The Koftos boys were handsome bullies. Even when we were small I remember Spiros kicking younger children or getting his brothers to hold a boy so he could punch him. During the occupation all three became informers, like their father. They went to Flocca’s café, where the Germans gathered, and where people sent anonymous letters denouncing their fellow Greeks. I once passed and saw Spiros talking to an officer. Who knows what he said and who was arrested or killed because of him – the prisons were full and there was news of executions almost every day. The Germans began using the blóko, rounding up all the men in certain areas and gathering them in the square. Then informers came in, wearing hoods, and pointed out who was left-wing or who belonged to the resistance or just someone they didn’t like. And those people were taken away as hostages, or shot without further ado. I know Spiros wore a hood at least once as he boasted about it on the street. It was a way of feeling powerful for weak people.
Just as when we were young children, Markos was usually by my side and we were always outside. Whereas Alexandra was a “home-cat”, we were street kids, “dirty dogs” like Irma. Markos looked innocent, but he wasn’t. He didn’t know what fear was and I became more daring with him. We got to know the Italian soldiers in Pangrati. They weren’t as bad as the Germans, though they were no saints – they were fascist oppressors too. Markos would swap cigarettes or an ornament from our house for bread, coming home triumphant with the prize inside his jacket. He looked so sweet, with his black, curly hair, big, brown eyes and short trousers, even the soldiers liked him, though when they couldn’t see him, he’d taunt them like the rest of us. We’d shout out “Air”, the Greek battle-cry, to remind them of their humiliation in Albania. Markos believed in resistance as much as I did. It was as clear as black and white. Anyone could see the fascists were wrong and resistance was right.
My school friends and I used to paint slogans in the street: “Down with the fascist occupiers!” or “Freedom or Death!” It was a risky enterprise and youth was no guarantee of safety if they caught you. One evening, I took Markos with me to keep watch while I painted AIR in tall red capitals on our school wall. On the way home Spiros stopped us in the street. He looked excited, his blue eyes were lit up and his hair was greased flat. He was tall and strong and he held onto the strap of my bag as though to stop me running away, which I might have done. I prayed he would not notice the tip of the paintbrush sticking out; inside was a small tin of red paint that could only have one purpose. I could hardly speak. I never doubted that, whatever his feelings for my sister, he would have reported me. It was Markos who kept his head and tried to distract Spiros by asking him questions.
“Did you see a German moved into our street?” Markos jumped around like a clown, making Spiros look in his direction and away from me. He was quick-witted like that. “He’s an officer, billeted with Kyrios and Kyria Panopoulos. They had to move out of their bedroom for him and now they’re sleeping on a sofa. But they’re hoping he’ll bring in some food.” Spiros looked impatient. He said, “Yes, yes”, and waved his hands as though wanting to swat a fly. There was something he had for Alexandra, he said. “Tell her to come to the shop in the morning.” He walked away and I had to sit down on the pavement to recover.
Alexandra came home the next day with a lump of meat wrapped in paper – an unbelievable luxury at a time when the ducks had gone from the Royal Garden and the numbers of cats and dogs on the streets was noticeably dwindling. We all stood around staring as though it was the first time we’d seen meat. Then Aspasia chopped it into tiny pieces and made a stew with beans. It wasn’t long after this time that Irma, my dog, disappeared. There was no evidence to suspect Spiros, but I had a strong feeling that he was connected. He was heartless enough to do that and nobody was fussy about the provenance of meat in those days.
