“After the war I took over my father’s business, so clothes have been my business.” Alexandra put on her finest English accent. I remembered it from our childhood lessons; it had always annoyed me.
“I’ve loved clothes since I was young. But, you know, I’m a believer in Plato’s theory that simplicity is the foundation stone of style and grace.” I felt sick. Why had Mod meddled in our lives and brought Johnny back to Greece?
As they went towards the exit, I plodded after them, wondering what to do. They made their way to the taxi queue and I lurked behind, watching them talking and laughing. My sister was flirting like a girl.
“You shouldn’t be staying in a hotel. At least come back to Paradise Street first. Come and see your old home in Mets. It’s hardly changed.”
I joined the line a few places behind them and, in the muddle of different people hiring taxis, I got into the one after my sister and Johnny.
“Please follow the taxi in front,” I said, and the young driver laughed.
“Spying are we?” he said. “I don’t want to get into trouble with the police.” He laughed some more. “Do you know where we’re going, Granny?” I could hardly speak by then. I was sweating and felt weak.
The taxis took ages to get back into Athens as many roads were closed.
“You never know what might hit you,” said the driver. “They’re still smashing things up and burning them. Young people have gone crazy and you can see they’re enjoying it.” We ended up in Paradise Street – Alexandra had evidently worked her ways on Johnny. I asked the driver to park some way behind them and peered out of the window. I watched as they emerged from the car. Johnny took a case from the boot and followed Alexandra up the steps to the house. My house – taken by my sister. My friend – usurped by her, too. All through my life, she had taken what was mine. She even took my son. That was hard to digest, as they say. It makes your stomach hurt.
I paid the young taxi driver, who continued joking:
“Don’t get yourself into trouble now, Granny. This game isn’t suitable for a lady of your age.” I edged along the pavement, avoiding the low branches, until I was outside number 17. The door was still green. They had gone inside so I was left quite alone. Almost by instinct, I sat on the second step – it had been my favourite as a child. I let my fingers rest on the faint ridges in the stone that I remembered from when I used to wait for the ice man. Once, Markos had found a tortoise on Ardittos hill, under the pine trees, and carried it home. We had put it on the highest step and watched it work its way down to the pavement with surprising ease, though its shell had clunked and it had left a green slick of excrement in its wake. I sat there, thinking about these distant things and longing for my brother. He would have known what to do. A cat slunk past on the other side of the road, looking suspiciously like Misha, and yowled before continuing on its way.
My body was hurting all over and the giddiness was getting worse, so I lay my head down on the step. The fantasies of revenge I had nurtured for my sister when we were younger flooded back. I wanted to hurt her, to make her suffer for everything I had been through. After some time in that position, I heard a voice.
“Kyria, are you unwell?” I opened my eyes and took in the black sails of a priest’s robe. It seemed like a dream, but then the door opened and I heard a cry. I recognised Chryssa. She sat down next to me, saying my name and asking me questions. Then I heard my sister.
“Antigone?” She sounded horrified. I looked up and our eyes locked in instant recognition, though it had been so many decades since we had last met. Our mutual loathing acted on me like a dose of smelling salts.
“We must phone for an ambulance. She needs a doctor.” Alexandra was trying to take charge of the situation before it got out of hand. I suspected she didn’t want Johnny to see what was going on.
“No, I’m fine,” I said, probably not very convincingly. Raising my head slightly, I saw Alexandra, Chryssa, Johnny and the priest staring down at me.
“I would like to go upstairs to my bedroom, please. Chryssa, will you help me?” I tried to sound dignified, imagining that things would still be as they were and that I would be in the room that looked out at the pines and cypresses of Ardittos.
“But you must come into my house on the ground floor.” Alexandra spoke as though this was an entirely normal event, presumably for Johnny’s benefit.
“Antigone, it’s really you,” said Johnny, as though I might be someone else. “Look at us – we’re old!” That sounded so funny that, instead of weeping, I began to laugh. And that was how Mod found us when she arrived back from the hospital. I must have looked like a mad woman.
“Shit.” Mod sounded exhausted and looked awful. Her hair was uncombed, her clothes crumpled. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s a sort of family gathering. I was just coming in. May I come with you?”
Mod smiled faintly. “All right. I’m only here to have a shower and change my clothes. Then I must rush back to the hospital. They’re operating on Tig’s arm. I want to be there when she wakes up.” She turned to greet Johnny.
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t be there to meet you at the airport. I hope everything went smoothly.” The English people shook hands on our doorstep, making polite comments as though they were at a tea party rather than in the middle of a family drama.
“Such a good girl, our Mondouly,” said my sister patronisingly, addressing Johnny. “She has almost become a Greek, you know. Better than a Greek. She speaks the language so well. And she’s such a good mother.” Alexandra glanced at me.
The priest hurried off, saying he would call at a more convenient time and Chryssa and Mod helped me up the stairs, step by step. Alexandra disappeared, but Johnny followed, lingering in the doorway as I was put on a bed. Chryssa fetched me a glass of cool water and gradually I felt my strength returning.
