The Greek Wall

by Nicolas Verdan

  “Excuse me?”

  Evangelos jumps. The baby, and now the voice of a woman in a white coat, smiling at him.

  “You are Mrs Tsimias’s father?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Your daughter told me I’d find you in the corridor. You can go in to her now, in room 306.”

  Evangelos consults his smartphone: two unread text messages and three unanswered phone calls, all from his daughter. Andromeda must have thought he’d left. What was he thinking, standing there at that window? That the defence budget hadn’t been cut by a single cent, that a submarine torpedo is still called a submarine torpedo, yet the division of Athens into administrative regions suffered an onslaught of petty cuts, forcing him to change the very way he thinks about the city of his birth? ‘Regional units my foot.’ Evangelos finds it hard to understand these economic measures, which he considers useless. Merging the Athenian municipalities won’t save the state a cent. On the other hand, cutting the armed forces budget by a factor of two or three would have allowed a substantial reduction in the debt.

  The door to room 306 is open. Agent Evangelos takes a few steps into the room and then stops, disconcerted.

  “Come in, Dad!”

  He sees her, he sees them, he sees the little one. He still doesn’t budge, but for the first time in months Agent Evangelos smiles.

  Antonis Antoniadis knows that the human fingernail grows continuously at the rate of a tenth of a millimetre a day. That means it takes six months for a fingernail to grow back completely. Twelve months for a toenail. But, contrary to common belief, the nails don’t continue to grow after death. Like any cell in the human body, the nail matrix must be irrigated by blood to produce keratin. So, when he bites his nails, Antonis Antoniadis is definitely alive; his nails are growing back. And he can bite them again, for in any case they’ll grow again. But this cycle is the result of a partial death: keratin is a protein produced by certain skin cells. These cells continue to store keratin for as long as they produce it, but when they are completely full of it they die and become hard. Each dead cell then becomes a tiny piece of nail, pushed out by new keratin-producing cells. This is why the nail grows a little every day, and it is also why Antonis Antoniadis consumes his with a regularity that demonstrates his principal quality: he is a methodical person.

  Indeed, the man responsible for the morgue in the University General Hospital of Alexandroupolis has an orderly mind, and Evangelos doesn’t doubt it for a moment.

  “No. 2666rb, you see, is in the same condition as when it was found.” Adroitly, Antonis Antoniadis removes a human head from a transparent plastic bag and holds it up in front of Agent Evangelos, whose gaze follows it unflinchingly.

  “Of course, it didn’t have as much beard. Contrary to the widespread notion, hair doesn’t continue to grow after death. What happens is that the skin becomes dehydrated, leading it to contract…”

  Evangelos looks at Antoniadis’s fist gripping the hair of number… of number… what was it again?

  “2666rb. Yes, it’s not easy to remember, but it’s our numbering system, you understand.”

  The clenched fist of the forensic pathologist, a very slender young man in his thirties, whose fingers are white in the bright light from the morgue’s ceiling fixtures; his fingernails are bitten to the point of bleeding. Disgusting!

  “A clue already,” mutters Evangelos. “The guy’s a worrier, beneath his nonchalant air.”

  “A clue?”

  “No, no, just talking to myself.”

  “But no, I heard you clearly, a clue, you said, whereas I only work on facts, sir. The head has told us what it has to say, and I’ve taken note of everything.”

  Whose head? It has no name. A male head. A man’s head, no doubt about it, you can tell from the shape of the cranium. And in any case there’s no need for a more detailed examination of this one, which is well preserved, not like some that are swollen and have turned black.

  “You sound as if you had some in your refrigerated containers every day,” Evangelos tosses out. “Do you collect them?”

  “We get several a week going through here,” sighs Antonis Antoniadis. “Not pretty ones either, believe me, drowning victims by the sackful, five of them a month.”

  Evangelos knows what the pathologist is talking about. Never fewer than three hundred people enter Greek territory illegally through the Evros region every day: Afghans, Pakistanis, Tunisians, Moroccans, Algerians, Somalis, Bangladeshis – more than seventy-six nationalities have been listed by the Orestiada police. And out of that number some never reach the opposite riverbank, the Greek side, the European side, the Schengen Zone.

