2

From time to time I used to go into the grand hotels on Syntagma Square and hang around in their lobbies reading the headlines in the New York papers. My eyes were searching for the piece of news I was awaiting—if it happened, then it would certainly make the front page. Only the Gasman’s death would make it possible for me to return. It was absurd to be living in the expectation of something like this. But man lives on hope. And clinging to fantasies of this kind certainly wasn’t the best thing for me to be doing: you can’t settle to work, or live, or meet people, or develop relations or put down roots anywhere when you’re constantly focusing on the possibility of packing your bags and going back home.

Nor was my health any better. The climate may have been warmer, the humidity minimal and the springtime air light and fragrant with the orange trees in bloom along the sidewalks. Yet my lameness was worse here. Lebesopoulos kept suggesting that I get a walking stick; he was sorry to see me walking with a more and more pronounced limp. A detective with a walking stick… highly original. In a profession where you need to be able to pass unobserved, my gait was the first thing someone would notice. If he then encountered me a second time, I might just as well have handed him my calling card. But I didn’t get the chance to realize how unsuitable I now was for my work, because work was precisely what I didn’t have.

I learned to live on almost nothing. Since I was frightened of spending all my money (and I hadn’t even got a return ticket!), I economized, filled my empty stomach with water, chewed on dry crusts of bread and bought vegetables and fruit from the local greengrocer, on the corner of Themistokleous Street, just before closing time when if I hadn’t bought whatever was left in his crates he would have been throwing it out. Neither my own mood nor the hot climate made food seem a prime necessity. And luckily ever since I was a child I’d never had much of an appetite. I used to grab a bite of something, standing, and then go out—this was the way I lived. Thus when in ’41 the Hunger began it took me quite a while to grasp the difference and I was puzzled at first when I heard people bewailing the situation.

I continually had the sense that I was living in a long, tormenting dream which was taking its time to end and to let me wake up into my own world once more. I’d never travelled further than Richmond, although I’d always wanted to go, for example, to Mexico; I used to buy books and maps and travel guides and hang out with Spanish-speakers, but I’d never had the opportunity or the money to make the trip. Now I looked around me at Athens and Piraeus as if I was watching a movie. Even the language which I’d thought I knew sounded incomprehensible to my ears. Buildings, streets, shop signs were all a series of surprises or riddles that needed to be solved. There were few cars on the roads: all of a sudden I found myself surrounded by models which in our own country lie rusting away in breakers’ yards or which you’d see in old films, their handbrake down by the pedals and their horn with its bulb outside the driver’s window, creaking past me like vampires come to life, while other models from France or Italy I was seeing for the first time in my life.

Only the streetcars reminded me slightly of pictures I’d seen of San Francisco. The main streets here were lined by low buildings, not more than three stories high; they were of strange archaic design with tiled roofs, statues on their parapets and caryatids supporting the balconies, wooden shutters at the windows to shut out the bright light and heat of summer. In our country, carriages and carts drawn by horses or mules are relegated to outlying neighborhoods or the countryside; here they coexisted with the automobile traffic of the city center, up and down the two-lane avenues linking Syntagma and Omonia and along the roads leading to the capital’s country districts, Patissia, the Thon neighborhood, Old Faliron and New Faliron.

The poverty, the shabby clothes people wore and the lack of facilities made an impression on me. Houses had ice-boxes instead of refrigerators, gas stoves were used for cooking, the grocers sold macaroni, rice, sugar, pulses and dried fish loose from sacks. The butchers’ shops resembled slaughterhouses. Children’s toys were primitive contrap-tions made of painted wood with wheels nailed to the axles, or else crude dolls and spinning tops; in the poor quarters the children fabricated home-made roller skates out of planks of wood and ball bearings. The streets were full of itinerant hawkers. In our own neighborhood, apart from the fish-seller with his large, round basket sealed with tar and painted bright blue, there was the knife-grinder who used to pass by with his wheel, the tinker who mended the old copper cooking pans from the kitchen, the iceman’s handcart, its columns of ice covered with sacking, and a saw and tongs to carry your order into the house, the milkman with his stout glass bottles topped with paper tied with string, or the musical vinegar woman with a small barrel strapped to her back.

