Signs of a Struggle

by Tony Kaplan

  “Patriot.”

  “Nai. Patriot. And fasistis. Fascist – nai?”

  I tell him I know a little from the book on Modern Greek history I read on the plane coming over. I know the ardently anti-communist General Metaxas was put in power by the King in the mid-30s, because the King wanted a strong man to oppose the rise of the increasingly popular Communists, who held the balance of power in the parliament.

  Yiannis pours us each a generous shot from the General’s bottle. “So what Metaxas he do? – he say no more political parties! Just like this.” He snaps his fingers. “Like Mussolini. The Kommunistica peoples he put in the jails. No freedoms. Newspapers? - only the ones for him and for the King. Books? - they burn in the street! – even Plato! Even Aristophanes! Wil-liam Shakespeare! Unbelievable! But the army? - for them, everything. Nice uniforms, guns, everything they wunt.

  “Metaxas and Mussolini, like two dogs with one bone. When comes War of the World Number Two, Mussolini and Metaxas they make a big fight. Mussolini send his men when it is winter in the mountains. Can you believe it? Macedonia. Albania. The Italians…” he shakes his head, “freeze in the snow. All of them die. Metaxas is a big hero. For few months only. Then he also die - in his bed! And the Germans come. In two weeks, in Athens.”

  “How was it on Mythos in the war?” I ask.

  Yiannis slugs back his drink and pours himself another shot. I am still sipping slowly. He loosens a cigarette from his pack and lights up. “You see the Greek families was here before? Lambros. Brothers. Their Baba, grandfather, Aris Lambros - Kommunistica.” He exhales and tips ash which isn’t yet formed. “The woman who was come in after - Limoni, is their sister, married to grandson of Garidis. Konstantinos Garidis is Fascistis. The two families no speak for fifty years, only after Limoni marry to Fotis Garidis and she have a baby - at the Christening they speak. The young ones, what they care? What they know of the war? But now, when they find the body in the bridge, now they don’ talk no more. The body in the bridge it makes people to remember.”

  He takes a puff of his cigarette. “I was just a zmall boy. Garidis, the grandfather, Konstantin - he was a young man, very handsome and lots of muscles. He like to show us his muscles and what he could lift up. The Italians they come here first, and a few Germans. Garidis was work for them. He was one who show who is a Jewish – two families in the port, in Agia Sofia. Finished. He show who is Kommounistika. The men - the andartes - went to the mountains. ELAS. But what guns they have? – to shoot rabbits only! Their families they suffer. No food. No can make work. Garidis have uniform, and boots... He walk up and down like famoos man.”

  “Was there much resistance on the island?” I ask.

  “Later, after 1943 when Germans come – the Germans kill-ed some Italians, so Italians helps us. The Germans, some of them not so bad; they give us childrens sweets, respect the woman (not like the Italians) – but the Gestapo…” he can’t find the English words to match his expression of disgust. I glance at the young hippy couple, still at their table in the shadows. Are they Germans? Yiannis sees my glance. “Dutch,” he says, “Not Germans.”

  “It was worse in the big cities. In Athens 300,000 people they die of no food. The Greeks in the government – trothotiz – Rallis – he make Security Battalion – you hear Security Battalion?”

  I have heard of the infamous Security Battalion and their excesses and mimicry of the Gestapo.

  “They punish everybody who is not support Rallis and the Germans. Garidis, he make himself head of the Security Battalion in Mythos. After the war, Garidis in prison, but only few years. Malakas. The bastard – they should have shot him! But he is still have his business, his factory – he live in the village up there in the mountains,” says Yiannis pointing to the faint pinpricks of light in a cleft in the dark hills. “Kasteli,” he savours the name. “His grandson is marry with the grand-daughter of Aris Lambros who was with ELAS in the mountains. First they don’ speak, then they speak, now again they don’ speak. Istoria – history…” he gives a shrug, “like a drunk man. What you can do?”

  9

  When I get back to the cottage, the note I left for Lucy is still on the door. Lucy is not back yet. The night has not turned out like I hoped it would. I must be patient. Maybe she’ll come back in the night.

