Nikitas became like a teacher, determined to inspire me and make me love his subject. I saw the pleasure he took at his success.
“It’s as though I’m seeing things from a new perspective – from your eyes. It makes everything fresh and new,” he said. We went up to the hills that hem Athens in on three sides, and from where you understand that the city seethes and boils in a cauldron, bubbling up the mountain slopes and spilling down to the sea.
“You think the buildings are white, but when you see them from here they’re creamy, like piles of old bones,” he said. On Penteli, we picked up pieces of its famous marble and on Hymettus, we gathered wild greens as the old women do, using a kitchen knife and a plastic bag. Afterwards, we sat among the trees near Kaisariani Monastery, on slopes where the best honey in Greece was produced for millennia, and watched the sun go down over the Saronic Gulf.
“This is the most perfect light in the world,” said Nikitas. “There is something about Attica that produces all the right ingredients for the light to create beauty. It is the catalyst that transforms whatever it touches.” We looked across at the gilded mountains and the wide expanse of gleaming sea.
“You can see why people needed to create the concept of the divine in these circumstances – even humans can seem like gods in this light. And the best thing is that it cannot be spoiled, however hard we Greeks try.” Whether it was the luminosity or not, we both felt like gods, at one remove from the rest of humanity, obsessed with one another so that everything else appeared mundane.
I had not thought that I would be the sort of woman to give up her job and home to go and live with a much older, twice-divorced man in another country. My life had not been characterised by recklessness. Nevertheless, that is what I did. I gave my notice to the university, agreed to finish the academic year, and ended things with Austin. He was what my grandfather would have called “a good sport” about it and kept in touch, asking my advice about his subsequent girlfriends and later on, sending me email jokes.
When I returned to Greece for Easter, Athens was being ravaged by an amorous spring – like a plain bride made beautiful with flowers and veils. Drifts of camomile sprang up on waste ground, producing visible clouds of scent. The bitter-orange trees lining the pavements exploded with outrageously perfumed blossoms, and house-martins and swallows returned to their nests among the city’s human inhabitants. Nikitas took me to see his village, in central Greece: Perivoli, the place he associated with the greatest happiness of his childhood. His grandmother, Maria, used to take him there for the summer holidays and she rebuilt the family house after the war. She told her grandson she had always loved the place because it reminded her of where her family summered in the hills near Smyrna – both places had mulberries, plane trees and mountain breezes that cooled you even in August. For Nikitas, the rural pleasures of his youth were amplified because they were enjoyed without Alexandra and Spiros.
“They used to go to the village of Spiros’ forebears near Tripoli – a dreary flea-pit full of fascists,” Nikitas said. Perivoli was firmly left-wing and the Koftos couple did not feel welcome there. However, Chryssa used to go with Maria and Nikitas, keeping house for them and visiting her many relatives.
In Perivoli, Nikitas showed me where he ran wild, unwittingly using the same paths his mother had as a child and revelling in the same kinds of freedom. He made friends with the local boys, who showed him how to kill snakes, milk goats, steal fruit from orchards, and the fastest way to get up to the remote church of Prophet Ilias, where they masturbated together on a rocky promontory with views across the whole valley. In the village kafeneío Nikitas introduced me to some big-bellied men, whom he remembered as skinny, sunburnt boys, and they slapped his back and bought him drinks. I felt like the foreign “chick” along for the ride. But I saw how Perivoli had become Nikitas’ Eden. It was the place he dreamed about and yearned for in a way that could not even be assuaged by visiting it; an abstract ideal of home and ancestry.
Visiting his old haunts, we bathed in the hot springs that form pools down in the valley and afterwards sprawled on powdery, sulphurous rocks that smell like the bowels of the earth. On a stroll through some olive groves, Nikitas presented me with a lacy white flower resembling cow parsley, saying it was kónio.
