The Greek Wall

by Nicolas Verdan

  On the face of the big clock, an absurdly triumphant folly erected to commemorate… to commemorate what?

  And what if he went, if he climbed it to see – to discover what the road to the Bulgarian border is like? He still has time to see dusk fall from the slopes of the Rhodope Mountains onto the tiled roofs of the old town; he has time, before the damp from the Nestos takes over.

  Go ahead, take the steps up the alleyways four at a time, stepping on the disjointed stones where the foot rolls over tiny black fossils, the hardened droppings of passing goats vanished forever behind the worm-eaten doors of leprous stables.

  Nikos wasn’t mistaken. Where the town now meets the mountain road at the edge of a ravine-furrowed forest, it is five o’clock; up there, his gaze can slide unobstructed across the jumble of roofs before reaching the plain beyond, which seems darkened by the river.

  Just then the evening bell rings out, grave strokes of the Angelus, as if hurrying to finish. Then silence, the Orthodox church in the foreground, its dome above the stuccoed choir swelled by the amber reflection of the setting sun.

  Squatting, arms clutching his knees, Nikos waits. Half German, half Greek, he waits to hear the other call: now it pours from the muezzin’s throat, hoarse modulations coming from the loudspeaker on the minaret.

  Along with darkness, a sooty smell of woodsmoke rises over the roofs. In the narrow streets of the old Ottoman town, shadows are lengthening under the blank gaze of the corbels. No light testifies to even a silent presence around the table on which a lentil soup awaits. He must return to the square and its bright café signs to believe in the shepherd’s invitation, “You’ll come and eat with us.” And indeed Sezan is waiting there, smiling broadly, holding out a can of beer, the four-by-four’s engine running, its door open. Its radio is throbbing with the heavy bass of a çifetelli. Nikos accepts a hand-rolled cigarette and doesn’t refuse the beer; Greek words come to his lips, leaving a froth that dries in the corners of his stammering mouth.

  As they drive, there is no more to be said than before. The paved surface of the square with the clock might open under their feet, the landscape might collapse, they would be there; the streets might be engulfed by the dark of the abandoned stone houses, but the exchange remains inarticulate as the sweet taste of tobacco dispels any obligation to find words, the bitter tang of the beer fills his stomach with contentment, and the heater warms his icy feet.

  At Sezan’s, in the greyish glow of the neon bulb, Nikos sits on one of the four sofas upholstered in a floral pattern. A synthetic wool blanket for the night is folded on the wooden arm. It will be impossible for him to go and spend the night in a hotel.

  On the glass-topped table a couple of vases holding plastic flowers sit on embroidered place mats. To make room for the meal, the shepherd’s youngest daughter places them on top of the TV that stands on a glass-fronted cabinet where the framed portrait of an elderly gentleman with a long moustache and wearing a black shirt occupies pride of place among the family photos. His hands rest on a cane identical to the one Sezan gave him that morning.

  “It’s the same one?” asks Nikos.

  “No, not the same, but it was my grandfather who taught me to carve them out of softwood.”

  “And he’s still alive?”

  “No, he’s dead, inshallah!”

  Sezan’s wife and three daughters don’t eat with the men. They serve the olives, the goat’s cheese, the egg-and-lemon soup, the pastourma, the cucumber salad, the gherkins, the sweet peppers, the beer and the raki. They eat the same meal, but in the kitchen. Their laughter penetrates the cloud of smoke in the living room and tempts the gaze to steal a glance, trying to see what the women’s quarters are like, and Nikos is just wondering what the cause of their merriment can be when a brother arrives, followed by a neighbour, then another brother – the youngest, just back from Germany, a student in Berlin, who refuses the raki with a frown: the bearded brother who speaks only the dialect and says, “As-salaam ’alaikum.”

  Since he is able to reply, “Wa ’alaikum as-salaam,” the brother from Germany finally meets his gaze with a questioning, somewhat ironic look. Sezan had judged him capable of this sudden seduction brought about by the greeting and raises his glass, exclaiming, “Geia mas, health, good health!” The women’s laughter from the kitchen is twice as loud; the youngest daughter has cleared the plates away and emptied the ashtrays, and the black tea arrives, followed by a plate of pastries. The newcomers’ questions finally issue from mouths full of honey and almonds – they are crisp, they explode, sticky and twisting.

