The House on Paradise Street

by Sofka Zinovieff

  Markos and I both wanted adventure. Sometimes we would follow the Ice Man after he left the daily lump for the ice box on our front door step. He had a large, beaked nose and smelled of sweat. But we liked him for the frightening stories he told us in a hoarse voice. From him we heard of murders and missing children and he handed out small pieces of ice for us to suck. Or we would visit Kyrios Yiorgos at the bakery, hoping for a piece of steaming bread fresh from the oven or a misshapen sesame ring. Everyone liked Markos for his wide-open dark-brown eyes and easy smile that got us out of trouble so many times. He never lost that shimmer of innocence, whereas people assumed that I was leading him into trouble.

  When we were quite young, my paternal grandmother gave me and my siblings three small icons. She had bought them on a trip to Tinos, at the shrine to the All-Holy Virgin, after climbing the steps to the church on her knees. “Till they bled,” she said. “Nothing without sacrifice.” We children obediently kissed the silver-plated haloes of the Panayia and Christouli, curled asleep in her arms. We said our prayers as instructed and placed the wooden icons under our pillows to protect us from harm. I liked the solid outline of mother and babe jutting into the soft pillow. I suppose I always appreciated the absence of doubt.

  Later, Uncle Diamantis began to talk to me about injustice. He taught me about workers’ rights and hungry children, about capitalism’s inevitable demise, and I swapped the icon for a copy of Rizospastis, the communist paper that I bought in secret. It cost one drachma. It was made illegal under Metaxas, at the time when the dictator began rounding up the communists. But it only went underground. Diamantis took me to the shacks and shanty towns where it was still available. Most of his friends were people like him, who had come over in 1922 as young refugees. They had moved from tents into huts and gradually into small, mud-bricked houses on dirt roads. There were whole new neighbourhoods like New Smyrna and New Philadelphia. These places were chaotic and the people were shockingly poor, but the houses I visited with my uncle were always clean and well kept. Naturally, most did not have bathrooms or what we would now see as minimal necessities, but they turned them into homes. Oil cans with basil and geraniums made miniature gardens, and fences and walls were whitewashed each year in time for Easter. The older generation clung to dreams of going back, or politicians’ empty promises of compensation, but the younger ones saw there was no return. They knew it was up to them to fight for their future.

  Diamantis and several of his comrades were sent to prison during Metaxas’ petty fascist regime for being communists (the law against “communists and subversives” had been in place since the ’20s). But I went on buying Rizospastis on the quiet – my parents would have been horrified. I was a youthful but committed convert, and when Diamantis was released he fed my faith with certainties. He showed me suffering that was so obviously wrong that it was impossible not to adopt his belief in an earthly, socialist paradise. Diamantis often took me out “for ice-cream” and we’d attend meetings with his union friends from the Papastratos cigarette factory where many of them worked. They were hardened by relentless work, strikes, arrests and imprisonment, and they laughed at my pretty dresses and teased me for my “bourgeois manners”. Still, they welcomed me to the basement off Piraeus Street where they met and made their leaflets on a rusting printing press. Diamantis wanted me to learn. He showed me his worn copy of Das Kapital and a small bust of Lenin, kept in his bedroom. And he sang with his guitar – romances from Asia Minor and stirring socialist anthems, including a few in Russian. It was from him that I learned the Internationale:

  So comrades, come rally,

  And the last fight let us face.

  The Internationale,

  Unites the human race.

  When he took me home, Diamantis often made ironic comments: “Run off now, back to Paradise.”

  I knew better than to tell the family about what went on during my outings. Neither of my parents was interested in politics, though my mother, like many Asia Minor refugees, had been a keen supporter of Venizelos. She still viewed the old liberal statesman as the greatest hope Greece ever had. My father put his business first, preferring to stay on good terms with everyone (“They’re all the same, just looking to line their pockets like everyone else”). As for Alexandra, her alliances were with the adults and, as first-born, she took her responsibilities extremely seriously. She was determined to keep me and Markos under control and was as aloof and certain of her authority as an officer with his troops. If she found us younger ones up to no good, she would report us without hesitation. Once, Despina, our maid, found my stash of Rizospastis. But I swore her to secrecy. It helped that she knew I’d seen her kissing the baker’s son in the alleyway.

