The Greek Wall

by Nicolas Verdan

  It will be a beautiful day. North of the central plain of Attica, a vast wheelbarrow laden with shards of marble, Mount Pentelikon’s bald pate bares its eastern side to the sun.

  The mountainsides are so scorched that nothing remains to halt the thrust of the city, which has disturbed the soil so much that it seems to emerge from it like an ossuary.

  Sunlight is already attacking the rear of the house. A cock crows in a makeshift henhouse on one of the bushy slopes that mark the city’s edge. Evangelos returns to the little garden below, which is overgrown by weeds. It is time to get some rest. The scrape of the bolt against the strike plate of the glass-panelled door shatters the marble silence of the entrance hall. The blinds in the main room are drawn. Evangelos is on the sofa. His eyes are about to close when he feels a vibration. The phone in his jacket has lit up.

  Andromeda, calling so early?

  “Sweetheart, have you seen the time?”

  “Dad! It’s a daughter; she was born at three this morning!”

  Agent Evangelos is a grandfather. Dawn is breaking over Tsimentoupolis, “Cement City”, the name by which Athenians sometimes refer to their city.

  The corridor ends at a large, very tall window. Agent Evangelos looks out. From that height, on the third floor of the maternity clinic, he can see beyond the hospital car parks that have pushed the last surviving marble works on Erithrou Stavrou Street into the background. Along what was once a side road in the countryside of Nea Filothei, a little 1950s house, surrounded by greenery, is the last remaining witness to a landscape formerly composed of olive groves and a few flat-roofed sheds surrounded by vegetable gardens which once marked the frontier with the wealthy neighbourhoods occupying the nearby heights of Filothei.

  Agent Evangelos consults his watch. His flight to Alexandroupolis leaves at 3.30. He has a little time to spare. Giorgos is to drive him to Venizelos Airport. The Mitera Clinic is on the way. His colleague won’t breathe a word about this unofficial stop. Agent Evangelos likes Giorgos a lot: he is a young father who would really have liked his wife to give birth there, in a private clinic. Held up in the traffic jams on Kifisias Avenue, he had made no comment when Agent Evangelos told him he had become a grandfather and would like to visit his daughter on the way. Giorgos understood perfectly, and accelerated down the long straight road across which a footbridge had been built. It had taken an accident on the pedestrian crossing, the death of a boy from Athens College high on drugs, for them to decide to do something at last. Until then the authorities had turned a deaf ear.

  On Kifisias Avenue Giorgos said that his wife had had her baby in the military hospital. He’d have liked his wife to give birth in such a nice clinic. “We’d really have liked the Mitera Clinic,” Agent Evangelos hears him say.

  “The Mitera, the Mitera, a lovely clinic,” repeats Giorgos as they are passing the bridge, the one at the crossroads for Chalandri, the spot where, in 2000, the 17N terrorist group shot the British military attaché Stephen Saunders. Agent Evangelos remembers the precise time: it was 7.45 a.m., he was right on the spot, as he’d just arrived on the bridge. Traffic was at a standstill, creating a huge traffic jam. The witnesses said they had seen two men on a motorbike, wearing helmets, one short and the other tall; the bike was an Enduro.

  Agent Evangelos remembers it as if it was yesterday. The bullets were from a 7.62 mm Heckler and Koch G3. On the bridge, a shattered windscreen, the blood-soaked man in a white car, there on the bridge, nearly eleven years ago…

  “Immediately after, you have to turn left! Giorgos?”

  Giorgos takes the left turn without any problem. He catches on fast: the birth of his granddaughter, which way to go. As his colleague enters the congested street past the hospital, the radio announces the date of the early elections: “On 6 May, Greece will go to the polls.”

  “8 June,” murmurs Agent Evangelos.

  “No, 6 May,” Giorgos corrects him.

  “No, no, I was just thinking of something else.” It was 8 June 2000, at 7.45. They’d got him. The Brit was soaking in his own blood. The cars were driving slowly by; it was already warming up by then.

  “Not serious. By the way, I think you told me, and I should know, but how old are you? Sixty this year, is that it?” asked Giorgos.

