The Greek Wall

by Nicolas Verdan

  On the port, three more police cars arrive as reinforcements. From the terrace of the Imaret Nikos can make out men in fatigues boarding the ship, climbing rope ladders they have thrown up. He has seen enough. It’s time he took refuge inside the hotel. In the courtyard, all is quiet. The water has frozen in the big blue pool. A warm light is flickering behind the window of his room. Room service has lit a fire in the grate. He undresses. His bare feet sink into a thick woollen carpet. Crouching in front of the fireplace, he looks for the little carafe of raki offered as a welcome gift. He drinks it slowly, sinking into a gentle torpor. He would like to think of Christina, but already the vision of the head reappears. This time it falls off and rolls into a ditch. He drives the nightmare away, thinking of Crete, of that summer when they took the boat to Chania and Christina was so happy.

  The scene is repeated; the pink lettering of the brothel’s neon sign hurts his eyes. He can hear the girl’s yells; she has Christina’s face. He wakes in a sweat, wanting to vomit. The precise image of the head falling off finally disappears, as the body did. Why did nothing remain but the head? The girl was shaking all over; she spoke to him in Russian. He shivers. The fire in the grate has gone out. He looks for the central-heating remote, without success. He returns to bed and buries himself beneath the covers. The years he spent with Christina are behind him now. Yesterday evening, on his own, as he watched the snow falling in the Imaret’s inner courtyard, he struggled against the memory of that spring when, as a surprise for him, she had reserved a room in Ali Pasha’s former seigneurial residence. “I was sure you’d like it,” she’d said. “You know, this residence was built in 1817 by the founder of modern Egypt. But wait, you haven’t seen the bathroom yet!”

  A magnificent Ottoman palace, one of the few still existing in Greece, a gift from Christina on the anniversary of their meeting on Eleni’s balcony in Pieraki. Memories of Christina, a rising tide, a dangerous undertow, the steaming bathwater, all the rooms of the Imaret open to her: she had the run of the place. But yesterday, to drive away the memory of that head, he had remained outside, watching the snow fall among the marble columns of the former madrasa.

  Don’t turn around, leave as fast as his legs can carry him. Concentrate on the carols broadcast by the loudspeakers in the courtyard: “Jingle Bells”, “O Holy Night”. The seasons pass. It’s been a summer, a winter, a new year since they parted ways: the Christmas music underscores the distance. But there’s nothing to measure the distance of time’s passing since that summer day when he was heading along Kolokotroni Street, in Kifissia. Christina was waiting for him as he tried to find the location of their first rendezvous. She was there: hadn’t she said she would be? Then his dawning smile of gratitude to let her know – at this spot, the square in Kefalari, rendezvous at 9.30 in front of the church, yes, that’s the place – she should know that this was where he began a new life. Christina in white, her cheek offered to his still non-lover’s kiss, her cheeks, kisses, one on each, and off they go, walking now, he searching for a bench, two people already in love, and knowing it, but looking for a bar as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, still pretending.

  Christina and he discovering one another, their hands, then their knees, their tongues, in unison, exploring. What took place between them is almost a journey. Christina and he are seen on the Athenian plain; they are leaving the heights of Kifissia by car; driving through a residential neighbourhood, stepwise along one, then two, then three tree-lined avenues connected by little one-way streets that intersect them at right angles. She is driving, at the wheel of her blue Citroën Picasso, a rather dilapidated family car, with a child seat in the back. Nikolaus sees himself sitting in the car; he knows he is there, just as he is aware that what is happening at that moment involves traffic, is inscribed on a map of the city: a roundabout, followed by a small bridge, passing abandoned buildings that stand in an expanse of dry grass, glimpsing the vestiges of a pine forest on the slopes of Mount Pentelikon, the mountain with a bald summit that had so often burned, and halfway up, which you have to drive around to reach Melissia, once nothing but beehives but now all five-storey apartment buildings replete with flower-decked balconies and brightly coloured awnings.

