“Every time anything is built or dug in Athens there has to be an excavation first. Someone who wants to build himself a house can wait ten years before something happens, unless he pays for the archaeologists himself. Then, when the study is over, the foundations are laid and a great big concrete apartment block is put over the top. And it’s onto the next one.”
The water board men completed their day’s work and left at 2pm, chucking the last of their Nescafé frappés and cigarette butts into the trench. After checking that they had gone out onto the street, the foreman took me over and pointed to one edge of the cut that had a smooth surface, like a slab of stone.
“It might be a tomb,” he said gloomily. “I’ve had to call the archaeological service and they’re sending someone to take a look. Let’s hope it’s nothing too interesting, eh? Or you’ll have guests in your yard for rather a long time.” Almost as soon as he left, a woman arrived. She was about my age, skinny with short hair, a sunburnt face and dressed in boyish clothes and lace-up boots. She shook my hand in a professional manner.
“Hmmm, let’s see what we have here,” she said, like a doctor examining a patient. I stood under the large vine that was covered with brand-new, lime-green leaves, and sniffed the black hair on Tig’s head as she slept on my breast in a sling.
The archaeologist used a brush and small fork, revealing more of the stone surface and then gently coaxing the red earth around the top edge. Quite unexpectedly, something dropped into her hands, rather as a baby falls into the midwife’s grasp, and she held up a delicate, ceramic vase with a narrow neck and a curved belly, on which was engraved a parade of geese and ducks, showing red through the black glaze.
“It’s the sort of offering that was normally left on a child’s grave,” announced the woman, blowing particles of soil from the perfectly formed object in a matter-of-fact way. “When a baby died in ancient Athens, they’d often bury it right by the house. So we have a good indication that this marble is the side of a tomb and I’d say it dates back about two and a half thousand years. The child and its parents almost certainly lived here and the vessel would have contained oil or sacred water. They would have placed it on the sarcophagus at the funeral.”
“Aren’t you going to examine the tomb?” I looked at the earth-stained side of marble. The archaeologist raised her eyebrows in the silent Greek “No”. For a short time, we gazed at the sweeping lines of the geese necks and chubby ducks’ wings that were like the illustrations in a children’s book, then she rolled up the funerary urn in a plastic bag, and placed it gently but not reverentially in her rucksack.
“I’d be grateful if you don’t tell the workmen or they might want to explore it themselves and they’d just destroy it. We’re not allowed to dig any further than the work-in-hand requires. Even if the drains are being dug up near a king’s grave, you just leave it alone and make a note of it. It’s illegal to proceed beyond what is strictly necessary. If we went ahead for something like this, we’d never stop. We already have more than enough material for several lifetimes of work. It’s not the digging we want; it’s the research and study.”
I had always been secretly bored by archaeology, with its painstaking techniques and perplexing terminology, but here in our courtyard were the remains of a child or a baby, whose mother had slept somewhere near where I slept and had suckled her infant where I fed Tig. The palimpsest of centuries upon centuries of human existence was made startlingly real. A manuscript written and re-written, lived and re-lived, wiped out and started over again. My baby was just the latest version. I felt the link by blood that a child can give you when you are an outsider; my own roots in this contradictory city.
“We’ll never know,” she said with a gesture towards the vertical marble slab. “That will be for future generations to discover. Maybe your daughter’s daughter…” She looked down at Tig’s sleeping face.
“May she live!”
“Stay a while.” I couldn’t bear to let her go. “Let me make you a sandwich. Please tell me some more.” This buried secret filled me with an intense curiosity and the prospect that it would exist, unexplored, below our feet was deeply frustrating. She hesitated, looking at her watch, then relented, taking off her rucksack again and introducing herself more officially: “OK. Just for a little while. Amalia Potamitis. Pleased to meet you.” She shook my hand. We both went into the kitchen and I prepared some bread and cheese and sliced some tomatoes with basil into a salad, while trying to draw her out about her work.