When I first arrived I used to wander mainly around the center of town, taken in by its festive atmosphere. The Crown Prince was getting married and the whole city was carnival-like with its floral decorations and arches. The golden carriages, the grooms and coachmen and mounted retinue made you think you were suddenly in the midst of a romantic fairy tale. I liked the king, who was slim and spare, and had a haughty air as he brought his Field Marshal’s baton to his cap to salute the crowd. The other official guests followed in limousines, you couldn’t make them out. But I liked the king—there weren’t any kings in the USA, one way and another he impressed me. And people threw their hats in the air and showered the procession with flowers.

Everywhere you went you saw photographs of the Governor, Metaxas. Sometimes he had a benevolent air, when he was posing as a friendly old uncle, and other times he was distant and grave, when he was posing as the Leader of the Nation. The common people mocked him for the short stature and plump waistline that made him look like a provincial schoolmaster. I soon realized that the king wasn’t popular, people blamed him for a whole host of things, the last and worst of which being, as I heard, that he’d saddled them with Metaxas. As well as the king, most people also cursed the English for this. In our own country the English are ancient history; here, they’re constantly on the lips of everyone who doesn’t like the regime: the English are to blame for everything. Personally I didn’t find this at all hard to believe, having read about the American Revolution and the battles between the English and the French in Canada.

But there were people of another kind too.

In Zacharatos’, in Zavoritis’ and in the Petrograd, well-dressed ladies wearing little hats with veils over their faces, around their wrists the leash of some small dog concealed beneath the table, and gentlemen wearing monocles and wing collars and starched shirts smiled in satisfaction as they lazily enjoyed their tea, their coffee, their cakes or their drink and sent wreaths of smoke to the ceiling as they read Kathimerini, Estia or Eleftheron Vima, on whose pages were announced in bold headlines the achievements of the government or the goals of the Governor along with photographs of people in the news.

Everyone was always talking politics here, rich and poor, contented and discontented alike. Over there, at home, rich and poor alike go to work in the morning and return home in the evening to have a meal and then tuck up in bed. It’s a different world. And I didn’t feel the slightest interest in all the things that my fellow-countrymen talked and gesticulated about in the cafés.

I had of course met both types of people. In our own apartment building there were a few of those discontented with the status quo, the Kanellis lawyer couple, for example, and a great many of those satisfied with it—even enthusiastic about it—like Mr Kynigos, their neighbor, or Mr Balomenos on the second floor or Mr Zygadinos, another lawyer, on the ground floor. I’m not sure about Varvitsiotis, a landowner from an old family, who lived opposite. Certainly he was a royalist and anti-Venizelist. And there wasn’t any royalist who objected to the 4th of August and Metaxas.

Mimis Papachrysanthou belonged to the first category, those who opposed the current regime. I met him in summer ’39 at Karalis’ grocery store on Harilaou Trikoupi Street, next door to the St Joseph convent school. This narrow little store was near my home and was convenient whenever I realized at the last minute that I’d run out of something and needed to get it at once. It wasn’t for everyday shopping or to be visited very frequently. Only Balomenos, Mr Kynigos and maybe Varvitsiotis from across the road bought their groceries there regularly. Other people were in the habit of saying, “He’s got good stuff, but you pay its weight in gold.” The shopkeeper himself was a perfect gentleman, always dressed in a suit with a watch-chain over his waistcoat, a bowler hat and a cane. If you saw him leaving his store when it closed at midday and making his way home to where he lived on a side street off Skoufa Street, the last thing that would have crossed your mind was that he was a grocer. In any case, he himself never touched his merchandise, he had assistants for that, he simply sat at the cash register and chatted with his customers. The law courts were just across the road on Panepistimiou Street and all around were lawyers’ and notaries’ offices—their purses were fat enough.

