The Greek Wall

by Nicolas Verdan

  “Then,” says Polina, “he told me to follow him, I had no time to go to the bathroom, I had to follow him, he dragged me by the arm, we went down in the lift directly to the parking garage in the basement.”

  “There was no one in the parking garage?” asks Evangelos.

  “No, there was no one around, and he pushed me into a little bus where there were three other girls, all crying. There were two men waiting: one was the driver, he spoke Russian, and there was another man who spoke both Russian and Greek; he exchanged a few words with the one from the room, but he didn’t get into the bus with us.”

  “What then?”

  “After that we went out, or, rather, the bus left the underground parking and drove just a few minutes to another building, like a big garage with lorries and offices upstairs. There they told us to get out and locked us in a room; we waited for an hour, about an hour I think, and they did let us go to the bathroom. They gave us water to drink too, and after that I don’t remember anything. I think they gave us a drug to make us sleep, because when I woke up we were driving. It was dark night, and there was no window, I could hardly breathe, my tongue was heavy, it stank of vomit, with the other girls, about twenty of us I think, we were packed into the back of a lorry, as I saw when they opened the doors. We drove like that for hours and hours with the other girls, we were all throwing up. And I was really scared, I was afraid I’d throw up again because I was taking medicine for my kidneys, and since I didn’t have my bag any more I was scared, but now I’m used to the pain that has come back, and it’s there all the time.”

  Agent Evangelos asks what medicine she was taking, and briefly interrupts the interview to dial a number on a wall phone. “Yes, Zyloprim, she hasn’t taken any for weeks. Yes, that’s it, Zyloprim; do what you can to find some.”

  “But tell me,” Agent Evangelos resumes, “don’t you remember any details – I mean when you were in that big building with the lorries?”

  Polina only remembers a name written in large Roman letters: Orpheus.

  “But that’s very important,” says Agent Evangelos, “you mustn’t forget a single thing if you want us to get anywhere. So, where was this name written?”

  “I read the name Orpheus when we arrived in front of the building, there was a big sign on the roof saying Orpheus, and I think the same thing was written on the lorry that brought us.”

  Agent Evangelos typed this part of Polina’s story on his computer, as far as she managed to tell it. He put it in chronological order, starting with the President Hotel: the President, the Lacoba, the short bus ride, the stop at the headquarters of Orpheus Tarminoglou (which turned out to be a transport company based in Kallithea, owned by a member of Golden Dawn, the extreme right-wing party), the trip in the lorry, and the Eros brothel. As for what followed, Evangelos said to himself, ‘I’ll see about the rest tomorrow, but I think I’ll pay a visit to my daughter and then go to the Batman; I’ve been thinking of it for days now.’ In fact Evangelos thinks of it constantly, and going there will help him to think more clearly. But the thing is that the story is forthcoming, and it can’t wait.

  Polina resumes her story when Agent Evangelos invites her to, after first ordering a coffee, using the wall phone for the second time.

  “A coffee?”

  “No thanks, I don’t drink coffee. And after that they made us go into that house beside the road; they ordered us to sit on the ground and told us that nothing would happen to us if we were nice to the people who’d come to pay us a visit. They gave us Coke to drink. It tasted strange, and that’s when they drugged us. Almost right away I felt I was no longer myself, like I was drunk. And that’s when the guys came. They spoke German and English and other languages I didn’t recognize. Those guys made us crazy, and they laughed to see us crazy like that. They ripped our clothes, and they made fun of us when we tried to scratch and bite them. I don’t know what came over us. We were like crazy, we fought with them, but that’s what they wanted, they wanted us to hit them and bite them. I swear to you, I’ve never been as naked in my life, I had no control of myself any more, I couldn’t even recognize my own reflection, something had driven me out of my own skin…”

  “And then?” asked Agent Evangelos.

  “Then nothing. I keep telling myself I should never have phoned that customer who calls himself Peter, I should never have left the President Hotel with him; I let him see me just the way I am, I wasn’t Alisa Model any more – that was the name I used on the agency website. As I said, they must have been spying on me, because as soon as I was back in the hotel after spending the evening with this Peter without asking him for anything, my false name was gone off the agency website. And that’s how I came to phone this guy who arranged to meet me at the Lacoba. If I’d never called his number none of all this would have happened.”

