The Greek Wall

by Nicolas Verdan

  The first migrants arrive in front of the police station. They are the youngest, barely more than children, aged fifteen or sixteen at most.

  ‘You’d think they were painted black.’ That is how Agent Evangelos sees them: painted black, with eyes like marbles. ‘I know those eyes defined by fear, the fear that makes a man look away as you interrogate him in a windowless room, exposing the whites of his eyes as he avoids your gaze.’

  Every year, tens of thousands of asylum seekers and people without any papers arrive in Greece. The great majority of the former, fleeing war-torn countries, are Afghans, Eritreans, Iraqis, Palestinians and Somalis. The land frontier between Greece and Turkey, which extends over some 150 kilometres in the north-east of the country, along the river Evros, has become the main crossing point for illegal immigrants to the European Union, accounting for almost half the illegal entries detected. To think that just two years ago, reflects Agent Evangelos, most immigrants crossed the Aegean in makeshift boats, to be cast up on the shores of the Dodecanese. The directorate has provided the figures. They are alarming. Between 2009 and 2010, the central Mediterranean route through Italy and the western Mediterranean route through southern Spain have seen a decline of between thirty and sixty per cent. At the same time, the route through Turkey and Greece has seen an increase of 345 per cent.

  Agent Evangelos has been told that the number of crossings could amount to over a hundred and fifty thousand this year. In Greece, it has hitherto been the responsibility of the police to deal with asylum cases. Migrants are barely registered in a police station before they find themselves interned in detention centres, generally situated near the frontier. Access to application procedures for asylum remains restricted, even in Athens, where it is difficult even to report to an Aliens’ Bureau. Asylum seekers kept in detention still risk being turned back. Agent Evangelos knows all too well that no improvements have been made to the reception facilities, which are practically non-existent. Greece has no triage system for new arrivals, nor a way to identify the most vulnerable cases. A good number of applicants must wait months before they can embark on the asylum process. During this time they are in danger of arrest, and risk expulsion. Here, everyone closes their eyes to the inadequate facilities and functioning of the reception centres, which don’t yet meet international standards.

  ‘How can we fulfil our commitments to reform the asylum process, now that the Greeks themselves are beginning to find it difficult to survive?’ Evangelos often asks himself when he reflects on the desperate situation of those migrants who swell the ranks of the homeless in Athens. ‘A fine excuse,’ he sighs this morning, as he observes the young migrants stretched out at the entrance to the police offices. ‘If only at least the youngest were granted preferential treatment or special protection because of their age. But no, Presidential Decree No. 114 simply failed to forbid the detention of immigrants who aren’t yet of age.’ Evangelos has heard of minors being listed as adults in the Hellinikon registration centre in Athens.

  The lieutenant is keeping him waiting; he went to fetch something from his office. As for Stefanos, he is trying to set up another interview with the Finns of Frontex. The request has to go through the Frontex headquarters in Warsaw; it seems their cooperation isn’t a given. But in any case, as Agent Evangelos very well knows, nothing is a given. He intends to take full advantage of his one-on-one interview with Lieutenant Anastasis to throw some light on this business of the brothel and the ivy wreaths, just not in the police station. They’ll go off to the Goody’s terrace on a corner of the town square, in front of the big glass building. They’ll chat, as if casually. And afterwards there’ll be the interview with the captain, Orestiada’s senior police officer, who thought it preferable not to mention the brothel in the report.

  Like frightened but hungry cats, the migrants approach the police-station entrance step by step. Encouraged by the daring of a few, an entire group finally sits down on the edge of the pavement. The duty orderly gestures to them to line up on a kind of covered terrace, divided from the street by a low wall. Agent Evangelos counts about ten of them, but families are already flocking up, a futile, disoriented crowd.

  Now they must number around sixty. The people-smugglers have told them: Don’t try to run away from the Greek police. On the contrary, go to the police station, it’s easy. From the riverbank, head directly across the fields and you’ll find the railway track; look for the railway station, then go up the street; it’s on the right. They’ll give you the white paper you need to stay in Greece.