  She doesn’t. When I wake, I go to her bedroom to see if she’s returned, but her bed is still made. She has not been home. I guess she is on some urgent assignment. Still, she could have left a note. I presume her phone is still not working or lost, or she would have called me. At least I am now sure she’s got her laptop with her, so I could e-mail her again.

  On my way down to the Seaview for breakfast, I compose a message to Lucy in my head.

  Dearest Lucy, Maybe you’ve worked out that the mess in your cottage is me. I’m here. So much for the surprise! Now that I am so close to you and see your things around me, I miss you with the intensity of a volcano (… no, that has sexual connotations) … I miss you with the intensity of… I miss you even more. Lucy, I am so happy we are going to be together. I think this was meant to be. I hope you feel the same. Please come back soon. With all my love, Tom.

  Yeah, that should do it.

  Lucy, who I first glanced through a half-open door, sitting with her back to me on my sister’s bed, a seventeen-year-old girl, clothed only in a Javanese wrap, her towel-ruffled red hair splayed over the smooth whiteness of her shoulders, poised, delicately tilted up, like small angel wings. A vision of beauty. I felt it indiscrete to gawp, but was transfixed, until she looked around, her jewel-blue Slavic eyes opening slightly in surprise, drawing me in to drown. I’d rushed away, embarrassed.

  ****

  London. Five years earlier. March, 2000

  Irini’s friend is with her at the breakfast table, their heads close together, whispering conspiratorially. When they see me, they part and go silent, smiling knowingly. “Morning,” I say, being cool and older-brotherly.

  “This is Lucy,” Irini says. The girl, Lucy, lifts her chin at me, defying me to make the first move. Her firmly drawn lips and deep tapering of her cheeks make her appear more handsome than pretty. But it is the luminescence of her cobalt blue eyes and the wildness of her luxuriant auburn hair that make me look away. So much beauty is dangerous. “Lucy is going to stay with us,” Irini says with certainty.

  This is the day after my mother’s funeral, the day after Irini’s panicked phone-call. All I heard between her sobs was “vomited blood” and “ambulance” and I dashed back from university, just as I was about to take my Finals, hoping against hope that there would still be time to say goodbye. I’d arrived too late. My mother had been ill for a long time, deteriorating slowly from cirrhosis of the liver, although she hid it well from me. She did not want her indisposition to affect my studies. The moment of her death came as a shock - I did not think she would die then, not before I’d got my degree. But now she is dead. And Lucy is here.

  Irini tells me, when Lucy goes to the loo, that Lucy is now her best friend, she’s had a tough time and can’t live with her family anymore. Our mother had agreed for Lucy to stay, but had stipulated that Lucy should not have the use my bedroom. She and Irini were sharing a bed. She smirks when she says this. She can tell how turned on I am by her beautiful friend, but I will not give her the satisfaction of owning up to this. I am her older brother, the man of the house, the grown-up. Irini is, to me, still a kid. And so, by extension, is her friend. Therefore out of bounds. “Do you mind, Tom?” she asks provocatively. I grunt my assent.

  For the next week, we are often inevitably in each other’s company, casual everyday things - preparing meals, eating together, watching telly - but I keep to my resolve to be the dutiful older brother, so I do not make a move on Lucy. She and Irini go to movies, but I don’t go with them. They don’t invite me, and I don’t impose myself. I tell myself that my sister’s new best friend is at least five years too young for me. She looks up to me in a way I find touching. S
till, I find myself tongue-tied in her presence.

  A week after she arrives, I am sitting in my bedroom at my make-shift desk, revising for the re-takes of exams I hadn’t taken, when, with an informal knock on the door, Lucy walks in. “I thought you might like some tea,” she says, placing a steaming mug on the desk.

  “I usually take it with one sugar and a drop of milk,” I say.

  “I know,” she says, with a smile of accomplishment. She must have been watching me. She examines the cover of a reference book for my Politics course. “Primitive Rebels by Eric Hobsbawm. Is this any good?” she says.

  “Yeah, well the guys a genius. Have you heard of Eric Hobsbawm?” I ask.

  “No,” she says, defensively, as if I'm testing her, which I am not. “What's it about?”