  Their route, that first time, took them past the tavern on the corner of a square in the centre of which the church faced them that night, as it would on every subsequent occasion; Christina and he driving along a cobbled road that led off behind the brick church, their momentum hindered by the raised railway crossing. Then a stop sign she ignored without a smile, both hands on the wheel, seeming to obey something beyond them both but more perceptible to the driver, obliged to admit that she was powerless to do anything about it.

  The Picasso climbs ever more narrow streets lined with cars whose bodywork shines like the dark waters of a moonlit bay. He can still see himself: it is really he, sitting beside Christina, her passenger, transported into a new geography of Athens that arouses him.

  They have arrived. Christina reaches through the Picasso’s window to point the remote at the gate. This wasn’t the first time he had met her. He still wonders if Christina got out of the car. She must have walked towards the door of her building, and he must have followed her.

  And he, getting out in turn, locked to her, to the rough swish of her rope soles, following the resolute advance of her sandals, from that moment, and for some time, forever, as you must believe at such moments, in Christina’s footsteps, feeling his way on the steep flank of Mount Pentelikon that surrounds her, at her pace, in the rush of his blood, swelling, towed in her wake, dragged along, until the final hollow before the hump where, it is said, fate goes awry: actually just the building and its driveway, the little garden, the intermittent jet of the sprinkler, a ball, more cars, but they belong to the neighbours, the glow of spotlights among the laurels, crickets chirping, the friction of the door against on the hall mat, a marble table, envelopes on the floor, floodlighting, a lift, staircases, a door on the first floor, the sound of a key in the lock, a new fragrance: Christina, he entering her flat. The entrance through the living room. The sandals again, the corridor, the bedroom, an unfamiliar laundry smell, her personal chemistry. The sound of the switch, too much light, maybe turn it off?

  “Well, I mean, can’t we turn it off?”

  The night light on the bedside table, a neatly made bed, dark sheets, Christina standing on one leg, and as her arm seems to go looking for the other one bent behind her back, a sudden right angle, the weight of her foot in the air – at that moment Christina only had her sandals left as, balanced on one leg with her ankle folded back behind her buttocks, she tries to reach the little tongue in the buckle, and that is when he moves forward and says no, he’d like to do it with the rope soles on, would that be all right?

  A terrace, that was immediately after, but it will always remain with him. She led him outside, that night, as she always would. Behind the pine forest the winking summit of Mount Hymettus was visible. Later, a dog would bark. Then that feeling of having arrived somewhere – in other words, of being finally there, of a homecoming.

  A ship’s siren. But that was not what made him open his eyes. The siren had emitted several blasts, and he had let it penetrate his sleep. No, in his room in the Imaret Nikolaus is awakened by something else. He has heard voices in the inner courtyard. A pale light filters through the half-open window. It is barely dawn. Nikolaus leaps out of bed and, without showing himself, looks outside. It’s the police. He can see two uniformed men talking to the receptionist, and another, in plain clothes, on the wooden gallery overlooking the courtyard. Nikolaus dresses quickly and presses his ear to the door. Now the voices are distinct. The police are asking to search the entire hotel, they’re looking for a “terrorist, a spy”, a dangerous individual. The receptionist asks them to wait; he protests. Voices are raised, and then he hears his name: Strom.

  “At least wait until I call the management,” says the receptionist.

  “That’s n
ot possible. We’ll assemble everyone here in the courtyard,” replies a policeman, the one in plain clothes, who has just joined his colleagues.

  “Have you seen the time? You’ll frighten our guests. Since you’re here, why not wait for my boss. If your fugitive is hiding somewhere in the hotel, he has no way to escape.”

  “Stop arguing! And lower your voice. We’re counting on the element of surprise. Go and fetch me the list of your guests instead.”