Papachrysanthou had attracted my attention one noon when I’d gone in to buy something and found him arguing with Karalis about some affair of high politics—as usual, the English were mixed up in the conversation.

Karalis had his own beliefs, but he was a polite and soft-spoken man who never got into arguments. Papachrysanthou had had enough, however, and was delivering a tirade: the policy of “keeping equal distances,” he was saying, was a cover for Metaxas’ pro-German sentiments and the king had his donkey tethered at both ends—he himself was a creature of the English, Metaxas was a creature of the Germans—and the country, said Mimis, would pay twice over, because we are small and weak and poor and an insignificant quantity.

Karalis disagreed with this. “Greece,” he said, “has never been an insignificant quantity. It may be poor but it is honest, and in any case it is already on the path to modernization and economic recovery as a result of the measures the government is taking.”

Mimis, although he was setting eyes on me for the first time, turned to me and asked my opinion. Maybe my appearance and my age made him think that I too belonged among the ranks of the disaffected.

I didn’t belong there, though. My own discontent was due to my exile in this country, to the fact that I’d been forced to emigrate here. And I wasn’t accustomed to laying the blame for my situation on any government.  So was it Metaxas’ fault or the king’s fault that all the people here seemed to be poor and wretched and shouted and gesticulated and tried to rob or cheat each other? Anyone who worked, I believed at heart, could earn money and live comfortably, could shop every day at Karalis’ and enjoy his expensive goods.

Since my spirits were low, I always tried to avoid getting into conversation with people I didn’t know. I murmured something vague—that the regime frequently organized parades and spectacular events. At this period they were preparing a public performance on Lykabettos of some play, or some spectacle anyway—schoolchildren to play the walk-on parts, dressed in tunics with wreaths on their heads and shields, actors from Athens’ best-known theaters, directors and costume designers, work-men transforming the quarries on the hill to serve as the walls of the city of Troy, and newspapers listing the donations in money and material made by banks and manufacturers, while the mayor Kotzias and his workforce were opening a road up to the quarry so that the audience, and especially the cars of the VIPs, could have easy access. The populace, as ever, was seething in outrage.

Papachrysanthou was highly amused by my comment on the planned spectacle; Mr Karalis said not a word but simply counted out my change. As I left, I heard Mimis calling me to stop a moment so he could speak to me.

“Do you know,” he told me, “that some young relatives of mine haven’t been to school for a whole month because of this fiesta? Every single day they’re dragged off up to Lykabettos to practice and rehearse and any thought of reading or schoolwork has gone clean out of their heads. The way things are, their teachers have resigned themselves to it. And their parents, who aren’t supporters of the regime, have simply swallowed their objections helplessly instead of withdrawing the kids from this rubbish, because they’re afraid of being hauled off to the Security Police. Not that the Security Police had any need of Penthesilea to have them listed in their black books… my cousin, the children’s father, is a long-standing trade unionist…”

“What Penthesilea?” I asked, not having understood.

“The play, of course! That sick piece of work they’re going to perform. Penthesilea… you know… the warrior Amazon who was killed by Achilles…”

My expression showed that I didn’t know much about any of these people and Mimis burst out laughing. All the same, he was convinced I’d been being ironical when I’d said that Metaxas organized fine parades, and he liked me. The very next morning we ran into one another again outside my house. He bade me good morning cheerfully and said that we were neighbors, he himself lived a few blocks further up on Zoodochou Pigis Street. He offered to buy me a coffee and I accepted with pleasure, for I wasn’t making enough to be able to spend money on extras like that. And there, over the coffee that we ordered, sitting among all the strange birds that frequent the Petrograd, we became friends.

