The House on Paradise Street

by Sofka Zinovieff

  “Antigonaki, you’ve become a lady,” he said with approval. I didn’t feel like a lady but a ridiculous fake, with my lightened hair and agonising shoes. Kyrios Kostas led me to the Protestant Cemetery, the walled-off part for foreigners. And there, over in one corner, next to the tomb of a German couple who had died in the 1920s, there was a grave marked by a small, horizontal stone. It was engraved with my brother’s initials, Μ.Π. Kyrios Kostas said, “I didn’t want to put any more than that in case of trouble. I know you’ll do the right thing by the boy when you can. We’ll get a nice stone and a proper plot, and you’ll bring a priest. Naturally, you must let your poor mother know. I don’t want to make trouble in your family, but she is suffering.” I sat down and tidied the grave, as I’d seen women do in every graveyard I’d ever been in. But I had never understood before. It was as though I was stroking my brother as I brushed the dried leaves away and, when I whispered to him, I felt he could hear.

  By the time I returned to the house in Kokkinia, I was unwell. I had a cough and recognised the light-head and heavy limbs that mark the beginning of illness. I went straight to bed and slipped into uneasy and hallucinating dreams. It was another nightmare when, a few hours later, there was a loud banging on the door and several men pushed their way into the house, shouting in the darkness. They were the police. Using torches (there was no electricity in the place), they dragged me out of bed along with Dora and Storm, and told us we were under arrest. There was no time to do anything. They pointed guns at us while we pulled on clothes and followed them out to a van. The old couple had been sleeping in the kitchen and they were taken along too. We were driven to a police station in Piraeus, where our hosts were put in one cell and the three of us in another. We had shown the police our false identity cards, but they seemed to know we were partisans.

  “Dirty Bulgarian whores!” they said. “Filthy communist traitors! You betrayed your country, you deserve to die.” Storm was never at a loss for a reply and said, “If we’re Bulgarians, you’re Turks! We are Greek patriots who love our country.”

  “What you need is a good Greek man to knock some sense into you.” One of the policemen leaned in and squeezed Storm’s cheek as though she were a child. He twisted it until there was a red welt. “If you were a patriot, you’d be at home with your family. You made your choices and now you’re going to pay for them.” He spat a gob of phlegm on the floor by our feet.

  There was no bed in the cell, and the two blankets they brought us were so soiled that we threw them in the corner and sat on the floor, leaning against the wall. Later, however, it became so cold that we put one of the greasy, blood-encrusted rags on the floor to lie on and pulled the other on top of us so that at least our backs were covered. I was sweating and shivering from the worsening fever and none of us slept. As the sun came up and the concrete floor of the cell was lit up with a thin line of light, I watched lice crawling on the blanket. They seemed like monstrous creatures. I was so weak, I felt powerless to protect myself but, when Dora woke, she crushed them one by one: “before they make us their breakfast”. She smiled at me and her mouth looked enormous, then distant, and her teeth white and sharp. I didn’t know where I was and can’t remember anything of the next day or so. Eventually, I was seen by a doctor and was put in a cell by myself, which had a bed and a pile of similarly disgusting blankets. It was more comfortable, but I felt utter loneliness of a sort I had never experienced before nor have since. Nobody spoke to me, except the guard who brought watery soups and stale bread twice a day. He wasn’t unkind, but something even worse – uninterested.

  After my illness passed, I was moved to a police station near Omonia. At my first interrogation I was told they knew exactly who I was, so there was no point in denying it. They even knew about my family.

  “Why couldn’t you have behaved like your sister?” Naturally they wanted to learn about my comrades, but I was nothing if not stubborn. The more they tried, the more I refused. They used to take me up to the top floor of the building, to a room where the policemen rested, which contained several beds. They would remove a mattress from one and tell me to take my clothes off down to my underwear. Then I was told to lie face down on the wooden base of the bed. Four policemen held me by my wrists and ankles, while another one beat me with a truncheon. They grunted like animals and shouted as though it was good entertainment. I didn’t tell them anything. Even when I was covered with black and purple bruises I refused to speak to those pigs. I lost count of the times they took me there.

