The Greek Wall

by Nicolas Verdan

  Nikos and she ended up spending several days in her grandfather’s place on Spetses. They slept in the bedroom where they used to come to spend weekends with Margarita. She couldn’t stand the smell of the wardrobes, which would never lose the odour of the mothballs her grandfather had scattered in the drawers. Since her mother had considered it best to leave everything in the house as it was, each morning on her way downstairs she passed the pictures of mountain goats, pine trees and waterfalls that covered the walls. And Nikos? He ate in the kitchen with a hearty appetite and relaxed on the chaise longue, admiring the little bay and mocking her gently for a few days when she complained, “I can’t stand those false paper flowers, or those lurid place mats.”

  It was then that Nikos uttered some words that put Christina beside herself: “You know, I’m feeling so marvellous, it’s as if I’m in a family again at last.” She had retorted, dryly, “Don’t say that, do you hear? We’re not a family; never say such a thing again!” For Christina, it was far too soon, for she was just getting to know Nikolaus Strom. He was her Nikos, her new love. But the mere word “family” reminded her of her failed marriage.

  It was at that moment, as Christina is all too aware, that something had gone awry. Nikos hadn’t replied, but she could see from his expression that she had hurt his feelings. She often thinks of that moment, like this morning after the phone call from the police. Christina no longer knows what the police represent. She doesn’t even know any longer who controls what in the country. Soon she’ll be in a car being driven to some place in Athens, then inside some office or other. Why can’t they question her here? When they come for her, she’ll offer them coffee.

  Where will the car take her? To the police. She remembers that day on Alexandras Avenue with Nikos. It was spring, and they’d decided to go for lunch in a taverna in Exarcheia. As they sat in the car he gently made fun of her, laughing as he tried to change the station on the car radio, and she rapped him on the hand as soon as he turned the knob.

  “Why do you always listen to Kosmos?” he asked. “They only play Latino music, and I’m here to listen to Greek songs.”

  All Athens was at their feet. Nikos had come for a few days, and Christina sensed that he was happy in the city, our city, of which she was part. She knew how much he identified her with the capital, the only place where she saw him really let himself go, in her arms, with a broad smile, like a child returning home after a long journey. She was driving along Alexandras Avenue; their hands had finally met on the car radio, and then the police pulled them over. They had to show their identity cards. There were three policemen, two of them riding motorcycles and masked beneath their helmets. Their eyes were unpleasant-looking; they walked slowly round the car, one hand on the butts of their revolvers. The one who had signalled to them to stop didn’t say anything. They never discovered why the police were checking up on them.

  Nikos was beside himself. “Do they think we’re terrorists, or what? They’re the terrorists, do you understand, Christina? Did you see the way they looked at us? Christina, say something! They didn’t even give us an explanation.”

  She didn’t really know what to think; she heard him talking about a dictatorship, the return of state violence, and Lord knows what else. She thought he was going too far, but she didn’t dare say, “But you didn’t live under the dictatorship, so what do you know about it?”

  That morning, when she heard the man’s voice on the phone, she told herself Nikos would have reacted badly, like that spring day on Alexandras Avenue.

  Christina wonders, ‘What have you done, my love, for this policeman to send for me?’ She is sure it has something to do with his business. She’d warned him never to attempt to do business in Greece, and above all to have no dealings with the state. With every day that passes, she feels closer to him. She also knows that each new day returns them to the past. Lacking any future, their love is strengthened by the memory of what unites them forever. Nikos is hers forever, because he didn’t know how. But for that he’d have needed to know he was. That day when she told him off so brutally for imagining they were a family together, why couldn’t he have understood that that was what she wanted more than anything? Christina had realized it that day when they made love for the first time. For, after all, that evening, on the little square in Kefalari, in front of the church, and later in the bar where they kissed like seventeen-year-olds, for, after all, when they made love for the first time in his room, for, after all, wasn’t it then that they had defied distance for once and for all, denying the kilometres, denying anything that could separate them?

  When he told her it was over, she could have remembered that, she should have taken out the little oval mirror she keeps in her handbag, held it up to him and asked him to repeat: It’s over between us, over between us, over between us. Christina would like to throw it all in the face of the police, tell them all about it, get them to understand that Athens is no longer the same now that they’re constantly patrolling the streets on their motorbikes. Not a single day without a police presence – a sign of weakness from a government of technocrats now obliged to defend itself against the people’s wrath. Christina despises the stupidity of the police, their bullying blindness beneath their masks. She’ll tell them how Nikos and she came together, he facing Mount Hymettus and she with her back against the chimney, completely exposed to the scorched flanks of Mount Pentelikon, in full sunlight, standing on the roof of her house, teetering in the heat of the day.

  What did Nikos do, what did he do that they know about? Does she have to tell them all about him? She’ll say he’s innocent, that it’s not his fault. It’s just that he couldn’t understand that you can only feel love once, forever, on a little square in Kefalari, in front of a little church, in the smell of the laurels that she remembers, and the smell of the pines through the windows open onto the streets of Melissia, making love at her place, in Athens, with a view of Mount Hymettus, of the sides of Mount Pentelikon, both of them panting on the roof, again, often at the height of midday, sometimes also motionless in front of a hearth in a taverna buried in the sand of Schinias, the long wintery beach, after an icy dip in the sea, both of them sitting in front of the fire licking their fingers dyed pink by the shrimps. The fire in the chimney, on their backs, but their love already dying out?

