Signs of a Struggle

by Tony Kaplan

  We travel in silence with the windows rolled down – Antonis wishes to smoke. The night-time trees float by, ghosts of their daytime selves. The moon drifts behind a thin cloud, with the face of an old man with sunken cheeks and gaunt eyes. Behind us, the lights of the police car follow, disappearing then reappearing as the road unfurls. As we go over the last ridge and see the lights of the town in the valley, Antonis remembers something. “Ah,” he says, tapping his ash, “We got back the results of the DNA analysis. The body in the bridge, and Michalis Epistemos – there is no correspondence. There should be at least some. So the body in the bridge we can say is not Eleftherios Epistemos.” He shrugs and we return to our contemplative silence. “So, who it is in the bridge? It is still a mystery.”

  Antonis parks Bobby’s car opposite the police station. The square is empty and our footsteps clatter across the space into the shadows of the awnings at the sides. The police car comes to a respectful stop outside the door to the station and the officers get out, supporting Kosta, who has trouble staying on his legs, so wilted by his shame. His father turns his face away. I suspect he, too, is ashamed, but he must also be torn apart by anguish at the fate that awaits his only son and by his foreknowledge of the life he himself will now lead alone.

  We go through to the single holding cell at the back. Jurgen Preissler has heard the commotion and is standing peering out expectantly. One of the officers unlocks his cell and signals for Jurgen to come out. Jurgen Preissler is indeed short and wiry as described, with a shifty belligerent look, as if he is not pleased to have been woken up. Kosta is hustled into the now vacant cell, while the German activist looks on nonplussed. The officer throws Jurgen’s holdall out of the cell and it collapses onto the floor outside. “Hey!” Jurgen exclaims indignantly, “Don’t do ziss! You break my electric toosbrush, you numbskull!”

  “You are free to go,” Panagiotis tells him in a lifeless voice.

  “Go vere? It is the mittel of ze night!” Jurgen complains.

  “Go anywhere you like. Just not here. Go. We are very busy now,” the Chief says, pushing the activist out the door.

  “No apology, no explanations, no nussing!” Jurgen whines. “Ziss is not ze end. Ze Ambassador vill haf your guts for garters!” he shouts defiantly as he slouches out into the unexpected night.

  I go over to the basin and turn the tap on. I have a strong urge to wash, to cleanse myself. “No!” Antonis shouts, “Don’t wash your hand. We must test you for cordite, to see if you fired the gun. Wait,” he says and speaks in Greek to the Chief, who gives one of his officers (who I think is Vassilis) an instruction. After a rummage, he finds a kit and sets about swabbing the skin of my hands while Antonis looks on. Job done, I am instructed to wait while the one I think is Vassilis compiles the blank documents they will need to record my statement.

  Panagiotis, glancing at the cell where his son is now held prisoner, whispers something to the officer guarding him and then goes out. He cannot further delay the job he has designated to himself, that of breaking the bad news to the relative of a deceased. He must look Hektor in the eye and tell him his son, Christos, his golden boy, is dead. The officer (the one who is not Vassilis) looks in on Kosta and shakes his head sadly. Hours ago, Kosta was his colleague, his boss’s son.

  Antonis pulls the table into the middle of the floor and arranges two seats on either side. He motions for me to sit. I will write a statement of the events of the night as fully as possible. I will write in English and this will be translated later. I set about doing this, my brain like caked mud, dark and lumpen. I plough into this, relentlessly methodical, straight lines, my words emerging mechanically, precise, without the intense emotions which will throw me off course. Reported speech, no quotations, as if once removed, disembodied. The night’s events encapsulated in formal prose, as if I were an observer only and not a participant.

  The officer (the one who isn’t Vassilis) makes instant coffee for all of us. I notice in the mug for Kosta he puts in three sugars and stirs the dark liquid assiduously, like he wants to be sure to get the warming drink to the right pitch of sweetness for his erstwhile friend and colleague - an act of comforting. As I review what I have written, I hear Kosta gulping down the coffee and then pant with the effort. Then he gags and throws up all he has eaten and drunk for the last day. It spews out and between evacuations, he howls with his despair, until he has nothing left, save for his whimpering. The officer who isn’t Vassilis brings a mop and bucket and cleans the cell, then he shuts the door behind him, carefully, like he doesn’t want to disturb a sleeping child.