  “Right,” says Evangelos. “Then tell me what else this head has told you.”

  Suddenly, Evangelos feels dizzy. He sees Samothrace again through the aeroplane window, the island directly below. ‘What did I eat recently, on the plane?’ he asks himself. ‘A tuna sandwich. It’s suddenly sitting heavy on my stomach.’

  He says quietly, in a blank voice, “Leave that, Antonis, put it on the table.”

  “When I said I saw dozens going through here, I was talking about heads with an appendage – with a body attached. But some migrants who have drowned arrive completely naked, especially ones that have been in the water for a long time, and when they do still have clothes it’s rare to find an identity card in their pockets.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Obviously.”

  “And not in this specific case,” says Evangelos, suppressing an urge to vomit.

  “Here, certainly, we don’t have much. Apart from the head. Apart from this head which, as I told you, has told us all it has to say.”

  Evangelos is wondering where the toilet is. The doctor is going on and on, now explaining to him that he should forget about the entire head and just look at the face: “But by the looks of you, you won’t have time, you’re not looking so great yourself, ha ha! No, forgive me, your face, it’s turned quite ashen, I mean, yes, of course, the toilet, don’t worry about it, habit, I understand, me, you know, in my case familiarity breeds contempt.”

  ‘I caved in. I couldn’t take it any longer. That head…’

  He couldn’t take it, Agent Evangelos. Dammit, a head like that sitting on the table, seeming to squint up at him. He just had time to listen to the forensic report: not very much to go on, apart from certain details that seem to prove they are not dealing with a migrant.

  ‘I feel dead tired,’ Agent Evangelos tells himself. ‘What the hell is Stefanos up to? I can’t take another hour in this stench.’

  “Antonis? There was something else I wanted to ask you,” says Evangelos, returning to the room. “What’s that smell, what is it? It reminds me of something. But I just can’t remember. What’s that smell, dammit!”

  “Try to think what it reminds you of,” answers the pathologist. “Search deep down within yourself; put it into words; but it’s best of all to not think about it.”

  Evangelos shrugs. He remembers there are still photos to be taken, from every angle, for his superiors, and then maybe for Interpol, even if his bosses had told him that he’d have to wait before broadcasting to the world about this head, this head that had committed the faux pas of falling to the ground inside a prohibited military zone. Its discovery couldn’t fail to add to the salvos of criticism aimed at Athens. If it admitted that the head belonged to a migrant, the Greek police would surely be accused yet again of being incapable of ensuring the security of the border with Turkey. Greece is already being singled out for letting illegals into the Schengen Area. And if on top of that they arrive in pieces…

  Stop thinking about it! Agent Evangelos takes his leave of the pathologist and goes outside to wait for his colleague from the local unit of Section C of the National Intelligence Service. Something moving over there on the plain – a reflection off a car window, a brief flare, the glint of a fisherman’s lure: no, merely the sun filling the empty space behind the hospital, on the s
ide where the wards are, at the time of day when patients ask their visitors to raise the blind to allow them to admire the sunset.

  Still no sign of Stefanos. The evening is warm for the time of year. Under the awning over the emergency department entrance insects gyrate in the headlight beams of a colourless car. Its engine is turned off. All its doors are open. There is no one to be seen.

  Agent Evangelos sniffs the sleeve of his jacket to make sure he hasn’t brought the smell of the morgue with him. Outside, the air has no smell, nothing to eclipse the stench from inside. There is no breeze, and the sea is too far away to create an illusion. Beyond open country lorries glide along the southbound lanes of the Egnatia Odos, a silent film of lit-up tarpaulins. In the truckers’ weary vision, the crossing over the Evros is near; soon the motorway will be reduced to a single lane as the trailers clatter across the bridge that intersects the dark line of the river, then they will be in Turkey with the border post at Ipsala leaping into rear-view mirrors that reflect the drivers’ faces, grey in the intense light.