  In the migrants’ vernacular, this document, printed on “white paper”, conveys a false hope: it is a thirty-day authorization to remain on Greek soil, long enough to have fingerprints taken and undergo interrogation. Agent Evangelos knows the whole charade by heart: ‘Under the Dublin II Regulation, all illegal immigrants picked up by the authorities are registered in the Eurodac database, located in Lyon. They are then given a document ordering them to leave the country within thirty days. Except that no one takes the trouble to inform would-be immigrants properly, so they continue to believe that the “white paper” is a residence permit allowing them a month to organize the next stage of their journey without any reason to fear the police. In fact, this document provides no protection whatsoever, for its sole purpose is to get them on file with the Greek police.’

  Inside his little gatehouse, the duty orderly is sipping an iced Nescafé. He’s waiting to be relieved and never as much as casts a glance at a woman who is collapsing, drunk with fatigue. Her three children look on; the smallest, barely three years old, begins to cry. At that moment, Lieutenant Anastasis emerges. In a fury, he shouts, “Hey! You, drinking your coffee! Don’t you see they’re dying of thirst? Go and fetch a few bags of bottled water from the news stand. Say it’s for the police.”

  “I know, chief,” says the orderly, “but Dimitris, at the news stand, gives me hell when I go to get water; he says he still hasn’t been paid for all the times when —”

  “It’s an order! Go and fetch me water and some biscuits, right now, do you hear? Anyway, damn it, here, take these fifty euros.”

  Agent Evangelos has approached the woman lying on the ground. Some schoolchildren go along the pavement; they can’t miss the scene, but they have witnessed so much misery every morning on their way to school that the word “pity” has been eliminated from their vocabulary, leaving only a sense of discomfort, a kind of impotence that makes them stare at the ground – themselves refugees, but evading their own anguish. Their children’s minds are already filled with fathers losing their jobs, fuel bills their families can’t pay, a grandmother’s cancer that can’t be treated for lack of health insurance. In any case the hospital even lacks the resources needed to provide care.

  The lieutenant returns inside the police station and asks the receptionist for a blanket. He adds, “Bring some sugar too, and if you find a few leftover sandwiches, take them, pick up everything there is to eat!” As he passes Agent Evangelos he calls out, “If you’d be good enough to follow me to my office, I’ve no time left to go to the café to chat; it’s too bad if we’re overheard, but look, you can see there are just too many of them. The last time we saw a crowd like that arrive was in November.”

  And the border guards, where are they? Agent Evangelos is surprised, and wonders what they are doing. A military van with Hungarian plates and a Land Rover with Bulgarian plates are parked in front of the police station. But there’s no sign of anyone from Frontex. “It’s just that they’re out on patrol, sir,” says the young officer. “They’re out on patrol, while we’re in it up to our necks.”

  Agent Evangelos follows the lieutenant into a small, windowless room. The furniture consists of just two desks, three computers and dozens of coffee mugs brimming with cigarette butts. An icon of the Virgin squints blessedly from the wall. There is also a calendar depicting local football teams, sponsored by a telephone company. It is open at June of the previous year.

  �
��Forgive the mess,” grumbles the lieutenant, “but we no longer have any budget for a cleaning woman in the evenings.”

  “I know how it is, Lieutenant, no need to explain.”

  “By the way,” says the lieutenant, “have you heard the latest? The Troika is demanding new cuts, otherwise the aid tap will be turned off, and in addition we still don’t know the date of the election, so the provisional government remains in place.”

  “Lieutenant, if it’s to talk politics, let me invite you to my office in Athens.”

  The lieutenant sighs. “All right, but you have to understand that some days I don’t know if I’m coming or going.”

  Agent Evangelos says nothing more. He is waiting for Lieutenant Anastasis to calm down. He watches him dig around in his packet of cigarettes and pick up the phone to order two coffees from the nearby restaurant.

  Two men go along the corridor, heads down, hands behind their backs. They are handcuffed. A tall fellow with close-cropped fair hair pushes them ahead of him. He stops briefly in front of the office door. “Lieutenant, I’m bringing you two suspects. They were caught over by Nea Vyssa. Turkish peasants, I think.”