  Evangelos nodded, and Giorgos laughed aloud: “Young to be a granddad!”

  Just now on the radio the prime minister had announced early elections and the weather forecast was predicting a hot day. Giorgos changed the station and lowered the window; he turned the radio off and slowed down as they passed the Hygeia, the polyclinic that precedes the maternity clinic. He stopped opposite some florists’ shops, in front of the first of the taxis parked two abreast. The taxi driver unleashed a volley of insults and blew his horn, and Giorgos said again, “I’d really have liked my wife to have had the baby here.”

  “Wait for me, I’ll be less than half an hour,” says Agent Evangelos.

  “Best wishes for the little one! I’ll park a little farther on,” Giorgos tells him, already moving off. Now Agent Evangelos can see him down the street, chatting with the attendant of the last car park. In no time they’ll be sitting on plastic chairs under the awning of an old caravan, like two old friends side by side on a little wall beneath a plane tree, on a village square somewhere in the Peloponnese. ‘What can they be chatting about?’ wonders Agent Evangelos. ‘Football, the high price of petrol, the new taxes, the weather?’

  When he arrives on the neonatal floor, Agent Evangelos positions himself behind a pillar, well back, away from the lifts. Andromeda had texted him to let him know that her mother and her mother’s partner were still in the room.

  Agent Evangelos doesn’t want to cross paths with his former wife, especially in such circumstances, and he’s grateful to his daughter for the warning.

  Through the thick window glass, Agent Evangelos can sense the noise of the city; he can’t hear anything, but he can feel the sound waves coming from Kifisias Avenue; when he looks he can see the concrete landscape vibrate, and with every car that crosses the bridges he can feel the impact of the joints. His gaze is arrested by some big shopping centres, steel and glass giants capped with gigantic signs with pictures of Babis Vovos, the insatiable property developer.

  The huge sign of Carrefour, the French supermarket chain, will soon be gone. The French are clearing out: Greece hasn’t turned out well for them – unmanageable, and the turnover was insufficient; the colony has proved a disappointment. Agent Evangelos met them one 14 July, executives loosening their ties beside the swimming pool at the Hilton. The new ambassador, a graduate of the elite National School of Administration in Paris, had just taken up his post. The sun was beating down, and vintage wines sat in buckets of melting ice. The reception was attended by diplomats and investors, representatives of the Franco-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce, all uppercrust, bankers large and small, a consul, military men from the Saint-Cyr military academy on one hand and from the Marine Regiment on the other, the Crédit Agricole as a bridgehead, bosses and underbosses. Danone was there, as were L’Oréal and Citroën, upper management sweating in the boiling heat of the brilliant reflection off the hotel as the inferno of the setting sun lingered on its western facade: the French roasting in their suits, BNP Paribas and two young know-alls from the Société Générale trying to outdo one another in witty remarks about their new Greek colleagues: “Don’t even know the basics, do bugger all, drink coffee all day long, spending an hour over a Nescafé, you can’t imagine; accounting methods out of the ark and a completely clueless HR department. But they’re nice, no, really nice people, and the girls all speak French.”

  Behind the residential high-rises of Maroussi, Kifisias Avenue slips into the abyss of the motorway interchange. Soon, Giorgos will be paying the toll and they’ll be on their way to the airport – twenty minutes; the control tower is already in view, solitary, looking from a distance like a water tower lost on the Plain of Markopoulos.

  An officer is
to meet him at Alexandroupolis Airport. This evening Agent Evangelos will be in Thrace, and he expects his colleague will drive him directly to the morgue.

  “What’s the little one like?”

  To the left, beyond a little house with a patch of colourless sky falling vertically on its whitewashed roof, it is almost midday on the high tops of Filothei’s trees, an intimation of the washed-out shade surrounding the residences with their perpetually lowered blinds – the kind that are always out of sight, both from here and below, for any view of them is blocked by walls whose height is increased by masses of blossom: hidden, not allowing the slightest glimpse through the complicated tracery of the gates closing their impressive entrances.

