Dead Europe

by Christos Tsiolkas

  I doubt I would have found the Café Beirut in a guidebook. It was a coffee shop a few hundred metres from the pensione, tucked between a butcher shop and a tobacconist. The seating was uncomfortable but the tables were large enough to spread my photographs over them. It was usual for me, when examining my own photographs, to concentrate first on perspective, then tone, rejecting immediately the shots which struck me as clumsy or cluttered. But it wasn’t anything technical I first noticed when I studied the photographs spread before me. What I first noticed were the ghosts.

  I picked up a photograph. It was of my mother’s village. I had used a wide-angle lens, wanting a panoramic view of the largely abandoned fields that criss-crossed the steep descent into the valley. I had judged the light well. Even the hasty processing had not dulled the rich greens of the valley, the cool azure of the sky, and the stark, stripped whiteness of the cottages. What I could not understand were the shadows that dotted my landscape. In one of the fields, a thin strip of roughly ploughed land, a figure crouched and stared furiously at the camera. The boy’s face was haggard and lean, and even though he was simply an element in the background, his eyes shone brightly. I peered closely at the black ink of his eyes. Everything about him—his body, his face—was blurred and faint, except for that violence in his eyes. As the valley receded, a clearing of poplar trees became visible in the photo and underneath the wooded shelter, tall thin figures congregated. Of them, I could make out nothing at all: they could have been wisps of smoke. All I knew was that they had not been there when I had clicked the shutter for that shot.

  Another photograph. Giulia and Andreas standing arm-in-arm in front of the coffee shop in the village. Behind them sit the old men at the table. But behind my cousin and her friend there is the boy again. He is mocking me behind the cemetery gates, his eyes again luminous, fierce and dark.

  Cursed. Giulia had said to me, Did you know that your mother’s family is cursed? I had attempted a laugh but she was serious, searching my face. There’s no one remaining, did you know that? she continued. Everyone in your mother’s family has disappeared. The old men say that it is as if they were never in the village.

  I felt a weight on me then; I felt that the whole village—the heat, the dust, the mountain air and the stark sky above—were all weighing on me. Cursed. Your whole family is cursed. I had tried to shake that word from me.

  Fairytales, I had dismissed. There’s no one left because they’ve all migrated from this shithole. That’s why no one’s left here. I walked away from her, my camera swinging alongside me, determined to bring this place to clear rational modern life with my flash and camera, through film and chemicals.

  Cursed? What the fuck did that mean? That wasn’t in my language, that wasn’t part of my world. Fucking peasant shit. Not my world, not my clean rational world. I started, looked up; the men at the bar were shouting and screaming, laughing and yelling at the silent screen. Juventus had a goal.

  I examined the negatives by holding them up against the light streaming in from the cafe window. The boy’s face was there as well. I shivered, ice fingers down my spine. Then I let out a slow, relieved laugh. Not a curse, not magic: a technical error. Superimposed. They fucked up my bloody film. They fucked up my mother’s memories. I’d got somebody else’s memories superimposed on my film. I silently cursed the sullen bitch at the kiosk off the Piazza San Marco. Then I laughed again, and forgave her. I thought of the millions of snapshots she had to process, had to see, endless identical shots of pigeons, wet stone, the same fucking cathedral again and again and again. I’d fuck up as many as I could get away with as well. I gathered up the photographs and stuffed them into the envelope. This was a technical, scientific world. There was no evil eye. I was not cursed.

  I hadn’t slept much since leaving Greece. Giulia had wanted me to travel with her to Thessaloniki but I had declined. On returning to Athens I had found myself restless and increasingly irritated by the Greeks. I was angered by their indifference to the sight of beggars and gypsies on the streets; I detested their sour disapproval of the new immigrants in their country.

  I could not bear their obsession with the accrual of possessions: Prada, Gucci and Versace. I could not get settled back in the city. It was as if my time in the village had unclogged my senses, had cleansed my perceptions. I felt I was sensing the world through another’s skin. The noise and dirt and dust of the city all seemed amplified: I could not find peace.

