The Greek Wall

by Nicolas Verdan

  But those are just words. Ever since they’ve been telling him about this river Agent Evangelos has seen nothing of it apart from a few clumps of trees drifting in the lingering mist, farther down.

  In Evangelos’s nebulous mind, confusion takes unexpected forms: ivy wreaths, a mufti’s felt hat, mouldering sheets from a brothel. Suddenly, his head, feeling heavy after only twenty minutes on the road, is nodding on his chest. He is asleep.

  The lieutenant explains to him about the mufti. “To start with, without saying anything to us, the Pomaks began to provide graves for the drowning victims pulled from the Evros. They couldn’t accept the idea that Muslims might be buried without a proper ceremony. It was the mufti who had the idea of the cemetery. He had graves dug in the forest, just outside the village. He encountered a few problems when this was discovered. But, like the captain, we told ourselves it wasn’t such a bad thing. Now, whenever they find a dead body, they phone us. We pick up the corpse and bring it to the morgue, Antonis examines it, and three months later, if it hasn’t been claimed by a relative, it’s handed over to the mufti. I’m talking about the deceased who don’t have an identity card. And that means most of them!”

  Agent Evangelos can’t have been paying any attention to the landscape as he struggled against sleep, for he has caught only fleeting glimpses of vegetation, replaced here and there by monotonous rows of fruit trees.

  “Here’s what I wanted to tell you,” says the lieutenant. “The real problem is Frontex. While it’s true it’s not easy to work with all those bastards in uniform, and they don’t like us either, both of us know our job is pointless, as the migrants are still able to cross the frontier. We’re hobbled by the same inability to act as the guys from Frontex, except they’re not in their own country. This Schengen frontier is absurd, but that’s not what I want to talk about. The thing is that among the officers there are four guys who are real bastards.”

  With his eyes fixed on the road which is now rising onto a plateau, its relief dishevelled by stunted, windtossed scrub, the lieutenant goes on. “There are four officers who take part in the orgies in the Eros, and what’s worse, they arrange a kind of scenario. They’ve reached an agreement with the pimp that they can use the girls any way they like. They require the girls to be nude, with ivy wreaths on their heads. They drug them before they abuse them, and the girls accept the drug to be able to tolerate the abuse, and if they don’t agree – but they do – and if they don’t, they’re beaten, though it seems they’re beaten to start with in any case. It’s the Frontex guys who provide the dope.”

  Agent Evangelos has heard the lieutenant, who adds, “And it suits the pimps just fine, it makes their job easy. The girls end up in such a state that they can send them to work in the big cities, initially to Athens, then to Heraklion, and apparently to Patras in the past few months. I really don’t know what kind of crap they give them, but it sends them into a trance; it seems they become as if hysterical, driven completely out of their minds. That’s what those cretins seem to like – the Frontex guys, I mean.”

  Questions from Agent Evangelos:

  “But how do you know all this?” “Does the whole Frontex personnel know about it?” “Why’s that?” “But the higher-ups in Frontex, the other officers – the ones who don’t take part in these goings-on – do they know anything about it?” “It remains to be seen, but listening to you it seems to me I’d better interview the Finnish patrol right away, for something tells me that they know more than what I was able to read in your report, don’t you think?” “And the captain, your boss, what does he say about all this?”

  Lieutenant Anastasis’s answers:

  “I sent one of my guys to observe one of the parties. I’d heard about these orgies a bit before that. People know about it, but nobody says anything. There are guys from round about who go along, just to watch.” “No, but rumours are rife there. The problem is, those four bastards are officers. Their rank protects them, and it isn’t in anybody’s interest here for the whole thing to get out. Can you imagine the public reaction to a scandal like that? Frontex officers organizing orgies in brothels on the Schengen frontier! The whole Frontex agency would suffer. Actually, I think those bastards’ colleagues have no idea about half of what goes on in the Eros. The captain says those guys can have as much fun as they want as long as he can keep control of all the operations to intercept migrants. In fact, he doesn’t give a damn what goes on in the brothel.”

  ‘What’s most infuriating,’ thinks Agent Evangelos, ‘is knowing that Frontex will do everything possible to protect its image, and therefore its employees.’

