The Greek Wall

by Nicolas Verdan

  “The police in Orestiada have found a head, you say?”

  “Yes, on the bank of the Evros, near the marshes.”

  “A head, all by itself? What about the rest, the body?”

  “Nothing, sir. Just a head, in Orestiada, found beside the river.”

  “But who found it?”

  “A Frontex patrol.”

  “What kind of patrol, exactly?”

  “You know, surely: the European Agency’s frontier guards responsible for patrolling the borders…”

  “Yes, I get that, but who was it exactly? What country’s police did they come from? The French? The Dutch?”

  “No, no, they were Finns, I think. They were patrolling with their Alsatian when it suddenly got all excited.”

  Until the creation of the Schengen Area in 1997 each country was responsible for its own borders. That all changed in 2004, when the Olympic Games were held in Greece.

  ‘All the fault of that damned Amsterdam Treaty, allowing free movement of citizens between member states,’ Agent Evangelos often tells himself, doubtful as he is of the effectiveness of police and judicial cooperation in combating illegal immigration.

  “Don’t we already have an officer on the spot in Thrace who can look into it?” asks Agent Evangelos.

  “Yes, he’s spending the night in Orestiada.”

  “But if I understand properly, his presence isn’t enough?”

  “Well, actually, as I was saying, sir, this isn’t a run-of-the-mill fatality.”

  “Just get to the facts, good God!”

  “The head, the guy, well, the head, the dead man, well, he’s not a migrant.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “That’s what the police captain in Orestiada says.”

  “He says what? Just come out with it, for God’s sake!”

  “He says it’s not an illegal, and it’s a suspicious death.”

  “Well, of course it’s suspicious! And what allows him to say it’s not an illegal?”

  “Because it looks like a Westerner.”

  “And what does a Westerner look like, according to you?”

  “Like a European, like a Greek, I don’t know. Our officer on the spot is of the same opinion.”

  “It’s because you think you look like a European, is that it? And what about me, have you ever seen my eyebrows, my dark complexion? A European! So what?”

  “I don’t know, sir, but in Orestiada they’re saying that the case is over their heads; they say it’s for Athens. It’s for us.”

  Agent Evangelos knows that his colleague is right. It would take less than a decapitation in a military zone on the Greco-Turkish border to alert Directorate C of the National Intelligence Service, the branch responsible for counter-espionage, counterterrorism and organized crime. And the matter of looks makes no difference. Illegal or not, this head seems likely to raise a stink around the frontier question. Greece has already been accused of doing a poor job in the Evros delta. How many illegals manage to cross the river every day? Two hundred, three hundred?

  Several European countries, such as France, have accused Greece of allowing too many migrants across the border with Turkey. President Nicolas Sarkozy has even said that a country that can’t control its borders should be excluded from the Schengen Area.

  A severed head. They’ll have to look for the body. The reverse would have been more difficult, of course. But Agent Evangelos will have to deal with his fatigue, a recent phenomenon, along with his tendency to view everything in context and his ability to procrastinate.

  It’s true that three years from now he’ll be turning in his badge. A well-deserved retirement, as they used to say when you could be sure of getting your pension. But nowadays, with the crisis…

