The House on Paradise Street

by Sofka Zinovieff

  I wanted to call Mod (I must check my daughter-in-law’s name) to talk to somebody about Nikitas, but I was paralysed. I kept thinking about the one time I saw my son as an adult – something I never told anyone about. Another burden of guilt. It happened over twenty years ago, in the 1980s, so I suppose he was about forty. He had written. He said he was travelling to Moscow for work and would like to see me. I replied, giving a time to meet outside the hotel where he was staying – the Rossiya. When the day arrived I set off from home and I don’t think I have ever been so afraid – not even in the war. I can admit that now. I walked down through Red Square and from some way off, I saw him. I suppose I would not have recognised him but for a photo in a newspaper that Dora had sent me. He was smoking and stamping his feet in the snow, his breath puffing out plumes of tobacco into the freezing air. He wore a fur hat with earflaps hanging down. I cannot explain why I hid behind a parked car. There are no good excuses. I just stayed there for some time, taking sidelong looks so he wouldn’t notice me, knowing that there was nothing I could do to make up for so many decades. Yet I wanted to watch my son, to take in every detail. I knew it was too late to become a mother. After about an hour, my jaw was shuddering and my feet numb despite the lined boots I wore. I watched as he looked around him and into the distance for a last time and walked through the revolving doors into the hotel. I waited a moment before turning to go, aware that there was still the opportunity to change this story. When I arrived home, I didn’t tell Igor about Nikitas’ letter or about what happened. I wondered whether my son might turn up at our apartment, as he knew the address, but he obviously decided against it. Who would want a mother who let you down all over again? That night in bed, I heard my mother’s voice: “Antigone, you deserve your fate. You have brought all this on yourself.” And it’s true.

  Son, my flesh and blood. marrow of my bones, heart of my own heart, sparrow of my tiny courtyard, flower of my loneliness.

  Yiannis Ritsos wrote that. A comrade during the war, he also knew about being locked up for your beliefs.

  * * *

  When I eventually called Mod she sounded pleased.

  “Antigone!” She called me by my name and used the intimate form of address as though I were a friend or relation. She said, “I’ve been trying to ring you. Where have you been?” I could tell she was surprised I was in Athens, which was strangely gratifying, as though I was part of her life. I told her about Dora and her house in Patissia and how I had been unwell. She said, “I would really like to see you. I would like to talk.” She invited me to go to Paradise Street, but I suggested we meet in a café. I was not yet ready to face all the ghosts, let alone my sister. I said, “Somewhere simple. Somewhere I can find easily,” and she suggested a little place on Anapafseos. I remembered it as a shady, sloping road full of marble monument workers, whose name made you picture the peaceful rest that could be found at its summit in the First Cemetery. And when I arrived, that was what it still was, though motorbikes streaked up and down more than in my day.

  I arrived early at Cafe 13 and a woman who must have been as old as me, gestured at a dozen empty tables from which I could take my pick. Mod had said that the place was quiet. I sat towards the back of a room that reeked of bleach and contained only two elderly men, who gawked at me as though I were an intruder. I stared back at them, not intimidated. Mod arrived exactly on time and my impression was of a slim body and a cloud of curling, almost red hair – the woman I had seen at the funeral. Her face was gaunt – you could tell she was grieving – but her eyes were beady with curiosity as she approached. I stood up and offered my hand but she moved in close and kissed me, holding onto my hand and examining me. She appeared to be looking for some kind of answer. She said, “You have Nikitas’ eyes, but I can also see my daughter’s mouth and chin. We named her after you, but I call her Tig.” I was never one for small talk so I liked her directness, though it was quite overwhelming being turned into the matriarch of a family I didn’t know. We both sat down and I offered her a cigarette, which she refused. I lit one myself, taking my time so as to pull myself together, drawing the blessed smoke in deep.

  My daughter-in-law said she wanted to find out more about my son. She would like to talk to me and write some things down.

