The House on Paradise Street

by Sofka Zinovieff

  When Orestes and Tig were younger, Nikitas always took them to the Polytechnic and then all the way through the centre of Athens on the march to the US Embassy. The children liked the part where everyone chanted angry slogans at the Americans, accusing them of having supported the Junta; I recall Tig returning aged six and chanting: “Down with the Americans!” with a grin on her face. There were a couple of times when I went, but I found it hard to relate to the enthusiasm, even if Nikitas did explain to me over and over how significant the student occupation of the Polytechnic had been and how their deaths beneath the Colonels’ tanks had led to the end of the seven-year dictatorship. Spiros had made sure that his nephew was arrested and beaten up frequently during this period, and though his threats of exile on Makronisos were never fulfilled, Nikitas felt he had suffered for his beliefs.

  Some years ago, Orestes refused to go to the Polytechnic with Nikitas and Tig. He drew battle-lines with his father across sensitive, almost sacred ground by attacking the very concept of the commemoration.

  “I don’t want to hear your ancient arguments with their stale slogans. Blue pricks! They don’t mean anything any more. That’s all over. The world is a different place.” Orestes had become a young warrior when he laid into Nikitas. His eyes were even darker and more direct than his father’s and the pair looked like stags sizing each other up, one an old alpha male, the other younger and less powerful but faster and with the future on his side.

  “Why should we have to carry your burdens?” Orestes said, as the tension increased. “Why should we fight for you? You should leave us alone to live our youth and solve our own problems.” In the end, Nikitas backed down by feigning nonchalance.

  “It’s your loss if you don’t understand that we made the world better for you. Stay home and have a wank. I’ll go with your sister.”

  The discussion got worse when Nikitas sneered at his son’s choice of communications and media studies at university.

  “It’s not a real subject,” he said. However, Orestes was equally capable of the verbal put-down.

  “Just look what your studies have done. You and your friends have destroyed Athens. You’ve all become rich, you’ve ruined the environment and you’ve created a corrupt system based on cronies with contacts. If yours is the model, God help us.” Later in the day, Orestes had told me he would “pass by the march” to check it out, and in subsequent years, he had gone with his own friends from university. However, each year he became angrier about the self-congratulatory style of his father’s generation and the way they gloried in their exploits.

  This year, I ignored the anniversary – a small stab of revenge towards Nikitas by showing I didn’t care. Instead, I stayed at my desk, working on a translation I had been failing to concentrate on since the accident. Tig went out and, yet again, I found myself alone in a still house, with the particular quiet of a city abandoned by most people except the protestors and police. In the evening, I took a bowl of lentils and sat down in front of the television. The news was filled with reports of the march. As usual, hooligans and anarchists had turned the more sober proceedings into chaos. Hooded youths threw petrol bombs and ripped up pieces of paving stones as missiles to throw at the lines of gas-masked riot police, who sprayed canisters of tear gas into the crowd. Lines of orderly protestors marched along, chanting slogans and ignoring the warlike conditions they left in their wake. The camera zoomed in on some elderly marchers and among the rows of respectable pensioners, I spotted a familiar face. At first I could not believe it, but there was no doubting it was Antigone. And next to her was Dora. They were holding banners that read Americans, Murderers of Peoples. I laughed aloud at the absurdity of these elderly women up to their old tricks, pacing stolidly against a backdrop of riotous youths in black balaclavas lobbing Molotov cocktails at reinforced police vans.

  After the news, I switched channels, changing from a talent show, with half-naked teenage girls writhing to Greek rap, to a talk show hosted in a mocked-up taverna, with jugs of wine, plates of food and re-hashed rembétika songs. I ended up with something called Great Greeks, where the audience had to choose between a surreal mix of twentieth century politicians and ancient philosophers: Sophocles or Karamanlis, Papanikolaou of the smear test or Alexander the Great, Socrates or Eleftherios Venizelos?