  The crisis… a word Agent Evangelos finds it difficult to utter. The debt crisis. Words that fail to explain how Greece has been reduced to this. Wasn’t it just in 2007 that the mandarins of the International Monetary Fund said that the Greek economy had “made remarkable strides”? Evangelos can still hear the first head of the Central European Bank, Wim someone or other… Yes, Wim Duisenberg. Hadn’t he said in the early 2000s that Greece’s economic performance was “admirable, remarkable”? They almost pointed to Greece as a model of growth. ‘And then,’ he remembers, ‘one October morning we woke with a bad taste in our mouths.’ Agent Evangelos can still hear George Papandreou’s voice as he announced to the Greeks that their right-wing government had been cooking the books. “The truth is,” he had said, “that our country is deeper in debt than you have been told.” Everyone in the country knows what came next. Athens called on the help of the good doctors from the IMF and the European Commission approved Papandreou’s austerity plan, placing Greece under close oversight. The euro nosedived, and Greece with it. There followed a succession of European rescue plans, and the Greeks demonstrated in the streets. The great international moneybags was called to the rescue. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel adopted a tougher tone: Germans couldn’t be expected to pay higher taxes to bail out the wastrels in southern Europe. It was a crisis. ‘The crisis,’ thinks Evangelos. ‘Maybe that’s why every day feels so overwhelming? The fact you have to search endlessly for words to describe what’s wrong.’ Something’s not right; there’s a sick feeling in the pit of Evangelos’s stomach – maybe the sixty-something crisis? ‘The crisis, the crisis everywhere. No, it’s something else. For a year or two now, since the start of the crisis… No! For a year or two, ever since petrol went up to over two euros a litre, since my salary was reduced by a good quarter, since I’ve seen little old men poking through the bins in front of my apartment building, since…’

  Why does Agent Evangelos keep looking beyond his constant nausea? ‘No, it’s with myself that something has gone wrong. And it has nothing to do with the present chaos. Nothing to do with Merkel, nor the Troika, as they call the IMF, Brussels, and the World Bank, all the banks bought out and sold out, and the politicians sold out with them, and on top of it the directorate requiring all the agents to pay for coffee out of their own pockets.’

  He can’t say when it began, but Evangelos feels the angst welling up in him. ‘And this dull fear affecting me like a beta blocker.’

  Orders are issued: A severed head on the banks of the Evros; a crime on the Schengen frontier. Alert! Emergency meeting, reports, ministerial orders, make telephone calls, make contacts on site, organize the personnel in Thrace, get there by plane, first a debriefing with the top military command, maps of the zone, files, what’s the name of the officer responsible for the Evros region? Who knows how the head was found? Establish relations with the media in case there’s a leak, ask Ria who works in the head office of Public Relations to clamp down and let nothing get out.

  Have the Turks been informed? Who’ll oversee communications with Frontex, that goddamn agency with its headquarters in Warsaw? Alert! Agent Evangelos must go, he hasn’t any choice.

  And always the same angst. But when did it start? A weary feeling that drains his energy. Evangelos can see his familiar landscape changing: the filthy windows of the agency building that never get cleaned. And that persistent rumour of drastic reductions in personnel.

  Evangelos thinks this matter of the severed head bodes him no good. They’ll hold the slightest misstep against him. In the meantime, he has to get organized. He has a plane to catch tomorrow, and he must establish a list of the people to contact on his arrival in Thrace, a thousand kilometres from Athens. He has no appetite for this.

  Agent Evangelos gets a grip on himself. ‘What’s the explanation? What’s the hang-up? Why the resistance? The thing is, I don’t want anything to do with this severed head! But why? Because memories return. Yes, that’s it, old memories returning: dawn, an island, a harbour. No choice but to obey, and ask no questions. No connection whatsoever: that was forty years ago. Where’s the link?’

  He stops searching; Evangelos knows why he is feeling so weary: it’s his sense of déj
à vu. For years he thought he could forget the whole business, block it out. ‘Yet today, with all that’s going on in the country, I have to try twice as hard to forget about it, now that it all seems about to happen again. Those raised arms in the slums, the militia hunting down emigrants, and the directorate continuing to target anarchists. It’s odd; nowadays it’s not men in masks heading for Syntagma Square to attack Parliament.’

  There are no more rockets fired at the banks, no more Molotov cocktails setting the streets of the capital on fire. Why aren’t there more street demonstrations? So much anger – the white-hot metal sheath of the Christmas tree reduced to ashes on Syntagma Square, the stones thrown at the police, Stadiou Street in flames, the strategic retreat behind the railings of the Polytechnic, the fading anger. There’s no one left to be surprised.

  “I’m so dog-tired,” he sighs.

  But Agent Evangelos will travel to the border. He’ll do his job.

