The House on Paradise Street

by Sofka Zinovieff

  * * *

  The next day I went to Nikitas’ office. I needed to decide what to do with his stuff and whether to go on paying the rent there. But I also wanted to see his private place. I walked down Paradise Street, avoiding the bitter-orange trees that are planted in the middle of the pavements and whose branches and fruit are liable to slap you or scratch your face if you don’t take care. The road was wet from the rain that had fallen early in the morning but bolts of sunshine now penetrated the clouds, gilding the puddles. There was a pungent odour like semen in the air, something that had disconcerted me the first time I came across it in Athens, but which now made me smile, remembering Nikitas’ explanation.

  “It’s the carob trees,” he said. “They flower in the autumn and give off this stink of sex. You can’t deny that Athens is an erotic city when the whole place smells of sperm.” Now this strangely human scent emanating from the trees’ tiny flowers is a familiar olfactory accompaniment to autumnal decay, wet leaves, the end of the year. Sex and death, as usual.

  As I waited to find a taxi, I looked across at the Acropolis. I was able to judge my mood by whether I was pleased by the sight or whether it annoyed me as a wearisome cliché. That day I felt happy to see the Parthenon, standing alone, creamy blonde and almost floating. Every Athenian has their own private Acropolis – a view from a bathroom window or a personal angle on that most public of places. Temple, church, mosque, weapons store room, provider of museum pieces, over-used tourist destination, and above all symbol, it is nothing if not adaptable to our fantasies. I like the way it’s not perfect: the gashing hole caused by one of the many battles that have raged around it, and the familiar beige cranes used for restoration that protrude awkwardly like surgical forceps holding diseased bones in place. On a good day, this glimpse of the Acropolis after I walk Tig to school or as I wait for a bus, can be a reminder of my attachment to Greece’s bare, salty landscape of rocks and ruins. Other times, the columns look like the bars on a window.

  I flagged down a taxi that already contained two passengers. They were disagreeing with the driver about his support of LAOS, the extreme right-wing party.

  “Greece is for the Greeks. I’ve nothing against foreigners, but they should go back to their own homes.” The driver was enjoying his easy prejudices and I didn’t have the heart to get into an argument as I usually did, asking whether or not his own parents or grandparents had not done a spell as immigrants in Germany, America or Australia (they usually had). I just thought: “Fair Greece! Sad relic…” and was relieved when he dropped me off on the corner of Sophocles Street. As I walked my spirits lifted a little. Nikitas had loved this area, where old Athens meets new; the town hall and the central fish and meat market, Pakistani cafés, Chinese clothes emporia, old men wheeling barrows piled high with cheap socks, bankers and businessmen striding along barking into mobile phones, East and West, forgetting and remembering. The streets are named after the ancients: Sophocles, Socrates, Euripides, Sappho, though they are now filled with groups of immigrants, cheap prostitutes and home-grown junkies. You don’t really want to walk there at night any more, Nikitas advised.

  Nikitas’ office was in a modest version of the many arcades that snake under and between buildings in this part of town, each with a different character. The shops in this one looked too modest to stay in business, yet had remained there for years: the sign-engraver, with its dusty selection of bronze name plates and stick-on symbols for public toilet doors; the translation and photocopy office; the coin and stamp collectors’ shop; the tiny key-cutting business, with its basil pot outside the door. I moved slowly, remembering how often I had come over here in the early years of our marriage. I usually met Nikitas down the road at Diporto, his favourite taverna – a smoky hole down some steep steps, with whitewashed walls, bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling and a row of massive wooden barrels filled with pine-scented retsina. Fellow diners were mostly market workers who were offered a few simple dishes cooked in the corner – chickpea soup, salads with cracked olives and small fried fish; there was no menu. Nikitas talked to me about the significance of the classic Athenian basement taverna and how it represents the subconscious, the Dionysian celebrations of wine, food, music and open conversation, far from the constraints of work, family and logic.