“Couldn’t we just take a quick look at the tomb and then re-cover it?” I asked.
“Where are you from?” she countered, hardening slightly. When I told her England, she smiled a bit too politely.
“The English have had some wonderful excavations in Greece. You’re lucky that you have the money for research and proper academic investigation.” We took our food out into the courtyard and sat at the table.
“The problem for us Greek archaeologists is that we’re so few.” She sounded weary. “There’s never the funding for proper studies. And there’s constant pressure to finish excavations so that construction work can begin. We just don’t have the opportunity to uncover our own history – that’s done by foreigners – the Americans, the British, French, Germans… they’re the ones who have the upper hand, even if on paper they need our permission.”
I didn’t try pushing Amalia again, but then Nikitas returned and the atmosphere changed.
“I read your articles. I’m a great admirer of your writing,” said Amalia, blushing slightly after he introduced himself. We went over to have a look at the side of the sarcophagus with Nikitas, and Amalia obligingly unwrapped the vase with the birds for him. He was captivated and I saw he had the same longing I had to discover more. Amalia explained again why we could not.
“You know the meaning of sarcophagus?” Nikitas asked me. “It’s from the Greek sarx – flesh, and phagein – to eat. Flesh-eating. That’s what awaits us all.”
We returned to the table and Nikitas brought out more food, turning my modest offering into something more impressive. He offered Amalia avgotáracho – the salty fish row preserved in yellow wax, which he sliced into thin, red slivers.
“The people who buried that child would have eaten something like this too,” Nikitas said as he put slices on Amalia’s plate. “Amazing that we’ve been trading avgotáracho around the Mediterranean for millennia.” Nikitas also produced two bottles of beer, which he and Amalia drank while I fed Tig, who had woken up and was starting to grumble. After we had eaten, Nikitas made coffee and brought out three tiny cups of espresso with a bitter-orange syrup sweet made by Chryssa.
“How about if we remove enough of the top soil to just take a look at the lid?” Nikitas put on his warmest smile: he had lost none of his ability to charm women of any age. “Nobody would have to know. We’d put the paving stones back afterwards and it would be our secret.”
Amalia paused, then without saying anything, smiled quickly, brought out her tools again and began more of the gentle brushing and scraping I had witnessed earlier. While she worked, Nikitas drank small glasses of mastic liqueur, icily viscous from the freezer, and became increasingly excited. He put his arm around my waist and whispered,
“It’ll be full of treasure. Jewel-studded bracelets, and rings magnificent with sparkling emeralds.” He was getting on to Cavafy. “Maybe it will be a major discovery. Like Schliemann at Troy. We’ll place the golden diadem on your head, Maud, my love…” Once the lid was exposed, it didn’t take too much to persuade Amalia to push it slightly to one side so we could peep into its darkness. She produced a torch and pointed its white laser beam onto a jumble of bones and a pitifully small skull.
“It looks like a child of about two or three, I’d say.”
“Is that an egg?” asked Nikitas, pointing to a dented white object.
“Something for the journey to the underworld,” nodded Amalia. “It’s the high alkaline soil that preserves calc
ium so well. And look over there in the corner. Those little sculptures are toys – a dog and the one with wheels is probably a horse. These were the things the kid would have played with.”
Nikitas helped Amalia pull the lid back on the sarcophagus, and they shovelled the earth, laid the paving stones on top and swept away the excess dirt to disguise what we had done. The archaeologist looked solemn as she took her leave.
“Never tell anyone, OK? Grave-robbing and archaeological crime is a huge problem in Greece. I don’t want to be part of anything like that.”
“Amalia mou” (he was already calling her “his” Amalia), “this will be our secret. We’ll die with our lips as sealed as the tomb.” He held one of her hands between his. “Thank you a thousand times.”