During that first winter of the occupation my father fell ill with tuberculosis. I believe he couldn’t bear to see all his achievements melting away and that he felt he was nothing without his success. As the provider for his family, it pained him to see us hungry and he often gave us part of his rations, which made him even weaker. He became terribly thin. My mother barely ate, but seemed to survive on will power. She never mentioned her needs and discouraged us from talking about food: “Just ignore it,” she said, when we complained or dreamed up fantasy recipes. “You are stronger than hunger. God will provide.” She became increasingly devout during the war, spending hours at church, but she was always a practical person and one of the first things she did was set up a soup kitchen with some local women, to help the children of the parish. Those families who could contribute something did and for dozens of children it was the only food they got. Sometimes Alexandra and I helped ladle out the boiled macaroni or lentils, and cut the horrible bread made from lupine – the stuff they normally feed to pigs. And you’d see these little kids with swollen bellies from malnutrition, queuing up with their tins. Many were orphans who had recently lost their parents and their silence was the worst thing – they’d forgotten how to play or to make a noise. They looked like tiny old people.
Sometimes the English planes would fly over and we were happy even when they dropped their bombs – it was a sign that someone cared about us. But it was a black time for the Greeks. We felt we were being gradually exterminated.
* * *
Johnny. Writing his name now reminds me of how I used to write it over and over. You might think the war would destroy the childish dreams, but in fact it was the reverse; the fantasy was my escape. I went down to the Ilissos and sat on the broad branches of our plane tree, picturing his long limbs and intelligent eyes, imagining how his kisses might be – I had never kissed a boy. My reveries were bourgeois stories of marriage “and they lived well and we lived better” as the fairy tales finish. I knew nothing else.
Winter 1942. Cold rain was splattering down in the darkness when the doorbell rang. It wasn’t late, but nobody liked it when a visitor came after nightfall. Your immediate thought was that something bad had happened – a death, news of another group execution, German soldiers with an order to search the house. If there was a worst point in the war, this was it. Hope had become too elusive and slippery to grasp. When I opened the door, I did not recognise the man standing before me. His face was unshaven, his hair dripping beneath a sodden hat. It was only when he asked to come in that I heard his voice, with its English accent, and realised it was Johnny. We all gathered around him in the drawing room. Even my father got out of bed and lay on a sofa, directing my mother to open the bottle of brandy they kept for emergencies.
“Welcome to our old friend!” my parents said in the hushed tones we used instinctively.
Johnny replied with the correct formula, “Well found!” He remembered his Greek even though it had been four years since his last visit. I could barely speak from nerves and pleasure. His hair was dyed black and his skin tanned from months in Egypt. He had just come from there, he said – a captain now and working for a secret agency called Force 133. I later learned that this was a code name for the SOE, Churchill’s solution for undermining the Nazi grip on Europe. Sabotage, parachute drops, gold sovereigns. Words like incantations.
My father was upset that we didn’t have food to offer. It is dishonourable if you can’t feed a guest: “Shame!” My mother dug out a small bag of lentils and made a soup with some onion. And later in the evening, we all sat at the dining table where we had been four years earlier at Johnny’s farewell dinner. My mother used a silver tureen, which looked ridiculous with the khaki slush not even half-filling it. There wasn’t even any bread to have with it. I felt awkward because I saw us all through Johnny’s eyes, diminished and altered from the family he had known. The contrast between our hollowed, thin-skinned faces and Johnny’s well-nourished cheerfulness was shocking. My father, slumped and feverish from tuberculosis, was half the man he had been. My mother had turned grey from this second great disaster of her life, her beauty threatened by malnourishment and anxiety.
Nevertheless, that evening she put on her favourite diamond earrings from Constantinople (all her other jewellery had been sold) and a little lipstick as a gesture to the occasion. We three teenagers were scrawny and taut with anticipation. Even Alexandra, who still liked to refer to me and Markos as “the kids,” was excited by the development.
Johnny refused the offer of a bed that night. He knew the penalty for us if he was discovered. The following day he was leaving for the mountains somewhere near Lamia, but he needed somebody to take money to a safe house in Athens in three days’ time.
“I was wondering whether Antigone might do it. A schoolgirl would be unlikely to be suspected.” He looked at my father, who paused as though he hadn’t heard and then nodded slowly. I was so excited Johnny wanted me that I ignored the insulting implication that he thought I was still at school. I said, “But, you know I have started my first year at the university. I don’t wear a school pinafore any more. I’m studying law.” The truth is there was not much studying going on at the university, but I was proud to be there.