  Agent Evangelos checked: Alisa Model had not been online for at least three months. However, the people in IT were able to recover the escort’s profile:

  Alisa Model

  AGE: 23

  HEIGHT: 172 cm (5’8”)

  WEIGHT: 52 kg (115 lb)

  BODY: 91–61–92 cm (36–24–36”)

  BREASTS: C

  HAIR COLOUR: Blonde

  NATIONALITY: Russian

  LANGUAGES: Russian

  English

  Greek (some)

  Agent Evangelos asks Polina to pick up her story at the point where she was tempted to run away from the Eros brothel. “You were holding that axe, and you told me that it was as if someone had stopped you from bringing it down —”

  “Yes, that’s right, someone stopped me from using the axe.”

  “Someone?”

  “I don’t know who.”

  “But let’s not go so fast, Polina,” says Agent Evangelos, picking up the thread of her statement. “You told me you had never felt as naked as you did during those weeks you spent in the Eros brothel.”

  “Yes, I was lost, scared to death, I no longer knew who I was, what I was like. I just wanted to be an escort, but now it had all turned into a nightmare. The other girls and I were just there, somewhere, in a room with no windows, lying on mattresses laid directly on a strange floor, waiting for passing customers, dreadful men, soldiers who spoke all kinds of languages. But that was nothing compared with the days when we had to put on a kind of white nightdress and wear wreaths on our heads, the days when they forced us to drink that bitter-tasting drug mixed with Coke.”

  Agent Evangelos asked Polina if she really had no idea of the place where she’d been kept, and her only response was in the form of pictures.

  “There was a field in front, with trees farther off.”

  “You had no other way to tell where you were?”

  “No, I knew I was in the middle of nowhere, beyond anything I could imagine.”

  “Could you repeat that?”

  “I could never have imagined anything like it,” Polina repeats.

  Agent Evangelos next asks her if the men who came to the brothel wore uniforms.

  “Yes, most of them,” says Polina. “I could see them undressing before they began to drink and make us dance for them. They pushed us into a kind of invisible circle; I remember that everything was spinning, there was very loud techno music, and they made us spin and spin, they pulled our hair, they pinched us, they tripped us up, until we became crazed with fury.”

  “And then one day, that day – that night, I mean – tell me again what happened?” Evangelos presses her.

  He instantly believes every word that Polina Zubov utters after that. Because you can’t make up a story like that. And because he was firmly convinced, from that moment when he met the young woman’s gaze for the first time in the Orestiada police station, that this person wasn’t wearing a mask: displacement was the only evidence of her existence.

  “So, that evening, as you said, you ran from the brothel, pursued by one of those men?”

  “The man who chased me,” says Polina, “was one
of the customers – not the soldier, but someone I’d often seen there and who was very familiar with the men who guarded us. I even wondered if he wasn’t one of their bosses. He was very brutal, and he enjoyed hurting me, he used to pinch me very hard, he used to hit me.”

  “And so you found yourself outside?”

  “I don’t think I knew what I was doing, and I even wondered if I’d had a flash of awareness, as if I felt I was going to die from exhaustion, from the dancing and howling.”

  “Do you realize what you’re saying?” interrupts Agent Evangelos, for he knows how this possible flash of awareness on Polina’s part could have disastrous consequences for her, occurring as it did in a sequence of events which until that point had occurred entirely beyond her control, under the influence of a drug-induced hysteria.

  But Polina isn’t aware of anything; she’s tired of repeating what she has already described.

  “Then I found myself behind the building, on the side next to the road, where they hang out our sheets – if you can call them that – that never dry, after they were washed in a tub; that’s where they dry, behind the fence, and I got tangled in them, I fell down among the wet sheets. I could feel that guy grabbing me by the leg, but I threw the sheet in his face. I got up, and that’s when I saw the axe, it was sitting there on some farm machine, and when I turned around I saw a man’s face; he was shouting ‘No, don’t!’ And then I no longer had the axe in one hand, because it was heavy, so I’d taken it in both hands, and I was trying to strike when I felt that someone had taken me by the arm and was stopping me.”

