The Greek Wall

by Nicolas Verdan

  The plane left three dark tracks in the layer of powdery snow on the tarmac. Already standing up, defying instructions, the tired-looking passengers were donning capes and woollen overcoats. Nikos had remained in his seat, forehead pressed to the glass. As his eyes tried to follow the flakes whirling in the beam of a large spotlight that was pointed at the arrival area, it occurred to him that he would remain here longer than he had planned. Something – he didn’t know what – was pulsing within him.

  In the bus with its wet, salt-stained floor, he caught himself smiling at his blurred reflection in the fogged-up window. When he reached the luggage carousel, where the passengers formed a dark, compact hedge, like mourners watching a coffin being borne from a church, he was again overcome by this feeling to which he found it difficult to put a name.

  He had been waiting for half an hour in the freezing arrivals hall when he suddenly become aware that everyone had left yet there was still no sign of his suitcase. An airport employee, who had added a scarf and gloves to his thin uniform, emerged from nowhere and addressed him in Greek, asking: “Which flight did you come off, sir?”

  “From Vienna,” he’d answered in his mother tongue, which he hadn’t spoken for some time.

  “Then you’re at the wrong carousel. That one was for the plane from Athens. Austrian is at number three, behind you.”

  He turned around and saw his suitcase, finely coated with snow, circulating on the carousel under the softolive neon light. It was then that he understood what had been animating him since his arrival in Thessalonica: an immense joy.

  Nikos stopped thinking. Now he has left behind the frozen heights of Mount Pangaion, which bars the access to the Aegean, and is advancing across the Lekani range. He could have followed the coast from Kavala and then hugged the E90, passing under the monumental arches of the motorway bridges, and gone around the southern side of the mountain. He could equally well have rented a car from one of those agencies with their garish signs, taking the keys to a metallic-green Nissan that, as usual, blocks the pavement in front of the car rental agencies in Greece, and steered with one hand through the depressing suburbs surrounding the port. He had been too hasty, he shouldn’t have given in to panic, even at the risk of being spotted by the police, who must have erected roadblocks. Didn’t he leave his mobile in the hotel room? For Nikos, everything is clear: the police are on his heels. They are moving heaven and earth to catch the individual who chopped off a man’s head outside that brothel. And – he still finds it difficult to believe – that individual is he!

  Nikos doesn’t have time to pursue these reflections. Even before he hears it, he sees the danger that suddenly emerges ahead. It skims the crest of the mountain before plunging into the valley he is in: a helicopter. Without a moment’s hesitation Nikos takes cover; he crawls towards a bank, and slides down the remaining snow on his stomach. The clatter of the rotors explodes above him; in a fraction of a second he sees the aircraft’s white underbelly passing overhead. Nikos makes for a rock against which he huddles, camouflaging himself with a pile of damp leaves. The engine’s racket moves away. From where he is, he has a view over the forest and can make out a road, carved out of the rock below. The helicopter hovers at the entrance to a little tunnel, mere metres above the ribbon of asphalt. It finally comes to rest in the middle of the road, its engine still running. Four men in military fatigues jump out and set off to explore the tunnel. About twenty minutes later the helicopter takes off in a northerly direction. Nikos resumes his progress, careful never to leave the cover of the trees. In the afternoon, dog-tired, he finds himself facing a pyramid-shaped mountain at the entrance to a little combe with a stream running through it. Looking up, he can see a roof that draws a grey streak across a bright patch of meadow. He estimates at a glance that it will take him at least two hours to reach this refuge – and that’s discounting the snow which is beginning to fall in tiny flakes. In no time at all the sky darkens and a storm comes up. No longer able to tell if he is heading in the right direction, Nikos tries to follow a path which had seemed to lead to the meadow. Frozen stiff, his face lashed by the gusting wind, he has left the trees half an hour behind when he bumps into a wooden fence. The sheepfold is very close; he can make out its elongated shape, and reaches it after crossing a field blanketed in a thick layer of fresh snow. Bowing his head under the eaves, he pushes open the door of the drystone building. He brushes off his jacket which bristles with tiny snow crystals, stamps his feet as he would have done out of consideration when entering someone’s home, and slips inside. His feet encounter a floor of beaten earth, as soft as a carpet. His knee strikes something solid, which makes a sharp sound as it falls. His eyes become accustomed to the dark. He had knocked over a chair with a straw seat; he picks it up and collapses onto it.