  One day, a guard came to my cell and said I had visitors. Before I could ready myself, two people walked in. When you are not prepared, it is harder to be in control. I had never cried or even called out in pain while I was being thrashed by the policemen, but when I realised who the man and woman in front of me were, I crumpled onto my bed and wept like a child. The woman, hunched and thin, staring into my face without speaking, was my mother. Next to her, in the pristine khaki uniform of our English conquerors, was Johnny. I was both relieved and angry, comforted and hurt. My mother sat down next to me and took me in her arms, as she had when I was younger. She kissed my forehead and stroked my hair, making the soothing noises that had always calmed me as a child.

  Johnny was talking, though it was hard to take in what he was saying. “Article 125 of the Penal Code… Instigation of civil war and the formation of armed bands… crimes of high treason.” He looked very clean and pink, his skin close-shaven and his hair combed. He spoke in English to keep the conversation more private from the guard lurking outside the door. “It’s serious, Antigone. But I want to help you. Don’t forget, you have a brother-in-law who is a senior police officer. If you do the right thing, Spiros will help you too. He is family now.” I looked at the man I thought I’d loved and hated him. I detested the English and their hypocrisy. As to Spiros, he was beneath contempt.

  “I have always done what I consider to be the right thing. If you really want to help, you can leave.” I spoke calmly, surprised at myself. “And you can tell that to your fellow countrymen,” I said to Johnny. “You have ‘helped’ us enough. We’re not part of your empire and we don’t want to be a British colony.” My mother left some food, kissed me goodbye and went out after Johnny.

  My trial was a farce, but there was no laughter. There was only one punishment for high treason: execution. I was expecting it, and yet when I heard the judge say the words, there was a strange sensation in my intestines, like lead pipes pulling me down. Although my mind could cope – there was a group of us being sentenced together and we were determined to keep our dignity – my body received the shock in its own way. In the end, though, it was my body that saved me. I was taken to Kalithea Prison and at the medical examination, I was found to be pregnant.

  19

  The incurable necrophilia of radical patriotism

  MAUD

  When Nikitas and I moved into Paradise Street with Tig, I was happy with our new existence. I loved the house, which somehow managed to be both solid and decorative: floors of grey marble, filled with small fossils that Tig traced with her fingers; the sturdy terracotta sculptures of Athena, standing sentry at the corners of the terrace and gazing out across the city; the heavy green shutters, which filtered strips of light into the bedroom; the old bath with 1930s French chrome taps. The whole place was redolent of Petros, Nikitas’ grandfather and the journey he made from village boy to self-made businessman; it was his monument to a successful life. I liked being part of the continuation of the Perifanis family. Practically too, it was good to have Alexandra and Chryssa, the two “grandmothers”, downstairs, and I appreciated their company.

  Having been brought up by people whose formative years had been during the Second World War, I found it easy to relate to the two old women. I remembered how my grandparents had valued peace for its own sake, and how careful they were with food (half a tomato saved on a plate in the fridge, leftovers recycled into new meals). Chryssa often cooked for us and both she and A
lexandra were happy to take Tig for hours on end if I was busy. I enjoyed sitting with Chryssa in the kitchen, taking the role of sous-chef, cleaning vegetables or cutting onions (Greek style, in one’s hand rather than on a board) and talking with her while she rolled out feta pies with scalloped edges or made dolmades –vine leaves stuffed with rice, onions and pine nuts.

  “It’s like embroidery,” she said, as she folded them into parcels, like small presents, and then smothered them in egg and lemon sauce.

  Despite my hopes for a domestic idyll, I admit that this was when Nikitas and I began to have problems. Or rather, the problems began to show. Nikitas was plagued by nightmares about earthquakes. I would wake to find him dragging me from the bed so we could escape from the collapsing house. Sometimes he’d shout for Tig, until I soothed him into waking properly and then going back to sleep. Perhaps the return to a childhood home associated with unhappiness was harder for him than I realised. Spiros cast a long shadow even after his demise and Nikitas continued to belittle his uncle whenever possible, mocking and criticising him, and harping on about his last moments. He argued that the manner of a person’s death changes the perspective of their life.

