“And the drug dens,” winked Athos.
“He took us to a small place off Adrianou Street. There we heard Vito for the first time. His voice was a river. It was glikos, black and sweet. Athos, do you remember? Vito was also the cook. After preparing the food, he came from the kitchen rubbing the rosemary and oil from his fingers onto his apron, and then he stood among the tables and sang a rembetiko that he made up on the spot. A rembetiko, Jakob, always tells a story full of heartache and eros.”
“And poverty and hashish,” said Athos.
“After Vito sang, he played santouri music that somehow told the story again. One night he did not sing first, but played something so mysterious … a story I seemed to know, to remember. It gave me an ancient, suspenseful feeling, like an orchard when the sun moves in and out of the clouds … and later that night Daphne and I decided to marry.”
“And if you hadn’t heard the song?” I asked.
They laughed.
“Then it would have been moonlight, or the cinema, or a poem,” said Kostas.
Athos rubbed my hair. “Jakob writes poems,” he said.
“Then you have the power to make people marry,” said Daphne.
“Like a rabbi or a priest?” I asked.
They laughed again.
“No,” said Athos. “Like a cook in a café.”
In Athens, we stayed with Daphne and Kostas—Professor Mitsialis and his wife—old friends of Athos’s who lived on the slopes of Lykavettos in a small house with rubble where the front steps had been. Daphne had set a pot of flowers in the pile. A vegetable and herb garden in the back. Past Kolonaki Square, between Kiphissia and Tatoi, past the foreign embassies, palms and cypresses, past parks, past tall white apartments. Past the statue of revolutionary Mavrocordatos, where an Athenian kneeled in 1942 and sang Solomos’s national anthem and was shot.
It had taken Athos and me close to two weeks to travel the wounded landscape from Zakynthos to Athens. Roads were blocked, bridges out, villages in ruins. Farmland and orchards had been devastated. Those without a scrap of land to work or money for the black market were starving. This would be the case for years. And, of course, peace did not come to Greece at the end of the war. About six months after the fighting ended in Athens between communists and British, with an interim government still in place, Athos and I closed up the house on Zakynthos and crossed the channel to Kyllini on the mainland.
In Athens, Athos would begin to search for news of Bella and the only other member of my family I knew of, an aunt I’d never met, my mother’s sister Ida, who’d lived in Warsaw. We both understood that Athos must search so that I could give up. I found his faith unbearable.
On the boat, Athos brought out bread and a spoonful of honey for our breakfast, but I couldn’t eat. Looking out at the waves of Porthmos Zakinthou, I thought nothing would ever be familiar again.
We took lifts whenever we could, in carts and on the backs of bone-rattling lorries that stirred up the dust climbing hairpin turns and spiralling down again. We travelled long distances me ta podhia—on foot. There are two rules for walking in Greece that Athos taught me as we climbed a hill and left Kyllini behind. Never follow a goat, you’ll end up at the edge of a cliff. Always follow a mule, you’ll arrive at a village by nightfall. We paused often to rest, in those days more for my benefit than Athos’s. When we were both worn out, we waited with our satchels by the side of the road, hoping someone might come by to take us to the next village. I looked at Athos in his frayed tweed jacket and his dusty fedora and saw how much he’d aged in the few years I’d known him. As for me, the child who’d entered Athos’s house was gone, I was thirteen years old. Often while we were walking, Athos put his arm across my shoulders. His touch felt natural to me, though all else was like a dream. And it was his touch that kept me from falling into myself too far. It was on that journey from Zakynthos to Athens, on those crumbling roads and in those dry hills, that I realized what I felt: not that I owed Athos everything but that I loved him.
The landscape of the Peloponnesus had been injured and healed so many times, sorrow darkened the sunlit ground. All sorrow feels ancient. Wars, occupations, earthquakes; fire and drought. I stood in the valleys and imagined the grief of the hills. I felt my own grief expressed there. It would be almost fifty years and in another country before I would again experience this intense empathy with a landscape.