  On my first night back in Athens, trying to fall asleep on Giulia’s narrow sofa, I had closed my eyes and felt a touch on my face. I’d opened my eyes sharply to find myself alone in the room. I hadn’t been able to sleep after that; instead I sat near-naked on the cement balcony and listened to the incessant traffic and belligerent exuberance of Athens below. I smoked cigarette after cigarette on the balcony, furious at myself for fearing returning to bed but too scared to lie back on the sofa. I watched dawn arrive and only with the refreshing spring sun streaming into the room did I allow myself to sleep again.

  The following night I told Giulia I was leaving Greece and resisted all her objections. She understood that something had changed for me and when I attempted to explain my feelings she grew angry.

  —Fuck you, she thundered. We finally have some money in our pockets and the bloody immigrant cousin from the New World comes back to tell us how he regrets the changes. What’s wrong with fine clothes, fine food, a decent living?

  —Nothing, I yelled back, but there’s nothing fine about dressing up like some nouveau riche trash.

  I stopped then, ashamed. I apologised. She softened and caressed my cheeks. Greece is dying, she whispered to me, this is Europe now. Then she snapped back to anger and slapped me hard on the cheek. We were hungry, for years we were hungry. Even those of us who were lucky went hungry. Do you understand? Her eyes flashed and I nodded my head in contrition. She smiled ruefully.

  Pouring an ouzo, she handed it to me, and kissed me on my lips.

  —Drink, cousin, who knows if we’ll still be drinking ouzo when you next return.

  Before I left, Giulia gave me a small gold crucifix on a chain and put it around my neck. I spent the long hours the ferry took to get from Patra to Kerkira, and from Kerkira to Brindisi gazing on the smooth blond-haired legs and arms of young Danish and Swedish tourists. I listened to music on my walkman, I caught snatches of sleep underneath the ferry stairs, but even then I was certain that someone or something was lying next to me, caressing my cheeks, kissing my eyes, but when I opened my eyes it was only the sharp sea breeze. The crucifix hung heavy on my chest. I thought I’d remove it as soon as the ferry left the dock. I hated jewellery on me. But I kept it on. Even though it was only superstition, I was glad for it.

  I ate very little, even when the ferry stopped at the port at Kerkira. The harbour was dotted with little cafes and restaurants for tourists and even though the fresh fish and produce looked inviting, I found that I could eat little of it. Some distasteful residue, coarse and thick, seemed to coat every morsel of octopus and every strand of salad that I had chosen for lunch. I was hungry but everything tasted of this sour fluid. It had the consistency of phlegm, of blood. It had a human stink. I hardly touched the meal. I was getting sick.

  I kept boredom and hunger at bay by taking more photographs. I had only two rolls of cheap film I’d bought at a kiosk in Patra and so instead of snapping the attractive blond tourists or taking pictures of the sky and the sea, I took photos of the white-uniformed staff on the ferry. I was not interested in taking photographs of horizons and clouds that had been shot at a billion times. I wanted to capture faces. The seamen were initially suspicious but I spoke to one of the stewards and explained I was a student of photography, and he spread the word that I was an Australian Greek and that I should be supported. I took a photograph of him: his black hairy arms. I snapped the deep white grin of a porter. I shot the squatting man who was cleaning the toilets and who, on hearing the click of the camera, spun around, stood u
p, and smiled obscenely, grabbing his thick crotch and asking me if I wanted to film it. I photographed that pose as well. I took a photograph of an aged sailor, his body sinewy and strong, his hair grey and thick, who was smoking a cigarette on deck and watching a gypsy family spread a meal across a blanket, a meal of sausage and olives, tomato and egg. The gypsies would not let me photograph them. They cursed at the camera. The old man turned to me and I caught him against the sky, just as he was about to speak. I snapped.

  —You’re the Australian photographer?