  “When I think of how Spiros spent a lifetime lecturing me about the value of the family, of Christianity, of telling the truth… all a great pile of shit in the end. If you die in a ridiculous way, you will be remembered for that. It reveals your essence, much as dying resolutely makes you a hero. Imagine if Jesus hadn’t ended up on the cross, but had died of flu – maybe the world would have turned out quite differently. Or take our King Alexander, who died from a monkey bite that got infected. Almost a hundred years later he still isn’t remembered for anything else.”

  Now that Nikitas was gone, I recalled his words, pondering on what his death revealed about him. The fact that he had died alone, in the small hours and away from his family, holding onto secrets, was a bleak reminder of how the gap between us had been widening. The shift in tone started gradually, like an invisible disease working its way through the body. It’s not that we didn’t love each other, but that certain things started to rankle. I began to believe that at least part of his veiled hostility was due to my nationality. When he made his documentaries about Greece’s relationship with Britain, each new scandal he uncovered was like a black mark against me personally. I began to feel shamed and humiliated, as though I was being smeared with mud and cinders, as the Byzantines used to do to miscreants, after parading them sitting backwards on a donkey. I understood better why the Greek moúntza gesture of splaying the hand (as though to smear) has, ever since those times, been the nastiest insult in this country. The outstretched palm of the hand, sometimes paired with the other hand for emphasis, goes beyond the power of curses and offends an individual’s honour.

  “Do you know what you English did to the resistance fighters after the end of the Second World War?” he asked, using the second person plural when speaking about British politicians who had been in power decades before my birth.

  “And don’t forget Cyprus – your handy little colony in the Mediterranean. Of course, it was such a useful stop-over on the way to India, but even after the Indians were given their freedom, England clung on to Cyprus. Who in England remembers that long after India became independent, you went on executing Cypriot Greek freedom fighters for being terrorists?” Nikitas’ film on Cyprus had interviews with old men in village coffee houses, who spoke of the British as unjust oppressors. They were still haunted by their lost comrades and convinced that their cause was just. Two of the respectable-looking pensioners stood up to recite the oath they took in the 1950s:

  I shall work with all my power for the liberation of Cyprus from the British yoke, sacrificing for this even my life.

  “Naturally, the English tourists who fill the charter planes and go to sweat like pigs on Cyprus’ beaches have absolutely no idea,” Nikitas said, revelling in his outrage. “They’re like the Germans who drive past Cretan villages, ignoring the signs listing how many civilians were shot there by the Nazis. Forgetting is very useful when you’ve committed atrocities.”

  I had not known these things, or at least not in detail. And, to tell the truth, I felt aggrieved by what felt like wrongful accusations, rather than remorse – these episodes had occurred well before I was born. I suppose my outsider’s innocence ceased to be refreshing to Nikitas. I believed that I was not part of any grand plan, mass political movement or colonial conquest; I was an individual, a human, who happened to have been born in one place and lived in another. That didn’t convince him.

  “Our history is inside us,” he said. “It’s in our cells, just as our grandparents and ancestors live on in our DNA. We cannot escape from what went before, from what our countries have experienced.”

  The more Nikitas laid into me as though I were to blame for Churchill or the brutality of British troops in Cyprus, the more I began to find fault with my adopted country. What had previously been exotic became annoying, starting with the details of daily life. What sort of country expects people to put their shitty toilet paper in baskets instead of down the drains? Why couldn’t they install normal drain pipes like everywhere else? Why is it considered normal to have power cuts for hours on end during summer heat-waves and winter storms, as though we were living in Gaza and not twenty-first century Europe? Why are seatbelts seen as an infringement of liberty (even for children), when they know that the roads are the most dangerous in Europe? Why is the Greeks’ idea of freedom interpreted as the freedom to park across the pavement, blocking women with pushchairs and pensioners, or the freedom to smoke incessantly, everywhere? Of course, once I started down this slippery slope, the questions came faster and more furiously. Why was it considered normal when we handed the surgeon a “small envelope” containing 3,000 euros cash when Nikitas had a minor operation in a state hospital?