  “So long as the women are back home doing the real work,” I’d snipe amiably.

  “Maybe, but it’s like Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, a dark place where emotions replace reason, where outsiders are welcome, where the normal rules are let go. It’s where a simple, working man can feel moved to dance and is transformed into a god during that time. Nobody can stop him. To a people who have so often lost everything, this is important.”

  After lunch we would wander back to the arcade (a cool retreat from the baking afternoon streets), up the stairs and along to the end of the first floor walkway that overlooked the internal courtyard. Nikitas’ office was dark and peaceful, despite its uncompromising mess of newspapers, ashtrays and unwashed coffee cups. He would draw the ugly orange curtains, inherited from the previous occupant, and undress me. We lay on the wooden-framed daybed, with its rough, village blanket. Nobody would disturb us.

  I hesitated after fitting the key into the lock. I had never been inside alone before and even though Nikitas was gone, I did not want to spy. I often caught glimpses of his former life when I went there: the lengthy Before-Me era as opposed to the shorter With-Me one, was how I thought of it. Whatever our marriage was, I never doubted that I was loved. Nikitas retained an almost old-fashioned gallantry with me, complimenting me on my appearance, helping me negotiate the day-to-day problems of Athenian existence, buying me little presents from the stores selling hardware or herbs on Athenas Street. I was never ignored, but neither did I feel that these attentions were exclusive to me. He was interested in so many people and there had been so much experience before he met me. The two former wives revealed their presence in photographs, letters and small objects whose history I would never know. Sometimes I referred to myself as “Number Three”, hoping to make Nikitas laugh. But it also made me realise how I was just one among all the other people who came and went through his life, leaving deposits, like water dropping silt along a river bank. It was all welcome to him. The more people you knew, the richer your life would be. But the longer we were together, the more I was aware of how little I knew of Nikitas’ origins – the lake or spring at the source.

  The air was musty, like coffee dregs growing mould. I went over to the daybed, gripping the worn wooden end, keeping steady, noticing the dent in the cushion that must have been left by Nikitas’ head the last time he lay there. I sat for a moment, taking in the manly smells of wood and books, then opened the curtains, turned on the overhead light and went to the desk. It was swamped with papers that already looked old, as though the place had been abandoned long ago. The laptop was closed and dusty. Standing on top of it was a glass and an almost empty bottle of Cutty Sark whisky. There were several Greek books about the Civil War – thick paperbacks with grainy photographs of men with untamed beards and weapons slung across their backs. The dense texts were littered with acronyms like codes that might give answers: EAM, ELAS, KKE, EDES, EPON, OPLA, SOE, X…

  Nikitas had been researching for a book about the relationship between the British and the Greeks through history, with a particular focus on the Civil War and its aftermath. He had been gathering material for ages, and had taken on an assistant who worked at the paper. I hadn’t met her, but I knew that someone called Danae was helping stoke his anger about the contradictions that lay behind the famous British philhellenism and the country’s involvement in Greece. He didn’t have a title yet, but my nickname for his book was Perfidious Albion. He was annoyed that the British remained so ignorant about the Greek Civil War that they helped provoke.

  “Even English school children know about the bombardment of Guernica and the horrors of the Spanish Civil War,” he complained. “But nobody i
n England learns about the massacres of civilians in Greece a decade later. Sadly, we didn’t get Picasso painting the English aerial attacks in Athens, or Orwell and Hemingway telling our story.”

