The House on Paradise Street

by Sofka Zinovieff

  3

  Privacy and solitude are not Greek words

  MAUD

  Orestes and I returned home from the hospital via the police station, where I signed various papers in triplicate and saw the statement from the swimmer who had spotted the wreck. During the brief time that elapsed after I called Aunt Alexandra to tell her the news, she had taken charge; she knew what had to be done. When Orestes and I came through the front door and into the communal hall, she opened the door to her apartment, already dressed entirely in black. She stretched her arms in a gesture of resigned sadness and embrace, pulling me to her, and including Orestes, who submitted, still pallid and queasy-looking. Chryssa came hurrying up behind, emitting a raw sound of misery. Her face was wet and her eyes red.

  “Life to you, children. May God give him rest. May God forgive him.”

  I hugged Chryssa, bending down to hold onto her small frame, feeling her tears on my face that was still dry from shock.

  Tig was very brave. At 1.30, I walked up the hill for the second time that day and waited for her a little way from the school gates. By the time she spotted me, she and her friend, Eurydice, were already lighting up. Tig threw her cigarette in the gutter and stalked over, looking both angry and contrite.

  “What are you doing here?” It was hard to answer. I had already taken a sedative from a packet Nikitas kept in the bathroom, and though it had passed its expiry date, it was effective in blurring the edges, rather as the pink Saharan sand was still dulling the city skylines.

  I had previously imagined that if your husband died you ran into a storm of grief that would obliterate anything else. But it was not as simple as that. There were all the practical things to be done, and some of the time I was so emptied of emotion, I barely knew who I was – a cog in the machinery that surrounds a death. Then, unpredictably, the void would be filled with terror. I became like a cartoon character who runs over the edge of the cliff and suddenly realises there is nothing below them. Tumbling into the depths, I found myself letting out a groan, as though I was actually falling. Death seemed so close.

  Throughout the afternoon, friends and relations rang up, wanting information; questions, disbelief, more questions. I telephoned my parents, who were shaken and sympathetic, but the distance that had characterised our dealings since childhood remained. I asked them not come to Greece and they didn’t insist. They had never been close enough to understand my life and I wasn’t interested in trying any more. Now was not the time to instigate change.

  As the light drained away from the heavy clouds at the end of the day, I lay on my bed feeling paralysed, unable to move, as though a great weight was pressing down on me. It was then that I wondered whether I could just leave. Take Tig, go away, and it might be as though nothing had happened. I could erase Greece, make it an episode that was over, and return to a parallel ghost life – the one I would have had if I had not left England. That way, the disaster could be left behind. But even as I fantasised, I knew it was impossible. After all these years, Athens was home. It no longer mattered that I would always be a xéni – the word that used to haunt me when I heard it said of me in offices or shops. It always seemed an explanation of what I was not, what I lacked: a stranger, a foreigner and, above all, not Greek. I had struggled for a long time, trying to fit in, to do the right thing, to adapt, though eventually I preferred to embrace the freedom of existing on the margins. Still, in spite of everything, I loved Greece and I knew that going back to England could not be a solution. I had become an awkward hybrid who belonged nowhere – what an Italian friend called ne carne, ne pesce – neither fish nor fowl.

  My decision to come to Greece twenty years ago was somewhat chancy. I was embarking on a PhD in social anthropology and most of my contemporaries at Cambridge were planning to paddle up the Amazon to find lost swathes of rain forest or build their own mud hut in a forgotten African province. When I chose to examine “changing rites of passage on a Greek island”, it looked tame in comparison. My fellow students enjoyed teasing me about what was evidently my intention to live the good life in the Mediterranean – beaches and buckets of bright pink taramasalata. There’d be moustachioed men dancing, the twang of bouzoukis playing The Boys from Piraeus, and a Kodachrome backdrop of the sun-drenched Acropolis.

