“God forgive him. May you remember him, always.” The words came easily to the cemetery worker, though I knew in this case they were genuine. A button was hanging from a thread on my brother’s jacket and I pulled it off and put it in my pocket. Markos was not a big man, and Kyrios Kostas lifted him up easily, laying him on the cart, tucking the sacking under him as though he were putting a child to bed.
As we passed through the gates onto Amalia Avenue we were confronted by a group of policemen carrying out checks. Kyrios Kostas had his papers and they let him through with the cart, but there was something about me they didn’t like, despite my false identity card. I was to be taken to the station in Syntagma. As I was led away, Kyrios Kostas told me not to worry. “I’ll look after him.”
17
Wild greens and cold water
MAUD
Antigone rang me twice to ask if I had found out anything about Markos’ grave, but I was reluctant to get involved in a row over someone who had died in 1944. I had enough of my own problems and a more recent grave to worry about. Antigone insisted however, telling me details about their grave-digger neighbour, Kostas Lambakis, who had buried Markos secretly. He had rightly surmised that nobody would look for the boy among the British and Germans, who kept their Protestant corner separate from the Orthodox Greeks.
“It was over in the corner of the foreign part,” Antigone said. “Kyrios Kostas put a small temporary plaque with his initials – M.P. Nothing else.” Now there was no sign of the grave, she explained. Antigone had walked up and down with Dora to no avail. After examining every plot, the two old women went to the Lambakis house – still the next-door building in Paradise Street, but Kyrios Kostas had died years ago. His son, Babis, had no knowledge of the matter.
“I very much want to find him.” Antigone’s voice was insistent and I could tell that she was not going to forget about it. “It has stayed with me as a regret during a lifetime in Moscow. I’m not called Antigone for nothing.” What a strange myth, that celebrates a young woman standing up to the authorities and preferring to die rather than leave her dead brother unburied.
“Who cares what happens to rotten bones?” Tig said after I explained.
“He’s your Great Uncle,” I said, unconvinced by the title I was giving this boy who was only a few years older than my daughter when he died.
“Why can’t these old grannies just get on with their lives? They’re obviously using you as a go-between.” It was late afternoon and we were sitting in the kitchen while I cooked lentils in Nikitas’ way, with pureed red peppers, bay leaves, plentiful wine and extra garlic for the sauce. The windows were fogged up and a gentle rain seeped from the dark sky. From where she sat on the kitchen table, Tig swung her legs – clad in black leggings and heavy boys’ boots. I wished we could get back to the camaraderie that we had from the time when she had stopped rejecting the English language (aged about eleven) and the time when anything parental was automatically off-putting (aged about thirteen). During that happy period we had got on so well, enjoying our insider-outsider status, and playing games with the two household languages, taking Greek expressions and translating them literally into English. We’d trade mock insults and threats: “You don’t know from where the chicken farts” – you’re so ignorant; “You’re going to eat wood” – I’m going to beat you (accompanied by a threatening hand slicing the air); “You made them sea” – you messed up; and “pumpkins” – rubbish. When I found Tig wide awake hours after her bedtime, I would say “your eye is a prawn”, but over the last couple of years it had stopped being funny. Even Tig’s favourite, “so what the eggs” (so what?) had been abandoned like an outdated nursery rhyme.
“I’m planning to go and see Yiayia Alexandra,” I said. “Do you want to come? She loves you more than anyone.”
“I can’t be bothered.” Tig’s thumbs tapped away on her mobile phone keys like a virtuoso, a smile flashing across her lips as she read a message, her face illuminated by the blue light. “And I’m going out soon. Anyway, you’re a big girl, you can manage by yourself.” She enjoyed throwing my own clichés back at me. She made a rapid, fake smile and jumped off the table. “Orestes and I thought we’d go and see our real grandmother.” She was trying to gauge my reaction. “We rang her and said we might drop by.”
“That’s nice.” I felt an unreasonable twinge of jealousy and hoped it wasn’t obvious. “What time will you be back?”
“Nine or ten,” she said, her hand passing over the still unfamiliar surface of her shorn hair as though she was stroking an animal. “I’ve got my mobile.”
I thought of Nikitas’ injunction to pray to Zeus, the god of family love, and wondered how you do it. Libations and roasted oxen, presumably.
Once the lentils had cooked and sat steaming aromatically, like a picture of the homeliness that was missing from our family, I rang Aunt Alexandra and asked when would be a good time to drop in.
“Come now, my child. I’m always happy to see you.” I felt the affection in her voice. She may not have been the best mother substitute to Nikitas, but she had always been good to me.
“Come down and I’ll make some tea. And you can try my new lemon sweet. I’ve made ten jars.” The tree in the back yard was weighed down with yellow fruit, like Christmas decorations. I had picked enough to fill a large bowl in the kitchen and they lay there, slowly rotting, developing pretty patches of blue and green.
“Let me kiss you.” Alexandra welcomed me as though I was a visitor she had not seen for some time, rather than someone who had just come down the stairs. I breathed in her lady-like scent of powder, hairspray and polished leather, soothed by the familiarity, by how everything about her and her home was the same as always. I didn’t care that she was right-wing. I never had.