  Everything is silent. The sheepfold is empty, and the cold has obliterated even the animals’ smell. There remains only a vague odour of oil, like lamp oil. He finally makes out a table, one leg of which he can touch with the toe of his boot. He gets to his feet and slowly brushes off its icy surface with one hand. It encounters the rounded belly of a storm lantern in a brass frame. The oily feel of the fuel on his fingers tells him that this is someone’s dwelling. He has arrived somewhere; he is dry and there will be light for him here as soon as he finds his lighter in a trouser pocket. When he turns up the flame inside the glass chimney, an astonishing sight is revealed. A simple wall of boards divides off a sheep pen from the living space. He is in the latter, which is arranged around a cast-iron stove.

  By way of furniture it contains a bedstead with a straw mattress, the table, two chairs and a stool. There is a supply of dry wood. At the rear of this area a squat fig tree is growing, its uppermost branches sticking through a large opening in the metal roof. Curiously, there is no moisture around the tree. Gazing towards the uppermost branches he can see his shadow, which is cast on a vault coated with some chalky deposit. The sheepfold has been built under an overhang in the rock.

  He decides to lay out his sleeping bag at the base of this fig tree, which grows at the entrance to what seems a kind of grotto. He lights a fire in the cast-iron stove, which, to judge by the warmth remaining in its layer of ash, was used only a few hours before. He stretches out at the foot of the fig tree and immediately sinks into a slumber which for once spares him the recurrent picture of the head.

  In the morning, he is awakened by a sudden noise. It takes him a few seconds to figure out the source of the din: the frost is causing the metal roofing over the shelter to contract with a sinister cracking sound. Stiff and thirsty, he sits up on his bed and glances through a line of faint light shining between the roof and the sheepfold’s front wall, which supports the roof beams.

  The sun is coming up over the Rhodope Mountains in Bulgaria, directly to the east, in the direction he is heading. Looking around, he sees a few objects that must have remained invisible during the evening but now emerge in the strengthening light: a small coffee pot, a packet of matches, a gas ring and a box of sugar, all rusty, arranged on shelves in crevices of the rock. Beside the door stands a can of olive oil; a yellow waterproof coat is hanging from a nail just above it, and a shepherd’s staff leans against the wall. It is carved out of green wood, and doesn’t look like the traditional shepherd’s crook: it is straight, with no handle, its top carved in the shape of a pine cone. He decides to take it with him.

  Outside, dazzled, he returns directly to the immediate problems of making his way. He had left his point of departure only a few hours ago, and is already tending to consider everything past and gone. The severed head falling off, Christina: it all seems far off, remote.

  At this moment he can’t deny that he has slept at the foot of a fig tree inside a shepherd’s cabin built under an overhang in the rock. But it so happens that the snow has stopped falling, and it looks as if the sun will come up in a cloudless sky. And then there are fields streaming with meltwater, and a thin mist hanging level with his boots above the
melting snow. Time and distance will provide him with an explanation for the end of his relationship with Christina. But will he ever discover the identity of that man decapitated by the axe?

  A sound of tinkling bells makes him turn his head. He can’t see any sheep, but he does notice a pickup parked at the side of a road cut into the mountainside, one storey above the rocks overhanging the fold. Something tells him that he will have to speak to this man who is collecting his flock above. He can see him herding his sheep into a terraced field. The young man, wearing an army jacket and jeans, opens a wooden gate. Nikos can hear his shouts and whistles. The shepherd is talking to his sheep.