  “Research,” she said.

  I said, “Perhaps I’m not the best person to help you. After all, I last knew Nikitas when he was three.”

  I could see the thought pass across her face: “Aah, a difficult old woman.” And perhaps I am, but I had nothing to prove. Why should I open myself up to a stranger in this way? She said, “But you could tell me about yourself and explain what happened, why you left him. I need to understand more. You could do it for my daughter – your granddaughter.”

  I did not answer, but sipped my coffee, pondering. Then I asked her how her name was spelled, which made her laugh and her whole face altered and became quite beautiful and lively. I saw for the first time what my son might have seen in this woman.

  Mod tried a new approach. She said, “I wanted to ask you about John Fell. Who was he?”

  “A family friend. Dead and gone, I should imagine.” I wanted to say: “What’s it to you, my girl?” What did she want, my curious daughter-in-law, with her insistent ways? What kind of interrogation was this? She told me she had found a letter to me from England and looked at me closely as I answered. I turned the questioning back and asked her what the letter had said. And where did she find it? Mod paused, as though we were talking about her private correspondence, not mine. Then she said, “It was from before the war – you must have been a schoolgirl. And it was sent from Oxford.” Mod had that terrier-like tendency I’ve seen in other English people, including Johnny. Once they’ve picked up a bone they won’t drop it. That’s their strength and their weakness; they didn’t hold onto their colonies all that time without having strong teeth and a belief that whatever anyone else says, the bone is theirs.

  I told her briefly that Johnny had been a student of classics before the war, and that he came to Greece two years running to study inscriptions on the tombs in Keramikos. He taught English to me and my siblings. Then, to my surprise, Mod suggested we visit Nikitas’ grave and we left the café as a group of mourners were pushing through the door like a herd of sheep. At the entrance to the First Cemetery, she bought two bunches of anemones from a flower stall and gave me one. The earth over the grave was still raw and there was no stone yet, but we sat for a few minutes on a wall, looking at the scene. She spoke very softly, not looking at me.

  “I loved him, your son.” I could not come up with the right answer (“I’m pleased”, “so did I”, “what difference does that make?”) and remained silent. I was never one for the quick retort or the easy chat – I’ve left that to others, like Natalya or Dora. My answers come to me later, when I’m alone.

  As we walked back in silence along the paths, I spotted a cat hiding under a shrub. I bent down, saying Misha’s name, trying to coax him out with Russian endearments.

  “Kssss, kssss,” I called. I saw Mod looking at me as though I was mad but she said nothing.

  “Kssss, kssss. Mishinka, come here.” Eventually a skinny tabby bearing no resemblance to Misha got up and slunk off and I couldn’t face explaining the whole story. Mod’s expression revealed how disturbing she found my behaviour, but I didn’t mind. I have nothing to prove. Still, when she kissed me goodbye and helped me into a taxi, she appeared disappointed. And who can blame her? I have made a habit of letting people down.

  It took almost an hour to get back to Patissia, as the centre had been blocked off for a demonstration. We got stuck in traffic and, crawling along, I had plentiful opportunity to reflect on my mistakes. Why was I keeping my distance from the English girl? What was my problem with talking about the past? I would soon be gone anyway, so why not tell some stories? Now that I had my very own family I should make the most of them – I had to admit I was curious to meet my grandchildren, my own flesh and blood
.

  Several Somali children were playing on Dora’s front steps when I arrived and they laughed at me as I made my way into the hall. The lift eventually arrived with one of the Ukrainian women carrying a shopping bag and I greeted her in Russian. She answered dully, as though everyone spoke Russian in Athens. Dora was out and I sat at her kitchen table with a new pad of lined paper. In front of me I placed a lock of hair, a button and a photograph. They would help bring the memories. I didn’t feel like speaking to anyone about my past – perhaps my silence has been kept too long to break it – but I decided to write down my own version of events. Perhaps my granddaughter will read it one day. I will start at the beginning, as one should.