  “The new opium of the people.” I could hear Nikitas’ voice as though he were there. “They want us to be dazed and anaesthetised, so we don’t think about more important subjects.” It was true – the longer I sat there, the more frozen I became. I was alone, trapped between the fossilised fights of the older generation and the equally unfathomable battles of the young, in a country that was not even my own.

  * * *

  Although I was intrigued by having spotted Antigone and her friend on television, I didn’t feel like seeing my mother-in-law – and still hesitated to use the title. I was sickened by Alexandra’s stories and I didn’t want to be dragged too deep into their feud. However, Antigone was surprisingly insistent. She rang me several times and wanted to find out if I had discovered anything about Markos’ bones. Eventually, I agreed to visit her at Dora’s house. Perhaps I had subconsciously been expecting a partisan’s lair, but in fact it had the familiarly feminine touches of so many Greek homes – hand-made doilies on the television set, kitsch china ornaments, old, framed photographs. Dora brought out a choice of spoon sweets on dainty saucers and then went to prepare coffee, which she served with “dipping biscuits” from the bakery.

  “My sister always wanted to have the upper hand,” Antigone said, after I mentioned that Alexandra had spoken about the marches and abductions. She handed me a thin plastic folder with some handwritten pages. “This will show you the story from my viewpoint.” Antigone looked well, and though her clothes were as indifferently combined as Alexandra’s were elegant, she had evidently had a haircut and her eyes were bright. When she spoke, her strong features were animated like someone much younger.

  “It will also give you an idea of why I am so busy.”

  I flicked through the sheets that were covered with a tidy, if slightly shaky Greek script in blue biro.

  “Of course bad things happened,” she replied, when I told her the gist of her sister’s revelations. “It was a war. We were desperate. And the other side had superior weapons and manpower. There were 70,000 English killing us with their Spitfires and tanks. And they were taking our people as hostages. They transported them all the way to prison camps in Egypt. What could we do?” I could tell she had worked out the justifications long ago, just as Alexandra had for what “her side” did. As for Spiros’ suffering, Antigone had little sympathy. Dehumanising the other side had always been the first rule of war.

  “Spiros should have been shot, or at least imprisoned, for being in the Security Battalions and for collaborating with the Germans. I suppose my sister didn’t mention that I arranged her release before the marches. She was allowed to go home. As the fiancée of Spiros Koftos, she was seen in a very bad light – everyone knew what the Koftos family had been up to all those years – but they agreed to let her go because of me.”

  According to Antigone, Spiros was not treated so badly and Alexandra was exaggerating the case. It was true that nobody had much food, and that those “gangsters of the air” (the British) had strafed them at one point, believing them to be a column of communist families leaving Athens. However, she herself had got Spiros a pair of boots from somebody who died and, she claimed, she had persuaded the Kapetánios in command not to have him executed.

  “I told them that, as a policeman, he was more useful to us as a bargaining chip. We saw a different man, a coward, once he was away from his cronies and henchmen. He wept and moaned and begged me to help him. And I did – not that he would have ever revealed it. Didn’t he return to Alexandra and get married, then live happily ever after?” Antigone’s tone was acid. “It was the rest of us whose lives were ruined.”

  Before I left, Antigone said she had s
omething for me. She examined my face as she returned from her bedroom with something small wrapped in tissue paper.

  “Thank you. What is it?”

  “It is something important to me but I think you should have it.”

  I began unrolling the paper until a slender lock of dark hair was revealed.

  “It was cut from my son’s head when he was three years old – the last time I saw him. I kept it during all my years in Russia but maybe it is of more use to you now? A link to the past perhaps?”

  I looked at the child’s curl and managed not to cry. I didn’t want this to turn into one of those drenched female scenes that Nikitas had found so trying.

  “Try to think how he would have laughed at this,” I thought.

  “Bravo Maud,” he would have said. “You’ve got my stubborn old mother right in your pocket – just where you wanted her.”