  He would need to get away very quickly. But Nikos lacks the strength to move; he knows that the man has seen him and will question him. Maybe his picture has already been on TV. It was only to be expected. So he sits down on a large stone in front of the fold. He rests the staff, his newly acquired walking stick, across his knees. He closes his eyes and waits, immersed in the tinkle of sheep bells. He waits for the voice that will eventually address him, for the questions he will soon have to answer. Naturally he’ll be obliged to explain what he is doing there, why, and where he is heading. Resigned, he awaits the greeting. He is startled to hear the man say, “I can tell you the GPS location of the fold.” The man, who is very tall, is standing in front of him, his sunlit face obscured by the warm steam of his breath when he speaks. He is holding a mobile phone which he consults as he glances at Nikos without a hint of curiosity.

  The shepherd reads off, “N 41.15652 E 24.63678.”

  “That’s our position?” asks Nikos.

  “No,” the other answers, “it’s the precise location of the fold. So, if you like, it’s where we are, except that very soon we won’t be here any longer, but its position won’t have changed.”

  ‘A crackpot,’ thinks Nikos, without uttering a word.

  “Pick up your things and come with me,” says the shepherd, smiling at him.

  “And why should I go with you?”

  “Because you must be lost, so that makes you my guest, and anyway there’s nothing more for you here, or for me either. And you must be hungry, too.”

  “All right, I get it, I’ve slept in your sheepfold and I apologize; I was overtaken by the snow and didn’t know where to find shelter.”

  “Let’s go!”

  “I’d rather walk.”

  “My name is Sezan. Come with me.”

  Nikos doesn’t answer; he pulls his bag to him from the low wall on which it was resting, gets up, and goes to close the door of the fold.

  “Leave it open, and don’t forget your stick.”

  “I found it here.”

  “It’s yours.”

  What follows is no longer part of the trajectory imagined by Nikos. He finds himself sitting reluctantly in a red pickup driving downhill towards the Thracian plain, robbed of his route, and along with it the memories that would inevitably have surged up at some turn in a path – like, perhaps, if he’d taken the time to pass through them, the olive groves that now flit past his field of vision, or the sudden silence of the ferry in the humid dawn over Chania harbour, then crossing a gorge on the arch of an old Ottoman bridge, or, even more precisely, the sudden absence of vibration in the ship’s cabin, with the engines stopped, his body still not believing the rolling of the ship had ceased, and then the long minutes of nothingness before the docking was announced over the loudspeaker; places along his way, and reliving the disembarkation in Crete with Christina and their children, children of their own, with sleepy faces – a clear impression that must have occurred to him, who knows why, on hearing the noise made by footsteps in the run-off from the melting snow, those stages skipped, leaving nothing for now or the future but a few fragments of a landscape seen through a windscreen, and the pain of losing Christina suddenly reawakened.

  The shepherd, whose name he has already forgotten, is driving him to Xanthi, “the town”, he said, as if it couldn’t be anywhere else: “We’re going to the town.”

  Then, the first question at last: “Where are you going like that?”

  “I’m walking the path of the Ancient Way.”

  “The Ancient Way? You mean the Egnatia Odos?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Let me guess, you’re an archaeologist, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, in a way. I’m trying to trace history.”

  “There’s not much of that road left.”

  “Yes, but in the places where the Ancient Way has disappeared we know where it went.”

  “So that’s why you’re walking all alone in the mountains in the middle of winter?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know a lot about archaeology. I graduated from the Polytechnic, I’m an engineer. But I’ve seen bits of that road, the Egnatia, and I remember seeing its route on a map in a book at school.”

  “You’re not really a shepherd, then?”

  “I’m becoming a shepherd. I was fed up with city life, and anyway there’s no work, because of the crisis.”

  “I see.”

  “And archaeology pays well?”

  “It all depends.”

  Nikos comes up with a sum, he gives a few banal details, mentioning the German Archaeological Institute in Athens. The lies come easily, for he is simply repeating what Christina had once told him: “As soon as you begin to remove the soil, you’re disturbing the work of years. Layer by layer, painstakingly, slowly, respectfully, I finally discover fragments that once fitted together – an origin. To understand the beginning, you must start from nothing. My job is to deny the human landscape its claim to forget.”