  ‘Is it even possible for Athens to be just a brief passion snatched from the city’s normal resistance?’ In the evening, when the fragrance rises from the pine grove her balcony overlooks, Christina recalls, ‘We’ve experienced it together, you and I, in the silence of nightfall, just before the crickets’ chorus, when there was only the sound of our voices to convince us of our presence in the world.’

  Nikos used to tell her that desire comes and goes, but she thought of it as something you enter and leave, like the tide ebbing and flowing on their beach at Schinias. She thought they spoke the same language, though she never told him so, never told him that they knew the source of the variance, and that the recurrence gave them pleasure. So why?

  Today, she no longer recognizes anything: their café in Chalandri, the dry-cleaners in Melissia, the Cretan taverna in Kessariani, the Benaki Museum, the library on Stadiou, Doukissis Plakentias Metro station – it’s as if the door of each was shut. The city is turning in on itself; her daughter asks her who are these people begging in front of her school gate, she finds people sleeping as if glued to the walls of the National Bank, she comes across students breaking pieces of marble from the Academy steps to use as ammunition; she sees more and more masked police, and Kosmos has stopped broadcasting music.

  Christina doesn’t know what nightmare her lover has ended up in, but maybe she’s going to find out.

  Her doorbell rings. The police have arrived. Christina goes out on the balcony and sees a face looking up at her.

  “Mrs Lazaridou?”

  “Yes, I’m coming, I’ll be down right away.”

  It is a man with an inscrutable face; he is alone, in plain clo
thes, but he’s a policeman all right, they just told her so, they’d warned her that she should be ready. She’s coming, she’ll be there directly.

  Now the car is speeding towards Kifissia Avenue. Christina would like to open the window; she asks if she may and the man nods; he says nothing; he is driving very fast. That’s odd, she thinks, he’s turning right, towards Psychiko.

  “Is this a shortcut?”

  The policeman doesn’t answer; the car bounces over a hump, but he doesn’t slow down as he turns onto a little road that leads uphill. Halfway up, the car suddenly stops in front of the entrance to a little grey house surrounded by a neglected garden.

  “Where are we?”

  “We’ve arrived.”

  “But this isn’t a police station; I was told it was the police. It’s not the police?”

  “If you like.”

  “But where are we? Who are you?”

  The policeman has got out; he opens the car door and says, “This is an office of the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection.”

  “I don’t see any ministry here! Let me go, I refuse to set foot in that house, let me go, let me go, don’t touch me, stop, do you hear, let me go!”

  “Let her go!” says a man standing on the doorstep and holding the door open. The driver releases her arm. She can feel droplets of sweat running down her back, and doesn’t budge from her seat. The man on the doorstep doesn’t move; she can feel him looking her up and down and hears, “Mrs Lazaridou, please calm down! Follow me inside; nothing will happen to you.”

  “Yes, because I’ve my daughter; I must go and pick her up soon.”

  She enters the house, passing the man, who steps back to allow her through and smiles at her as she goes by; then she says to herself, ‘Anyway, what choice do I have?’

  She steps onto the marble floor of the little entrance hall and follows the man into a sparsely furnished room overlooking a bushy garden. She sits on a chair, and the man does likewise.

  “Listen, Mrs Lazaridou, I did my best. It could have been worse.”

  “What you mean?”

  “We could have sent uniformed police to fetch you. You know the kind of thing? They’d have knocked on your door and led you away like a vulgar criminal.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “A glass of water? Make yourself at home. You’re welcome to smoke.”

  “I don’t know what you want with me; I don’t know anything.”

  “My name is Agent Evangelos, from the Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection, and as you know we have a few questions about Nikolaus Strom.”

  “Go on.”

  “First, are you aware of his whereabouts?”

  “No, I know hardly anything about him, I haven’t seen him for over a year. But why are the police looking for him?”

  “When was your last contact with him exactly?”

  “I don’t know, three or four weeks ago; he called me at home to tell me he was going to the north of the country. But why —”

  “We’re the ones who ask the questions,” interrupts Agent Evangelos. “But I should have started by asking you the nature of your relationship.”

  “What nature, what you mean? I don’t understand your question.”

  “You and he —”

  “We’ve gone our separate ways. For almost a year now. And anyway, what business is it of yours?”

  “Nikos, is that what you call him?”

  “Yes. Nikos, that’s how he introduced himself to me. His mother is Greek, and he likes to be called Nikos.”

  “Tell me what you know about Nikolaus Strom, his profession, everything, everything.”

  “But you already know everything, don’t you?”

  “Listen, Mrs Lazaridou, it’s in your best interest to cooperate with us. Nikolaus Strom is a murder suspect.”

  “Nikos, a murder suspect? That’s impossible! He’d never kill anyone, I know him.”