“Don’t eat it!” he warned. “That’s what Socrates drank after he was sentenced to death. It paralyses the nervous system so first you lose all feeling in your toes, then the numbness spreads up your legs and when it reaches your heart you’ve gone.” They used it all over ancient Greece, he said. On the island of Kea, when old people were unable to cope with life any more, they had a big party and then went out to sea in a small boat with a cup of kónio.
“No degrading homes for the dying and demented in those days. A way to leave with dignity.” Later, I looked up the word kónio in a dictionary: hemlock. It occurred to me how knowing the name of something in your own language can make it slot into a comfortably familiar category, while learning a word like a child who sees something for the first time, allows it to be fresh and fascinating.
So determined was Nikitas that I should join him in Greece that he even found me work with a historian friend who needed some archive research. I agreed I would start as soon as I arrived in June. It was also at this point that I was introduced to Orestes, during Holy Week, when everyone was preparing for the great celebration – whitewashing, spring cleaning, buying new clothes, fasting, going to church, dyeing batches of hardboiled eggs red, and slaughtering lambs for the paschal feast. Orestes was dropped off by his mother and came in to Nikitas’ place looking pale, tense and younger than his ten years. Nikitas and I made the mistake of laughing at his formality when he said:
“Pleased to meet you,” and shook my hand ceremoniously. His eyes sparkled with suppressed tears as though we were mocking him, and it was too late when I replied, “I’m very pleased to meet you too.” Nikitas picked his son up, misjudging the moment, as he tried to decrease the tension with rough though affectionate playfulness.
“What a son I have, eh? A fine fellow.” Orestes’ seriousness and sensitivity touched me and we developed an unlikely rapport that sometimes bewildered his father. Later, even during his most difficult teenage phase, when he stopped talking to his parents, Orestes would come to me. I know that Nikitas was sometimes resentful.
* * *
Nikitas and I got married that winter, in December 1993. I was six months pregnant and was already undergoing a complete transformation: linguistic (Nikitas started talking to me in Greek rather than English); physical (my breasts swelled, my stomach grew hard as a drum and I was devouring platefuls of olives); and emotional (I had left everything else behind). There was a song Nikitas knew from his paternal grandmother and he used to sing it to me and his unborn child, the restless 5/8 rhythm rolling on as though it would never stop. It spoke of a girl – a “little partridge” – garlanded with myrtle, with breasts like pomegranates. Tears in the well, spirits in the wood, mountain churches, threshing floors… I was the bride and I never doubted that while Nikitas was in his late forties, he was the palikári, the courageous, upright young man of the song who plants the seed that grows the tree and wins the girl of his dreams.
I went to see Alexandra several times after arriving back in Athens, but I always felt awkward; she was evidently not pleased at my relationship with Nikitas and I felt guilty, as though I had betrayed her in some way. Nevertheless, she was polite and gracious and, when she learned we were getting married, she invited me over to Paradise Street one morning. Alexandra had just been to the hairdresser and her hair was lacquered into a solid lilac-grey cap. She looked as well turned out as ever – her seventy-year old legs shapely in high court shoes. She was wearing a navy blue dress that looked expensive. Spiros made a show of greeting me, though I could tell he didn’t feel comfortable. He probably suspected that Nikitas had told me all sorts of stories about him, and it was true that when I now saw Spiros, I thought of his cruelty
to his adopted son and how he had mocked and beaten the “little bastard”.
“Welcome to the lovely bride! How is our little Mondy?” I kissed him hello with reluctance, feeling his moustache brush my cheeks. “Third time lucky for the groom, eh? He’s still a strong man, our Nikitas,” he said with an off-putting wink. I thanked him stiffly, recoiling from the “snake”, which was how my future husband referred to his uncle. To regain my composure, I pretended to examine a formal studio photograph of Alexandra and Spiros on their engagement. They made a handsome couple; she was curvaceous in a tightly fitting skirt suit, with curled hair and dark lipstick, while he exuded masculine power, holding her hand and glaring slightly at the camera, under his lustrous brilliantined hair.