  “Lieutenant, listen to me, this whole business stinks to high heaven, but I don’t want to make a mistake. You’re like me, you’re looking for the truth, isn’t that so?”

  Suddenly, Lieutenant Anastasis brakes and pulls the Cherokee over to the side of the road with its engine still running.

  “If you agree, let’s try to find out the truth, even if we can’t be sure that any kind of justice will be done.”

  If the preceding events represent the truth, it seems to be nothing extraordinary, because so far, even if the head found a body that could very well belong to it, there is nothing to indicate the identity of the dead man. In the basement of the hospital in Alexandroupolis, Antonis Antoniadis spends a sleepless night reassembling the various pieces of an unknown individual who had indeed been buried in a common grave in the village of Sidiro, thanks to the mufti’s good offices.

  The mufti was outside when Agent Evangelos and the lieutenant knocked on his door. He was stacking firewood on the flagstone floor of a house at the bottom of the village, too long under construction to ever be completed.

  Bent over, his face hidden by a thick woollen hat, the mufti doesn’t look up on hearing the two foreigners approach – for that is how he must consider his visitors. He carries on with his chore, even when his daughter approaches to whisper something in his ear. It is the girl who leads Agent Evangelos and Lieutenant Anastasis to her father, obeying the instructions shouted down a corridor by her mother, who is reluctant to come to the door. The youngster enjoys a definite advantage over her parents, as the lieutenant doesn’t fail to point out. “At least she speaks excellent Greek.”

  “Why do you say that, Lieutenant?” asks Agent Evangelos.

  “For the past twenty years, the young Pomaks have had to be educated in the national language. As I’m sure you know, the Greek government is looking for ways to wean the Pomaks away from Turkey. As a minority within a minority, they’ve long been under Turkish influence. During the past ten years, five schools that also admit the Pomak minority have opened in the region. No Turkish is taught in these establishments.”

  Agent Evangelos was on the point of replying that if this was accompanied by all the rights of citizens of the Hellenic Republic, he wouldn’t have anything against such an advance in the educational system. But he has second thoughts, telling himself that this isn’t the time to discuss the lot of minorities with Lieutenant Anastasis, especially since too many questions about the investigation remain unanswered, beginning with the ivy, which reminds him of something he can’t quite put his finger on, not unlike that smell in the morgue.

  When the mufti eventually looks up at Agent Evangelos, who has approached him, forcing him to interrupt his work, he doesn’t utter a word. He just stands with his arms hanging, perfectly aware of the reason for this visit. He must be in his sixties, judging by his wrinkled brow and fine white moustache. Seeing that no question is forthcoming, he mumbles an As-salaam ’alaikum that evokes no response. Then, without further ado, he points first to his car, then to the jeep, signifying to follow him.

  The sun is disappearing behind the hill overlooking the village as the mufti stops on the top of a little ridge. Beyond the red tiled roofs of the village, with its poor, white houses scattered across small hills of bare earth, the landscape resembles dense scrubland that has been chopped down to the soil along th
e length of a football pitch, but just ten metres wide. The cleared ground slopes, and rivulets of ochre soil that lead away from around fifty low hillocks form a delta of dried mud on the dead-end forest road where the vehicles have just stopped. What seems to be the cemetery is enclosed by a chain-link fence and its gate is secured by a padlock.

  Still not uttering a word, the mufti takes out a bunch of keys and without further ado opens the gate of the resting place of the dead pulled from the Evros’s troubled waters. A moist wind blows across the hilltop, raising little clouds of dust above the piles of earth, some of them long, others short, some narrow and others wide. Walking slowly, with bowed head, the mufti turns to the right and points to the most recent burial, at one end of a row of five graves.

  He speaks for the first time, in an approximate Greek. “The man with no head is there, inshallah! Men from the village, they find him beside river, 21 December, morning, six o’clock. Like with all the Muslims that die crossing the Maritsa, they put his body in truck. It was dark night, all night, they look for head, inshallah! But scared, scared when see blue police lights.”

  “But can you be sure they’re good Muslims?” asks Evangelos.