“You just don’t understand,” Nikitas said to me during one of our discussions about how political orientation defined a person to their core. “It’s not just where you place your cross at the ballot box, it’s who you are. But an English person doesn’t have that awareness. You can’t imagine it. You English never experienced the fear of waiting for the police to knock on the door at night because of your political beliefs. You don’t know about jails overflowing with political prisoners.” His face would go red with annoyance and each time I experienced it as a complaint about who I was, about my Englishness.
“Ah, poor Mondouly mou.” Alexandra looked freshly coiffed and was dressed in a sharp-collared white shirt and grey skirt. She was back in her normal outfits after a couple of weeks sticking to dark mourning clothes and gestured to them.
“It’s what you feel inside, not what you wear,” she announced, as though I might have argued otherwise. She had worn black for a year after Spiros died and, although she was a staunch supporter of custom, she knew that these prescriptions had become far more flexible than in her youth; her mother had been in widow’s weeds until she died.
“This is a hard time, but it will pass. God will look after you.”
I reflected how that comment would have been enough to set Nikitas off on an anti-clerical diatribe whereas, for me, Alexandra’s certainty was comforting, even if I didn’t share it (more of my “liberal English bullshit”, I thought, conversing with Nikitas in my head). She had been good to me since my student days and had provided steady, reliable love for Tig throughout her life. The older I got, the more I valued these quiet, less glamorous virtues.
We sat in the sitting room and she poured tea into her guest cups and saucers and made small-talk – how Chryssa was feeling her age and was asleep at the moment (as if she herself was not in her eighties too), and how there was a big pan of spanakórizo in the kitchen and I should take some for my supper (“does my little granddaughter eat spinach yet?”). Then she paused, adjusted her hearing aids, sighed deeply, tucked her hands inside the waistband of her skirt and said:
“I suppose my sister has been feeding you her old propaganda. I hope you can see through it. They were always good at t
elling stories that flattered them. But you can’t hide behind your finger – the horrible facts of what they did are still facts.”
I got straight to the point and explained that Antigone was trying to locate their brother’s grave. I asked whether she knew what had happened.
“So, she has finally come begging,” she said, looking angrier but more confident than before. “Mondy mou, we should call things by their name. Markos was my brother, too. Can you imagine what it was like when we learned he was dead? We had nothing to grieve over, no body to bury, no memorials to offer to his soul. Did she not think of her mother’s suffering? She only ever thought about herself. Well, now it’s her turn. Why should I help her?”
My suggestion that it might be helpful to let the quarrel remain in the distant past and make peace was not taken well.
“Ask her what happened when those wicked communists saw they were losing. Ask her about how they went around houses dragging entire families out of their beds to kill them. I expect she has conveniently forgotten whatever doesn’t fit with the picture of her as a holy martyr to the hammer and sickle. Ask her about the forced marches.” Although I had picked up a certain amount of information about the Civil War over the years, I had not heard about these. Alexandra looked gratified. “You don’t hear them talking about those things, eh? It was a nightmare – shattering for Spiros and me. You never forget something like that.”
Alexandra mentioned OPLA (Organisation for the Protection of the People’s Struggle), the communist secret police, who had murdered Spiros’ father and brothers.
“They’d arrive at houses before dawn and take anyone they thought was not on their side. ‘Enemies of the People,’ they said, but weren’t we people? Kyrios Dimitris was always kind to us, and Spiros’ two brothers, those wonderful lads… so handsome and strong. They were pulled half-dressed from their house like criminals.” Alexandra spoke calmly but with disgust in her voice, describing how later, after the bodies were found, Spiros went to identify them. They had been thrown on some wasteland, their hands tied behind their backs with wire and it was obvious they had been beaten and tortured before they were killed with a bullet in the head. She said that Spiros’ mother lost her mind and had left Athens to stay with her sister in Sparta and Spiros – “virtually an orphan” – was taken in at Paradise Street.
Two weeks later, armed men burst into the house.
“You can imagine what we thought.” Alexandra was getting into her stride and I sensed her weighing up my reactions, fighting to gain ground over her sister.
“We were sure they were going to kill us, like Spiros’ father and brothers. They pointed guns at us and kicked Spiros as we went down the street.”
“It must have been terrifying,” I said.
“The strange thing is that I was so angry that this would be the end of my life and that I would miss my wedding, that I lost my fear. I told our abductors that we were Greeks and patriots and not afraid to die for our country.”
The engaged couple were taken to a house filled with similarly disoriented people and told they were hostages. Alexandra was locked in a room with dozens of other women while Spiros was taken somewhere else. She stayed there for two days, sitting on the floor and waiting to be shot.
“I hope you will never be in a situation like that – women of all ages crying and moaning. Some were ill. It was bitterly cold and we were not dressed properly. There were grandmothers and babies – nobody was safe. There was no toilet and no food, so you can imagine the state of the room. We all thought we were going to be killed by those savages.”