  He’ll leave tomorrow; in the meantime, he’ll go somewhere else. The shortest route is the Sacred Way, and if it wasn’t for that train he’d be there already.

  Where?

  Agent Evangelos would be there already, if it wasn’t for that level-crossing bell. He’d already have reached the big intersection and driven under the ring-road bridge before heading diagonally through Peristeri, the great western suburb that rises ungracefully to the stark slopes of Mount Aigaleo.

  A moment later, the barriers come down. A long horn blast announces a goods train. Agent Evangelos can see the outline of the driver inside the cabin of the diesel locomotive, which is followed by an endless succession of graffiti-covered wagons, its clatter sawing the city in two.

  There’s not a soul to be seen this evening in this quarter full of former warehouses where the only stocks of merchandise are relics of Greek pop music: faces with make-up and gelled hair frozen on huge, outdated concert posters, and the trampled carnations on the stage at three in the morning when the dancing is done, when Parios and his group always ended by playing the nisiotika, the songs from the islands – Parios, the little king of Naxos, playing it up the way he would in his village every 15 August, except that here a bottle of whisky costs three hundred euros. But this evening, outside, at the dead street-corners, the wasteland car parks are empty. The bouzoukia have closed, and that little gang only sing and dance on invitation – open-air concert tomorrow, free for the good people, the obligatory party in the private amphitheatre of some ship owner, his way of buying the right to take off five times a day in his helicopter, he takes off and lands, he takes off from some bald pebble in the Cyclades on which he has set down his villa. Everybody to the port this evening, it’s the rich guy’s treat! A good guy, there’s not a word you can say against him: thousand-euro gifts at baptisms, a gift of new windows for the village school, and the fish in the taverna yesterday evening too. This generous individual’s yacht is anchored in the dark water of the little inlet. It flies the Australian ensign. What a patriot!

  And in the meantime, on the Sacred Way, in front of the deserted club, only the roasted-corn vendor tries to keep up appearances. He turns his corn like on Friday evenings, when the avenue becomes an amusement park with its merry-go-round of four-by-fours in front of the club entrances.

  Where is he off to now, Agent Evangelos?

  Agent Evangelos isn’t on his way home; he’s not going to sleep in his own bed, on Makriyanni Street. He is heading directly west; he simply knows that he has the keys with him. He always has, since his parents died.

  From the outside the house is the same as ever. Inside, he has gutted it completely. It’s an empty shell, like a cradle with only the frame remaining, not even a smell. Where is he going? He is going home. He feels at home there, which isn’t surprising, since he has made a clean sweep inside: not a single memory remains; there’s nothing to remind him of his childhood; it really is somewhere new. But then why did he keep it? He could have sold it, replaced it with a four-storey apartment building. No, he has kept his parents’ house as it was out of reverence for the view, with its panorama of Athens, a spot from where he can measure the city’s evolution. Four walls and a flat roof built by his father, a rampart to protect him from himself.

  If Agent Evangelos had demolished his parents’ house he would have lived with its memory. He would have missed it, and that would have recalled pictures of his childhood, but if he had left it just as it was he would also have been overwhelmed by nostalgia. He had preferred to make it his lookout. From the heights of Petroupolis, sitting on the terrace, Agent Evangelos can see the city’s rise and fall, he can feel it vibrate. To see Athens evolve you need a stationary viewpoint. We always consider things from the same vantage point. Adopting a new one means condemning yourself to refuse change. But change inhabits us all.

  And, when he considers Athens, Evangelos no longer thinks of anything. His parents are dead and gone; his mother died ten years ago, taken by cancer, long before his father. He had lasted much longer. He’d died in January of this year, in his eighty-ninth year. He was born in Smyrna, in 1922, the year of the great calamity, when Atatürk’s troops drove the Greek population into the sea.

  But is that really the history of his family? His own history?

  Agent Evangelos isn’t too sure any more. After long weeks spent wandering the islands and the first Greek ports on the mainland, his grandparents had existed for months and years in hardship and poverty. Evangelos knows the story off by heart: ruined financially, meeting hostility in a mother country that viewed them as Easterners with peculiar customs, they had to create a place of their own. For a long time they lived in a shack in Nea Ionia, an inhospitable landscape far from the city centre, in what was for years a refugee camp, a herd of white canvas tents amid an expanse of wild grasses.