Alexandra wanted us to take coffee in the sitting room as though I was an honoured guest, but I asked to see Chryssa first. She seemed smaller than ever and I stooped so she could hug me “May you live, may you live!” she repeated with obvious pleasure. She saw me notice a woman sweeping the tiled pathways out in the courtyard and called through the window, “Morena, come and meet our bride.” An attractive, round-faced young woman came in and shook my hand shyly, looking down at the floor.
“Morena is from Albania,” announced Alexandra. “She’s a good girl. She’s helping us out with some of the heavier jobs as none of us is getting any younger, you know.”
“So we’re both foreigners here,” I said, hoping to put Morena at ease, but she just fingered a gold chain at her neck and looked even more nervous. It was only later I learned how she had walked over the Albanian-Greek border through the snow, in order to join her husband in the Athenian basement he shared with seven compatriots. I had little appreciation then of what traumas the hundreds of thousands of recently-arrived Albanians had to go through to make it to what they hoped would be a new life.
After we had drunk our coffee, Aunt Alexandra said she had something for me.
“I have no daughter of my own and there are things I would like to pass on before I go.” Beckoning to me, she walked over to a table at the side of the room that was covered with a pile of linen. She unfolded an exquisite crocheted cotton bedcover, all in white, with flowers and zigzag edges hung with white pompoms.
“This is from the trousseau my mother prepared for me. There are embroidered cloths made by my grandmother, and various sheets and pillowcases I don’t use. You won’t find things like this anymore – they’re hand stitched. I always cared about you, Mondy. Now you will be part of our family and I hope you will be happy. And if you have a daughter, you can pass these on to her.” The bundle of delicate lace and finely sewn tablecloths that I walked away with were like the sealing of a pact of female cooperation between me and Aunt Alexandra. She wanted me on her side.
The idea was to do something quiet and I didn’t invite my parents or friends from England to my wedding. On a freezing day we bought our rings at the last minute from a cheap jewellery shop off Athena Street and went to the Town Hall. I’d been expecting a few of Nikitas’ friends but in the end there were several dozen. Nobody came specifically for me except Phivos, who was shocked that I had returned to Athens and was getting married to “this old tough-guy” (as he put it). I noticed Phivos throwing rice at Nikitas with extra vehemence at the end of the brief ceremony, as everyone called out the usual greetings:
“May you live!” A few added the traditional wish to a pregnant woman: “Good Freedom!” We moved slowly down Sophocles Street, the entourage holding up the traffic and creating its own commotion – there’s no celebration in Greece without noise and disruption. Even traffic lights changing colour provoke a chorus of honking. Nikitas told a joke about the English man on his first trip to Athens who remarked: “How convenient that when the lights go green they make a sound to let you know.”
The nuptial lunch was at Díporto, Nikitas’ favourite basement taverna. We took over the place for the afternoon, waving at passers-by who peered down from the street and called out “May you live!” After we had eaten, musicians arrived with an accordion, a bouzouki and its miniature relation, the baglamá. Tables were pushed aside, and soon people were dancing and singing. Underneath my dress (a capacious and brightly embroidered antique that Nikitas had bought in an Istanbul junk shop with the idea of hanging it on the wall), the baby kicked and bucked as though joining in the festivities.
I was pleased to shed my own surname and become “Mond Perifanis” as a reflection of my new, Greek life, but perhaps I should have worried a bit more about becoming part of this particular family. For some time I believed that my move to Greece was a way of creating a simple, pared-down persona – a clever trick, as though leaving behind my old existence physically would therefore slice through the roots that tied me to place, family, and above all, memory. At that stage – the phase I later recognised as my “Hellenic Idyll” – I abandoned myself to the worn but nonetheless charming cliché of the cool northerner being bathed in the warm water of Mediterranean delights. Perhaps it is no more of a cliché than falling in love; both are limited in duration and may be followed by pain or disappointment, but while they last are as real as anything that alters a person’s perceptions.