At Kyllini, we saw that the great medieval castle had been dynamited by the Germans. We passed outdoor schools, children in rags using slabs of rock as desks. A shame hung over the countryside, the misery of women who could not even bury their dead, whose bodies had been burned or drowned, or simply thrown away.
We descended the valley to Kalavrita, at the foot of Mount Velia. Since disembarking at Kyllini, everyone we’d spoken to had told us of the massacre. At Kalavrita, in December 1943, the Germans murdered every man in the village over the age of fifteen—fourteen hundred men—then set fire to the town. The Germans claimed the townspeople had been harbouring andartes — Greek resistance fighters. In the valley, charred ruins, blackened stone, a terrible silence. A place so empty it was not even haunted.
At Korinthos, we climbed aboard a lorry that was filled to overflowing with other travellers. Finally, on a hot afternoon in late July, we arrived in Athens.
Dusty and tired, we sat in Daphne and Kostas’s living room, with Daphne’s paintings of the city on the wall— all light and edges, a radiant cubism that in Greece is close to realism. A small glass table. Silk cushions. I was afraid that when I stood up my dirty clothes would leave an imprint on the pale sofa. A little dish of wrapped candies on the table distracted me, gave me a painful glimmer, as when part of you falls asleep and then blood returns to the place. I didn’t understand I could help myself. My elbows rubbed against my sleeves, my legs against my shorts. In a large silver-framed mirror, I saw my head looming above the thin stem of my neck.
Kostas led me into his room and he and Athos picked out some clothes for me. They took me to a barber for my first real haircut. Daphne drew me to her, her hands on my shoulders. She was not much taller than me and almost as thin. She was, as I look back, like a very elderly girl. She wore a dress with a pattern of birds. Her hair was fastened in a knot on top of her head, a little grey cloud. She served me a stifhado of beans and garlic. I ate karpouzi outside with Kostas, who showed me how to spit the melon seeds all the way to the bottom of the garden.
Their kindnesses were mysterious and welcome to me as the city itself—with its strange trees, its blinding white walls.
The morning after we arrived, Daphne, Kostas, and Athos began to talk. Starved, they fell into conversation, cleaning their plate as if they’d find a truth painted on the bottom. They talked as if everything must be told in a single day. They talked as if they were at shivah, at a wake, where all the talk cannot fill the absent chair. Once in a while Daphne got up to replenish their glasses, to bring bread, small cold bowls of fish, peppers, onions, olives. I could not follow it all: the andartes, EAM, ELAS, communists, Venizelists, and anti-Venizelists…. But there was also much I did understand—hunger, shooting, bodies in the street, how suddenly everything familiar is inexpressible. I paid such close attention that, as Kostas said, history wore me out, and around four o’clock when we moved into the garden, with the breeze and sun in my freshly trimmed hair, I fell asleep. When I woke, it was twilight. They were leaning back in their chairs in a silent melancholy, as if the long Greek dusk had finally drawn every memory out of their hearts.
Kostas shook his head.
“It’s as Theotokas says: ‘Time was cut by a knife.’ The tanks came down Vasilissis Sofias. Even when one German walks through a Greek street it’s like an iron rod so cold it burns your hand. It wasn’t even noon. We heard it on the radio. All morning the black cars made a trail through the city like a line of gunpowder.”
“We closed the drapes to the sun and Kostas and I sat at the table in the dark. We heard sirens, anti
-aircraft guns, yet the church bells kept ringing for early Mass.”
… When they pushed my father, he was still sitting in his chair, I could tell afterwards, by the way he fell.
“Our neighbour Aleko came to the back door to tell Kostas and me that someone saw swastikas hanging from balconies on Amalias. They flew, he said, over the palace, over the chapel on Lykavettos. It wasn’t until evening, when we saw the flags ourselves, and the flag over the Acropolis, that we wept.”
… I could tell by the way he fell.
“At the beginning, we continued to go to the taverna, just for the company and to hear some news. There wasn’t anything to eat or drink. At the beginning, the waiter still pretended, brought out the menu; it became a ritual joke. People still told jokes then, didn’t they, Daphne? Sometimes we even heard the one from student days when we were so poor and someone used to call out to the waiter: ‘Cook an egg, there are nine of us!’“
… When I was in the ground and my head was prickling, I dreamed my mother was scrubbing the lice from my hair. I imagined skipping stones with Mones on the river. Mones once caught his finger in a door and his nail came off, but he could still make the stones jump more times.