“My dear girl, that’s marvellous.” He patted my shoulder and I was paralysed with joy.
That was the moment when I realised we could refuse to be crushed. I could fight back. I was “in”. It was like the old saying: “If the first cog catches you, you can’t escape” – you are caught up in the machinery. Both Markos and I pleaded with Johnny to go with him to Lamia. We knew the area – we had the house in Perivoli. But he insisted we would be more useful in Athens. He needed people who spoke English and Greek to liaise between British agents and the runners. Later I learned that all this was part of a plan code-named Animals. Its intention was to create a diversion, to distract the Germans so they would think the Allies were going to invade Greece rather than Sicily. Markos and I immediately sensed the excitement. We’d beat the Germans this way. It was perfect. When he left, Johnny shook hands with my father and Markos and kissed my mother, sister and me. I felt wild. I was burning.
* * *
Three days after Johnny’s visit, Markos and I took a tram to the centre. We walked to the stop separately, pretending not to know one another.
“Don’t speak to me. Don’t even look at me,” I warned.
“I don’t want to look at you, dim-wit. I’ll just make sure you are safe.” He was younger than me by sixteen months, but he liked to look after me. I put the letter and a pack of fifty gold sovereigns given to me by Johnny in my leather school satchel underneath some text books. I had a key in my pocket and had memorised the address. While we were waiting at the tram stop, one of the Germans billeted in our street walked up and, when the tram arrived, he went to sit opposite me. The soldier stared at me as though preparing to speak and my heart started beating with such violence that I feared he would see my chest moving. I pictured the developments, the search, my arrest, and the pain of letting Johnny down. I averted my gaze, but every time I raised my eyes he was focusing on me. There was little doubt about my fate if I was caught; being a girl was no help. I knew there were drops of sweat on my upper lip.
Finally, the German got up and I prepared myself for the worst, hoping Markos would save himself when I was taken away. The man leaned in close, so I could smell the foreign cigarette on his breath and see the blonde bristles on his chin.
“Lovely eyes,” he said in heavily accented Greek, smiling and revealing shining white teeth. I almost burst into tears from relief and shame. Markos’ cheeks were red and he stared at the floor until we got off from different doors at the next stop.
The apartment was just off Queen Sophia Street, near Evangelismos Hospital. Markos waited for me further along the road, while I let myself in and went up to an apartment on the fourth floor. As arranged, the bell rang sometime later and an Englishman arrived at the door. He was stocky and pink-skinned and he laughed a lot.
“Billy Hicks,” he said, taking my hand and squeezing it too hard. “But everyone calls me Basher.” Basher spoke ancient Greek, and I wondered how he would get on trying to pass himself off as a native, but he was full of confidence and he never did get caught. I handed over the letter and the money and he explained where the next meeting would be, with one of the runners who would travel between Athens and the mountains. They had links with the partisans, he said, and they were working together on an important plan. I told him my Uncle Diamantis was with ELAS [Greek People’s Liberation Army], and how that was the armed wing of EAM, the biggest resistance movement.
“Ah, the Commies, eh?” Basher raised an eyebrow.
“No. They are patriotic Greeks who want freedom and peace,” I said. “We all want the same thing.” We didn’t continue the conversation and Basher gave me a bar of English chocolate, which I shared with Markos in the small park near the hospital. It was the creamiest, sweetest thing we had ever tasted and I licked the crumbs from the paper.