  —Yes.

  —How old are you?

  —Thirty-six.

  —You are like them, he said, pointing to the gypsies, the old women napping in the sun, their children draped over the adults, sitting on their mothers’ thick woollen skirts, grabbing at the food. At thirty-six a man must be a sailor or a gypsy or an artist to journey on a ferry alone.

  I am still not sure if he was insulting me.

  Within an hour of landing in Brindisi I saw a boatload of Albanian men being shipped back across the Adriatic, their pleas and insults ignored by the impassive young Italian soldiers. I saw a barely teenage girl giving a blowjob to a sailor in an alley; I saw a young boy shooting heroin on the docks who then threw his bloody syringe deep into the Mediterranean waters; I watched a man pick the pocket of another. Soldiers and police, their rifles splayed against their chests, their enormous pistols in black holsters, wandered lazily up and down the dusty salt-drenched streets. They ignored the junkies and the whores, they ignored the drugs and the sex, and eyeing me quickly and contemptuously, working out I was neither refugee nor terrorist, they ignored me. The train north was not due till late in the evening so I rented a room in the Hotel d’Amour for which you could pay for by the hour. Climbing the stairs I saw a Russian whore leading a priest to a room and I was accosted by a Greek sailor who clutched at my balls. I took him to my room and he sniffed at me, then ordered me to wash. There was no shower or bath, only a small basin in the hall with cold running water, and I washed under my arms and scrubbed off the flecks of white grit from underneath my foreskin. When I returned to the room the sailor had squashed a small mouse with his boot. We both stared at the bloody flesh.

  —Broma Itali. Dirty Italians. I wouldn’t let him fuck me or come in my mouth and he left as soon as he had finished. I wiped the semen off my shoulders and pulled up my trousers and discovered that I had run out of cigarettes. I went out on the street, lugging the backpack as I feared it might be stolen if I left it in the room. Three whores, who might have been Romanian, who might have been Albanian or Macedonian, niggers from the Balkans and the East, rushed at me and in English and Greek and French and Italian, asked me if I wanted sex. When I refused, the youngest woman wrapped her arms around me and felt up and down my arse, looked for the zips on my backpack, searching for my wallet, searching for anything. I attempted to be polite, then I snarled and told her to fuck off, and finally I pushed her against the wall. They yelled insults after me as I entered a small grocery shop, they yelled insults when I emerged, they screamed insults as I stepped up to the Hotel d’Amour. Another Greek sailor came through the glass door, more attractive than the man I had just been with, but he did not look at me and the three whores rushed towards him. The youngest one again placed her arms around his neck but he was much more experienced than I. He slammed his palm so hard across her face that she fell to the ground on all fours, gagging. The other women went silent. The sailor seemed to be skipping as he sauntered down the street.

  I returned to my room and smoked my cigarettes staring up at the cracked plaster on the ceiling. Through the thin walls I could hear the grind of sex.

  It was an Italian who was my first fuck and it was an Italian who was my first love, but they were not the same man. I grew up in a suburb of Melbourne bordered on either side by creeks and bushland; at its southern end, where the city began, the sludge of the Yarra River ran across its border. It was only when I first travelled to Europe that I realised how rare was the profusion of space so close to my city. But as a youth I had no idea of my fortune. I was a loner as an adolescent, and after school and on weekends I would wander the creeks, climb the hilltops that overlooked Melbourne, meander along the cycle tracks that ran along the river.

  It was there that I met Signor Bruno. I was thirteen and he had just turned sixty. If that difference in age now seems fantastic, at the time it was of little consequence to me. At thirteen, with thin, sparse hairs I detested curling on my top lip, with my voice breaking and my balls beginning to drop, anyone over eighteen was an adult, and that promise of maturity was what was desirable. More desirable than the football-obsessed boys at school who resented my reading and my love of cinema. More trustworthy than the girls who mocked my gangly limbs and pimpled skin. Signor Bruno, who told me he was retired, lived in a small house close to the river and was not at all like those boys and girls at school.