  “We know many people who cross river come from Muslim lands. If not Muslims, we not know, but we take body anyway. We take all bodies.”

  Agent Evangelos also asks if anyone else was seen. The mufti seems to reflect for a moment, as if hesitant to say what he finally confides with a weary expression. “Them always hearing women crying, men laughing loud. But that evening, no noise, all quiet. Just saw police car, not a Greek one, and a minibus drive away. They tell me cars driving in dark, with no lights.”

  “Could you tell us more exactly where the body was found?” enquires Evangelos. The mufti informs him that the body lay at the river’s edge and that it was naked; it didn’t look like the other bodies the river gives up, it wasn’t wet, it wasn’t swollen and it was still warm, with much blood everywhere, inshallah!

  Lieutenant Anastasis takes out his phone.

  Later that evening, the mufti and the men from his village were present at what the annals of their community would record as sacrilege: twenty or so police from Alexandroupolis and Orestiada arrived, cordoned off the cemetery and installed floodlights that lit up the entire sky and the newly dug soil. When the body was exhumed from the latest of the river graves, inshallah! an expanse of starless night descended on the Pomak village. The dogs began to howl, the roosters to crow, and the sheep to bleat, inshallah!

  Now it is late, though that doesn’t mean much any more; events are following one another so fast on one another’s heels, outstripping comprehension. Agent Evangelos leaves the office of Captain Giorgos Souflas, the very epitome of those obstructionists an intelligence agent inevitably encounters during his career. The mere contact of the captain’s large hand, curiously dry and firm, makes Agent Evangelos recognize immediately that he is dealing with an impossibility. An enormous man, but at ease with his corpulence, jovial behind his moustache, authoritarian in his nonchalance, inspiring pity as he lights his tenth cigarette during an hour’s conversation, almost choking as he draws on it with genuine pleasure; a large man smelling of eau de cologne, but above all formidably intelligent, the chief of police in Orestiada is on the verge of retirement. He has an unparalleled instinct for detecting the slightest threat to the established order – his order, in other words, starting with the setting of his chair, a notch lower than his superior officer’s and a notch higher than his subordinates’. On the wall facing him are reproductions of icons of all those Orthodox saints who, each morning of every Godgiven day, do him the favour of reviving his clogged lungs by infusing them with the requisite quantity of auto-persuasion: the sense of being alive, fortunate and omnipotent, despite the presence of all those accursed people – not the migrants, towards whom the captain feels a kind of compassion inherited from the history of his own father, a refugee who arrived in Greece in 1922, not the migrants, especially since he knows they are just passing through, but those stupid big fellows from Frontex who strut through town in their national uniforms knowing all the while that the real boss around here is Captain Giorgos Souflas.

  “Point taken,” sighs Agent Evangelos, who despite all this has obtained what he wanted, namely a debriefing of the Finns and Souflas’s collaboration in the interrogation of the four Frontex employees: Major Stefan Mankel, a German national, Captain Mikail Cerbonescu, a Romanian, Corporal Joseph Lumirascu, another Romanian, and Sergeant Sven Roboroski, a Pole.

  Agent Evangelos had known how to get around the obstacle of Souflas. “If you don’t collaborate with me, I’ll say you’re responsible for the inaccuracies in a report concerning the discovery of a severed head on the edge of a sensitive military zone.”

  “Are you crazy?” barks Souflas. “You don’t know what you’re doing; forget about the whole business of the brothel, and above all think twice about taking on Frontex single-handed. Are you looking for early retirement, Agent Evangelos?”

  “If you weren’t a little police captain in an eastern province with his fat arse sitting on what is now an ejector armchair,” says Agent Evangelos, “I’d think you were trying to threaten me, but you don’t scare me, and Frontex will answer for the abuses committed by its men, don’t doubt it for a moment.”

  Agent Evangelos knows very well that he’s bluffing. Frontex will transfer the culprits out, and do everything possible to stifle the affair. And already he can almost hear his superiors suggesting to him not to push his investigations too far. “There mustn’t be the slightest risk of compromising the best interests of the country and endangering the security of its eastern border, which, as you very well know, Agent Evangelos, is under scrutiny from Brussels, and which we are attempting to strengthen at this very moment by erecting a wall to plug the gap.”