  “Outlaws,” I tell her, “Outlaw peasants who took a stand against the prevailing elites. The original class warriors. You can borrow it if you like,” I say, hoping she will and that later this will be the portal to a lively discussion wherein I can display to her the fast bends of my analytic mind. Her face opens into a wide smile, even as the colour rises from her neck into her jawline.

  “Really?” she says. She is evidently pleased that I am prepared to treat her as intelligent enough to read a book for 3rd year students. She turns the book this way and that. “Outlaws. I like that. It's only fair when there is so much unfairness in the world,” she says. “We should make things fair.” A hard look narrows her eyes. What has she had to deal with, I wonder. Irini said she’d had a bad time with her family. “Yeah, but then... like guns, in America. That’s what they say - a gun makes things fair, so you can stand up to bullies and criminals. But then all those poor schoolchildren who were killed. How come those two boys even had guns?” She is talking about Colombine, the shooting last year in an American high school. Everybody outside of the US National Rifles Association is up in arms, as it were, against guns, but a year on, you can still buy a gun at a petrol station in some states.

  “You know what I saw on Channel Four?” she asks, her eyes wide, her voice sharpened by outrage. “There's a bank somewhere in the States which, if you open an account with them, is giving customers a free gun! I hope they don’t also give them the bullets! A gun? In a bank?” I grin at her fervour. “What?” she asks, grinning back at me. “Are you laughing at me?”

  “Take the book,” I say with a chuckle. She does. I don’t see the book again. And we don't get to have that discussion.

  What we do have is a row. A few days later. I am woken by the irresistible smell of fried bacon. I have studied deep into the night, trying to store dates and places in my mind for my History exam, and it has not been going well. My brain feels like wet clay. I put on a tee-shirt and jeans and, barefooted, go into the kitchen, knowing that what I want, what will put the world right, is a couple of BLT sandwiches. There’s a double pack in the fridge - should be more than enough. But there isn’t. Irini and Lucy are scoffing a pile of bacon, and I see the empty packet on the sink. “Fuck off!” I explode. “Have you two just eaten all the bacon?”

  Lucy looks guilty, her fork poised near her mouth. Irini has her mouth full (overfull), and is trying to chew and swallow it down so she can defend herself. “You fucking pig!” I shout. She looks so ugly to me in that moment.

  Lucy puts her fork down. “You can have some of mine,” she offers. Irini glares at her.

  “I don't want some of yours - I want mine!” I say churlishly (or could that be childishly), realizing I am being a pillock, but too far gone now to stop myself. “You realize I am paying for all of this with my grant. You two are paying nothing towards your upkeep.”

  Irini is chomping her food as fast as she can, but the effort is keeping her silent for the time being. Lucy is watching Irini’s vigorous chewing with fascination. She is waiting for her to say something. But then she loses patience. “I don't have any money. I used up all the money the social worker gave me. I can try to get some more though,” she says, the doubt in her voice poignant. I feel a pang of sympathy (and sorrow) for this girl who has been kicked out of her family. I want to tell her it’s not her I’m angry with – it’s my gluttonous sister I am angry with - but I don’t.

  “I suppose you’ve eaten all the eggs too?” I growl.

  Irini has started crying. Lucy gets up to comfort her. I check the fridge - there are still eggs. I turn to see Irini fleeing the kitchen, with her best friend’s arm over her shoulder. Lucy looks back at me at the doorway, her eyes smoldering. I think I also detect a look of disappointment in me - coming from a seventeen-year-old. I want it not to matter, but it does.

  I fry myself two eggs but my anger doesn’t dissipate. Irini and Lucy have left bacon on their plates, but I can’t bring myself to eat their left-overs. I scrape their plates into the bin. I am filled with self-righteousness and I am digesting that last look of Lucy’s. God, she’s so beautiful. An intelligent mind too, I think. I want her to like me. I want her, but I can’t let myself have her. I can’t. Can I?