“Daphne’s brother heard that when they found Korizis, he had a gun in one hand and an icon in the other.”
“After the macaronades and before the Germans, there were the British and Aussies everywhere. They took sun baths without their shirts.”
“They sat around Zonar’s and sang songs from The Wizard of Oz. They burst into song at the slightest provocation, Fioca and Maxim’s suddenly seemed like sets for operetta. … I went looking for pipe tobacco at the King George. I thought maybe there they’d still have some, but they didn’t. And maybe to pick up the Kathemerini, the Proia, any newspaper I could find. A British soldier in the lobby offered me a cigarette and we had a long discussion about the differences between Greek and British and French tobacco. The next day Daphne answered the door and there he was, bringing us meat in tins.”
“That’s the only time one of Kostas’s vices has ever been useful,” called Daphne from the kitchen where she was pouring me a glass of milk.
… Mrs. Alperstein, Mones’s mother, made wigs. She used to rub her hands with lotion to keep them smooth for her work. She gave us milk while we were studying and the glass always smelled of lotion, it made the milk taste pretty. When my father came home from work his hands were black, just like he was wearing gloves, and he used to scrub them until they were almost pink, though you could still smell the shoe leather—he was the best bootmaker— and you could still smell the polish, which came in tins and was soft as black butter.
“They made us take in a German officer. He stole from us. Every day I saw him take something—knives and forks, needle and thread. He brought home butter, potatoes, meat—for himself. He watched me cook it and I had to serve him, while Kostas and I ate only carrots, boiled without oil, without even salt. Sometimes he made me eat part of his meal in front of Kostas but wouldn’t let Kostas eat. …”
Kostas stroked his own cheek with Daphne’s hand.
“My dear, my dear. He thought it would make me crazy, but truly I was happy to see you have enough for once.”
“At night, after curfew, Kostas and I lay awake and we heard the sentries marching up and down Kolonaki, as if the whole city was a jail.”
“Athos, you remember how they wanted our chrome before the war. Well, when they didn’t have to pay for anything, they took what they wanted from the mines: pyrites, ore, nickel, bauxite, manganese, gold. Leather, cotton, tobacco. Wheat, cattle, olives, oil….”
“Yes, and the Germans stood around Syntagma Square chewing olives and spitting out the pits so they could watch the little children scramble to pick them up off the ground and suck dry whatever was left.”
“They drove their trucks to the Acropolis and took tourist photos of each other in front of the Parthenon.”
“Athos, they turned our Athens into a city of beggars. In ‘41, when it snowed so much, no one had coal or wood. People wrapped blankets around themselves and stood in Omonia Square and just waited there for help. Women with infants …”
“Once, after the Germans loaded up a train at Larissa, a patriot decided to liberate the cargo. The train exploded as it pulled out of the station. Oranges and lemons flew, raining into the streets. A glorious sweet smell mixed with the smell of gunpowder. Balconies glistened, lemon juice dripped in the sunlight¡ For days after, people found an orange in the crook of a statue, in the pocket of a shirt hanging to dry. Someone found a dozen lemons under a car—
“Like eggs under a hen.”
… I saw my father and Mrs. Alperstein shake hands and I wondered if they had traded smells and if all the shoes would smell like flowers and all the wigs like shoes.
“Our neighbour Aleko revived a man in the middle of Kolonaki with a bowl of milk. Aleko himself didn’t even have a piece of bread to share. But soon when people collapsed in the street they didn’t get up again, they simply starved to death.”
“Kostas and I heard stories of whole families being killed for a case of currants or a sack of flour.”