  “So there were two men?”

  “I don’t know who the man was that shouted ‘No, don’t!’ I don’t remember seeing him before, but I know he was shouting.”

  “In what language, Polina?”

  “I can’t remember now, but it wasn’t Greek, or English, or Russian, I don’t know any more.”

  “But according to you he said, ‘No, don’t!’, so you must have understood what he was saying.”

  “Yes, but I don’t know any more what language he was speaking, and since I’m telling you that he shouted out ‘No!’, and afterwards it was like I wasn’t about to bring down the axe, for it felt like someone was holding back one of my arms, like my action was stopped.”

  “Yet you saw the head fall?”

  “No, no, I didn’t see it fall, it was just a few seconds later, when the noise had stopped, after the soldiers came out. They pulled on their trousers, but their chests were bare, and it was then they found me, and I could see the terror in their eyes, and I followed where they were looking, and the head was right there, at my feet, and they went back, and that’s how I was able to get away and run off into the dark.”

  “But your clothes” – Agent Evangelos has only thought of this now – “you say they were forcing you to wear a kind of white nightdress, isn’t that so? You told me several times that you had to wear a kind of costume for the orgies, so why were you found in street clothes, wearing a sweater and jeans?”

  “Because that evening there weren’t a lot of customers, so I just tried to run away, I lied to you.”

  The young woman looks at Agent Evangelos, who repeats to himself, ‘Because I lied to you, because Polina is lying, like Alisa Model, like my directorate lies, like the frontier guards lie, like the migrants lie under questioning, like I lie to myself, like everyone here in Greece tells lies.’

  Evangelos could have continued the interview. But a question has occurred to him, though he doesn’t know exactly why.

  “What do you know about the crisis, Polina?”

  “What?”

  “Yes, you said you had fewer customers because of the crisis. What did you mean by that?”

  “There were fewer men calling, because of the crisis.”

  “Yes, I understand, I understand perfectly. But what do you know about the crisis in Greece?”

  “One day, I was in the Park Hotel, and I heard shouts and explosions coming from the street. I went out to see what was happening and I saw people everywhere. There was a demonstration going on, and young people were fighting the police. I watched the news on TV, and I heard lots of people saying that the whole thing, the crisis, was just a fiction.”

  “Meaning what, a ‘fiction’?”

  “That’s what they say on TV, the Greeks, they say the crisis is just a fiction, something that doesn’t really exist. I don’t know… something made up.”

  “And you, Polina, what do you think?”

  “They say the crisis is just in people’s heads, and I think they’re right.”

  Episode III

  Alisa Model has disappeared. David Minc, a financial expert born in Paris in 1973, is upset. He has had a long day: the liquidation of ATEbank (a drifting Greek wreck) is dragging on, the sessions with the bank directors have been interminable, and the prospect of having to do without the services of his little Russian is rousing his stomach pains again. Dammit, where can she have got to, the little minx? She has disappeared from the radar of athensescorts.gr, the go-to sex site in Athens from which David Minc, the first day of his assignment in Greece, had ferreted her out after hours of night-time surfing from his room at the Divani Caravel Hotel.

  Alisa Model has been expunged from the map of Athens, and Polina Zubov won’t be returning to Greece, having been barred from the country despite her protests. She is to take a plane to Moscow the following day, at one in the afternoon. Agent Evangelos has tried to make her see that she is getting off lightly, for in normal times she would have had more problems because her statement barely hangs together, and that she can consider herself lucky that no one else is taking any interest in her case, starting with the directorate, which prefers to concentrate on the Frontex business, displaying its contempt for the truth even when the national interest is at stake, even if it means closing the file on Polina. But Evangelos keeps all this to himself while resolving to pursue the inquiry for his own satisfaction, in collaboration with Lieutenant Anastasis, to whom he has sent the description of the man Polina had described once she decided to stop spinning yarns and relate what really happened that evening in the Eros brothel when that head was chopped off by the stroke of an axe that she wasn’t holding, according to her story at least.