  Agent Evangelos knows what came next: his father grew up in poverty. He found a job as a page in the Hotel Grande Bretagne shortly before the Nazis entered Athens. In the 1950s, not long after Evangelos was born, he was promoted to maître d’hôtel. By 1962 he had accumulated enough savings to build a little house on a stony, still uninhabited hillside directly west of Athens, in Petroupolis.

  Agent Evangelos was ten when he moved there with his father, mother and grandmother. ‘She lived with us for five years,’ he repeats to himself. ‘I’m pretty sure she died the year the Colonels seized power.’

  The neighbourhood Agent Evangelos knew in his youth is unrecognizable today. Only the tiny house and its minuscule garden remain unchanged. In 1972, a developer tried to convince his father to sell him the land. He planned to demolish the house and erect an apartment building in its place. His father would have received two apartments in exchange.

  ‘But my dad refused. He didn’t want that.’

  Almost forty years have passed. ‘It’s 2010, and what have you got?’ Agent Evangelos asks himself. ‘A severed head on the banks of a frontier river.’ He launches his car into the labyrinth of one-way streets leading to the heights of Petroupolis. ‘It’s time to leave it behind, that whole history, Greece. Those refugees from Smyrna, from the Great Catastrophe, mean nothing to me any more. For too long I thought my future had been compromised definitively by that exodus. I’ve had enough of the tortured history that’s supposed to be ours as Greeks, and apparently my own. What an excuse! Our history books are poisonous, our songs and novels are filled with venom.

  ‘Forget, I must forget the books and take up the story as I see it, not get involved in other people’s memories. I have to learn a different language, change my vocabulary. My job is delving into earlier lives, spying on people’s lives, the lives of the ones I interrogate, the ones I wiretap. Report, record, Agent Evangelos, but don’t get involved. Keep out of it. Never discuss your private life! It’s the motto of the National Intelligence Service.’

  Evangelos has led several lives, and there’s nothing to connect them. Their narratives are irreconcilable, which is why he tries never to talk about his past. Why would he want to remembe
r his childhood? What’s the use of evoking his teenage years? His education? His divorce? All so many successive, incompatible stories, a series of accidents of the kind we all experience and that finally get us lost if we try to reread them. ‘Our lives are made of bits and pieces,’ he murmurs. ‘Trying to reconcile them means disassembling ourselves, agreeing to become other than what we are.’

  Evangelos has never made public mention of the young man who was conscripted, compelled to enlist, on the double, on the docks one morning in August 1972. He was only twenty. ‘How could you refuse?’ At that age, you become a soldier, that’s the way it has always been, standing at attention after getting off the ferry, chin raised, eyes fixed on the Turkish coast, so close, carrying a letter he’d started to write at sea in his canvas kitbag, expressing all his love for a girl who would soon, every morning of his existence, still be sleeping in another man’s arms at this moment. The engines of the turning lorries, the end of a first life and the beginning of a new one beneath the walls of Kos, among shouted orders, and the boat for Athens already on its way, its hold still open.

  The rasp of a handbrake being pulled, a car door slamming in the heights of Petroupolis: who but he, Evangelos, coming to park in front of the closed shutters? He has arrived. The gate creaks, the shadows of the terrace lengthen with his approach; there is no one else, just a passing motorbike. A TV glows somewhere upstairs in the nearby apartment building, an insomniac buzz leads to a dustbin lid that flaps in the breeze: all the silence of familiar sounds.

  Before entering, he decides to go up onto the roof, using the exterior metal staircase. Every evening, before going to bed, in all seasons and in all weather, he likes to spend time up here.

  Opposite, where military aerials wink on the long crest of Mount Hymettus, the landscape is shifting, profiled against a sky on which cottony strands scatter the first crimson hues of dawn.