“We heard of a man who was standing early one evening in Omonia Square. Another man rushed up to him, carrying a parcel, ‘Quick, quick,’ he said, ? have fresh lamb, but I must sell right away, I need to buy a train ticket to return home to my wife.’ The idea of fresh lamb … fresh lamb¡ … was too much for the man on the corner, who thought of his own wife and their wedding supper and all the meals they took for granted before the war. The good tastes he remembered chased all other thoughts from his head and he reached into his pocket. He paid a large sum, all he had. Lamb was worth it¡ And the man hurried away in the direction of the train station. The man on the corner rushed off in the opposite direction, straight home. ? have a surprise!’ he shouted, and handed his wife the parcel. Open it in the kitchen.’ Excited, they stood over the bundle of newspaper and his wife cut the string. Inside they found a dead dog.”
“Athos, you are a brother to Kostas and me. You have known us many years. Who could believe we would ever have such words in our mouths?”
“When the British were still here, we managed to find things. A little margarine, a bit of coffee, sugar, sometimes a little beef¡ … But when the Germans came, they even stole cows about to calve and slaughtered both the mother and child. They ate the mother and threw away the child….”
Daphne touched Kostas’s arm to stop him, inclining her head in my direction.
“Kostas, it’s too terrible.”
“Daphne and I cheered, ‘Englezakia!’ as the English bombs fell in our streets, even as the smoke turned the sky black above Piraeus and sirens screamed and the house shook.”
“Even I learned to recognize which planes were theirs and which were English. Stukas shriek. They’re silver and dive like swallows —”
“And drop their bombs like shit.”
“Kostas,” chided Daphne, “not in front of Jakob.”
“He’s sleeping.”
“No I’m not!”
“Since Daphne won’t let me swear in front of you, Jakob, though you’ve seen so much it’s only right you should know how to swear, I’ll tell you instead that war can turn even an ordinary man into a poet. I’ll tell you what I thought the day they abused the city with their swastikas: At sunrise the Parthenon is flesh. In moonlight it is bones.”
“Jakob and I have read Palamas together.”
“Then, Jakob, pedhi-mou, you know Palamas is our most beloved poet. When Palamas died, right in the middle of the war, we followed another poet, Sikelianos, in his long black cape through Athens. Thousands of us, the whole city, accompanied Palamas’s body from the church to the grave. At the cemetery, Sikelianos shouted that we must ‘shake the country with a cry for freedom, shake it from end to end,’ and we sang the national anthem, surrounded by soldiers¡ Afterwards Daphne said to me—”
“No one but Palamas co
uld so rouse and unite us. Even from his grave.”
“The first weekend of the occupation, the Germans held a procession through the city. Armoured cars, banners, columns of troops a block long. But Greeks were ordered to stay inside. It was forbidden for us to watch. The few who could see anything from home peeked through their shutters while the mad parade marched through empty streets.”
“On street corners, in restaurants, like sideshow acts, black marketeers pulled raw fish out of briefcases, eggs from their pockets, apricots from their hats, potatoes from their sleeves.”
… When it got too hard to find stones flat enough to skip, we sat on the bank. Mones had a bar of chocolate. His mother gave it to us the day we went to the cinema to see the American cowboy Butski Jonas and his white horse. We saved it because we were already planning our next expedition to the river. Inside, under the wrapper, there’s always a card, with a picture of a famous place. We’d already had different palaces and the Eiffel Tower and some famous gardens. That day, we got the Alhambra and folded it and tore it in half and pledged our eternal loyalty like we always did, and Mones kept half and I kept the other half so that when we went into business together we could join them up and pin them on the wall, his half of the world and my half, everything shared right down the middle.
“The night before the Germans left Athens: Wednesday, October n. Daphne and I heard a strange sound, not quite a breeze, very faint. I went outside. There was a tremor in the air, like a thousand wings. The street was deserted. Then I looked up. Above my head, from all the roofs and balconies people were leaning, quietly calling to each other across the city, spreading the word. The city, which had been like a jail only a moment before, was now like a bedroom full of whispering, and also in the darkness the clinking of glasses filled with whatever we could find and ‘yiamas, yiamas,’ to your health, rising like gusts into the night.”
“Afterwards, but before the dekemvriana, the December battles, we began to hear more of what happened elsewhere. …”