  “OK, OK, put them in a cell, we’ll look into it this evening. If they’re Turkish people-smugglers, the captain will have to be told right away. He’s across in Edirne today.”

  The tall, blond man gives a curt nod of acknowledgement. ‘All but clicking his heels,’ thinks Agent Evangelos, who discovers that this is his first European border guard: Werner, the head of the Austrian patrol; an efficient fellow, unlike some of the others.

  “Between the two of us, as I’m sure you’ve understood,” confides the lieutenant, “I’ve no control over these Frontex people. They lord it over us, and their superiors accuse us of not doing our job properly. But what about them, I ask you? What do they do that we don’t? All they do is register the incoming illegals to get them into their European database. And then what?”

  Voices are heard in the corridor. More uniformed men go by; there comes a clunk of rifle butts, a clump of heavy boots on the stairs.

  “Right, they’re coming back, they’re returning their guns to the armoury. Maybe we should go to Goody’s to chat after all,” sighs the lieutenant.

  Evangelos looks at his watch. At the rate things are going, he tells himself, he might as well phone his daughter. And maybe take the first plane for Athens – especially since the instructions he was given by phone this morning were very clear: “Perhaps that head of yours didn’t come from a migrant’s body, Agent Evangelos. But if didn’t, then it must have sat on a people-smuggler’s shoulders, if you’ll excuse that way of putting it. Let’s be clear: this case absolutely must have something to do with illegals, or be some kind of settling of accounts. In any case, that’s the direction to look in. As you well know, Agent Evangelos, all this validates our idea that erecting this barbed-wire wall is very urgent, with so many criminals crossing the border…”

  The phone rings.

  The call has come just as Lieutenant Anastasis is finally getting ready to say who took part in the orgies in the Eros brothel. That will have to wait, especially since the Frontex men, who are arriving by the dozen, are too numerous in the police station.

  “It’s for you, I think.”

  Agent Evangelos takes the phone. He recognizes the voice, it’s Antoniadis, and he knows where the voice is coming from, because the smell from the morgue accompanies it. But it’s not the smell of death. Agent Evangelos doesn’t smell death with his nostrils; he sees it coming, he knows when it’s on the prowl, but it’s not because of its smell. When death is present, it doesn’t smell, it no longer has a smell, and when the smell returns it’s because death has already been there for a while.

  When he found the British military attaché with three bullets in him, soaking in his blood behind the wheel of his car on the Kifisias Avenue bridge, just past the AB Vassilopoulos supermarket, Evangelos could see right away he was a goner. ‘Why do I have to keep remembering it today, twelve years later?’ Evangelos was on his motorbike that day, like the assassins. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, and was just telling himself that Athens had a smell of its own: a mixture of eucalyptus essence, freshly baked bread, cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes.

  Evangelos was on his motorbike, riding bareheaded – it was June, which explains how he could be on the spot only ten minutes after the shooting. He got there at the same time as the ambulance. When he found the Englishman slumped over the dashboard he immediately lost his taste for the city.

  ‘When impressions are so strong,’ he reflects, ‘you don’t feel anything, you lose your sense of smell, you just use your eyes to register the events.’

  So too the smell from the morgue: ‘What does that smell from the morgue remind me of? I don’t know. But it wasn’t fair. All those allegations, utterly false! Saying the Greeks had botched the inquiry into that assassination. I was involved, and I did everything possible to find the killers. I did, anyway. And I’m a Greek. And an intelligence agent, until further notice.’

  “Hello, Agent Evangelos? Are you still there?”

  “Yes, it’s me, sorry, we’ve got a bad line. Do you have something new, Antonis?”

  “You recognized my voice?”

  “I can’t forget it, nor that strange smell!”

  “Oh, you’re still on about that smell! You haven’t worked it out yet, Agent Evangelos? Look within yourself.”

  “But why don’t you tell me about that goddamn head? If you’re calling me, maybe it has finally come up with something worth saying?”