He was tall, stooping, probably something over forty years old, with a wandering eye and a purple birthmark at the top of his nose, just under the eye that squinted slightly; he had a mania for Greek mythology and was in the habit of giving everyone nicknames deriving from it (he baptized me Hephaistos). He had formerly been a customs officer in Piraeus but had now opened an accountant’s office where he kept the books for various Athenian shopkeepers and tradesmen. It was through Papachrysanthou that I met my single female client—all the others were men. When he first heard what my profession was, he eyed me with distrust. However, the rest of my story, my forced removal to this country and my financial difficulties, apparently persuaded him that I was some kind of political refugee! Thus—in the spring of ’40—he referred a woman to me who was the friend or relative of some captain in Piraeus whom Mimis had known since the days he worked at the port. She needed someone to undertake a job of a confidential nature.

And so it happened that one afternoon, wearing my smartest clothes, I rang the bell bearing the name “Stathis” at a grand apartment building on Dimokritou Street. The door was opened by a maid, as pock-marked and ugly as sin, who told me to wait in the drawing room. It was an apartment the likes of which I’d never entered before, neither here nor at home. At the end of the room there was an alcove with concealed lighting, before which stood two carved columns of the most translucent pink marble, there was a large oil painting depicting a hunting scene and a chaise-longue covered with embroidered cushions. On the little low tables were scattered an assortment of decorative objects, the most insignificant of which would have fetched enough for me to live on for six months. The parquet consisted of an inlaid pattern of dark and lighter-colored wood. You felt almost ashamed to step on it.

In one corner, on a little oval table in front of a lamp with a silk shade, I saw a photograph of the king in an embossed silver frame. I couldn’t resist the temptation of bending to look at it more closely. Behind the glass I could make out a handwritten dedication “to the Honorable Madame Sitsa Stathis, Colonel of the Fascist Youth.”

After a little while the lady of the house appeared, accompanied by a tall middle-aged gentleman to whom I was not introduced. She herself must have been fifty or thereabouts, she wore her hair dressed high above her forehead in two separate strands and her deep décolleté was adorned with lace as fine as crêpe. She gestured me to sit down on one of the chairs and seated herself on a sofa beside her companion.

Mrs Stathis spoke a lot in a style that I’d never come across before. I don’t know if it was the accent of her island origins or if it was the katharévousa^[1] she used (something rare in everyday conversation even among the highest class of people). She touched my proffered hand with the tips of her fingers, addressed me with the phrase “I have the pleasure”—an expression I hadn’t ever heard before—and continued in the same vein, saying “this need hardly be stated” which meant “without a doubt,” “this is a matter of delight to me” which meant “all right, that’s fine,” and “he is an ill-raised person” which meant “spoiled.”

She was speaking of her nephew, Pepe (Pericles) Demarias by name, her sister’s son. His parents had obliged her, almost extorted her, into making him her heir, but for some time she had considered him unworthy. She had made a will in his favor, compelled to do so for reasons which did not concern me, but the young man (who was already twenty-eight years old), having completed his studies at the Polytechnic School, was spending astronomical sums of money amassing a collection of legal and illegal antiquities from official or unofficial excavations. Pepe Demarias had recently ceased visiting her to pay his respects, although he lived in the same building; his aunt owned one floor and his parents another, while the remaining apartments all belonged to her and she received rent from them. His behavior towards her was “absolutely appalling”—“I shall do you the favor of avoiding all mention of the details,” she said, meaning that she preferred to spare me them—and she herself had “the strongest possible suspicions” that her nephew was abandoning himself to unspeakable pleasures and mixing with people from “evil circles” What she wanted me to do was to come up with adequate evidence of his vices so that she could change her will and cut him out of his inheritance.

She needed tangible proof, documents, photographs, names, addresses, dates, witnesses. Could I undertake such a confidential job? She had had “the very best of references concerning me from the part of Mr Doukas”—he must have been the man who had spoken to Mimis about the lady and her problems.