  At this moment, Polina is spending her last night in a bedroom of the Sofitel Athens Airport, awaiting deportation. Now that she is locked in, with a policeman posted in the corridor, Agent Evangelos turns off the bedside lamp in a nearby room and closes his eyes. But he can still hear Polina lamenting the loss of everything she had – her agency and her regular customers – as well as the fact that she doesn’t know in which European city she will be able to find work. Agent Evangelos remains silent, listening to her. He understands, he imagines her return to Moscow, the complete lack of resources that awaits her there, her mother’s phone call enquiring if she has had a nice holiday and saying that her father would like her to come home to Vladivostok for Easter, and Polina looking for new contacts as she tries to find work in Europe, still determined to buy that apartment.

  “But doesn’t this experience – I mean what you’ve gone through here in Greece – doesn’t all that abominable treatment make you want to get out of the sex trade?”

  Agent Evangelos would have liked to tell Polina what he could have said to the Pakistani waiting at the traffic light with his squeegee and bucket of soapy water: Why do you keep on, here, breathing in the exhaust fumes; why, despite all the poverty?

  Polina knows she won’t always be so lucky, that eventually her luck could run out, that it has been costly for her, body and soul, yet she won’t give up her dream of that little apartment in Moscow, of building herself a different world, a refuge where she can work everything out, make a new beginning and (why not?) start a family – but it will be up to her to decide with whom, and she’ll owe her husband nothing. Only then will she pay a visit to her parents at Easter, when she’s as round as a balloon and living in her own place i
n Moscow. Polina didn’t express it in precisely those terms, but it amounts to the same thing when she says that Agent Evangelos must understand that it’s a hard job, but that it means everything to her and she can’t imagine just admitting defeat, so if it isn’t Athens it’ll be some other big city.

  A short time ago, on the way to the airport, before joining Polina, who was already shut in her hotel room, Agent Evangelos told himself that he would pay a visit to his daughter and granddaughter. And now that he thinks about it, as he reclines on a king-size bed in the usual tomb of a standard room in the bubble of the airport Sofitel, he reflects that the little girl does really look like her grandmother, his former wife – but it’s still too soon to say, and anyway Andromeda is sure that her little nose will grow a lot and become more like her maternal grandfather’s, Agent Evangelos’s – but, after all, what difference does it make? The most amazing thing of all was the unchanged atmosphere of Kifissia, with its shopping streets as smooth as tennis courts, its heated terraces, its news stands flanked by humidors set at the proper temperature – the fashionable neighbourhood of Kifissia with its stay-at-home mothers bored out of their minds in their expensive pyjamas, its fathers absently reading the news of the riots devastating the distant city centre, the Filipino maids laden with groceries, and all that coffee, all that fresh orange juice, all those shoes, very expensive cars, cigarettes, pastries, perfumes, beauty products, painted nails and high heels – how can such a hill of garbage still remain standing at the edge of the Athenian cesspool?

  Agent Evangelos is a grandfather, the light hasn’t been turned off in the toilet of the Sofitel bedroom; is little Polina asleep already? But no, of course, she won’t close an eye all night, for she knows her hours here are now numbered – no more than a dozen hours left in Greece before she emerges into the corridor without handcuffs, as had been agreed, given the minimal risk of flight; and anyway, where could she go? The silent, windowless corridor of the Sofitel – the room doors all closed, like at the President, like in every hotel, like at the Hilton and the Divani Caravel where at the moment the top officials of the Troika are masturbating in front of their tablets, deprived of their Alisa Model, too tired to go and get laid in the President – the corridor, the lift, and then the direct descent into the underground parking where a black van awaits her, like at the Lacoba, but she’s no longer thinking about that, she wants to stay here, in Athens, and wait in other hotel rooms, open her door to other customers, new ones, to take her clothes off, to be naked, to close her eyes when they touch her, to pretend, to take her usual precautions, always “with”, even if the site says she’ll do it “without”; she closes her eyes, says nothing, submits, shifts her position, turns over, looks away. She doesn’t want to get into this vehicle that is to drive her directly to the plane; she doesn’t want to go back to Russia, not like this, not penniless, with nothing, and then what will she do in Moscow?