  Then a few days later, I come home from the library to find that Irini has moved my mother’s things out of my mother’s room, stuffed my mother’s clothes into prosaic black bags ready for the charity shop and has moved Lucy into my mother’s bed. I am not ready for this. I am still acutely feeling the loss of my mother. I want to regain her. I want her scent in her bedroom, the familiarity of her possessions anchors on which to tie childhood memories, already fading. Irini is taking my mother away from me. I hate her in that moment. “You’ve always been ungrateful, Irini, always contrary. You never respected our mother, never tried to understand her. You just always wanted everything your way. You had no compassion for what she had to endure after Dad died. You still don’t. None.”

  Irini glares at me. “You don’t know half of it,” she hisses at me.

  I have been unfair I know, but I am seething and want to be right. “You’re taking the piss,” I snarl.

  “You’re not my parent!” Irini screams at me. “You can’t tell me what to do!”

  “Yes, I can! And I want your friend out of here!” I shout back and immediately regret it. I mean the bedroom, but I know, when I see Lucy’s face, she has heard it as ‘out of the house’. Lucy looks shocked, mortified, then goes to Irini to comfort her, as if Irini is the one who will suffer.

  When I come back from sitting my retakes a week later, Lucy is gone.

  10

  I stride into The Seaview with my laptop. Nitsa doesn’t wait to be asked. She gets up, goes into the office and puts the modem on. I give her my five euros without a word being exchanged. I click ‘Get mail’. Nothing from Lucy yet.

  But there is something from Marsha back at the office. She suggests I send her more brief essays as “Letters from Greece”, but to make them “less dry” than my previous attempt. She likes the environmental angle, but it is the body in the bridge story which has piqued her interest. Do I have any contacts?

  I do, as it happens, Marsha. Antonis Ionides, my new friend, the Inspector from the Athens Political Crimes Unit. I could ask him if I can tag along. Also, that communist woman, Calliope. I should get an interview with her.

  First though I draft my e-mail to Lucy, get it sounding heartfelt but not too earnest and send it off. With this done, I shut my laptop and go to find the Inspector.

  He is on the veranda at the Kafenion, finishing his coffee. “Ah, my friend,” Antonis greets me enthusiastically. I tell him that my editor is keen to do a story on the body in the bridge and I would like to start with a profile of the lead detective. I sit myself down. Antonis smiles broadly, then he shuffles his features into the demeanor of a modest professional. “Yes,” he says, “You can make a report to your newspaper. Why not, my friend? You will need a photograph of me?” Already he is imagining his fame, the subject of a newspaper report in London. “If the story is read outside of Greece, my Minister, the Minister of Public Order and Citizen Protection, will give us more money for the investigation.” H
e offers his hand. We have a deal.

  A car pulls up outside. “My car,” the Inspector says, “Come. Today we go to the bridge.”

  We stop off at Lucy’s house for me to get my camera and shades, then we take the winding road back to the bridge. At the bridge, the heavy building vehicles form a guard of honour, respectfully silent, digging arms lowered. There is a small group of people in discussion, who look up and nod a greeting when we get out the car. Antonis goes to shake hands with the Mayor and the Police Chief, both of whom I recognise from the police station. The Police Chief looks at me suspiciously and asks Antonis something. Antonis gestures at me and says something offhand. The fat cop says nothing, but he is not pleased to have me there. Together we go to a group of men and one woman in white overalls and masks. The woman takes off her mask and talks to Antonis. He nods. They go together to examine the hand protruding from the concrete – it has turned black and is putrefying. I see Antonis grimace and hold his nose discreetly. There is a police photographer, also in overalls, taking pictures. I take a few quick photos with my Canon. Not the best light – the hand is in the shade – but it will have to do for now. I take a shot of Antonis and the female forensic archeologist (which is what she turns out to be). The fat cop comes to me and puts his hand up. “No pictures. No pictures,” he says curtly.

  Antonis comes back and gives me a commentary. The archeological excavation team say the body is likely to be well-preserved in the concrete, but as soon as it is exposed to the air, it will deteriorate rapidly. So, the plan is to take out the entire block of concrete and fly it back to the laboratory in Athens, where they will excavate it under controlled temperature and humidity. But they will have to work fast. The construction company will have to cut the block carefully so that it does not crack open and expose the corpse. It will have to be packed to avoid vibrations when it is transported to the airport and then in the plane. The female forensic archeologist will supervise this. The foreman has assured her they have the right equipment. She is satisfied.