  Nikos is trying to say something like: But why should identity in Islam be expressed by the existence of women who laugh only in the kitchen but not at the table? And Ankara is trying to make use of you to influence Greek domestic policy, isn’t it?

  He would rather say, But why did we part, Christina, my love? And where did I see that severed head before? It wasn’t me, I swear! I wasn’t the one who killed him!

  Nikolaus Strom protests, ‘It wasn’t me!’ Yet it was him, for the brother has turned on the TV, and it’s certainly him, Nikolaus Strom, his name spelled out by the scrolling text, yes, it’s he, Nikos, it’s his face he sees, his picture in a little window in a corner of the screen. A uniformed police officer is speaking very quickly, followed by shots of the frontier, of the River Evros. Along with Sezan and his family, neighbours and brothers, he reads: “Nikolaus Strom, a German national, wanted for espionage.”

  ‘For espionage? Not for murder, for espionage…?’ Nikos’s head is spinning. He doesn’t understand.

  In the living room, the conversation has died away. There remain only the sound of the television and pictures of the Evros, photos of a sample of the overpriced wall, of the barbed-wire wall for which the Greeks are about to pay an exorbitant cost: ‘Not my wall! The fence I offered them cost much less, half the amount!’

  The brother from Berlin has stopped smiling; the others stand up and take their leave. Sezan turns to him. “You’re my guest for tonight. But tomorrow you must go.”

  Nikos has no idea how many hours he has walked today. Sitting on a plastic chair in front of a service-station shop, somewhere in the hills between Komotini and Alexandroupolis, he knows only he’s not going to walk one kilometre farther. The crossing into Bulgaria is too risky. There are police everywhere. He has already skirted two roadblocks by leaving the road and cutting across fields. He has taken a decision: he’ll try to cross the Evros into Turkey, at a spot where he’ll be least expected. His legs are weary, and but for the icy cascade of the light above his head he would doze off in front of the petrol pumps. He’ll find someone to offer him a lift to the next exit from the Egnatia Odos, along the route he had resumed that morning after saying goodbye to the shepherd, who had insisted on driving him all the way to Komotini, where he’d said he had business.

  Sezan, the shepherd-engineer, hadn’t informed on him. He’d taken an enormous risk by picking him up in his truck. He didn’t question him, for Nikos was his guest and accordingly benefited from his complete protection. But now that he is on his own again? Maybe Sezan will phone the police in return for some favour and turn him in? He doesn’t think so, but the idea courses through his innards and takes root, growing like a tumour.

  He is sitting on his chair in front of the service station, warming his hands on a paper cup of coffee, when he feels a hand on his shoulder. A young man in oil-stained jeans addresses him in broken Greek. He must leave now, the shop is closing, he can’t stay. The attendant tells him again that he has no further business here, that he must get up; he must abandon his chair and go on his way.

  But, since he doesn’t budge, the young man merely shrugs and continues piling up the other plastic chairs.

  Inside, a woman turns out the lights and switches two pumps to self-service mode. She shouts something to the young man, who replies that he has already told the man to move on. She leaves it at that. Coming outside, she locks the door and goes off t
o her little car without another word to the attendant, who is donning a warm coat.

  Then he comes over to Nikos and asks if he is all right, if he needs help.

  Nikos tells him not to worry, that he’s waiting to ask the next person coming in to fill up for a ride to the next exit, to the next town, where he’ll be able to find a hotel.

  The young man hesitates, and finally says that at this late hour no one will be willing to offer him a lift, that it’s unusual to find someone like him sitting that way on a chair, just waiting.

  What follows doesn’t correspond at all to what Nikos has been told about the migrants who end up in Greece. The attendant, originally from Bangladesh, offers him a bed in his caravan, which is parked on flat tyres in a field beside the filling station.