  I knew my decision irritated my grandfather. Desmond had been a classicist, teaching for many years at King’s College, London and was a life-long scholar of ancient Greece. His obsession was Parmenides – Socrates’ teacher and the so-called “father of Greek philosophy” – and he used to quote obscure phrases that meant little to me as a child. His favourite concerned the “wise mares” who were “straining at the chariot.” He thought this was a good explanation of life; as charioteers, we need to give our horses enough freedom to run, but also to control them so they kept on track. “And maidens were leading the way,” he would add, gnomically. When I became what he called “emotional,” he would say: “Tighten the reins on the horses, Maud. Don’t let them take control.” If my grandmother, Lucy, heard, she’d add: “Let the bloody horses have a good time, that’s what I say. Let them run wild.”

  My parents were not much in evidence. Having met at the Royal College of Music, they were just getting their first concerts with an ensemble that played early music on original instruments, when I was born. To add to my youthful resentment, they gave me a name I hated for its sturdy, old-fashioned quality. Nobody else of my age was called Maud, and it was no comfort that it cropped up through the generations on my mother’s side. Her paternal grandmother was a Maud and her death soon before my birth (plus an inheritance of £5,000) had made the choice almost a moral obligation. My grandfather never tired of quoting Tennyson’s poem Maud and “Come into the garden, Maud” was something I was sick of by the time I was five. Maud Thomas. It sounded solid and English, though my surname should have been Tomaszewski; my father’s grandparents had tried to shed their Polish past as quickly as possible when they arrived in London before the First World War. Although I had often thought of getting rid of Maud in much the same way, I never quite managed. Later, as it was almost impossible for Greeks to pronounce, it was Hellenised. I was called Mad, Maood, Mood, Moody, but more often Mod or Mond – Μοντ – which in written Greek ends with “nt” because there is no single letter for the sound of “d”. In practice, even Mond was frequently feminised to Mondy. At least it wasn’t Maud.

  My parents tried taking me on tour with them when I was very young, but in addition to their viola da gamba cases, I suppose I became one thing too many to carry onto aeroplanes and trains. It made more sense to leave me with my grandparents. So, although I spent some holidays with my mother and father, it was Desmond and Lucy who dealt with me on a daily basis, knew the names of my school teachers and what breakfast cereal I preferred. The remoteness remained, as I never became close to my parents. If they left me behind as a child, I left them behind as an adult. Tig has only seen them a handful of times.

  As a teenager, my friends envied me my freedom. When I was sixteen, I was given the small, musty basement flat below my grandparents’ house in Bayswater and largely came and went as I pleased. Desmond was too busy working to notice and Lucy was long past worrying about what I got up to in my “den”. Desmond had visited Greece in his younger days and was clear that the virtues of the country’s distant past were no longer to be found there. He felt the ancient philosophers, sculptors and politicians belonged to him and the British tradition, and he was dismissive of contemporary Greeks.

  “They’ve spoiled the place. And you can’t even say they’re real Greeks. They have nothing to do with the ancients, though they’d like you to think that they are all Pericles’ grandchildren. In actual fact they’re Turks, Slavs, Albanians… a Balkan blend of former Ottoman subjects. And, of course, they never had the advantage of a Renaissance or an Enlightenment.” He hoped I would study classics and dismissed my choice of social anthropology as “woolly as knitting”. After I got a place to stud
y it at Cambridge, he said: “A pity.” Later, when I chose Greece as the country for my fieldwork, I knew it would annoy him. He quoted Byron to annoy me:

  “Fair Greece! Sad relic of departed worth!” Later, it became a catchphrase that Nikitas and I used when we were annoyed or depressed by Greece: “Sad relic,” we’d say, when a politician was accused of corruption or when a wooded slope outside Athens was burnt by arsonists and turned into prime real estate.

  Tig came into my bedroom and we lay together, dry-eyed and stunned. We were soon joined by Orestes, who banged open the door, kicked off his tattered trainers, and lay down on the bed next to Tig. He was angry, still trembling slightly, processing the tragedy with masculine heat and noise, as his father probably would have done

  “All he’s done for me, all my life, is to leave me. Ever since I was two. It always has to be about him. And now he’s really succeeded…” His voice broke awkwardly, almost like an adolescent’s. “I think he did it on purpose.”