  * * *

  Johnny Fell. Strange that Mod wants to know about him. I wonder about that letter and about what happened to the rest of them. I look at my picture of Johnny – one of the few things that made the journey into exile. It sat for decades in one of Igor’s old school files that I used for my papers. The photograph is a shiny black and white one, with scalloped edges and “Ilissos, 1938” written in pencil on the back. He is tall and slim, with shirt sleeves rolled up. His hair is neatly parted. Behind him is a wall of massive stone and he is smiling at the photographer – me. I loved him. But then we all loved him. He was only about twenty when we met him in 1937, but to a thirteen-year-old he seemed quite old. My mother thought him the perfect English gentleman, like the ones she’d known in Smyrna. I think my father appreciated that Johnny was masculine without being competitive – he learned demotic Greek and drank retsina with the workmen at the archaeological digs. What started as a social friendship quickly became something more like family, and after my parents asked him to give us some English conversation lessons, he moved into the house for several months over the summer and again the next year.

  Johnny brought out the best in all of us; we felt brighter under his gaze. We often had lessons outside, walking over to Hadrian’s Arch, or up to the top of Philopappos hill. We’d sit under a tree and listen to him talk. I liked the way he pronounced my name in the English way: “Antígony”, with the stress on the second syllable, as opposed to the Greek “Antigóny”, which emphasized the penultimate one. It made me special, to be someone else in English, unlike Alexandra, who was the same whichever language you said it in. Johnny got us to learn English poems by heart. I wanted to be the best, his favourite. I loved reciting Byron – “Where’er we tread ’tis haunted, holy ground.” I sensed the romance of Greece through Johnny’s eyes, the lure of a pure, ancient world. We learned quotes from Milton:

  Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts

  And eloquence.

  I still remember so much. When you’re young, it sticks. Johnny taught me the word “philhellene” and I felt lucky to be a Hellene, lucky to have been born in this special place. We Greeks were able to appreciate ourselves more because we saw our past reflected in foreigners’ admiring eyes. I believed that the English were philhellenes. That’s partly why it was so hard when they turned against us. In the end they wanted to dominate us like everyone else.

  When Johnny returned the following year in 1938, I had changed. I was taller, my breasts had grown – I had become a young lady. And I was in love with him. I had absurd dreams that I would go to England, that I would marry him. Of course I was still a child. I knew nothing. But there was something that passed between us. Or so it seemed to me. I kept the memory close and secret. I called it by the code name “Ilissos”, after the day we sat by what remained of the ancient river.

  It was early September, some days before Johnny was due to leave for England and I had not yet started school. I persuaded him to come on a picnic with me, knowing that Alexandra was visiting a friend and conveniently forgetting about Markos. Naturally, I would not have been allowed out with a boy on my own, but because Johnny counted as a teacher, somehow nobody noticed. It was the first time I had walked on the street with a man and I felt both proud and afra
id. After all, at school there was even a special children’s supervisor, whose job it was to prevent the sexes mixing, tracking pupils if they went over to the park, checking their identities. This was one of the charming details of the petty fascist state that Metaxas was trying to impose on the country. Another was the weekly session of “national education” at the National Youth Organisation – personal hygiene and sanitising toilets. That’s what they thought was important. It was all uniforms, badges, documents with numbers. Even our black school pinafores had the school number on it, to help the snitches that backed up the regime.

  The unforgiving heat of August had given way to September storms, but the day we went down to the Ilissos was warm with a sea breeze blowing up from the Saronic Gulf. The ancient river was Johnny’s idea.