  Agent Evangelos would like to have a chair to sit on. This is the second time today he has been driven to a hospital. The Alexandroupolis hospital is nothing like the Mitera Clinic, the doll’s house surrounded by marble works where his granddaughter came into the world.

  The baby was in a tiny, entirely personal cot, to which a blue and white label was attached by a bow adorned with a rabbit and a tiny bell. It displayed a number and a name: his daughter’s married name. Until the little one is baptized they’ll call her Beba.

  ‘So, what’s become of that wanker Stefanos?’

  Agent Evangelos had never met Stefanos before today. He only knows the guy is terrified at the thought he might put a foot wrong – in other words, open his mouth and say too much about the head, allowing the media to get wind of the matter, with the dreaded consequence that a horde of media people would arrive and start nosing around the Evros delta.

  “That’s all we need,” Stefanos had said when he met Evangelos at the airport.

  ‘Stefanos, about my age,’ he thinks, ‘maybe a little younger; is it possible I’m sixty already? Do I see myself as a grandfather? I’m a papous!’

  Since three o’clock this morning Agent Evangelos has been a grandfather, a papous.

  ‘What did Stefanos say?’ He tries to remember. ‘“There are enough nosey parkers around already, what with Frontex, those police officers from all over Europe, all with their little practices, the migrants, the traffickers, the prostitutes, the pimps, the dealers. All that’s missing is the Athens media, the Athens newspapers.” He gave me an odd look as he said “Athens”.’

  Two hospitals in one day. Agent Evangelos consults his mobile for the time; Stefanos is late. Two hospitals, but this one is on a completely different scale from the Mitera Clinic: it’s a mega-complex, six kilometres west of Alexandroupolis, the biggest hospital in Greece, a sinkhole for European money. Solid, heavy, modern, Herakles cement, solid construction, concrete, glass, more than six hundred rooms, dozens of labs, over-budget before it was completed.

  Agent Evangelos goes across to the car with the open doors. He hadn’t noticed the family that had emerged from it a moment earlier go past. The daughter shouted something, and now the son is running to call someone, there’s no one in the emergency department. Agent Evangelos remembers another scene: the father-in-law already on a stretcher, far along the corridors; the LED lamps in his face; the surgeon’s eyes, stainless steel, all that white; must give the doctor the envelope with the money; the chest pains began in the back bedroom, the evening before, under the naked bulb, that stitch in his left side, the shadows on the northern wall where there are traces of moisture, and now so much light, the surgeon’s eyes, the envelope before the operation or after?

  All the car’s doors are open, and the headlights are on. Agent Evangelos didn’t see it arrive. Nor did he see them arrive, the family. It’s only now he’s looking at the dust-covered car as the insects whirl frantically in the headlight beams.

  And now too, far inside the hospital, the father-in-law stretched out, his daughter holding his hand: decortication of both layers of the pericardium. The surgeon washes his hands, the suppliers paid cash for all the instruments, the ten-millilitre syringes have run out, we’ll just have to put the right dose in the twenty-millilitre ones; the supply of tampons is declining visibly, getting surgical gloves, they were bought on credit in a city-centre pharmacy; he’d get them, for he’s famous, the surgeon, he mustn’t leave, the region needs him. The generic disinfectants will soon run out; a week from now the cardiology ward will have to shut down if the hospital doesn’t pay the eight hundred thousand euros it owes – overall billing, delays everywhere.

  ‘The envelope before the operation or after?’ wonders the father-in-law.

  Night is falling; the foul atmosphere of the morgue is dispersed in the evening air. Agent Evangelos is standing in front of the car, looking at the yellow dust that clings to the dull reflections in its paintwork. His gaze is lost in the light from the emergency department, caught in a thick ochre layer, the rich soil of the hinterland. Evangelos breathes in every speck of it, sniffing the scales the moths have shed on the windscreen. A familiar odour reaches him: the sweat of all those journeys, the dark stains on the rear seat, and then the smell of petrol, hanging, sweet and sour, all the odours of the day evaporating from the car’s interior, and a kind of desire to believe in life again.