“Goodbye, my dear.” It was Johnny. He placed his hand on my forehead. “I’ll leave you in peace and come to see you tomorrow.”
* * *
I slept the night alone in Mod’s apartment. In my home. Before she left for the hospital, she gave me a nightdress and toothbrush.
“Make yourself at home,” she said and smiled at the irony. She put me in the spare room, which contained my parents’ old bed. It was white cast-iron with brass decoration and creaked every time I moved. Chryssa cared for me, bringing me a plate of soup and sitting on the bed while I ate. We talked for a long time, telling stories of the years and decades that had disappeared. Politics meant nothing to her, she said.
“For us, the ‘little people’, it doesn’t make much difference who is in power. It’s always the little people that suffer.” She said that Alexandra had been good to her – she couldn’t complain, and it wasn’t her business what anyone voted. It was the politicians, not the voters, who were to blame for Greece’s problems. I told her I was still trying to locate my brother’s remains and that Alexandra was refusing to say what had happened.
“I know where he is,” she said. “Spiros made an enquiry and they found the grave in the Protestant Cemetery. That was over twenty years ago.” So at last, it was dear Chryssa who told me where my brother was. After that I felt a wonderful calmness and fell asleep like a child.
In the morning I woke with the first light and went to the kitchen to find coffee and sugar. Then my grandson, Orestes, walked in. He looked bewilderingly like Markos, in spite of his long hair and the beads and baubles that today’s youth decorate themselves with. He was unshaven, with dark shadows under his eyes, but he had the gleeful expression of victory on his face that I remembered from my brother. He had just been released from the police cells. His mother had sorted everything out, he said. “As usual.”
I didn’t say he was lucky to have a mother like that and he continued, saying that there would be a trial.
“But I should be OK. I’ll be luckier than you were… How many years were you put away for?” Orestes kissed me on b
oth cheeks. I wanted to embrace him, but I held back. There’s nothing worse than an over-emotional old woman forcing herself on the young.
Instead, I asked him to explain what was going on in Athens. Why was the city tumbling into this chaos?
“What happened to make you all so angry?”
He smiled at my question and said, “If anyone can understand, it’s you. The oppression of the weak by the strong isn’t only the poor by the rich or the Left by the Right. It’s the young by the old.”
“And so it has always been.”
“Yes. But things can’t go on as they are. We’re being strangled by a system that we didn’t choose and we don’t like.” He told me that children are treated “like robots” at school. Teenagers are being suffocated by the amount of parrot-style learning they must do to pass their final school exams. Families without the money were having to spend everything they had and more on private lessons.
“We’re exhausted and disillusioned before we’re even adults,” he said. “And now we’ve reached breaking point. The system has to change.”
I told my grandson his anger reminded me of my Uncle Diamantis, who had been lucky to escape execution as a Kapetánios in ELAS. He had remained in prison until the early ’60s, and as soon as the Junta came to power in 1967, he had been arrested and taken to Makronisos. And there, on that dreadful island, it began all over again. Torture and the terrible pressure to sign the declaration of repentance. Just the same as in the 1940s and ’50s. He wasn’t released until the Colonels fell in 1974, by which time he was broken. Within a few months of going home, he died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five.
As we were speaking, Orestes made coffee and put koulourákia on a plate. He seemed less like a revolutionary and more like a good boy, who would become a sensible family man, with his house in order. We sat together companionably and, as the coffee warmed the blood in my veins, I told him my plan.
“There’s nobody else I can ask for help.”
I hadn’t been on the back of a motorbike for decades, but Orestes let me sit side-saddle as girls used to do. The air was chilly, and I felt the warmth from his body as I put my arms around his waist. It only took a couple of minutes to reach the cemetery. A man was polishing a hearse, but otherwise there were few people around. We walked through the gates and turned right, alongside a series of offices and rooms, just as Chryssa had described. Just before a small café that was shut, we came across the ossuary. I had never noticed it in the old days – the only ossuary I knew was the tiny construction in the graveyard at Perivoli, where my father’s forebears had always been deposited, some years after their burial. The place in which we found Chryssa after the massacre. This one looked more like one of the filing rooms in the Moscow broadcasting centre, with rows of metal shelving running from one end to another. Only, instead of files or tapes, there were thousands of boxes, each large enough to be filled by a dismantled human skeleton. There was a sickly smell of incense, oil lamps and rooms that have been closed too long, even though the door was open.
“Chryssa said he’s right at the back.” I peered at the stacks of iron containers, each marked with a number and name, and some decorated by mourners with photographs of the deceased, candles and plastic flowers. A snooty-faced military man was wreathed with artificial roses, into which someone had stuck a cigarette. Elsewhere, an ELAS comrade had fresh lilies next to his small coffer, squeezed onto the utilitarian shelf. Whatever side you fought on, you ended up as neighbours in the ossuary. We continued into the darkest part of the room. Orestes looked closely, reading names and dates, which got older and more illegible.
“Here he is!” He sounded excited. “Look! Markos Perifanis, 1925–1944.” My grandson removed the box that was on top and slid ours out. It was closed with wire, but not locked. The number 3782 was scrawled on the lid.