  Antonis says I can go, but if I want to, I can wait for him and he will drive me back to Agia Anna when he has finished interviewing Kosta. I don’t trust myself to drive Bobby’s car, so I tell him I’ll wait. I go out into the quiet night of Agia Sofia and amble down to the water’s edge, interrupted only by the occasional shadow of a surreptitious cat. The boats in the harbour roll gently on the hint of a breeze. There is the faintest rim of dawn light emerging over the distant mountains. The sea is still silvered by the moon, now sinking lower towards the distant horizon. At the end of the jetty, a fishing boat has its lights on and two grizzled fishermen are offloading their catch of calamari and small fish, murmuring inconsequentially as they work, their cigarette glued to their lower lips, the rich aroma of the nicotine mingling with the tang of the fish and of the open sea. They don’t acknowledge me.

  I feel, more than ever, an outsider, an interloper. They will not know I have been here nor that I am gone. Perhaps when the light comes up, it will all seem real again. For the moment, I exist in a penumbra of something awful that has happened to someone else.

  53

  I wake up late the next day. My sleep has been dreamless, but when I wake, my bedclothes are tangled and damp. I let the water from the shower run cold over me as I stand motionless. I dry myself listlessly, brush my teeth, drink down a glass of water, put on a tee-shirt and shorts and go to look for Antonis. It is as though my mind is emptied out, a hollow echo-less chamber. I feel the sun on my skin. It feels good.

  I find Antonis coming along the beach towards me. He too has just risen. His face looks slept in, his eyes bloodshot and heavily hooded. He steers me wordlessly back the way I have come. He hesitates at The Seaview, but then decides against it. There are complications there and he needs his coffee first. We go to Yianni’s and sit at my usual table.

  I can see in Yianni’s face that word has travelled fast. He is solemn and respects the silence there is between Antonis and me. He hands us each a menu – it is already lunchtime, I notice with surprise. We order coffee to start and I also have freshly squeezed orange juice – my tongue is like a potato crisp. We study the menu. I try to imagine myself into hunger, but without success. Maybe I should have Soulla’s bean soup – easy on the stomach and nutritious. I suggest this to Antonis and I can see his predicament has been the same as mine and he is relieved I have found an easy solution. He puts the menu down flat and sighs deeply.

  “Hektor Papademos is in the hospital. When Panagiotis told him the news about his son, he had a heart attack,” he says, his hand clasping at his chest. “The poor man. How terrible it must be to lose your only child. Tomorrow they will fly him to the hospital on the big island.” He leans forward. “He has called the mother of Michali,” (he signals with his thumb over his shoulder to the Seaview) “to come to his bedside. Why, I don’t know.” He leans back. “But it is strange, is it not? Stavroula Epistemos is not his relative. A married woman, whose husband has just returned to her. The tongues will flap in the mouths of the old women for sure!”

  I glance over to the restaurant next door, just as Michalis and Mavros emerge onto the balcony. Michalis claps his father on the back, but it is a gesture more fitting for a friend than a father. Mavros gives a slim smile, hardly a smile at all, but he appreciates that his son is making an effort. It couldn’t have been easy for them – Mavros back from the dead, when he wasn’t dead at all
, to reclaim his dead son (or so he thought) - he had never come back to be with his living one. Michalis must be hurt by that. To find out that there had been a son before him – Michalis didn’t remember his older brother and his mother had never spoken of him. For Mavros, to see the son he had left behind, whom he had last seen as an infant. And to find he had a grand-daughter.

  Xanthe joins them. She goes to sit on her Baba’s knee and runs her fingers through his still thick white hair, neatening him up. He smiles at her warmly, folding his arm around her and she talks to him with an amused lilt in her voice that I can just make out. Michalis looks proud of her and how she can make his father fond, how relaxed they are with each other.