  “Philhellenism, my arse,” Nikitas liked to say. “In reality, the English have been just as much anti-Hellenes or mis-Hellenes. Even Shelley’s old favourite, ‘We are all Greeks’, was a way of saying the English are better at being Greek than us. The English used Greece for their own fantasies and adventures, but trampled all over it when it suited. All Greeks know about Byron, the hero-poet who supported the Greek revolution. And maybe he did, but if it hadn’t been in their interests, the English would never have backed us against the Turks in 1821. And then they spent the next 100 years trying to foist atrocious foreign kings on us. Oh, and don’t forget the Ionian Isles were little English colonies for quite a time – they still play fucking cricket on Corfu.” I could almost hear Nikitas’ voice as I tried to bring some order to the surface of the desk and heaped all the books together on a shelf, and made piles out of different papers. I find this occupation as soothing as other people find needlepoint or knitting, and it is fitting that I have managed to place archives at the heart of my work. It was something my grandfather Desmond had taught me from a young age, when he got me to help organise his study. We would spend hours arranging the books alphabetically, sorting through index cards, tidying files and cleaning out drawers. Later, I brought this system to my own work, aware of how it made the world look better, bringing order to the chaos, just as it had given boundaries to my childhood, which so often seemed treacherously unstable.

  One pile of folders was spread across a table and I found them filled with photocopies and pages of notes in unfamiliar handwriting I presumed was Danae’s. There was a small, black lipstick lying close by. I opened it, twisting up the plum-coloured, pointed tip and examining the unwelcomely intimate object. It made me aware of how much I didn’t know of Nikitas’ life, of how I may have been loved, but I was also shut out. There was so much he chose to share with other people rather than me. I remembered overhearing Nikitas speaking with Danae on the phone not long before, and he was whipping himself up into a satisfying rant about his bête noir.

  “The thing about the English,” (Nikitas, like most Greeks, didn’t say “the British”) “is that what they like about themselves is all that crap about fair play, cricket, decency, moderation, and yet their whole history has been about oppressing other people with slavery, colonialism, and war. We are supposed to be taken in by their upright, perfect manners and their cups of tea, and we are all meant to love them as if they really were tzéntlmen and milórdi. But in fact they’re the number one drunken hooligans – they invented football violence. And if you look at problem tourists in Greece, it’s always them. Who else would create pub-crawls and open-air blow-job competitions in Greek tourist resorts? Not to mention their huge success with serial murderers back home. Have you ever wondered why we never had a Greek Jack the Ripper?”

  I remember waiting in the room while he listened to Danae’s answer, wondering what she was saying, until he shouted, “Exactly! Wherever you look in the world and pick a troubled place with civil war or terrorism, you’ll often find the English had something to do with it. India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, Northern Ireland – and that’s before we even look at Africa.”

  I picked up the whisky bottle from the desk and took a sip. It made me shudder, but then warmed my stomach and helped my breath go back to normal. I knew I shouldn’t fill my mind with petty complaints at this point – Nikitas’ obsessions and varied friendships were part of who he was. But I couldn’t help feeling hurt. Why had he needed to keep these things from me? It was as if his death was the culmination of a collection of secrets, and possibly betrayals. I had never clung to him or nagged to know the details of his life, but I had always assumed I was honoured with the truth. Now I was beginning to wonder.

  I sat down in the chair and began flicking through a pad of lined notepaper filled with jottings in Nikitas’ handwriting. The uppermost page had only one word written in large capital letters: ΣΦΗΚΑ (Sfíκa – WASP). It had been underlined several times, but meant nothing to me. On the other side of the desk was a large manila envelope marked with the initials J.F. Its bulging contents were held in by a thick rubber band, which I removed. I pulled out several letters, all addressed to Antigone Perifanis, Nikitas’ mother. He had not told me anything about this material and I wondered where it could have come from.

  As far as I could see, the letters were all sent from England by someone called John Fell, whose sharp, italic script scratched across the pages in black ink. I opened the first one, dated September, 1938. It was written on fragile, pale blue paper from Wadham College, Oxford and signed Johnny.

  My dear Antigone,

  Your letter was waiting for me when I got home and made me miss you and your family awfully. So much so, in fact, that I wanted to go straight back to Greece. England is as soggy and bland as the puddings they serve in college. I yearn for the intense colours and scents of the Mediterranean.