“Shall we open it?” He sounded both reluctant and curious.
“Not here. Not like thieves,” I replied. “Let’s take him home first.”
Nobody questioned us about what we were doing – who would steal old bones? Anyway, a grandmother in a cemetery is hardly suspicious. Orestes walked by my side, carrying the box to the motorbike, where he tied it to the rack on the back. We were a strange threesome riding the short distance to Paradise Street, me side-saddle again, and what was left of my brother behind me.
Orestes placed the container on a table in Mod’s sitting room and I watched, as he untied the twist of wire and lifted the lid. The bones were pale and smaller than what you’d expect for a grown man, but the skull was perfect – completely white and smooth. All the teeth were in place. I didn’t lift it out, but placed my hand on the crown, feeling tiny, zigzag lines and a light covering of dust. Undoing the safety pin in my pocket, I took out the button that had been with me all these years. I would put it in Markos’ box when it reached its final resting place.
It didn’t seem strange when the doorbell went and Orestes ushered Johnny into the room. The old man stared at the young one, and I realised he was seeing Markos in my grandson, with his dark locks and deep brown eyes. Johnny managed to disentangle his gaze to come over and kiss me in a distracted manner, looking down at the mortal remains in their open box. He said, “Markos?”
“We found him today,” I replied. “Now, finally, I hope, to do the right thing.” Orestes was lurking by the door.
“Sorry, but I’ve been up all night in the cells and I need to get some sleep. I’ll see you later.” He spoke in Greek and Johnny tried to answer but stumbled with “Kalón ýpno” [sleep well] and switched back to English. He said, “Goodbye, dear boy. God bless.”
Johnny and I sat on the sofa, side by side in front of the box. I appreciated that he kept quiet – the most appropriate response to the situation. It gave me time to reflect on our entwined lives and how he had meant so many things to me: teacher and first love, enemy, then someone who offered me help – the only one who did so when I was in prison. Now we were both near the end, dried up skin and bones. The next stage was beneath the earth. I was surprised when I heard a noise like a shuddering, stifled sob and saw that Johnny was crying. He said, “Stupid.” Then he shook his head and looked furious with himself for his lapse. “You know, Markos has haunted me since I left Greece. I loved him. I would never have done anything to hurt him. And now… It was my fault, what happened.” Johnny brought out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes and nose. His voice was steadier when he spoke again, though he looked drained.
“I was there during the attack.” He looked at me for a reaction, but I merely nodded, waiting for him to continue.
“Spiros told Basher and me there were rebels in that house in Kaisariani, but nothing about Markos. I know I said I wasn’t involved, but I couldn’t face telling you. I hold myself responsible and you have every right to hate me, Antigone. I didn’t launch the rockets, but it comes to the same thing.”
“We were both responsible for what happened.” I knew it was too late now to rage at poor Johnny and, after all, I was well aware that Spiros had followed me up to Kaisariani. I should have done something. My failure to report what I’d seen had been deadly. I put my hand on his – two loose-skinned, liver-spotted toads.
“I loved him,” Johnny repeated quietly.
“I used to hate you,” I said. “But not any more.” For the first time I consciously understood what I had not been able to admit to myself all those years before – that Johnny had truly loved Markos. Although he cared for me, I was never going to be his love. I had kept myself going on a girlish fantasy that had had no foundation in reality. Every show of affection was merely friendship on his part. And in those days there was so much room for misunderstanding. Memories came back, making sense of isolated incidents: even before the war, Johnny and Markos would go off on walking expeditions, leaving Paradise Street with knapsacks for day trips to Mount Parnitha or Pendeli. I was always envious. I recalled the cave in the mountains, where we had all met during the occupation. I had see
n Johnny’s arm around Markos, but never interpreted it correctly. I had still hoped it was me he wanted. I remembered the comment my sister spat out at a time when Markos and I started doing secret errands for Johnny during the war. “Anyway, he’s a poofter.”
I didn’t say anything. At the time I knew nothing about love between men, though later in Russia I had friends who were that way inclined. Now it seemed too late to question Johnny about long-lost love. It was time to bury the past before we were buried ourselves. It is what it is. I said, “We both loved Markos. And we are just ‘little people’, as Chryssa says.”
“Thank you, Antigone.” Johnny looked at me with great gentleness. “Now, please tell me what happened – why you left Greece and Nikitas. And what about all those years in Russia? Were you happy? You were married, weren’t you?”
I smiled “That’s a lot of questions.”
“At least tell me why you came back to Greece. Alexandra said you had made an oath never to return.”
“One thing I have learned is that there is never a last word, never a promise which cannot be broken or a belief that continues unaltered. If life has taught me one thing, Johnny, it is that. I came back to mourn my son and there was something else I wanted to do.”
Before I could continue, the door of the apartment opened and Mod appeared. At her side was my granddaughter, her arm in a sling and her head swathed in gauze.
“Tig was allowed to leave the hospital, so we came home,” Mod explained, supporting her daughter and smiling wanly. “I’ll put her to bed and come back.” I went over to greet the poor girl, whose face was drawn.
The House on Paradise Street Page 28