  18

  Dirty Bulgarian whores

  ANTIGONE

  I didn’t see Markos’ grave until long after he was buried. When I was arrested at the Royal Garden they took me to a police station, just off Syntagma. There were so many people inside that, in the chaos, I managed to escape. It wasn’t a glorious achievement, climbing over rooftops or fighting the policemen, but a question of seizing the moment when nobody was looking. A group of us were waiting to give our details to a police clerk and the policeman guarding us went off somewhere. I stood up and walked away, waiting to be stopped, but nothing was said. I wasn’t handcuffed. I walked down some stairs to a back entrance and was soon out on the street. I didn’t look back. I hurried on, into Stadiou [Stadium] Street, cutting off past the old Parliament building and into the winding side roads. Each moment I expected to hear a shout and to be caught, yet nothing happened. I went on, head down, trembling with cold and fear, feeling more alone than I have ever felt. I had lost my brother and we had lost the fight. Athens was in the hands of the English and their stooges. I didn’t know where to go, but I realised I had to leave.

  There was a safe house somewhere near Larissis Station and I made my way there. Then I was helped to leave the city – there was no point in staying. We had been defeated and the choice was now chains or weapons. It was only natural to choose the latter. “The mountains are accustomed to snow”, as they say. So there was a weary familiarity to life when a small band of us travelled on foot, by truck and with mules along old country tracks. After several days, we arrived back at the mountains near Lamia where I had begun, so full of hope, just over a year before. The button from my brother’s jacket was still in my pocket – a greyish, two-holed circle of horn. I kept fingering it. I liked taking it out to stroke the ridged edge.

  I met up with what was left of my battalion, including Dora, who had been to see her two small children at her parents’ house outside Athens, but left them again to continue the fight. What fight? At this point we were a sad collection of people whose hopes had been drowned like kittens in the river. It was cold and wet. Bands of fascists were on the hunt for us. Then, in February there was Varkiza – the so-called Peace Agreement, where ELAS leaders agreed to turn in their fighters’ weapons on condition that they would play a part in Greece’s politics. It is hard to imagine the shame felt by any partisan who gave up his or her weapon. Your gun was your honour and your life. Many of the men had acquired their weapons in battle with the Germans and Italians – they were their most precious belonging, something for which they had risked their lives. I thought of the beloved Mauser that Kapetan Eagle had given me the previous winter, with its smell of oiled metal. It had kept me company day and night until it was lost in the fighting when Markos was killed. Another loss. I’ll never forget seeing the toughest men I knew crying like babies when they threw their guns down on a pile. Some even committed suicide. We all wept for what might have been. Of course, we were never allowed to join in the political process. We were tricked into helping our enemies defeat us. If you are unjust to someone, you wound his soul, and that doesn’t go away, however many years pass. The bitterness always remains.

  After Varkiza we had the White Terror. Colonel Grivas and his X-boys rampaged through the streets of Athens, while gangs of right-wing thugs terrorised the villages, beating, killing and raping with impunity. Our enemies called us brigands, but they were the ones supporting these fascist bands. In the countryside we dreaded the ferocious Sourlides from Volos, who wore their hair long and greasy, with beards divided in two like devil’s horns. Sourlas was their leader, and they rode on horseback, dressed in black waistcoats, hung with bells, pistols and knives. The police gave them a free hand to do what they liked in villages that were known to support our cause and their brutality was notorious. They liked to torture their victims before they murdered them. And they were also useful for handing over live leftists to the police, who would then be sent off in their thousands to jails and island camps. The constantly growing population of prisoners was almost all made up of former partisans – people of conscience who had done nothing wrong. At a time when we were all exhausted by years of violence and war, the horror just kept going. We tried to keep our discipline and our rules continued as rigorous as ever, but they were black days.