  A few poplars rise above the ragged fringe of a pine grove which, farther on, traces the course of a little river, its existence unsuspected by the last show-business personalities living there, those who haven’t yet moved into their new quarters on the heights of Ekali.

  Agent Evangelos remembers coming as a child to play in Filothei when his parents brought his sister and him to visit an aged uncle of his father’s, a retired judge. At the time there were hedges growing, and the walls hadn’t been made intruder-proof; cascades of bougainvillea marked the approximate location of the frontier between the properties and the shady streets where there was not yet any CCTV glass eye to spy on the grey, intermittent comings and goings inscribed on the digital void of hours and minutes.

  But the last time that Agent Evangelos came to Filothei, it hadn’t been to get an orangeade from the stand at the street corner. It must have been in springtime, for the laurels along Kifisias Avenue were in bloom, it was very humid, and the leather seats of the car smelled of the warm errands of summers past.

  The driver never spoke.

  Agent Evangelos barely knew the driver, unlike Giorgos, a colleague with whom he felt entirely at ease, like today when they chatted as they drove. As they passed the American College, shortly after the turning to Psychiko, Agent Evangelos had turned towards the man to encourage him to strike up a conversation. But the man didn’t respond; he was driving, and that was it, he wasn’t a talker, but he could have tried to make a little small talk all the same: the weather, hot for the season, the strange humidity in the air, you’d have thought it was summer, but no, the guy headed straight for Filothei, a strange location for a meeting. They hadn’t told him the address; the directorate had simply specified that a driver would pick him up in front of his office at the end of the day.

  Agent Evangelos had grasped that he wasn’t being chauffeur-driven that day. He was simply being brought somewhere for a discussion that was still a mystery to him. The car seats gave off a strong odour; they smelled of stress, like when you have to act quickly, when time is short, and when a heatwave over Athens makes it a trial to move about because of the excessive heat inside the car, your shirt sticking to your skin and you feeling the need for a cigarette again. The entire neighbourhood around the Polytechnic was cordoned off, he had never seen so many people in the street, in episodia, the destructive aftermath of demonstrations. How many? At least 5,000, heading up Stadiou Street from Omonoia Square.

  The driver was distant and no mistake, not wanting any contact, not the chatty type, no possibility of an exchange, strictly under orders: Don’t start a conversation, just drive him to 21 Andrea Metaxa Street in Filothei; stop in front of the entrance, the camera will recognize you, the gates will open, drive in, drop him off, and go.

  Agent Evangelos well remembers the two gates opening on a little driveway, barely fifty metres long, with the house already in sight. The shutters were closed; dry leaves lay on the terrace, and likely on the balconies as well.

  Agent Evangelos doesn’t want to think back on the subsequent conversation in the sitting room of that house. His immediate superior was there. He didn’t introduce the others: plain-clothes officers and higher-ups, top brass, something like that, his superiors, but no one he knew.

  He’d rather forget about it, but this morning’s meeting about the severed head in the Evros region has revived the memory of the whole episode, when he was given to understand that his investigation was being terminated, that he shouldn’t try to be overzealous.

  Yes, just like earlier today when his boss had told him, “Don’t be overzealous. Above all, do everything you can to prevent this business of the head from getting out. Your mission in Thrace is to hush up the matter, do you understand? The way to handle it is to let people believe it’s a migrant, you see – the victim of some accident, or settling of scores, whatever! But you’ll think of something, I’ve every confidence in you.”

  Just like that day in that house in Filothei, when he’d been told: “We don’t give a damn if Barbaros has connections with the Germans.” “We couldn’t care less if he’s still a member of the KKE.” “We don’t care if he greases the palms of politicians on both the right and the left.”

  Agent Evangelos, who had believed he was doing the right thing, had learned that Barbaros, a former communist who had made his fortune selling electronic equipment and mobile phones, was now a major shareholder in several large daily newspapers, a board member of a private television channel and the owner of a big multimedia store in central Athens…

  “And then there was that business about East Germany. Yes, his father, Barbaros’s father was —”

  “We don’t give a damn, Agent Evangelos!”