  The body language between the father and the son, on the other hand, is formal, polite, forced. They are trying to be nice to each other. I wonder what they make of Hektor Papademos’s request for Stavroula to come to him – what was there between them?

  Yiannis returns with our coffee. “Yiannis,” I ask him, “You know about Christos Papademos?”

  “Nai,” he says. “And now his father is in the hospital.”

  “He has asked for Stavroula to come to him. Why Stavroula? What’s that about?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Everybody know Hektor had the eye for Stavroula when she was still a young woman, but he was married man. Hektor’s wife very rich woman. He take her money to start his business. What they could do? I think he tell her she must wait so he can divorce from his wife. But then came Mavros and straight away Stavroula marry him. Maybe Hektor is always love her and he wants now to tell her this.”

  “Hektor’s wife is still alive?” I ask.

  “Ochi. No. She die long ago.”

  “So why did he not tell Stavroula before?”

  Yiannis shrugs once more. “After he return from America, he not speaking with Stavroula. Why?” He shrugs again. “In the church, they not even look to each other. Maybe to do with Mavros? Maybe something was happen. Maybe this is why he call her now.”

  “Unfinished business,” I say with an uncharitable smirk.

  “Nai,” says Yiannis. “Maybe I find out. Soulla’s cousin is work in the hospital,” he says as he taps his nose and winks at me, a conspiratorial gleam in his eye.

  “You do that, Yiannis,” I chuckle. I am now curious about this late intrigue in the lives of these two octogenarians. The spice of local gossip. Maybe I can find a place for it in my last report. I leave in two days’ time.

  54

  Antonis has yet to tell Mavros the results of the DNA test, that the body in the bridge was not his son, Eleftherios. So, after our meal (Soulla’s soup, after the first tentative mouthful, is quite delicious – flavoured with cumin and served with thick-cut stone-ground bread), we head over to The Seaview. As we get there, Michalis is rushing out. Stavroula, his mother, has called from the hospital and told him he must come straight away. He searches in jerky glances for something to anchor his worry and puzzlement and then suddenly turns, murmuring to himself, “Ai, ai, ai!” he walks with short urgent steps to his car, where Xanthe waits, frowning, leaning forward in the driver’s seat, hands on the steering-wheel, ready to drive him into town.

  Mavros watches him go with a look of foreboding. We approach him and Antonis greets him pleasantly. “Geia sou, kirie Epistimos. Ti kaneis?”

  Mavros gives a non-committal head waggle and murmurs, “Kala,” without enthusiasm.

  Antonis sits down uninvited opposite Mavros and considers how to begin. Mavros looks apprehensive. He can see something is up. In English (for my benefit?) Antonis tells Mavros that the body in the bridge is not Eleftherios. There was no match with Michali’s DNA.

  Mavros considers this. His eyes sadden. He purses his lips. Then he says gravely, “Michalis is not my son.”

  He waits for us to take this in. Antonis explains the result to him again in Greek this time, to be sure there is not a problem of translation. But Mavros shakes his head. “Stavroula was pregnant when I agreed to marry her. The father of the child was a married man. She would not say who.” Again he waits for Antonis to comprehend him, before he goes on, “I accepted this arrangement. She agreed to take me in with my son. She gave me everything she owned, which wasn’t much, but it gave me a chance to start again. She did this so she wouldn’t live in shame.” His sad eyes smoulder. “I think the man who made her with child is Hektor Papademos. I think it was Hektor who gave me away to the Military Police, so he could be with Stavroula.”

  The startling revelation is interrupted by a smoky, “Kalispera, sintrofe Mavre!” I look around. I know that voice. It is Calliope, with her husband, Nektarios, in tow, slouching behind her.

  Mavros stands to receive her and is rewarded with a kiss on both cheeks. She is full of bonhomie and greets Antonis and me with expansive generosity. She sits down and leaves Nektarios to find a chair to draw up at our table. Then she notices the sombre mood and her face flinches into a respectful curiosity. Mavros’s stillness has quiet dignity. Calliope looks from Antonis to me. “Have I…?”

  “Calliope knows this story well,” Mavros says. “Maybe she is the only one.” He looks to Calliope, who in turn looks enquiringly at Antonis and then at me.