  That summer was dry and baking hot. In June, we heard the news of Aris’ death. I had met him several times, but I had not known him well. To tell the truth, he was always a bit dismissive of us girls – he was a man’s man, with his Black Caps around him, filling everyone with awe. But he was a great leader. His voice was urgent yet gentle, inspiring us all to keep going. He didn’t deserve to be treated like that – hunted down and murdered, though some say he managed to finish himself off before they got him. They chopped off his head, along with that of Tzavelas, his deputy, and strung them up on a lamp post in Trikkala’s central square. The pictures were in all the newspapers – the hero who had fought the Nazis and brought justice and freedom to the villages, mutilated and humiliated in death. I was horrified by the grotesque photograph. It took me straight back to the cellar in Piraeus Street, and memories of Uncle Diamantis and the hidden press. It had been Aris’ picture, still wet and black, that originally summoned me to join the fight. That seemed so long ago.

  After the summer it became harder than ever to survive. The English occupation of Greece meant that they distributed food aid and supplies around the country, but nothing reached the mountain villages where we still had support. The villagers could not feed themselves, let alone give us anything, and the drought that year added to the desperate situation. We moved around in smaller groups, but it was becoming almost impossible. Occasionally, we took a sheep or goat from a herd and had a feast, but mostly we didn’t even have enough beans or grains to make a soup. Once we ate a tortoise. The boys laughed, saying they had found a Nazi helmet wobbling along in the undergrowth, and they tossed it about while it hissed and groaned. Then they cut off its wrinkled, old man’s head and made a stew. It didn’t taste of chicken like they said it would.

  The National Army put petrol in the wells so we were unable to get easy access to drinking water and, as the weather grew cold and the snow began, it was obvious that we would not survive; Captain Winter was the most deadly enemy. We girls all had chilblains and gynaecological problems from the cold, from wading through icy rivers and then marching in wet clothes, frozen through.

  Almost a year after I had left Athens I returned with Dora and Storm. The latter was now famous for her courage as an andártissa. We intended to make contact there with the Communist Party. The leader, Zachariadis, had recently returned from Dachau, having been imprisoned there for the whole war by the Germans, and we were to meet with him or at least his representatives.

  “Make sure you are dressed smartly,” we were told by our Kapetánios. “You must look like city girls who are used to eating English cakes, not wild kids from the mountains.” We managed to get kitted out with clothes in Lamia and, by the time we took a bus down to Athens, we were unrecognisable. My hair was dyed light brown, I was given a grey woollen
suit and I wore high heels for the first time in my life. Dora emerged a terrible blonde, with beetling brown eyebrows. We were amused at the masquerade, though Storm, who was older and more worldly, did not see the game in it all.

  “If you laugh like that in public we’ll be in trouble before we even reach Athens,” she warned, as Dora and I applied unfamiliar lipstick before a mirror.

  We met a contact near the port in Piraeus and were taken to a house in the refugee neighbourhood of Kokkinia, near where I had stayed during the Dekemvriana, the previous winter. The weather was awful and we spent hours in a tiny house, boiling up the mountain tea we had brought with us, and listening to the rhythms of the rain hitting the tin roof. The elderly couple who owned the place gave us a large package of cigarettes that they had acquired in exchange for something, at a time when barter and the black market were the commonest forms of commerce. Neither of them smoked, so we three sat puffing away almost without stopping, lighting the next cigarette from the last. We had a passion for Comrade Tobacco that never left us. Smoking was a pleasure and, above all, companionship, however lonely you felt. And after the conditions we had been used to in the mountains, it was a luxury to sit in a dry room blowing smoke rings. We had been told to wait for instructions, but when nothing happened on the second day and the rain stopped, I left my comrades and went in search of my brother’s grave. I walked over to Mets in my high-heeled shoes, and arrived at the First Cemetery exhausted and with blistered feet.

  I found our old neighbour, Kyrios Kostas, gathering up withered wreaths and burning them. Like the previous time, he did not recognise me. I spoke quietly.

  “It’s me, Antigone, your neighbour.” He crossed himself several times as he looked me up and down.