  Captain Souflas was saying the same thing in rather less diplomatic terms. And he is already recovering his smile as he says goodbye to Agent Evangelos, who has obtained more than he expected.

  The night is going to be freezing cold, and as soon as he reaches the bottom of the town, along the railway line where the light from the neon signs becomes less intense and the yellow halo of the street lamps is turning grey, at the edge of the marshy plain which keeps Orestiada at a boggy distance from the Evros, from where the first migrants will soon be approaching under the indifferent lenses of the thermal cameras of the guardians of the Schengen Area who are posted on the heights above the river, as soon as he reaches the threshold of Europe Agent Evangelos will look up and see nothing overhead but an expanse that, star-strewn though it is, he finds empty and indecipherable.

  The need to walk for a bit occurred to him quite naturally as he left the police station. His fatigue should have brought him back to his hotel, two blocks farther up on the left, but his feet led him towards the railway station. When he felt the ballast underfoot, all the repressed anger of the day drained away and, instead of crossing the track and entering the darkness, thus resisting its attraction, Agent Evangelos told himself he could follow the tracks for a while, and walk parallel to the river. In that way he wouldn’t get lost, nor would he immediately become a pale silhouette on the screens in front of which the frontier guards are smoking silently inside their mobile surveillance post. And though he still wouldn’t see the Evros he would be better able to imagine it, as if he were following its course between the rails.

  But, as always, Agent Evangelos must struggle against unpleasant thoughts. The police captain’s features don’t disappear; they block his view, and there is no use telling himself that he is familiar with that kind of obstacle, since it always comes to him with the same appearance: the mocking eyes of that officer ordering recruits to beat up a student. It was in 1973, under the dictatorship, six years after the Colonels’ coup; the recruits were refusing, protesting, saying no, but he just continued to smile; the obstacle remained, overweening in its confidence, making Evangelos betray his principles, for
if he didn’t toe the line he would be the one to suffer: “Go on, give him a few clouts, the goddamn student, don’t you see he’s shitting his jeans, with his long hair, and don’t tell me, Evangelos, that you… he, he, Evangelos, hit him, hit him again, make him spill the beans, the filthy terrorist, don’t be a softy, Evangelos!”

  It’s a clear night. Tomorrow the whole thing will be out in the open; it will be on the news, the internet will have the whole truth, lots of pictures on TV, eye-catching headlines on the front pages of the newspapers pinned up on the fronts of the news stands: “Shocking Murder on the Frontier”; “Frontier Guards Rape Women from Eastern Europe in a Brothel”. Denials: protests from Berlin, Bucharest and Warsaw, disclaimers from Frontex.

  The directorate knows about the raid on the Pomak village; soon the press will know as well, the releases are being copy-edited at this very moment; Agent Evangelos will certainly be in the hot seat. Why does this business have to come out now, just when the wall is about to be built? Of course, Greece isn’t to blame, it’s Frontex’s fault, and Brussels is on tenterhooks – things could be worse, after all.

  It is a clear, frosty night, but the stars provide no direction. Agent Evangelos has been walking for a good half hour, following the Evros along the railway line; he still hasn’t seen the river. Tomorrow, if he has time, he’ll ask the lieutenant to drive him there; time is short, they’ve got the rest of the body but they haven’t made an identification yet, and the girls from the Eros have disappeared.

  ‘Where did they go?’ wonders Evangelos, hearing the frogs croaking in the ditch alongside the railway embankment that marks the edge of the plain, or maybe farther on in the marsh, and now the moon is rising on the gleaming metal of the rails, the frogs are croaking themselves hoarse, he can hear them, and it is in that moment, amid the nocturnal din, that he sees ivy wreaths on the brows of dancing women. Painted on the vases in black they are wearing ivy wreaths on their heads; he can see them in the display case in the Athens Archaeological Museum, black figures on a vase. It’s the dance of the maenads: three pairs of them, and a couple of satyrs around a woman, all taking part in a lively, dancing chase.