  It was summer when I met him, a summer in which Mum and Dad were always at each other’s throats. They would argue about anything. Work, money, Sophie and me, drugs, politics, music. Anything. Mum would scream at Dad that she hated him but I knew this was not true. She loved him. She loved him madly and obsessively. And he? His anger was of a different nature. He’d tease her, mock her, call her a peasant and a fool. He’d laugh at her. It scared me, his laughter, more than her shouts, for there was emptiness in his sarcasm and mockery. She hated him and loved him. He always kept a part of himself shut off from her. So in desperation her fury became venomous and finally, one day, after one petty insult, he simply got up and left. Mum wouldn’t cook, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t bathe, wouldn’t go to work. That summer, Mum stopped being.

  So that summer was when I took any chance I had to escape the house and go to the river, taking endless walks along the same paths and bike tracks, pretending it was the solitude and greenery I was seeking. In truth, I would have hooked up with any man who would have taught me truths about my body. It was Signor Bruno who was my first teacher. He saw past the flab of my chest, the embarrassing titties I hated exposing in the showers after Phys. Ed. He did not think me disfigured by acne, or clumsy and foolish in my body. He taught me pleasure, how my cock worked, my balls, my skin and hair, how to play with myself and how to pleasure another man. Beyond sex, he began to instruct me in music and etiquette, introduced me to what he called fine literature—which, for him, meant British and French literature, never anything American—and he encouraged my resentment of and antipathy to the world I came from. Without knowing it, even though our meetings were very short—an hour after school, an hour on the weekend—he transformed me into a coquettish snob. One day, he promised, you will leave high school and the suburbs far behind.

  So the damage done was in no way sexual. The little tricks he taught me, his determination to get my adolescent hands off my prick and show me that the arse, the neck, the stomach, the thighs, could also generate pleasure, were lessons that made me confident as a lover. That I was not attracted to him was something we did not talk about. He would have been a good-looking man, even handsome, in his youth, but age had weakened him and he was now ashamed of his body. He would never force me into an act and I learnt the power of being a flirt, a vamp. Just as he had taught me the brutal snobberies of the bourgeoisie, he taught me how ridicule could be a weapon. I won’t pretend that words can answer fists. My smart-aleck remarks were often answered by backhanders from the boys at school. But they stopped teasing me, worried that I would respond with some humiliating barb that would diminish them in front of their girls and their mates.

  Dad finally did return. One afternoon when Sophie and I came back from school, there he was, in a singlet and shorts, my mother giggling and cooking a meal, a crumpled foil of aluminium on the kitchen table. He kicked my arse for my prissiness.

  —What’s happened to that kid? he asked my mother.

  —Where were you to look after him? Eh? Tell me that, you fucking malaka. That’s what happens when a fa
ther walks out on a son!

  My father asked around. It didn’t take long for him to hear the gossip. One evening he took me driving in his car. He showed me the factory he first worked in when he arrived in Melbourne, he took me to the beach and we sat beside each other on the Valiant’s immense vinyl bench seat and watched small waves run across the stretch of St Kilda Beach. I remember that he had Savopoulos in the cassette player and that he smelt of marijuana.

  —How often do you see Signor Bruno Parlovecchio?

  I remember I asked him for a cigarette.

  —Do you like sex with him or are you doing it for money?

  I don’t quite remember my answer.

  —Are you a faggot?

  —Yes. I certainly answered yes.

  I remember that he lit a cigarette then, placed his arm across the steering wheel, and peered out into the sea.

  —Never do it for money, alright? You promise me that?

  I must have nodded.

  —Once you have a reputation as a whore, you’re lost. Do you understand?

  I must have nodded again.

  —I envy you, Isaac. I wish God had granted me a love for cock instead of damning me with the desire for cunt. I envy you. Freedom, no family to think of. You can do anything—remember that, you can do anything you like.