  Nikos can feel his heart beating very fast. He needs air. He takes two steps and leans against the wall. He keeps quite still, breathing through his mouth, as if he lacks oxygen. He recovers his breath, immediately pulls on his jacket and hat, throws his things into his bag, and makes for the back of the room where a large antique buffet conceals half of an ancient sealed-up door. During his first day at the Imaret with Christina he had taken great interest in the architecture of this former Koranic school now converted into a hotel, and had discovered that some of the rooms, like the one he occupies, open onto another courtyard, now closed to the public, which is lined with ancient prayer cells used by the cleaning staff for storage. One of the cells, as he remembers from the tour of the premises he made, opens onto a rooftop catwalk from where there are stairs leading down to an alleyway in the old town. With a single blow from his shoulder, Nikos cracks open the wooden door, whose worm-eaten boards yield easily. The pale light of early dawn enters through the gap. His escape route leads ahead, through the radiant silence of the empty courtyard. He glances right and left. No one in sight. Not one footstep in the fresh snow. He steps outside. The sky has emerged cloudless from the night, but he still hesitates in the shadow of the old walls with their broken-down balconies. Nikos locates the cell that opens onto the catwalk, and heads directly for it. Fortunately, it is not locked. Inside, he hurries to a narrow window, passes his bag through it, and wriggles after it. A few steps along the catwalk and he reaches the stairs, which are closed off by a little gate he can easily step over and descend to the snow-covered cobblestones of the alleyway. There is still no one in sight. Nikos can see the hills above the roofs of the old town of Kavala. If he can reach them he’ll have escaped the police. Now he must walk, not thinking about the footprints left behind him. His pursuers will be able to follow this trail for barely a hundred metres, and then the trace of his soles will have been absorbed in the mud of the already sunlit street corner. Avoiding haste, not to arouse suspicion, he comes to a little square. Still no one, he tells himself. But three men appear. They pass in front of him, and suddenly the sound bursts out in the air, like the ripe pomegranates smashed on Greek doorsteps to mark the New Year. They are musicians. The first, a stout man with a moustache, plays the big drum; it is he who strikes up the march. The eldest member of the little band, grey-haired and as skinny as a dead tree branch, follows him playing a gaida while a youngster too lightly dressed for the season brings up the rear, blowing into a trumpet with all his might. The numbers of this little group grow at each street corner as other members of the procession join in, and no one seems surprised to see a stranger join the joyful troop to celebrate the New Year.

  With his hat pulled down over his face, Nikos doesn’t bother to lower his head when police cars pass, not even slowing as they draw level with the procession. A little girl plays the triangle; her mother distributes treats. Fritters pass from hand to hand. He is offered a piece of pitta, and bites into it. As the drum echoes throughout the town he feels something hard under a tooth: a bean.

  *

  Nikos asks his way. The people he consults point towards the white heights of Kavala.

  “The Egnatia Odos? Up that way.”

  “The motorway? Too far, you can get there by bus, take a No. 1.”

  “The A2? It’s that way, just turn up Egnatia Street, you can’t miss it. But you’re not driving?”

  He sets off on foot, climbing the riverbed of Kavala’s steep streets, stepping over rivulets of red earth, often changing sides, even venturing along the pavement booby-trapped by the National Electricity Company, which has grown weary of refilling the holes. Behind the fugitive’s footsteps the town sinks back like a sandcastle collapsing on a shoreline battered by the compact mass of the sea and tinted red by erosion from the hills. Far behind – but he won’t turn around – lie the tiled roofs of a town directly in line with an Ottoman aqueduct, some houses built into a wall, and, towering over the port, the domes of the Imaret. Along the seashore, the snow has melted. The police must be all over the town by now. A while ago he could hear the scream of sirens in the suburbs.