  “No. The police think it was an accident.” I wanted to sound convincing for Tig, though my voice gave me away and the flicker of her eyes in my direction showed me I was failing. “They’ll give us the autopsy report tomorrow. It was just bad luck.”

  “Luck, like ants being trodden on? Or destiny?” Tig looked angry too, as if I should come up with an answer. I turned away, curling my body up as tight as I could, hoping I could hold myself together better like that.

  Within minutes, Orestes jumped up, stretching his arms and putting his shoes on with jittery movements; he rarely remains in one place if he can move to another.

  “Do you want to come up to my room?” He held out a hand to Tig. “Come on, doll.” Orestes had moved in to the studio flat on our terrace at the age of sixteen, after yet another quarrel with his mother and step-father, and had never left. Appropriately, this sort of apartment is known in Greek as a garsoniéra – a bachelor pad – and that is what he made it. He painted it purple, though the colour had since been virtually obliterated by posters of savage-faced heroes and provocative graffiti. The curtains were only rarely opened, the windows mostly shut, and the room stank of stale marijuana smoke, half-eaten pizzas and the faint echoes of feminine perfumes.

  From a young age, Tig became a mascot to Orestes and his school friends, charming them with her quirky, precocious questions. Later, Orestes’ girlfriends sensed they must make Tig their ally if they were to hold on to their privileged position, though irrespective of their success in this, they never lasted long. Orestes was usually surrounded by girls, but the relationships invariably petered out as something more interesting appeared on the horizon. He stayed on good terms though, and there were countless pretty girls whom I had seen progress from bewildered tears at my kitchen table (“I don’t understand what happened, Kyria Moody,” they would sob) to becoming part of his loyal coterie.

  That night, Tig slept with me, curling up on her father’s side of the bed.

  “The pillow smells of Babas,” she said. “It’s like he’s still here.” She cried at first but then fell asleep almost immediately from exhaustion. I lay next to her, breathing in warm hair that smelled of a fruity shampoo, like apples stored in hay. And beyond that, Nikitas. It was like an impossible riddle: how could he be dead, his body already turning into something else – a piece of meat in a metal drawer – when his cells were here, emitting his familiar, living scent? His physical self entered my nostrils – a vaporous spirit that would now fade away atom by atom. I wondered how I would bear this dreadful process.

  * * *

  The following morning, Alexandra took me to Mr Katsaridis, the funeral director, in the next street. We walked slowly and she was curious to know whether I had called Nikitas’ mother.

  “Be careful,” she warned, when she heard we had spoken. “My sister is one of those dangerous people who believe they are saving the world when they are really destroying it. If you speak with her again, don’t take what she says too literally. I always say, beware of grand schemes and people who don’t mind breaking eggs to make omelettes. Don’t forget she found her home with Stalin.” Alexandra already had one arm through mine, and she patted my sleeve with her other hand, as though she was closing the matter. “You are a strong woman, Mondy. And you must stay strong for your daughter. Leave my sister alone, where she has chosen to make her life.”

  I had often passed Katsaridis’ “Rituals’ Office” but had never really noticed it. Living so close to Athens’ most prominent cemetery, I had become accustomed to walking among death’s trades: the ranks of florists, marble-carvers and confectioners of mourning sweets, with their mocked-up memorial cakes decorated with names. “Out of here!” people would often exclaim if the subject of death or cemeteries cropped up, but not in our neighbourhood. Greeks don’t like cypresses in their gardens, for their association with graves, though their tall, almost human silhouettes grace the landscape. In our neighbourhood, however, it was normal to live below cypress trees, just as it was routine to see a black-clad woman wiping her cheek as she walked down the hill, couples going to tend a grave, or small groups of people waiting for memorials by the flower stalls. Quite often there were smiles as well as tears; it was a truism that funerals provoked both. I had previously held the mistaken belief that all this practicality removed some of death’s mystique, as though you could outwit it merely by observing it long enough.

  Kyrios Katsaridis was younger and kinder than I had expected, and supported me when I rejected Alexandra’s suggestion of bringing Nikitas home for the night. I didn’t want a wake. I couldn’t bear the prospect of sitting up all night in a crowded room looking at Nikitas’ dead body.