* * *
Over the subsequent years, we established certain routines, though that word was anathema to Nikitas, who continued to come and go according to mood. It is true that from the start, our attitudes to time and our body-clocks divided us, though we never discussed that explicitly. Nikitas appreciated the night in the best Greek tradition, believing that life gets going in the evening, reaches a crescendo in the small hours, and that mornings are ideally given over to sleep. This schedule fitted a journalist’s hours, and when he had to get up early, there was always siesta time from around 2.30 to 5.30, those appealing “hours of public quiet”, when noise must cease, phone calls are kept to a minimum and anyone who can takes to a darkened room for a rest. One of Nikitas’ complaints about how Greece was deteriorating was that there was no longer much respect for this quiet time.
There was a time when I used to join Nikitas at night, going out to dinner at eleven, proceeding to a small music club or sitting on a roof terrace with friends till the darkest hours before sunrise. I have even taken dawn coffee near the central market before going home with Nikitas griping contentedly over the early newspapers. After Tig was born, Morena sometimes babysat, and we’d find her lying asleep, open-mouthed on the sofa in the small hours, but gradually I reverted to my northern ways, reneging on the all-nighters. By the time Tig was attending nursery school, I was “sleeping with the chickens” (as Greeks call the wimps who go to bed early), before waking with her at seven. Nikitas didn’t complain – there were many who would sit out the night with him – not only journalists and artists, who eschewed early starts, but people with office jobs, who willingly renounced the vacuum of sleep for something more exciting.
“It’s the Greek way,” Nikitas said. And it was. It was all about grasping life and never mind if your day is tainted with exhaustion. Even children are put into training from a tender age. Was this also why so many Greeks were poets, I wondered. It was so usual to discover that a doctor, a taxi driver or a school teacher was pouring out private poems or had published something somewhere, I had come to expect it – a national habit, like smoking or loyalty to the village.
During my early years in Athens, I had a couple of foreign friends – women who had also married Greek men and were bringing up children. Caroline and I had the same gynaecologist and we bonded over complaints about Greek hospitals, patronising doctors and interfering old women who tell you how to bring up your child. Later, our conversations would inevitably deteriorate into ex-pat grumbling (the chaos, the traffic, the way nobody used seatbelts, even for their children, the smoking…), as though there was little else for us to discuss. So when she and her husband moved to Rhodes to open a hotel, it was something of a relief. I turned instead to a few Greek women I liked, but my favourite, Lydia, turned out to be an old girlfriend of Nikitas’ – something they had neglected to tell me. I ended up, if not exactly a hermit, then somebody without a large group of friends, who was absorbed into my husband’s impressive collection of comrades, admirers, companions, allies, hangers-on and ex-lovers.
The exception to this pattern was Phivos, who kept in touch over the years and, though Nikitas made enough disparaging remarks about him to indicate he sensed the threat of the younger man, he tolerated our friendship.
“Come out for a drink this evening. Let’s go dancing,” Phivos would say with a laugh so there were no hard feelings when I refused. “We’re still young. Leave the old man and have some fun.” We regularly met for coffee, or, as Tig grew older, for early films at the large old cinemas in the centre. He told me the latest gossip from the language school, which he now managed, and about his parents, whom he visited every Sunday for a family gathering.
“I love them and I worry now they’re getting older,” he said, reminding me that there were families without deep springs of discontent and misery at their core. His relaxed boyishness was strikingly different to Nikitas, who engulfed me with his intensity or, when he was absent, left me bereft in the vacuum. Phivos revealed no dark shadows. He made me laugh. And he made it clear that he still wanted me. I have to admit that there were times when I wanted him, but then I imagined the progression of our affair, its inevitable end, and I knew that I would quickly lose his friendship. I tried to keep things light, giving him advice on girlfriends, who were usually beautiful and impossible.
“You’re the only girl for me, Maud,” he half-joked, when yet another relationship was on the rocks. “It’s obvious,” he said. “I mean, what goes miaow-miaow on the roof tiles?” He liked that expression, perhaps because things were often clear to him. It’s something like asking “Is the Pope Catholic?”