  Nikos says yes, gets up, says he accepts, for he is worn out. He can barely get out the words in Greek, or even English, as he tries to express his thanks in either tongue, one of which the young man apparently speaks fluently.

  He has no idea how, but he listens, half-asleep, to the young man’s tale. The Europe that had been described to him was nothing like a makeshift home parked alongside a motorway. “But it’s not a big deal. At least I’m here, and I can earn something, thanks mostly to the tips I get,” he says in his melodious accent.

  What follows is the already familiar story, narrated in the words of the young Bangladeshi, of a young man crossing the river Evros. He describes how he crawled between two watchtowers manned by Turkish soldiers to get to the riverbank where the people-smuggler was waiting for him, his voice recounting how no one prevented him from leaving the other side, where there was nothing for him, describing the river-crossing in an inflatable boat, avoiding the floating islands of tree branches as the fine rain soaked through his clothes, and arriving in this new country that is as cold as Turkey, taking his first steps in the Schengen Zone, a long walk through some woods and across boggy ground, and the railway line he was supposed to follow to a little abandoned station where he could collect a little strength before dawn – the time of day when only hope of a better life makes the first hunger pangs tolerable, and when you have to start walking to the Greek town where, they had advised him, it was best for him to go to the police station.

  Inside the dark caravan, the story of his crossing continues, so far basically adhering to the route now favoured by the smuggler networks, following the meanders of an apposite discourse that doesn’t tolerate the slightest digression: single file, boats, smugglers, abandonment, watchtowers, spotlights, cold water, drowning, guards, dogs, fear, missing landmarks, and the impossibility of turning back.

  On the map of eastern Thrace, the course of the river that separates Greece from Turkey is no longer referred to as the Evros, but as a porous border, the main point of entry into the European Union, a sieve, a prohibited military zone, the route to the West, a migratory path. It was across this difficult terrain that the Bangladeshi had ventured, wriggling with all his strength past the barriers of a useless language while refusing to take an iota of interest in the country he is crossing, refusing to see in it any grave obstacle to the more general movement that keeps driving him on, the Bangladeshi relegating the river crossing to a mere springboard, while observers’ reports, hostile or sympathetic, wary or supportive, hostile or helpful, exploitative or benevolent, view his journey – the journey of every migrant, illegal or victim – as an odyssey capable of reversing the course of history, of threatening the European Union, of destabilizing Greece.

  Unburdened of his story and falling silent in his bunk, the Bangladeshi can let go of the part of him that crossed the Evros – just a few steps in his story, soon to be erased by time.

  Turning his back, Nikos falls asleep thinking of his wall, of the wall he represents on this side of the frontier, his wall, the purpose of which is to bar admission to migrants like this Bangladeshi. Listening to the pump attendant has allowed him to recover a rhythm, an entirely impersonal cadence; he has been able to descend into himself, into the depths of memory from which, he feels, forgetting always emerges in the end. At this moment, his story concurs with the migrant’s; it does more than coincide with it, for it has become one with his, with his story, theirs, ours, compelled as we are to search for that distant destination where we can sustain our faith in our errant dreams.

  Nikos is up at first light. He leaves Macedonia along minor roads, re-entering Thrace across the dry bed of the river Strymon. The Roma is changing a tyre when he sees him. Nikos approaches him slowly, guardedly; the Roma watches him, and points to the spare tyre with his chin. Nikos helps him, and they set off together. Following mostly unpaved little lanes to reach the plain, they head east. But the light is failing and the Roma doesn’t want to go any further.

  Now Alexandroupolis is in sight on the right; the large building all lit up is the University Hospital. The sound of the Roma’s little van fades away. Nikos takes a few steps and stops; he feels that his slow hike has become part of the landscape; then he turns, preparing for the great bend to the north, to above where the Evros enters its delta, traversed by low-flying waterfowl that utter cries of alarm when a migrating bird flies silently by.

  At nightfall, he takes refuge in the first village on the outskirts of Alexandroupolis. The hotel seems empty. The receptionist doesn’t look up. She is watching television – a Turkish soap opera with Greek subtitles. She must watch all the soap operas, but not the most recent ones. She likely knows nothing of the manhunt.