  There are times, especially after a roasting hot night in summer, when even a cotton sheet seems to burn the skin and the whine of dive-bombing mosquitoes drives you mad, that I long for the soothing North, the subtle shadows of grey London light and cool summer nights where you sleep with a duvet. “Moaning Maud” – that is what I am, or at least what I became. Even worse than “Bored Maud”, as an old boyfriend used to say. At least I wasn’t “Maudlin” or “Mordant”, as Desmond, my grandfather, called me affectionately. He would make up limericks that made use of all the words that rhymed with my name. There was a young lady called Maud, who was always incredibly bored… I remember flawed and ignored, but there was also roared, gnawed, clawed.

  Above all, the thing I had tired of was the Greeks’ obsession with themselves, with the nature of Greekness, with how they are viewed and how unfairly they are judged. Beware of saying even the slightest critical thing about Greece to a Greek as they will take it as though you have said their mother is a whore and their father her pimp.

  “Everything has to revolve around your suffering,” I once told Nikitas in frustration. “You like being the victims. You blame the Turks for keeping you as slaves for four centuries, the British for their political meddling, the Americans for supporting the Junta – anyone but yourself for the mess.”

  Looking back on my disillusionment with Greece, I realise that I had forgotten to place it alongside the extremes that mark so much of life there – a ratcheting up of intensity so that each experience takes you further than it might elsewhere. It starts with the senses. Colours, sounds, smells and tastes are richer in Greece (the tang of lemons off the tree or spearmint in salad, tomatoes or figs that taste of the sun). But these extremes continue so that emotions are stretched to breaking point in all directions. The lack of safety precautions is all part of the thrill; political correctness will never catch on. After Nikitas’ death, I had started to see these things more clearly. And now, it seemed not only obvious but understandable that the Greeks have a tendency to create tragic myths out of their experiences, with the Civil War being one of the most powerful and long-lasting.
The almost magnetic lure of calamity here was simply the other end of a spectrum on which the closeness of family and community has bound people together so tightly.

  While I was clearing and sorting things in Nikitas’ office, I had come across a book called The Incurable Necrophilia of Radical Patriotism. The title alone was enough to make me take it home. It was filled with comments Nikitas had written in the margin – angry disagreements (Ochi!) and scorings-out in heavy biro. One day, Orestes came in to find me lying on the sofa reading what turned out to be a critique of the left-wing Greek obsession with the glory of defeat, especially in relation to the Civil War. He laughed so much when I showed him the book that I feared he was going to cry. It was as if the spasms of laughter had drawn out emotions prompted by his father’s death that he had been successfully controlling. When he quietened down, he sat on the arm of the sofa beside me.

  “It’s true – we love our martyrs in Greece,” he said. “It’s better to lose in the name of honour than to win. Babas and his cronies clung onto the resistance story for so long because they got off on that masochistic shit. It excites the wankers – the pleasure is knowing they held the moral high ground. It applies even more to his mother’s generation, which was practically wiped out. It doesn’t matter if everyone was imprisoned or killed. As long as it was in a good cause. What a fucking mess.” Orestes groaned in contentment. “Incurable necrophiliacs! That’s what they are.”

  20

  Farewell poor world, farewell sweet life

  ANTIGONE

  When my son was born, he did not cry. He just looked at me as though he knew something. His body was like that of a tiny, wrinkled monkey, with black down over his back and a thick head of hair. They washed him, swaddled him tightly and handed him to me like a package ready for posting. I had no idea what to do. I had never seen a newborn or cared for a baby. Ironically, my life in the mountains meant that I was more, not less, innocent about the functions of the female body than my contemporaries in the city or the countryside. I knew how to clean a gun and gut a hare, and I was not afraid to walk up a mountain at night. But I had not really known what was involved in childbirth and had no idea how to change a nappy or hold an infant. Confronted with this new life, I was bewildered. Thankfully, babies are efficient teachers and I submitted to the powerful urges of nature.