After that, Markos and I helped run three safe-houses in Athens. They were bases for the Greek runners who needed somewhere to stay between journeys, and occasionally for British agents. Markos’ school had closed down and lectures had been suspended at the university, so we had plenty of time. I have to admit that beyond the satisfaction of helping the resistance, there was great pleasure in knowing I was doing something for Johnny. I thought of him obsessively, imagining how I would join him in the mountains, how I would help him, how we would be together after the war. I was very serious and very innocent. When Basher was in Athens, he enjoyed living the high life, bringing girls to the apartment and getting hold of perfume and whisky. To him, the war was a game and he annoyed me. I didn’t like the reckless lack of discipline. Now I understand it better – the close companionship of death can provoke all sorts of reactions. And though at twenty-five, he seemed old to me, we were all very young. It was Basher who often handed me money and instructions, and once, a note from Johnny. I kept it with me for the rest of the war until it disintegrated after I fell in a river. I knew it by heart.
Dear Girl,
I often think of you. It rains so much up here that I have forgotten what it is to be warm and dry. I remember the old days in Athens, before the war, as being always sunny. As distant now as ancient Hellas. Thank you for everything you are doing. All this will end, you know.
“I dreamed that Greece might still be free.”
Please send my greetings to your family.
With love,
J
p.s. best to destroy this
Just before Easter 1943, my father died. He was forty-six. We knew it was coming, but it was as though the roof had been ripped off our house – we lost our protection from the outside world. We felt like orphans. When his body was laid out in the drawing room he looked so small, as though he had shrunk. The bells were tolling for Maundy Thursday and Christ’s death and I never wanted to celebrate Easter after that. My mother’s desolation was increased because she could not fulfil his final wish to be buried in the village. It was impossible to find transport to Perivoli; it was hard enough to enlist a man with a cart to take the coffin to the First Cemetery. Our neighbour, Kostas Lambakis, was a grave-digger there and he helped us with the practicalities. My paternal grandmother died less than a month later, unable to bear the loss of her only son. Death had become so commonplace that their passing didn’t provoke the shock in the neighbourhood that it would once have done.
Our family split into two camps after my father’s death. My mother worked tirelessly with the church to help people in the neighbourhood, and Alexandra often joined her. There were so many women whose husbands and sons had died or been injured in Albania or who had been imprisoned or executed, and they had little way of caring for their families. My mother’s soup kitchen expanded and she even gave lessons to the children, many of whom lived like street dogs – scavenging and filthy. Spiros moved in closer, making himself useful to Alexandra, bringing her little presents and smirking knowingly. He supplied the sugar and almonds for the kólyva at my father’s memorials, so he managed to endear him
self to my mother too.
I cannot criticise what my mother and sister did – it was an honourable thing to help the weak, but Markos and I were different. We wanted to fight – although, so far, our protests had been more symbolic than practical. We had already joined the youth resistance group EPON [the United Panhellenic Organisation of Youth], which was growing by the day. It showed that even children could stand up to the fascist occupiers. Then there were the youngest of all – the “Little Eagles”. On one huge march, we carried black flags all the way through the city. It felt right to do something after the mass executions and to protest against the proposal that Greeks be sent off to work in German factories.
We may have been young, but we became organised, electing delegates, making pamphlets. And on national days, we visited the memorials to the heroes of ’21 – Kolokotronis, Bouboulina, Karaiskakis… those great men and women who had freed Greece from slavery over a century before. We were their heirs and we wanted to be worthy of them. We took flowers and danced to a gramophone by their statues. They were terrible times, but the truth is that for us young ones, it was exhilarating. It wasn’t to do with politics – for most of us there was no choice but to resist. We weren’t afraid, and going to the mountains seemed the most honourable thing to do. Our problem was how to get there.
In the winter of 1943, a year after Johnny’s appearance at our house, I found a way. Uncle Diamantis sent me a message to go to the old cellar in Piraeus Street. I had not seen him since the start of the occupation, but we had heard rumours of his rise in the resistance. He seemed larger and tougher than I remembered, his face sunburnt and bearded from two years in the mountains. I smelled wood smoke when he embraced me and noticed his strong hand with the two missing fingers grip my shoulder.
The House on Paradise Street Page 12