  “A fair resting place, full of summer sounds and scents,” he said, quoting Plato. “This is what Greece gives – we can sit in the same place that Socrates went with his pupils. We can hear the same cicadas he did.” The ancients thought that cicadas were given the gift of song from the Muses, he said. They appreciated their music so much that they would catch them and weave little cages out of grasses and asphodels in which to keep them.

  It is true that in springtime the area around the Ilissos was lush and green, if unkempt. I remember seeing irises, dragonflies and, once, the turquoise flash of a kingfisher. But it was never the verdant bank described by Plato and dreamed of by Johnny. By summer, the river was a smelly trickle of mud, the grass was like desiccated straw – it was hardly “a fair resting place” for even the most forgiving person. However, I realised that we needed to match untidy reality to a fantasy – Johnny wanted the place to fit his image of nature in ancient Athens. So, we persuaded ourselves that we were in the most charming place, rather as Athenians like to think they are direct descendants of the philosophers and sculptors who walked these places in the distant past.

  We went a little way up from the Ilissos near the gigantic Roman walls that enclose the Temple of Olympian Zeus. There were olives, cypresses and figs as well as wild undergrowth and we stopped by a plane tree, whose branches grew broad and low. I spread a rug on the ground and laid the picnic out: courgette pie baked by Aspasia that morning, bread, fresh curd cheese, peaches and lemonade. I watched Johnny as he lay in the shade after we had eaten. His eyes were closed, topped by eyebrows bleached blonde by the summer sun that had also burnt his face brown. He looked content. I lay down too, pretending to sleep, but looking at him between my eyelashes. The hard, warm ground below me seemed to be the centre of the universe, and I thought I could feel the planet spinning. I edged my arm closer to Johnny, not quite touching, but tingling, almost aching from sensations I did not comprehend. A romantic ballad of the times went round in my head – “Take me, take me”, though it did not speak to me of physical love but of going away with Johnny, of going to England. I pictured him in a study, surrounded by books and shards engraved with mysterious sayings. And me by his side. Neither of us said anything, but I saw him look at me and I knew he cared. That was enough. After that, the word Ilissos became my secret reference to pure happiness. Nothing was ever so simple again.

  The evening before Johnny left, my parents organised a farewell dinner. Aspasia, our cook, prepared the food all day, creating the Asia Minor delicacies that she, like my mother, had grown up with. Both women knew that some of our neighbours referred to them as Turks and commented on the spicy cooking smells emerging from the kitchen. But neither cared. In fact I think that my mother liked to provoke them. She encouraged Aspasia to add more cumin, more garlic.

  “If they call us ‘baptised-in-yogurt’, then throw the yogurt in! And make sure you add plenty of spearmint to the keftedákia.” She was convinced that the smell of these little fried meatballs was guaranteed to drive the neighbours mad with longing. I remember the menu that evening: giant tomatoes stuffed with rice, raisins and parsley; blackened, smoky aubergines on the grill; lamb fricassée, fava bean purée with capers. The memories of these tastes are like ghosts.

  The best dinner service and linen was laid, and my father made a small speech to our dear friend Yiannis, as they usually called him. My mother wore her diamond earrings from Constantinople and they sparkled in the candlelight. Johnny said he would return the following summer to the best people he had ever met. Afterwards, I sat up all night looking out of my bedroom window at the night sky, imagining England.

  9

  The unspeakable name

  MAUD

  When I told Tig and Orestes that I had met Antigone, they were only mildly interested.

  “Did she explain why she never came back to see Babas?” Tig was sitting in the kitchen, eating pieces of bread dripping with honey and carefully avoiding the crusts, which she placed around the edge of the plate. Her fingernails were bitten short and streaked black with the remnants of varnish.

  “She wasn’t allowed to come back by the arsehole fascists who ran this country,” said Orestes, using the tone of an irritable teacher with an indolent pupil. He was standing slumped against the open doorway that led to the spiral stairs, one arm stretched up the door frame with almost balletic grace.