  “These days most Athenians choose not to bring the deceased home,” said Kyrios Katsaridis. His face was smooth, almost boyish, but he spoke with a deep and soothing voice. I wondered about this young man, what he drank at bars with his friends, how he had learned his trade. At his father’s side, no doubt, in the Greek tradition. It’s hardly a job you’d dream of training for.

  There was no question that it would be an Orthodox funeral. Nikitas did not believe in God, he campaigned for the separation of Church and state in Greece and he wrote articles about how monks on Mount Athos lived the high life, wiring up expensive televisions in their cells and carrying out business deals on their mobile phones. The very sight of a priest’s black robes on the street was taken as bad luck:

  “Quick, touch your balls!” he’d whisper conspiratorially to Orestes. He despised the way that Aunt Alexandra, like most of the faithful, greeted a priest by kissing his hand, and his most heart-felt curses all included the figures of Christ and the Virgin. Yet like the vast majority of his compatriots, Nikitas didn’t think twice about marking his way through life with a priest as master of ceremonies. The only reason he and I did not marry in a church – as he had with his first two weddings – was that I was not Orthodox. Tig, like Orestes before her, had been baptised when she was nine months old – slathered in oil, plunged under water, hair snipped, adorned with a cross. And she was given a name; you don’t even have one until your godparent announces it to the priest.

  We chose a coffin that looked like a glossed-up mahogany wardrobe with fancy handles. There weren’t any hand-woven wicker baskets or biodegradable cocoons as found these days in England, and I didn’t care.

  “We found an excellent position in the cemetery. High up, in the part we call the artists’ area. All sorts are there – singers, writers, actors. Nikos Xilouris, Viki Moscholiou…” Kyrios Katsaridis looked pleased and I tried to be encouraging to the young man, nodding and smiling ridiculously. Later, I learned that it was Aunt Alexandra’s widespread contacts and savoir faire that had procured the grave. Few but the most famous and influential are guaranteed a place in the First Cemetery these days and there had been at least one unofficial payment in addition to the hefty monthly rent we would pay for the plot. Freehold prices were mostly out of the question – pushing 100,000 euros.

  As
the day ground on, our sitting room filled with friends, acquaintances, colleagues from the newspaper, people I didn’t even know, but who cared about Nikitas. Morena came in to help, taking time off from one of the other houses she cleaned, and brought her soothing presence to what became increasingly like what happened each September 15, on Saint Nikitas’ day. Then, the phone barely stopped ringing, the door was left open so people could walk in with sweets, flowers and presents and the whole thing usually went on late into the evening. Nikitas would cook and whip up the levels of kéfi (“there’s no translation – you either feel the mood or keep quiet”) with wine, stories, music and food until everyone was ready to dance or roar with laughter at his indiscreet tales about the politicians of the moment or his latest adventure abroad.

  Nikitas was notoriously contradictory and could be awkward, but he had many friends who adored him, and even more people who were entertained by or interested in him. There were others who felt his influence in the media; the number of politicians of various persuasions who tried to keep close to him was remarkable. He had spent a lifetime with these people – talking, working, fighting and drinking. He used to tell me that he didn’t care about these superficial relationships, but I saw they made him feel alive.

  “Athens is a village,” he said. “Wherever you go you find people you know.” And it was true. It was impossible to walk down the street, let alone go out for dinner, without meeting someone from his vast social network. And in restaurants, Nikitas always had one eye on who was coming and going: a disgraced minister, a minor celebrity, an attractive woman passing – they all meant something to him and his solid yet mercurial presence seemed to act like a magnet. He enjoyed it when someone sent the waiter over with a bottle of wine as an offering, and he’d jump up to drink the health of the admirer who had arranged it, and then do the same too, shoring up fragile social ties with these drinking rituals. Now that Nikitas had gone, I should not have been surprised that so many people wanted to be there. A heavy middle-aged woman with thinning hair and brown clothes came up and embraced me. She told me she worked at the paper and rubbed her red eyes.