  “Is this about Stavroula and Eleftherio?” she asks us. When we nod, she looks to Mavros. With a look of resignation, he waves an open hand of invitation for her to tell us what she knows.

  “Endaxi. I came to this island in 1962. I had only just qualified as a social worker at the National Royal Foundation in Athens, which in those days was the only place in Greece where you could train as a social worker. Social work had only been made a profession the previous year and cautiously so. We were prohibited from any political activity or applying ourselves in a way which may have been thought to give people the idea that they deserved more from the State. There was a strong anti-communist agenda in those days. I was by that stage already in the communist underground.

  “When Comrade Mavros came to the island of course I offered to help him settle, not for him only, but for the boy also, for Eleftherio. He had what now we call ‘special needs’, ‘learning difficulties’ – he was autistic. He was born in the Civil War in the mountains – the cold and the poor nutrition affected his brain maybe. He grew up without his mother. That too made a difference. But it was not easy. To get help from the State in those days you had to have a ‘Certificate of national probity’ – I think this is the correct translation. It was to prevent Left-wing people benefiting. It was harsh. And, of course, Mavros and Eleftherios didn’t have papers. So I had to pull strings – lie for them – to get assistance for Eleftherio – to get him education – well, it was more sheltered work, training of a kind.

  “Then when there was the military coup and Mavros feared he would be arrested, he came to me to ask me to make sure that Eleftherios would be taken care of. He didn’t trust Stavroula. Before Michalis came – before she had her own child, she accepted Eleftherio. But after she mothered her own child, she wanted nothing to do with Eleftherio. She said he frightened her, he was not right in the head – that he was cursed by the evil eye and she didn’t want the curse to affect Michali. That is right, nai, Mavro?”

  Mavros nods sadly, remembering. Calliope continues. “After Mavros was taken, Stavroula came straight to me with Eleftherio. ‘Take him,’ she said, ‘he is not my child.’ She said she was a poor woman, probably now also a widow and she couldn’t manage to look after Eleftherio. The poor boy – he was so ashamed and frightened. What could I do? – we didn’t have papers for him. I could get him a small job, but nothing more. He ran away. I heard he was living rough.”

  “I heard about that,” I interpose softly, “From next door – from Yianni.” Calliope fixes me with a look that tells me I shouldn’t interrupt her flow.

  “It was after they brought him to see me in the prison,” Mavros says. “I don’t know what they did to him or what they told him. This is why he ran away – to hide from them.”

  “And from St
avroula,” Calliope says firmly. “You must believe this, Mavro. The boy was frightened of her. Maybe she told him she would hand him over to the police, I don’t know.”

  Mavros puts his head down to hide his remorse and his bitter anger. Antonis puts a comforting hand on his shoulder. Mavros lets it rest there.

  “This made me so angry,” Calliope goes on. “I decided I should find out what Eleftherios was owed by Stavroula. She had married his father and had signed over all she’d owned to him. Nai, Mavro?” Mavros nods sorrowfully. “I told her if anything happened to her husband, Eleftherios would inherit from him all that was hers. If she’d had a girl, she could have argued that the matrilineal inheritance tradition on the island would have entitled her daughter to her property. But she had a son. So, as it stood, Michalis was the second-born – he would have inherited nothing. I threw the 1959 United Nations Rights of the Child at her. She came from a wealthy family in Smyrna, but she herself was not well-educated. She was terrified of having nothing – she had suffered when her family had lost everything in the ashes of Smyrna. She still thought of herself as a lady, an aristocrat. She’d been humiliated by her father’s poverty for so long. She did not want to lose everything. She was desperate. Then she got lucky: Eleftherios disappeared. I looked for him. I couldn’t find him. I thought maybe the authorities sent him to Macronissos.”

  Mavros lifts his head and gives a sigh that is more of a shudder. “I must go to Stavroula. I have been a coward. I have left it all these years. Stavroula will know what happened to my boy. I must do this for his mother, for my Eleni, who is buried in an unmarked grave in the mountains. My son must be buried in a grave with his name on it.” He gets up, his movements jumbled by his emotions.