  “She didn’t really explain why, but we did talk about Babas,” I said, replying to Tig’s question. “You could tell that she is his mother – she looks like him. And she is very stubborn. But interesting. Unusual. Would you like to meet her?”

  “Eh,” said Tig, using the non-committal Greek sound that leaves everything hanging.

  “Eh,” echoed Orestes. “If she wants to meet us. But I don’t know what the point is. You can’t just show up after sixty years and expect a ready-made family. It’s not McDonald’s: two grandchildren with French fries and a Coca-Cola please.”

  Tig looked exhausted and smelled of cigarettes and stale clothing. She had spent the night “on guard” at her school, which was under student occupation for the second time in the two years since she had moved there. The change from her private school in the smart suburb of Psychiko to the local one near home had involved much more than just meeting a wider social and ethnic group of children; she had discovered the delights of dissent. The move had occurred after both Tig and Orestes harangued Nikitas about his hypocrisy in claiming to be left-wing yet educating his offspring privately.

  “Even the hard-line communist politicians in Greece send their kids to private schools,” said Orestes. “None of you have any principles – it’s all just theory.”

  It didn’t take much to make Nikitas flip.

  “OK, go to the state school,” he said to Tig. “Why not? I was educated there and turned out fine.” I raised no objections and the following September, Tig stopped taking the school bus up to Psychiko and began walking through the neighbourhood to Athens’ Thirteenth Secondary School.

  Although Orestes had only ever attended private schools, he advised Tig about how to make a success of the occupation and was well versed in the language of protest. I imagined that he was behind the school children’s most provocative slogans, though some were more charming than angry. I particularly liked, Walls have Ears and Ears have Walls. Banners were painted and hung from the windows, classrooms were smashed and adults were forbidden to enter the grounds. A milder version of the repeated student occupations that paralysed universities throughout the year, they were a peculiarly Greek hybrid, combining the pleasure of a rave, the anger of a protest march and the satisfaction of a riot. I had given up asking why; the children’s “demands” were normally a pretext – a “lack of facilities” or “lack of teaching staff”, but I suspected they were mostly a vent for pubescent anger.

  Most parents I spoke to viewed these rebellions indulgently; the young are expected to rebel in the name of freedom; it’s almost like a rite of passage. And it never entirely goes away. Protestors who regularly block the city’s main arteries are quite often elderly men and women concerned about their pensions. Nikitas was pleased that his children were rebelling, but he criticised their lack of org
anisation.

  “Yours is a soft generation,” he said to Tig and Orestes last year, when they were making plans for breaking into the school at night. “You haven’t been up against the tanks or beaten by the Junta’s police. You must get organised – you need aims and demands.” He explained over and again the significance of the asylum law and its origins in the massacre of students at the Polytechnic. The law forbidding police from entering universities had become a basic tenet of young people’s freedom after the Junta’s downfall in 1974. It went along with the referendum to get rid of the monarchy and the end of right-wing rule. As a consequence, when adolescents took over their schools around the country and placed new padlocks on the gates, they had little fear that their gatherings would be forcibly broken up. All sorts joined in. Tig told me that friends arrived with pizzas and drinks and then rough elements would smash the place up, until the party eventually fizzled out. And then school started up again, much as it had been before. It was one of those customs that was now almost as accepted as the official parades for national holidays that forced pupils to march through the streets to military music carrying the Greek flag. Two sides of the same coin.

  The truth was that this year, Tig’s absorption in school politics suited me. Her distance allowed me to leave behind the weight of grieving and busy myself with ideas of research and writing – this time for myself and not some demanding academic who needed statistics on Greek abortion rates or archive work on nineteenth-century poets. But now, seeing my daughter at the kitchen table, she looked terribly young and vulnerable. I was reminded of her as a toddler – eating her bread and honey in much the same way, with fastidious delicacy. She was still a child.