  “Tell me everything you know about Nikolaus Strom. His age, his home address…”

  “He was born in Hamburg, in 1971. He has an apartment there, I’ve forgotten the name of the street. He also has a studio apartment in Athens, on Rendi Street, in the Koukaki district, but it’s been sublet for six months.”

  “And his profession?”

  “Nikos is in business. He has his own company.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “He sells security fences.”

  “What?”

  “Well, fences! I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

  “Please be more precise.”

  “He sells those barbed-wire fences, you know, like the ones between Mexico and the United States.”

  “Who are his customers for this material?”

  “I really don’t know. In his work, he always maintains contact with the army, with the frontier police.”

  “So it was in connection with his work that he came to Greece?”

  “Initially, no. When I met him for the first time he was on holiday. He was trying to rediscover his Greek roots. He’d never spoken to me about his work. But one day he explained to me he was about to pull off a huge deal. He felt sure he’d be awarded the Greek contract of the century. That’s when I found out what kind of business he was in. These past months, when I talked to him by phone, he said he was going to sell his fencing to the Greek government. It all began when he found out that Athens was prepared to pay three and a half million euros to build a wall along the Evros. Nikos said it was far too costly and that he could make a better offer.”

  “Do you know the name of Nikolaus Strom’s company?”

  “Security Fence Supplies, I think.”

  “Does he work alone? Have a secretary? An office in Greece?”

  “No, he doesn’t have any employees, and I’m not aware of any office in Greece.”

  “Where does he store his material?”

  “He’s never spoken to me about that kind of thing. He doesn’t really like to talk about his work. All I know is that he collaborates a lot with an Israeli firm. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s they who deliver the material when Nikos has been awarded a contract. It’s his first attempt to sell that filthy stuff here. I hate his job. And I always warned him never to work with Greece, because I was sure it would turn out badly.”

  “What you mean by that?”

  “I knew he’d have problems if he did business with Greeks.”

  “And you’re suggesting that he has had difficulties?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of difficulties?”

  “I don’t have any details. But the last time we talked on the phone he mentioned some problems he was having with a colonel in the Greek army. This man was his contact for the sale of his damn barbed wire.”

  “Did he mention the colonel’s name?”

  “No, he didn’t. He was calling me that day about something quite different. He wanted us to get together again. He was having second thoughts about our separation. It was only when I asked him what he was doing in northern Greece that he told me his business wasn’t going the way he’d hoped. He was supposed to meet this colonel, but the man never turned up.”

  “And that’s all he told you?”

  “He also said he felt he was becoming paranoid. He thought he was being followed, but he wondered if maybe it was because our relationship was turning him crazy.”

  “I don’t see the connection.”

  “I don’t know. Nikos was very tense. He wasn’t his usual self, and when I asked him what was going on he said, ‘Nothing’s going right for me: my business, the two of us, everything’s going wrong. I’m miserable without you, and I’m afraid of something. And then I get the feeling that someone is following me. I feel I’m being watched everywhere I go.’”

  Christina Lazaridou is free to go, but if she has to leave Athens she is requested to inform them. She finds the policeman with the inscrutable expression waiting in front of the house, but
she would rather return to the avenue on foot and take a bus. She has told them everything she knows. The very notion that Nikos is a murderer is intolerable to her. But it’s not her notion. She doesn’t believe it for a moment. Christina suddenly remembers the day when she’d booked a table in a restaurant overlooking the Mesogaia plain. Nikos had liked the view, saying that from the spot where they sat, on a terrace overlooking the plain, the aeroplanes looked like toys and the runway quivering in the sunlight was like a mirage. Nikos had said that the entire parched landscape, the control tower, and the planes landing and taking off, were all just an illusion, and that it really proved there was no distance between them. He was happy, and the holiday could begin with this vibrant image of time suddenly arrested in the violent shimmering of the tarmac.

  When she smokes on her balcony Christina often thinks of Athens airport, she imagines it as a model set down on the red soil of Attica, on this bare landscape devoid of shade, under the unwavering sun. There, everything is just a treasure hunt, comings and goings, losses, reunions, all just provisional, surface movements, kite flyers on a very windy afternoon.

  Agent Evangelos is standing by the window. In the garden of the little house used by the National Intelligence Service the last rays of sunlight filter through the dry leaves of a neglected clump of laurels. Inside the room the evening light plays with the outsized shadow of the single chair where, barely an hour ago, Nikolaus Strom’s ex-girlfriend was sitting. Nikolaus Strom, a German with a Greek mother, born in Hamburg in 1971, hoping to win the contract for the wall on the Greco-Turkish frontier. Evangelos looks in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes. He knows he won’t find any, but the gesture, the mere action of looking for them, is something at least, and then – why not? – he should have asked the Lazaridou woman for one or two. A very attractive woman, he thinks.

  He’ll have to take a closer look at those kilometres of barbed wire that the Greek government wants to roll out between Greece and Turkey. A rampart against migrants with an estimated cost of three and a half million euros. ‘A lot of money for a damn fence,’ thinks Evangelos. ‘And Athens wants Brussels to fork out the cash. Well, that’s understandable, since it’s also the European Union’s frontier.’