  With his eyes closed in the damp, cold bedroom, he wonders, ‘How can one cross a landscape barred by a river: how?’

  Days pass, and Nikolaus doesn’t seem to be making any progress, possibly because he is thinking a lot and thoughts like his go unremarked, even by him. But tomorrow, for sure, he’ll cross the Evros into Turkey. The frontier guards will be too concerned with the migrants to pay attention to someone crossing in a contrary direction. And even if the Turks are sure to pick him up, it’s better to fall into their hands than those of the Greek police. Considering the confusion that reigns on this frontier, it will be easier than entering Bulgaria. And then, above all, while surveying the site for the wall with the Greek army a few weeks before, Nikos had discovered a way to ford the river where it makes an elbow near the base of a watchtower, at a spot where the water is quite shallow. He knows that the guards are relieved at around four in the afternoon. He’ll have to see.

  Episode VI

  From a distance it resembles one of those restaurants found in large Caribbean all-inclusives: a large polygonal roof, little ornamental ponds all around, and little wooden bridges like in a Japanese garden. There is a flagpole at the peak of the roof. This is where Nikolaus Strom was sighted an hour earlier. The man now being questioned is positive; he repeats, “He’s the one that was on TV. He was walking on his own towards the river, I saw him go by the windows.”

  Agent Evangelos notes that the witness was having coffee with his girlfriend when he saw Strom emerge, like a ghost, from the fog. The witness is claiming a reward, and Agent Evangelos leaves Lieutenant Anastasis to explain that there has never been any mention of a reward, and now he is looking at this pastry shop, apparently parachuted onto a plain about fifty kilometres from Alexandroupolis. It is surrounded by a network of dried-up canals and side roads, dotted with little red signs warning of danger: “Landmines!”

  ‘How can that be?’ wonders Agent Evangelos. ‘Why would Strom decide to return to the Evros region?’

  “You’re quite sure it was the person you saw on television?” Lieutenant Anastasis asks the witness who, in Agent Evangelos’s opinion, is fidgeting too much.

  “Yes, I’ve told you already! And I want the money, it was me that saw the terrorist, me!”

  “Who said anything about a terrorist?”

  “Why, that guy is one! The guy you’re looking for. Give me my money, I’m entitled to it.”

  Inside the pastry shop, which is set up around a wooden column with plastic windows
in its canvas walls, families are ordering generous servings of cream cakes. A queue has formed in front of a vast glass-fronted counter chock-full of pastries adorned with figurines of Santa Claus and chimney sweeps on golden ladders. A priest, leaning towards his children, points to a fruit cake dotted with crystallized fruit. The waitresses speak Bulgarian to one another, and the coffee is very strong.

  Outside, the fog is so thick that a superb sense of direction would be required to find the way to the river. Agent Evangelos looks at his watch. It will be dark in five hours. He tells himself it’s essential not to lose Strom this time, the way they did in Kavala.

  Strom had been spotted for the first time in Samothrace. At this time of year strangers never go unnoticed on those sparsely populated islands. After the description of the wanted man was circulated, at least a dozen people called to say that they were sure they’d seen the man whose picture had been on TV the evening before. Agent Evangelos had found the evidence of a schoolteacher especially convincing. Her description was very precise, and she added that she found the man quite handsome. She even confessed that she sometimes got a bit bored all on her own during the long winters on Samothrace, since there were hardly any visitors, and she’d previously lived in the city. Evangelos had stopped listening to her, for he felt certain that they were on Strom’s trail. He therefore issued the order to search all the hotels in Kavala, knowing that the fugitive couldn’t have had a chance to rest since leaving the Europa Motel, where he first went to ground after his escape with Polina.

  Agent Evangelos takes another look through the window; he can’t see anything, but he senses that the frontier is very near.

  But why did the fugitive return to the region? ‘To tell the truth,’ thinks Agent Evangelos, ‘I’m not complaining. The directorate wants to arrest him for espionage. He must be crossing a military zone at this very moment. There’ll be no need to invent an entire scenario for the prosecution. It’s ready-made.’