  The tone was jovial and friendly. The writer recommended several English poets, including a number from the “Great War”. I flicked through the envelopes, some of which were dated 1946 and later, and mainly sent from England. Several were addressed to Antigone at Averoff Prison and were stamped by the Greek censor. I opened them. The man evidently cared for Antigone, but despite the endearments, I could not gauge their relationship. It was not clear whether this was a lover. And if not, who was he? There were many practical details: “Shall I send more of the soap?” “Were the pencils the right ones?” But there were times when he became more thoughtful.

  I arrived in Greece with clear ideas of right and wrong, of what we were fighting for. Now these absolutes have all faded into muted shades of grey. I feel much older, though not any wiser. It is unclear to me what history will make of this war and the world it has left in its wake.

  I decided to read one more letter before stopping. It was dated 1947.

  Since receiving your letter I have been choked with anger and frustration. It is utterly appalling about the Wasp. Why did you not tell me about this before? An impossible situation. Bloody

  I tried scanning some more pages to find another reference to Wasp, but with no luck. I replaced everything inside the envelope and put it in my bag.

  Nikitas’ office was almost as messy when I left as when I arrived, but my mind had come alive. The curiosity aroused by these letters dispersed some of the pain that was engulfing me. I was intrigued by the sense of Nikitas’ mother as a young woman, and longed to know more of her life. As I walked along Panepistimiou (University Avenue), I started to make a plan. It was as if I had been offered some sort of way through the horrible chaos of mourning. By the time I passed the Parliament building, I had decided that I would do my own research into Nikitas’ history. This would give me some answers, but it could also be my memorial to my husband. With luck, it might even provide an explanation for my daughter. Tig would need to know at some point; it was her history too.

  I turned off Amalia Avenue, with its traffic fumes, tram terminus and peanut barrows, and walked into the muffled green of the National Garden. Formerly the Royal Garden, the park was planted by Greece’s first Queen, Amalia, in the 1830s and its rows of spindly palms look as though they date back to then. Signs warn of the danger of things falling from the ageing trees. Old men and tired migrants sat slumped on benches and a couple of late-season tourists in shorts trudged by, looking like incongruous birds left behind after the flock migrated. I slowed down, thinking I would have to speak with Antigone. She was the only person who could help me understand more about Nikitas’ origins. Now that I was no longer able to speak with Nikitas or ask him questions, it would be a kind of communication. I would try to find his answers as well as my own.

  When I got home I wrote a short letter on the off-chance that John Fell was still alive and still lived at
the address given on some of the letters from the 1940s: Corner House, Claywell, Sussex. There seemed little more chance of it reaching its target than a shipwrecked sailor’s message in a bottle. That night, I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, and for the first time since Nikitas died, I didn’t wake until morning.

  8

  A fair resting place

  ANTIGONE

  Dora’s home is not as I remembered it. Her father’s solid house with its garden is all gone, along with the handmade lace curtains, and passing schoolgirls in pinafores. Now there is a four-storey block in which Dora has an apartment on the first floor. Most of the other buildings have changed too. Our neighbours include a large family from Senegal, two Ukrainian prostitutes, and several Albanian households. From the balcony I see Muslim men walking along the road to prayers. Dora says a shop has been converted to a temporary mosque. The smells are not of Greece but of other, unfamiliar places in exile.

  After I arrived I became unwell and was unable to go out for several days. I saw dreams where Nikitas became a giant cat that sat on my bed and sometimes I woke to the noise of cats fighting in the street. I went to check whether it could possibly be Misha, before I remembered where I was and what had happened. Dora made chicken soup with egg and lemon for me and took the bus to the cemetery twice to search for Misha. She also made three trips to her brother to take him food and clean his apartment. Dora is better than a saint because she is noisy and still shouts with a voice too big for her tiny frame and tells terrible jokes even after all these years.