  * * *

  My childhood

  When I was a child, my parents appeared like demi-gods. They towered above us and their past was our family mythology. I would ask them over and over to tell me their stories– so different from one another. My father, Petros, was born in 1897, in Perivoli, a village near Lamia, right in the middle of Greece. His father had been a tailor, but died when Petros was four and his mother took her only son to Athens. They rented a room in Kalithea and the young widow set up as a seamstress. Petros left school at twelve but he was ambitious and helped his mother expand her business. They brought in one employee, then another and Petros got hold of fashion magazines so they could copy the latest ideas from France. They moved to a larger workshop, eventually acquiring an atelier in Psyrri, where smart Athenian ladies came to be measured up and to choose fabrics and patterns. My father was too young to fight in the Balkan Wars and managed to avoid being called up during the First World War. Instead, he continued his own battle to make Perifanis a name in the city. By 1920, he had succeeded. He was rich enough to buy a car and a house where they had a cook and a maid. By this time, my paternal grandmother was dressing in silks and furs, and helped oversee a workforce of eight seamstresses.

  The story of how my parents met was my favourite part of the legend. I heard it countless times and still recall how my father described his first sight of my mother. In October 1922, when Petros was 25, a beautiful young woman walked into the atelier. She asked, in educated Greek, whether he needed a secretary, adding that she had plenty of experience. Petros did not know she was lying, and that Maria had only arrived in Greece the previous month. He too lied – that he had just been about to advertise for someone to help with the accounts. Petros already knew what he wanted.

  My mother was among the first wave of refugees from Smyrna. For us children, there was a sort of glamour in the enormity of the disaster. We heard about mythological scenes of destruction: the city flaming in the night sky, rampaging Turkish soldiers spearing babies on bayonets, bodies floating in the water. It was as though their screams reverberated through our childhood. For my mother, however, “Catastrophe” was a word that followed her around like an ugly dog. With a combination of luck and determination, she managed to get onto a crowded boat in Smyrna’s harbour with her mother and younger brother. Her father had been taken away – like many thousands of adult male Greeks, he just disappeared.

  They arrived in Athens with a few bundles and no money, joining a deluge of uprooted people with nowhere to go. Some were given tents on the empty slopes of Hymettus, others camped by the Hephaestus Temple at Thisio. Maria and her family were taken to the Municipal Theatre in Kotzia Square, where each family was allowed to occupy a box, rigging up blankets for a little privacy. It was a beautiful place – designed by the famous German architect, Ziller – but that was little comfort to its devastated occupants. Maria’s mother, Sylvia, cried all day. And my grandmother was not even Greek, so she did not have the debatable satisfaction of arriving in her fatherland. She had been born into an English family in Smyrna. They had lived in a villa and owned a business exporting dried fruits. Her parents had warned her about marrying a Greek and she had never even learned his language properly – everyone she conversed with in Smyrna knew French, English and Turkish as a matter of course. Then in 1922, on account of her Greek surname, she had been sent away from the only country she ever knew. When I was young my grandmother still lamented those painful times. She’d say, ‘We were like beggars. We had lost everything and knew nobody’.”

  Naturally they were not alone in their troubles. Within a year there were over a million Asia Minor refugees. They were classified as “Greeks” because they were Christians and sent “home” to a country they had never seen. Many didn’t even speak Greek. They were just numbers, little people, pawns for political ambitions and international treaties. As usual it was down to the whims of the Great Powers – the British (of course), the French, the Americans. One day they told the Greek army to invade Turkey, saying they’d be there to help, the next they had disappeared. The foundations of a tragedy were set.