  If he’d been in Athens Evangelos would have gone for a drink in the Batman.

  The street was like a wave billowing into the city. Evangelos in front of the entrance to the bar, yesterday evening.

  A vibration in his jacket pocket. It’s Stefanos: I’m on my way, sorry about the delay, the debriefing with the Frontex people lasted longer than expected.

  He’ll tell Stefanos what he saw: ‘A face with its eyelids half closed, its mouth half closed, a man with his eyes half closed, a swarthy skin, colourless eyes, dark hair.’

  Evangelos no longer knows what he was supposed to see about this head: ‘Hell, I don’t know, I didn’t see anything, what was I supposed to look for? The colour of his skin?’

  The skin was pale on the forehead; the cheeks seemed dirty, with blackish crusts under the chin. The dark hair, thick on top, seemed set. The temples were bare, the ears shiny.

  The skin was dirty.

  “Yes, with blood, with dirt, but there’s still no sign of tissue decay; and anyway it’s white, this guy didn’t come from the other side,” the pathologist had said.

  “From the other side?”

  “From across the Evros, across the river, the frontier. They all come from the other bank. And when they get here, if they’ve not deteriorated too much after spending a long time in the water, you just have to see what they look like to know they’ve crossed the Evros.”

  “His nose and cheekbones. It’s true, you’d take him for a European,” Evangelos had remarked.

  “Caucasoid,” rectified the pathologist, rearranging No. 2666rb’s hair.

  “The barbounia are locally caught.” Stefanos thought it useful to point that out. Red mullet don’t come from Thailand.

  Agent Evangelos looks up from his plate: “And the toothpicks?”

  “What about the toothpicks? There’s a container-full, there, beside the salt.”

  “Where do the toothpicks come from?”

  “You’re taking the mickey!” says Stefanos.

  “Let me tell you,” Evangelos goes on, “those toothpicks are from China and the wood was cut illegally in some part of Asia, in some forest that loses an area the size of a football pitch every day.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “No, there’s no doubt about it. The same applies to the chairs.”

  “To the chairs? Really?”

  “You’d think they were old-style taverna chairs, but actually they come from China. The Piraeus is Chinese too. So, you see, barbounia will always be able to swim in Greek waters �
��”

  “Well, anyway, what about telling me how things went at the morgue?”

  Agent Evangelos looks at Stefanos, he looks at this man his own age, an intelligence officer like himself; he sees him tearing off a corner of the tablecloth, a square of paper attached with clips, paper lined with plastic with a map of Samothrace printed on it in blue, and the name of the taverna entwined with a drawing of a caique framed by a fishing net. The sea is across the street. Over the water, a dark shape, a mountain: Samothrace.

  An intelligence officer his own age, tearing the tablecloth, with a question on his lips like a morsel of fish.

  “There wasn’t anything of use at the morgue.”

  “Nothing at all? How can that be? You saw the goddamn head, all the same! What does it look like?”

  “It doesn’t look like anything, frankly. But the teeth were informative.”

  “The teeth?”

  “First-class dental work: four amalgam fillings in the molars, and three composites of the latest type as well. He’d visited his hygienist very recently. And the pathologist even said he must have brushed his teeth shortly before he died, for he didn’t find any remnants of food. If that’s the case, he must have flossed after every meal.”

  “Well, that doesn’t get us very far,” sighed Stefanos, examining a toothpick as if it were a piece of evidence.

  “You don’t understand what it means? This head can’t have come from a typical migrant of the kind that enter Greece every day through the Evros region.”

  “You’re suggesting that the head came from a Westerner?”

  “I didn’t say that, and what’s up with all you people and this so-called Western appearance? It just happens that we have a head that tells us it was someone with enough money to pay for the latest kind of dental care. So we can forget right away about the poor folk lining up to cross the river in the hope of finding an earthly paradise in Europe.”