In the chaos before the hostages were taken out of Athens, Alexandra somehow managed to get released. She didn’t explain how, but that was how things worked – you lived or died on a whim or by chance acquaintance. Spiros, however, was forced to go on the long march. As a policeman, it was surprising that they let him live at all, as they were among the most hated groups. His coat and shoes were taken away and he had to wrap rags around his feet and join a straggling line of exhausted, war-weary and terrified Athenians, who were made to walk out of the city towards the north under armed escort. In total, they numbered about twenty thousand, including around a thousand British prisoners-of-war.
“They were like sheep, herded along the road and beaten if they lagged behind,” said Alexandra. “They didn’t have food, except a few wild greens and cold water, so of course people began to collapse. When they couldn’t walk, they were killed and their corpses left by the side of the road.” She described a dreadful situation; there was snow on the hills and the hostages were made to walk without shoes. There were families with children and old people, and at night they slept outside with no protection. Each day they became weaker.
“The communist bullies took away their clothes and many of them froze to death. They were beaten for having lived in a nice house. And what was all that for? For being ‘bourgeois’?’ Ask your Antigone about that. She knows very well what happened. Ask my sister about that glorious episode. She was there, with her gun and her slogans. Spiros begged her to let him go and she refused – her sister’s fiancé, whom she had known since childhood. Well after that, it’s hardly surprising that I disowned her. From then on, I didn’t have a sister.”
Alexandra told me that after twelve days, the march was stopped near Arachova. Those who had survived were suddenly released and had to make their own way back to Athens and some, including Spiros, were transported by the Red Cross. Later that winter, mass graves were discovered outside Athens.
“The communists took whoever they didn’t like and murdered them,” she said. “And don’t imagine they did it nicely. Tin can lids for slitting throats – that was their style. Or bullets to the back of the head. You can imagine that by then, not many Athenians felt like letting the Reds run the country. They had shown their true colours. Thank God we had the English helping us, or we’d have become a satellite of the Soviet Union. It was due to the English and then the Americans that Greece was saved. I’ve never forgotten that.”
Alexandra paused, looking exhausted by the memories. I had always thought of her as the perfect lady who would never lose control, whose emotions were carefully measured; rather “English” in fact, or at least what the Greeks call English. But here, I could see someone who had been traumatised and whose husband might have been a brute, but was also brutalised.
“You think a strong man will recover, but those things don’t ever leave you.” She got up slowly from her armchair and picked up a framed photograph of her husband, aged perhaps thirty-five. She brought it across, holding it reverentially, like an icon or a relic and showed me what looked like a perfectly healthy man with a carefully groomed, black moustache and a patronising smile animating his features. However, Alexandra said that Spiros was tormented by nightmares about his family’s murders and he was permanently affected by the march. He was hospitalised for pneumonia immediately afterwards, and then suffered from a chronic weak chest.
“And later, after Nikitas was born?” I wanted to ask Alexandra how it was possible that she and Spiros had taken in her hated sister’s child as their own, after all that happened.
“A child is an innocent creature of God,” she said, and I sensed the answer was one she had used before. “I couldn’t let my own nephew go to an orphanage. And Mondy, you know, I loved him. I wasn’t able to have children – we’d been to doctors. Later, it’s true that Spiros and I sometimes wondered whether we’d made a mistake. Nikitas was trouble, right from the beginning. There are some things that are passed on in the blood. You could tell that he had inherited certain traits. But we gave him a chance in life.”
After we cleared up the tea things, I returned to the sitting room and moved slowly around, looking at the familiar photographs in their frames. I now noticed other details in the 1930s picture of the Perifanis family outside their house in Paradise Street. As a girl, Antigone had a stubborn, tight-lipped expression that I noticed still appearing regularly on her
wrinkled, octogenarian face, whereas the teenage Alexandra stood upright and sure about herself, as though there could be no questions, just as she did now. Markos was holding his oldest sister’s hand, but I saw that his gaze was directed towards Antigone. The divisions and alliances were already in place.
Before I left, Aunt Alexandra told me that Markos was “safe” and that I could pass that message onto her sister.
“You know that for us Orthodox, a person’s remains are sacred. That’s why we don’t have cremation. That’s why we keep the bones. But it’s also why my sister made such a big mistake, even a crime, by not letting us know what happened to my brother after he died. Don’t worry, Mondy mou.” She patted my hand. “I will tell you where my brother is resting. I am not a bad person. And you are my family now. There is nobody else who will mourn me when I’m gone, just you and my beloved grandchildren.”
I returned to my empty apartment clutching a plastic container of the rice and spinach and a jar of Alexandra’s lemon “spoon sweet” – thick coils of yellow peel covered in syrup. I fished one out with a fork, letting the sticky liquid drip down, and ate it, my mouth filling with aching, acid sweetness.
* * *
The following day was November 17th, the anniversary of the students’ uprising at the Polytechnic in 1973. Schools were shut, so Tig and I slept in – she didn’t appear until midday. Due to the annual march through the centre of Athens, the commemoration has become a general holiday and I was accustomed to the celebrations. It was strange being at home without Nikitas there to press his point, to rally the children and to play recordings of rousing marching songs by Theodorakis that still had the allure of something forbidden, as they had been during the Colonels’ Junta.
The House on Paradise Street Page 21