  My mother and her young brother, Diamantis, had been brought up in the kind of sophisticated, cosmopolitan milieu that did not exist in Greece. Life was as gay and cultured as in Paris, they said, but with a better climate. As a girl, Maria had attended the Kentrikon Parthenogogeion [Greek Girls’ School], had taken lessons in dance, piano, botany and drawing with private tutors, and had gone to the latest charity concerts. She was a keen amateur actress and singer and belonged to an acting society, so when they set up home in an Athenian theatre she was young enough, at twenty, to be amused. During her explorations backstage, Maria came across some costumes and extracted a suit. She still had it in her wardrobe when I was a child – a reminder, she said. It was made of grey striped wool and had a matching hat. My father liked describing it in later years, as absurdly out of fashion, but, with its close-fitted cut, deeply flattering.

  Realising that she was the only person who could do something to help her family in its dire situation, Maria decided to find work. This was something she knew nothing about, but she pinned a flower to the actress’s suit, cleaned her boots and set off to an address in Psyrri. Inside her bag was an advertisement from a magazine that someone had left on one of the seats in the theatre. The half-page spread had a picture of an elegant woman and proclaimed that Perifanis [a name related to the word for pride] was the only place for a lady to go to be proudly well-dressed. Perifanis: yia perìfano styl.

  My father fell immediately and deeply in love, and although he was not educated as she was, I can see why my mother was attracted to him. He was confident and full of energy. And he was a good man. He took her for a drive in his motorcar and she lost her hat when it flew off. They had lunch in Faliro at a restaurant overlooking the sea – it became a family favourite and we always heard about their first meal there with the best, most orange red mullet that had ever swum in the sea. Within a month they had married. The wedding photographs showed Maria holding orange blossom and lace, and Petros so proud by her side. Next to them were the two widowed mothers. I remember them as life-long friends, despite their different backgrounds. Each recognised the other’s suffering.

  My father instructed an architect and by the time Maria gave birth to their first child in the winter of 1923, the new house in Paradise Street was ready. Alexandra was the first, blonde and blue eyed, followed a year later by me and finally by Markos. We sang English nursery rhymes with our Smyrna grandmother (who lived up in Kaisariani with our Uncle Diamantis) and heard village tales of evil spirits and mountain brigands from the other.

  When we were young my father was determined to give us everything he lacked as a child. We were proof of how far he had come. He loved that my mother wanted Alexandra and me to be proper bourgeois young ladies, with music lessons and dancing and French. In the evenings my mother used to light the candles on the piano – an upright Imperial – and she’d sing Italian songs she learned as a girl with her teacher, Signor Robini. We all thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

  My father had our clothes made up by his seamstresses – white sailor suits in summer and blue in the winter. And he made sure that the table was overflowing. In those days if you had meat twice a
week you were a pashá, and we always did, although my mother used to tease my father because he still loved the plain Greek cooking of his childhood, especially bobóta [maize porridge], which he insisted must still find a place on the table. My mother thought it was tasteless “peasant food”, but she loved him and went along with his wishes.

  “My Bobóta,” she used to call him, and he didn’t mind. He’d call her his Smyrnian girl.

  On Saturdays, my father went to the patisserie and bought a huge basket of chocolates and sweets that would sit on the hall table all week and we could take whatever we liked. On Sundays we went to church down the road at Agia Photini, where the Judas trees flowered bright pink in the spring. I was afraid of the pigeons that gathered to peck at crumbs from the sweet holy bread that was often handed out. The birds fluttering sent me into a panic, made worse by people’s laughter. Perhaps I was allowed to be too sensitive, but I was also always the rebel, the middle child caught between Alexandra’s haughty ways and Markos, the baby. I was much closer to my brother – we were almost like twins. Neighbours called us the little gypsies, for our dark complexions and also for our wild streak. While Alexandra used to sit and listen to the grown-ups or read a book, Markos and I would play in the street and climb trees on Ardittos hill. We rubbed dirt on our faces, put leaves in our hair and picked the gluey scabs of resin off the pine trees, coming home like “wild creatures”. But nobody was really angry. We were just taken out to the washroom and bathed, then given clean clothes and a bowl of warm trachanás porridge.