Sometimes I talked to Nikitas about the possibility of moving into the first floor apartment in Paradise Street; it would have been very convenient for me to have family support with Tig. When I was working on a research project, I’d often drop Tig off with Alexandra and Chryssa, who doted on her until I picked her up some hours later. And after all, I argued, the place in Mets was his, unlike the rented house in Plaka, where the picturesque facade and charming courtyard could not disguise the cramped interior that was damp in the winter.
“Given all the battles you fought with your aunt after your grandmother died, it’s a pity not to be able to enjoy the place.”
“I won’t even consider it if Spiros is there,” he said. “The man is poison.”
In the end we didn’t have to wait long for things to change. It was a warm day in early September 1998, when Tig was four and Nikitas had been writing all night at his office. He showed up in the late morning, tired and unshaven, but triumphantly bearing several bags of vegetables and a large red fish.
“I got it at the market and want to cook it straight away while it’s fresh,” he announced. “I’ve already called Nikos, who is bringing a couple of friends. I’ll set up the barbecue.”
I had left Tig at Paradise Street earlier that morning and was finishing off some notes for an English academic, having waded through piles of documents relating to the policies of Eleftherios Venizelos. Wafts of burning charcoal and roasting fish made their way in the first-floor window as Nikitas got to work on vast quantities of food; there was always too much – even if he was cooking for two, he would fill a baking tray for ten.
“That’s the Greek way,” he’d say if I questioned it. I heard him singing snatches of dissident songs from his heyday, by Theodorakis or Savopoulos, then forgetting the words and humming to himself.
By the time I came down, Nikitas was in his element – at the centre of a small but enthusiastic group of people who didn’t have to be at work on a Tuesday afternoon: two journalists, one poet, a university lecturer and a young woman with waist-length hair who didn’t speak. Nikitas was engulfed in smoke and garlic fumes, making toasts, hugging new arrivals, and distributing pieces of a rare Cretan graviéra cheese and glasses of eye-watering tsípouro from the village. The big fish spluttered and spat on the grill.
I noticed Nikitas stumble before I felt the paving stones in the courtyard tremble. In the time it took for a jug to fall from the table and shatter, I felt regret that Nikitas must have drunk too much – again. But then there was a noise like an approaching army of stomping boots and our guests were quick to reco
gnise what was happening.
“The gods are sending their greetings!” said Nikos, the poet, with bravado. But an unfamiliar subterranean roaring was soon accompanied by the disconcerting sound of roof tiles smashing onto the road and distant screams. Car alarms began wailing as we stood frozen. When the juddering stopped and it was obvious that we had not been swallowed up by the earth, the guests began calling their family and friends on mobiles (“Where are you? Yes, we’re fine”). A thin crack now snaked its way down the front of our house.
We quickly established that everyone at Paradise Street was unhurt and Nikitas went over to collect Tig. However, a couple of hours later we received a phone call from Chryssa. It seemed that Spiros was dead, though he had not yet been formally identified. At that stage, it was unclear what had happened. He had been out when the earthquake struck and seemed to have had a fall. To be fair to Nikitas, he showed nothing but concern for Aunt Alexandra following her husband’s death. But gradually, as the details emerged, he became obsessed by Spiros’ demise, intensely gratified by what he saw as its natural justice. He dined out on it for years.
“First we heard that Spiros had fallen down some steps,” Nikitas would say, grinning. “Then it turned out that he’d fallen from a window somewhere in Metaxourgeio (“Silkworks”) – not exactly a neighbourhood you’d expect his sort to frequent. ‘Business’ was what my aunt said, but I soon found out what sort of business when I went to the address and found a light bulb hanging outside the door. Apparently my uncle was a regular. I drank coffee with his favourite – a Bulgarian called Franka, with a motherly manner and enormous tits. They’d been together in a room on the first floor when the earthquake struck and the ceiling collapsed, along with a chandelier. It turned out that the plaster ceiling had been rotten, but Spiros thought the whole building was collapsing. So he rushed to the window and jumped.
The House on Paradise Street Page 15