  Agent Evangelos had learned that Barbaros’s father had been the personal physician of Erich Honecker, the leader of the German Democratic Republic from 1976 to 1989. That explained his German connections.

  “And you don’t find it extraordinary that these days the son of the East German president’s personal physician is pushing for the purchase of arms from Germany? A former communist activist, now a businessman and press baron, Mr Barbaros?”

  “Listen, Agent Evangelos, we’re not unaware of those facts, but —”

  “Objection: Barbaros contributed generously to the Right, who were in power during the electoral campaigns of the 2000s. In exchange, New Democracy promised this billionaire, even though he was still a member of the KKE, that it wouldn’t break the armaments contracts between Greece and Germany. This influential individual has at least one good reason to cultivate the links between his country and Berlin: he manufactures the battery system that fuels the German-made torpedoes with which the Greek navy’s submarines are equipped.”

  When he shared the results of his inquiry with the directorate, Agent Evangelos never imagined that it would be brought to an abrupt end, accompanied by a private lecture on the new strategic direction of the Greek armed forces and a “Case closed! It’s the defence of Greek territorial waters in the Aegean that’s at stake!”

  That day, Agent Evangelos was about to reply when he was cut short by a wink from his immediate superior, who told him it was time to move to the small drawing room, where an Eastern-style buffet awaited the guests. Among them, Evangelos recognized Barbaros, although he was familiar with only a single public photograph of the man. All smiles, the vendor of submarine batteries handed him a glass of wine.

  “Yes, but wasn’t it precisely the opposition that pushed for this inquiry into the alleged bribes?” Agent Evangelos had just had time to ask, staring at Barbaros, who was gesturing to him to approach.

  “True, but so what?” his boss had asked later, after the reception, when they were alone again, sitting in the car. “Always the same tiresome questions!”

  “I don’t understand it. PASOK, the opposition at the time, is in power now, and you’re asking me to drop the case?”

  “Oh, you’re like a dog with a bone. You’re being told to drop the case, that’s all there is to it.”

  “By whom?”

  “Agent Evangelos, you’re getting old.”

  “You’re not going to tell me that PASOK has benefited from his generosity as well?”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “Don’t act stupid with me, pl
ease. I’m talking about that shit Barbaros.”

  “Well, then, you shouldn’t have accepted his glass of wine!”

  “Who brought me here this evening? It was a trap, you bastard!”

  “Agent Evangelos, calm down! Let me ask you a simple question: who’s in charge of Greece today?”

  “PASOK.”

  Night was approaching, and the remainder of the conversation remains inaudible in his memory. But then, suddenly, it is still daytime, and Evangelos hears a baby crying. He hasn’t left his corner in front of the window at the end of the corridor in the maternity clinic. Why does he always have to look so questioningly at Athens? Filothei, Maroussi, and it’s already the foothills of Mount Pentelikon, Vrilissia and Melissia. At the end of the day, the new terminology imposed by the technocrats is perfectly adapted to this tormented urban geography: now we have “regional units” instead of “nomarchies”.

  The baby is bawling, a baby, his granddaughter, born on 22 December 2010, in Maroussi, in the regional unit of Athens North. She has entered the world exactly a year to the day since the Greek state’s credit rating was lowered from A1 to A2 by Moody’s because of the country’s deteriorating financial situation.

  ‘What does my granddaughter look like? What does she look like?’

  This morning, in the head office of Directorate C of the National Intelligence Service, he was given clear instructions: to identify the dead man as quickly as possible and do everything possible to avoid the matter becoming public. For the government, this incident had come at the worst possible time. Just a week ago the Minister for Public Safety had announced that a “wall” (actually a barbed-wire fence) was to be built along twelve and a half kilometres of the land border with Turkey. This was a message addressed loud and clear to the European governments, for the project possessed both practical and symbolic value, being intended simultaneously to discourage illegal migration and to send the message that Greece could not be entered at will. Athens, stung to the quick by the criticism from Paris and Berlin, who constantly blamed it for allowing too many illegals into the Schengen Area, wanted to demonstrate that its frontiers were not porous. The wall would show that. But Greece was asking Brussels for euros to finance its construction.