In later years, after the idyll faded, I began to see the experience as a fantasy. I compared my delusion to those lovers of the ancient Greek world who believe the smooth columns and elegant sculptures were always pure white with uncontaminated simplicity. They forget, or don’t know, that most of those creations were originally painted with gaudy colours, the sculptures dressed in fashionable robes, their eyes flashy and provocative, the columns bright with circus zigzags and seaside stripes. I might have left behind the location of my past, but it was hubris to believe that a new life with Nikitas would be characterised by clean-cut minimalism. Gradually, I began to experience the alienation of being an outsider. “Where are you from?” became the defining question of each new encounter, where I tried to resist being stereotyped with my nation’s characteristics. In the beginning I felt like a character in a novel, recreated each time I revealed my country of birth, but unhampered by my personal history: when nobody knew you as a child, or disliked your parents, or approved of your school, you are potentially something new. But increasingly, I sensed I was being defined by my first answer – put into a box from which I was not then allowed to emerge. Also, although my command of Greek was constantly improving, I became frustrated by my limitations, at not understanding all the jokes and references to personalities, events or films that everyone else had grown up with. I saw the missing parts as my deficiencies.
The third stage, after Idyll and Disillusion is Pragmatism. Ultimately, my status as an outsider became another form of liberation – to hell with other people’s preconceptions. I thought of England without disdain, even indulging in occasional bouts of nostalgia for rolling green fields, London’s cultural life, tea in a pot and other miscellaneous delights. But I was clear that I was wedded to Greece. And it is in this phase that I have tried to remain.
* * *
Tig was born in the spring with shapely limbs and questioning eyes. Previously, I found other people’s babies to be entirely without interest so I was shocked by the ferocity of my love for and fascination with this child. Nikitas, too, was inordinately proud of his daughter, and as we walked about our neighbourhood in Plaka, we were made to stop every other minute for neighbours and shopkeepers to scoop her up and make a fuss: Greeks have no doubt about the delights of other people’s offspring – “May she live!” rang in our ears like a signature tune. Tig’s first walks were around the slopes of the Acropolis, through the cat-filled alleys of Anafiotika and past the persuasive calls of taverna owners and souvenir sellers. When Nikitas was out, I often walked over to Paradise Street and sat with Aunt Alexandra, who insisted on being called Yiayia – Granny – and dandled, fussed, sang nursery rhymes and offered advice as though she had brought up legions of babies. Chryssa made nourishing purées for Tig and loaded me with containers of whatever else she had
cooked to take home for me and Nikitas. Even Orestes, aged eleven, appeared charmed by his little half-sister. And maybe because she had an older brother, Tig grew up with the rebellious independence and confidence of a younger sibling, combined with the observant nature and ability to converse with adults that is more typical of only children.
When Tig was a few weeks old, our courtyard was dug up by the Athens and Piraeus Water Board, which was replacing the narrow, frequently blocked drains in our area. The street had a deep ditch opened along one side and cuts were being made at right angles into certain buildings that required updating to a more modern drainage system. As with any project that goes below one metre in the city, the workmen from the water board were accompanied by an archaeological foreman. A dour, middle-aged man, he stood around smoking, with a worried expression.
“You always hope they won’t find something special,” he said on the day the noisy team of workers took over our shady yard, pulling away the large paving stones, shovelling out the earth, and dragging the pots containing herbs and flowers out of the way. “If you make a discovery, then you have to call in the archaeologists. And then there’s no stopping them, with their measuring and note-taking, and the whole job goes on hold and everyone’s annoyed. It’s a nightmare. You dig any little hole in Athens and you’re immediately inside the ancient world.” The foreman explained about time-consuming permissions granted from the ministry, about warehouses filled with boxes of finds that nobody has time to examine, because all the archaeologists are busy with new digs and are constantly pressurised by architects, landowners and citizens who need to get on with their lives.
The House on Paradise Street Page 14