  “Yes, further analysis of the blood and the wound —”

  “Spare me the details, would you?”

  “Okay, the decapitation must have taken place less than an hour before the head was discovered. Scientifically, I’m sure of what I’m saying, and given the information from Anastasis’s report I can deduce, as I said, that the Finns must have found the head right away, you understand?”

  “Not a shadow of doubt, then?”

  “No doubt whatsoever. And one more thing…”

  “What?”

  “The mufti called. He wanted to know if we could let him have the head when the inquiry is complete.”

  “Who? The mufti? Who is this mufti, pray?”

  Lieutenant Anastasis, who has been listening closely to the conversation, frowns. “Could I speak to the doctor, Agent Evangelos?” he asks.

  At first Evangelos pretends not to have heard. “But who is this guy, for God’s sake?” he exclaims after a moment’s silence.

  “It’s the mufti who buries the drowning victims; he digs graves for them in his village, Sidiro.”

  “Let me speak to Antonis!” insists the lieutenant, who has been following the conversation closely.

  Surprised by his change of tone, Agent Evangelos hands him the phone.

  “Antonis, it’s me, Anastasis. How did the mufti find out about the head? What did he say to you?”

  “As you know, the mufti is never very communicative. He just asked, ‘You wouldn’t have found a head, by any chance, because it would be good if we could bury his head too.’”

  The lieutenant turns towards Agent Evangelos and exclaims, “If that’s the case, we’ll have the rest of the body! The Pomaks must have found it and buried it without saying anything. Let’s pay the mufti a visit. I’ll get a car.”

  “I won’t budge an inch from here before you tell me who this mufti is, and how these Pomaks are mixed up in this business,” insists Evangelos.

  “I’ll explain along the way; it’s an hour’s drive to Orestiada.”

  Agent Evangelos shrugs and follows the young officer, who strides through the police station, swearing as he goes. On the threshold, a new group of migrants has just arrived. Confused, they shiver in their damp clothes.

  The lieutenant is driving in silence. He has put the blue light on top of the Jeep Cherokee and drives through the villages without slowing down. As for Agent Evangelos, he
allows his thoughts to slip back to the desolate streets of Neos Kosmos and the pale glow of the Batman’s neon sign; he is trying to imagine the wall, but he can only see impressions: images and faces of a fanciful Greece. Evangelos is wondering who that handsome young man can be, with his open shirt and flowing hair. A writer? A painter? His black-and-white photo was on the wall in the Batman. He always forgets to ask who he is. He knows the others: Kazantzidis, the singers, the ship owners, the actors, all those who have their pictures on the wall.

  Agent Evangelos wants to phone his daughter. He’ll suggest to her that they celebrate the little girl’s birth at the Batman. He doesn’t know why, but he likes the idea of going for a drink to celebrate the baby’s arrival. Maybe the Batman isn’t the right place for it, but it’s where Agent Evangelos feels most at home just now. And since he’s happy to be a grandfather it all makes sense.

  ‘Why do we always have to compartmentalize everything?’ he wonders. He has no trouble seeing himself with his daughter and the little girl and his friends from the bar, all assembled, with the old songs to celebrate the little girl’s arrival into the world. He has no difficulty seeing that.

  Now it occurs to Evangelos that he still hasn’t seen the river: ‘I haven’t seen the wall yet either, and maybe it’s not by chance.’ Agent Evangelos tries to imagine what the wall can be like. ‘One thing’s for sure,’ he reflects. ‘It’s that Brussels isn’t going along, Germany especially, for Berlin doesn’t want to give a cent to finance this barbed-wire fence to be unrolled along the only stretch of land frontier between Greece and Turkey, the sieve of the European Union, a yawning gap in the Schengen/Dublin agreement, twelve and a half kilometres of farmland south-west of Edirne, in an elbow of the Evros, before its long descent towards the sea. Brussels and Berlin aren’t in favour of the Evros wall, but they might be prepared to subsidize the installation of surveillance cameras along the strategic frontier.’