  He must have fallen asleep and dreamed he saw a patch of snow still lying in a hollow – or he thought that was what it was, but now he realizes it was a town blotting the plain: a blotch of white, for that was its only colour. He opens his eyes a first time, still seeing the pictures of the winding road and the river bridges, the sagging mountain peaks; he is dozing in the shepherd’s pickup, which bumps over a railway crossing, and then? Nothing. Nikos has fallen asleep again as Sezan drives along the sandy bank of the Nestos and enters Xanthi. Nikos doesn’t see the police roadblock at the edge of the town, just beyond a recently constructed bridge. The four-by-four avoids it, taking a dirt road lower down used by peasants returning at nightfall to their neighbourhoods in this sizeable provincial town. Seeing the police cars blocking the avenue leading to the town centre, Sezan frowns, believing it is some new humiliation being practised on the Turkish-speaking minority. Just as the shepherd accelerates his truck to climb a low embankment and return to the road, leaving the fields behind and slipping into the late-afternoon flow of vehicles in front of the service stations, Nikos awakens fully, with his hands crossed on his legs, which have gone numb, and his face leaning against the window, suddenly encumbered by the appearance of his reflection in the glass. As they drive along a narrow one-way street deprived of sunlight, he hears someone say: “We’ve arrived.” Sezan invites him home for coffee, after which he is welcome to eat with the family and spend a night or two on the living-room sofa – whatever he likes; anyway, there’s room for him, and blankets, but Nikos replies, “No thanks, there’s no need. I’d rather spend the night in a hotel and start out again on foot tomorrow, but as for the coffee, thanks, with pleasure.”

  But then he wants to take a short walk and starts to say, “I’m going for a bit of a walk, you can drop me here, yes, in this street with no sunlight,” though he didn’t say “street with no sunlight”, but just asked the shepherd to drop him off in front of an apartment building adorned with washing hung out to dry but failing to do so. They’ll meet later because right now, yes, he’d like to walk for a bit, so that he can say he arrived in Xanthi just as he’d imagined it, step after step, abiding by his decision to always keep moving east.

  “I can drive you,” offers the shepherd, who doesn’t understand. Nevertheless, he parks his four-by-four on the pavement and looks at him, wa
tching him search for his bag on the back seat and surely telling himself that this individual is a bit odd.

  The shepherd says, “See you on the square at six!”

  Out in the damp air, Nikos starts walking; the street, darkened so much by apartment buildings, bristles with balconies on which nothing will dry. Some of them have been converted into verandas enclosed by non-reflecting windows of plasticized aluminium.

  Head and shoulders above the column of cars advancing at a snail’s pace, with Sezan’s pickup still behind him, he plunges into the shade of the ground floors into which high-ceilinged shops are incorporated, and forges ahead under lines of neon lights, avoiding concrete pillars, passing between glued laminates, brushing against new plastering, re-puttying, synthetic resin oozing, for everywhere they are patching up, rewiring, reapplying self-adhesive strips, welcome to Xanthi, to do-it-yourself Greece, a screwed-together Greece, a storehouse of globalization, a country for sale on the ground floor, sold off, the upper floors housing the Greece of below and now evicted onto the street, prostrate, in Xanthi like in Patras, in Koukaki like in Patissia, in Larissa, Greece going for a song, everything cleared out! Bundles of laundry; buckets; plenty of water; bleach “made in”; ladders; cans of oil; washers, leaking; chlorine; balls of string “made in”; shears “made in”; padlocks “made in”; cushions “made in”; folding chairs “made in”; mobile storage cabinets “made in”; flowerpots; waxed tablecloths; rubber boots; pocket lamps; coffee sets; draughts games; tent canvas; saucepans; peelers; rubbish bags; fruit baskets; oil-filled radiators; batteries; carpets; Greece; China.

  In Xanthi, in this street devoid of sunlight, the smells linger on, he tells himself, breathing the aromas of a psistaria, whiffs of kebab stuffed with white onion, the sizzling fat of tavernas that have never been as empty and gleaming with dreary poverty, cheerless meals around the edge of Xanthi’s main square and its marble fountain, its concrete paving stones securely seated as if to make people forget the fractured alleyways that fade into a wasteland, a deserted fairground where a skinny old nag stands silhouetted between two cars, nibbling on a few sparse blades of grass.