guys aren’t even behind bars, which is incredible in itself. And why has all that been released to the media so soon, for that matter?”

  “Don’t be overzealous, Agent Evangelos. This murder is an unnecessary complication. For Athens, what counts is the scandal around Frontex. The more the frontier guards are implicated in sex trafficking, the more our government can demand that Brussels come up with the funding required to build the wall. Surely that must be clear enough, isn’t it?”

  It was a short while ago that Agent Evangelos drew back the curtains and looked outside; he’d just finished speaking to his directorate, there was pale sunlight and a kind of smoke over the dew-covered roofs, and now, at almost five in the afternoon, he closes the door of Lieutenant Anastasis’s windowless office.

  “Do you realize, Lieutenant?”

  “Just let it drop!” advises the young officer, crossing his elbows over the newspapers littering his desk, all the Athens dailies, the Thessalonica dailies, the Alexandroupolis dailies, the local Orestiada rag, it’s crazy all the newspapers that people still read in Greece: huge wads of pages wrapped in cellophane with gifts of CD-ROMs: The Greek Temples; Alexander the Great’s Great Battles; How to Furnish your Holiday Home; The Italian Cars of your Dreams.

  Agent Evangelos left his hotel to go directly to the police station, and now he hears the lieutenant saying, “Let it drop!” But the young policeman’s familiar tone doesn’t even surprise him; he finds it quite natural, he doesn’t take it as a lack of respect, for at this stage in their collaboration formality is no longer appropriate.

  “Just let it drop, Evangelos! They’re happy in Athens, do you understand what I’m saying? Take it from me, the wall is the only thing that interests them, the only thing that matters to them, so they’re leaving the case of the head to us, because they know we’ve no time to investigate further with all the migrants flooding in. On top of that, Frontex is likely to be working at half speed for a few days, and after the girl has talked, when she’s told us where she’s from, you can contact her embassy and she’ll be on the first plane out.”

  “A plane to where?”

  Agent Evangelos knows perfectly well what the lieutenant is saying, and he knows he is right. The directorate doesn’t want the business of the severed head to get out because they’re afraid the case will delay the construction of the wall.

  “With this brothel business we’re offering them a golden opportunity to bugger Frontex,” adds Lieutenant Anastasis. “My boss, the captain, hasn’t recovered from it yet. If only you’d seen his face just now, when he saw the papers!”

  “I’m going to see that girl in her cell right away,” says Evangelos.

  “The girl won’t say anything today either, she’s completely wiped out, and if it was up to me I’d let her leave, seeing that in any case the matter of the head is no longer of interest to your bosses in Athens.”

  For a moment, Agent Evangelos imagines the girl outside. “Outside where? In the streets of Orestiada, with no papers, no money, nothing, like all those poor folk you register every day and to whom you then say, ‘Outside!’?”

  “Yes, if you like, except that she comes from somewhere, not like the migrants who come from nowhere – you know what I mean. She has a country, she has the first plane home waiting for her, and she’ll eventually tell us where she comes from.”

  “From which country?”

  “From one of those goddamn countries in Eastern Europe.”

  Now Agent Evangelos, who had been standing with his back against the cold wall of the police station, goes across to the lieutenant: he plants his hands on the desk and brings his face close to the young officer, who smells of cigarette and coffee. “Lieutenant, do you remember what we said to one another, you and me, that time in the car?”

  Lieutenant Anastasis shrugs.

  “You know what you said to me?”

  “In the absence
of justice, the truth,” the officer had said. He remembers all right, but he doesn’t want to think about it; he takes a bunch of keys from a drawer.

  “The truth; you committed to discovering the truth.”

  “I did, but where is all this getting us, Agent Evangelos?”

  “To understanding, Lieutenant.”

  “To understanding what?”

  “To understanding how.”

  “How what, Agent Evangelos?”

  “How Greece has come to this.”

  To reach the cells in the Orestiada police station you have to go along the narrow corridor that passes by Lieutenant Anastasis’s windowless office. Agent Evangelos is observing the girl through the spyhole. She is lying on the bench in the foetal position. Is she asleep? Tomorrow morning he’ll take her to Athens. They’ll take the plane from Alexandroupolis together.

  Agent Evangelos won’t have seen the river, nor will he have seen the existing few metres of barbed-wire wall, but he’s not even thinking about that any longer. His daughter is doing well, his little granddaughter is doing very well. He has just called, and they’ll soon be back home. It’s a warm day outside; the depression moving down from the Balkans and covering all of Greece has shifted to the west, and winter seems to have given way to summer.

  The streets of Athens are clogged with traffic like before the Olympic Games, like before the Metro. The public services are on strike; Syntagma Square is afloat in a pale mist; people are spitting on the foam-covered pavements; the tear gas is subsiding, spreading now into the Metro corridors. Dustbins are burning in front of the Polytechnic gates, where young people have taken refuge, ski masks at the ready. In Athens, masked rioters are advancing. At this hour of the day – it is almost noon – the faceless insurgents must be preparing a new stock of Molotov cocktails to be lined up in the corridors in front of the lecture rooms now converted into an entrenched encampment, and where for quite some time now not a single student was to be encountered, according to the colleagues who have infiltrated the various anarchist factions. Soon, when the confrontations with the riot police begin, the centre of Athens will become a battlefield. The Molotov cocktails will answer the tear gas.