  He has no choice. He must get to Bulgaria. He had sensed that in Greece he had become a bother to someone, and now he’s on the run. Directly ahead is the road, the Egnatia Odos, high up behind the pine forest where the snow is still lying. Head east, on foot all the way to the Bulgarian border, and then we’ll see. Meanwhile, never look back. The police think he’s an accessory to murder. And maybe they think he’s the killer. Forget the head falling, the girl’s screams. That head… he’d seen it somewhere before. When it parted from the man’s body, as he was dragging the body and suddenly the head parted from it, he had told himself he’d seen that face somewhere before. Probably one of the men who was watching him, one of the colonel’s men. The more he thinks about it the more he is convinced it wasn’t the girl the man was after, but him, Nikos. The rendezvous at the Eros was a trap, now he is sure of it.

  He keeps going; he is on the run, trying to find his way. “The Egnatia Odos, you’re looking for the E90?” The young man in the shop where he bought water and provisions stares at him, astonished. “Two kilometres ahead. You can’t miss it.”

  He walks between gutted houses, still asking his way but not listening to the directions: he only asks so that he can hear his own voice, as if to convince himself of his unmerited punishment, the loss of Christina and the business of the head. With his rucksack, bulky jacket and woollen hat, he goes from hill to hill on the frosty heights above Kavala, never looking back, searching for an ancient road marked out by milestones. It’s not the modern road to Turkey he’s looking for, not the trans-European motorway with its covered lorries that negotiate the turns at reduced speed, throwing up meltwater with the roar of a mountain stream.

  Now Nikos is making his way along a hillside, the first part of his route already traced on the damp, mossy path. He walks with high, resolute steps, indifferent to his sole companion – a salty wind that chases through the pines and is now about to obliterate his footprints on the heights above Kavala. In a spot called Vyronas the ancient road appeared. The snow, which still lies on the olive branches on either side of the path, hasn’t survived on the first step along the granite paving stones. As he sets foot on them he feels a kind of warmth pass beneath his soles. Now something leads onward: maybe his way beginning at last. On this new prominence, he suddenly perceives the present with greater assurance – the assurance of advancing step by step. For if his eyes think they must avoid the brittle bouquet of a dead tree, if his arms still ache from lifting lattices of fragile branches, or if his ears persist in hearing a crow’s alarm cry in a copse, his feet are treading the Egnatia Odos with no more obstacles to overcome, surrounded by things, in the clarity of flight. On his way – and it’s no longer an image – with nowhere to call home, he is making his escape. And after walking for three good hours, he has looked up from the ground. Now the Egnatia Odos is no more than a direction, for the paved road has not withstood the erosion of centuries. On the narrow pass across Mount Symbolon the snow is more stubborn. But the dense, rolling fog, penetrated by sunlight, is lifting over the olive groves that cling to the steep slopes of the steaming mountain. On its crest, by noon the entire landscape will be flowing down into the Drama plain. It will be time to make a halt, and draw breath. But there is no dry stone to sit on, no shelter, just the feel of his overheated limbs and the protective cover of his woollen hat gleaming with dew.

  The sun has disappeared. Nikos is following a
sheep track. In his flight, he has been walking for hours, but all that matters right now is his perception of a circular space around his advancing body. He knows this light well, its comforting pallor. It took winter in Thessalonica for him to notice it for the first time. It was one evening in February, when he disembarked at Macedonia Airport. Flying out of Hamburg, he had taken off from Vienna two hours earlier, dazzled through the aeroplane window by the broad mirror of the river. The Danube plains were sparkling in the setting sun, so when the first pilot announced the ground temperature at their destination – minus two Celsius – he wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. A glance at the limestone terrain, barely veiled in mist, gave no hint of the snowstorm descending onto the Balkans from Russia. The meteorologists had got it right, for approaching Belgrade the plane plunged into in a profound, whistling darkness.

  The descent over Bulgaria was accompanied by strong turbulence, and when they reached the Thermaic Gulf the silence in the cabin deepened as the blizzard clawed at the plane’s hull. Then nothing but clouds, and the landing.