I made two grave errors one after the other: I said yes and I neglected to discuss my fee. Such was my desire to take on a case like this. That same evening I received a telephone call from my client at the office: the young man in question maintained a bachelor apartment in the Dexameni area and was spending more and more of his time there. She gave me the address and telephone number. I made a little reconnaissance tour to spy out the lie of the land, I looked at the name on the doorbell (“Per. Demarias”) and investigated possible sources of information: the milk shop on the corner, the bakery and the kiosk where the street opened into the square.

In the early evenings Pepe frequented a bar in his own neighborhood. The drinks were expensive here, the customers didn’t seem to have anything odd about them, the atmosphere was in no way suspect. I saw him there two days in a row.  He drank in moderation, once he had a brandy and the second time Turkish coffee and a sweet. On his own. At about eight in the evening he paid his bill and left, wandered aimlessly around Kolonaki Square, stopped and chatted once or twice with acquaintances, some of them his own age and some older, who looked like family friends or neighbors.

The third day I had more interesting information from Mrs Stathis: there was going to be a birthday party for one of Demarias’ friends at a restaurant, with a lot of guests. You couldn’t help wondering how she managed to find out about her nephew’s movements in such detail. Probably from her sister, his mother. I got myself ready and arranged with a taxi driver to drive me that evening, “wherever I wanted to go,” as I told him. He was an old man, grey-haired, with an apron tied around his belly to prevent the steering wheel of his old Ford rubbing on his clothes.

I had already gathered various bits of information about the nephew from the gossips of the neighborhood, yet nothing incriminating. Nevertheless, I noticed a sort of suppressed smirk as the kiosk man and the bakery woman spoke of Demarias to me. Nothing bad emerged from their words, but the smirk seemed to be implying something. By the evening I was on the right track. There might or might not be a basis for his aunt’s suspicions. The company that evening was largely male though two or three women were present who certainly didn’t belong to any “evil circles,” yet there was something odd about them all the same. The cars—two in all, with my old taxi making a third—went down Vasilissis Sofias Avenue, turned at the Grande Bretagne, and took Amalias Avenue.

Near the Faliron Delta, a little further up, opposite the Hippodrome, there was a taverna bearing the name of some island with little lanterns glowing in the entrance. Entering in the wake of the nephew’s party, I saw a large, fully-set table where some other friends were waiting for them.

On the raised stage was an orchestra and two singers, a man in a tuxedo and a woman in an evening dress with artificial roses sewn along the sash. The dance floor was still empty. The lighting was dim. I sat at a table near theirs and ordered wine and hors d’oeuvres. The prices were unbelievable, my pocket empty. My expenses had been beginning to mount up over the last few days and I hadn’t been paid any retainer. I’d have to be as economical as possible. Yet not to such an extent as to attract the restaurant’s attention.

The laughter and giggles, the conversation and the teasing didn’t have anything about them to suggest the “evil circle” into which Pepe Demarias was supposed to be plunging without restraint. The jokes were the usual trivial ones you’d expect from people of their age, all things you’d heard before. The few women in the company had seated themselves together at the bottom end of the table.

After a while my hors d’oeuvres arrived, after a while the place began to fill up and the singer who was doubling as master of ceremonies told one or two jokes to which no one seemed to pay any attention then went on to sing a few Italian songs and waltzes. The Hawaiian guitars moaned in nostalgic glissando, the piano trilled curlicues, the violin hankered after its gypsy origins and the maracas whispered the rhythm. I would have enjoyed myself more if I hadn’t had to keep my ears strained to listen to the conversation at the next table.

Late in the evening, when the place was thick with smoke and couples were dancing on the dance floor, I observed some movement at Demarias’ table. A small man wearing a suit, with round, wire-framed glasses, was changing places with a broad back that had until now been obscuring my view of the orchestra and sitting down next to the subject of my investigation. They said something, each lit the other’s cigarette, then the small man leaned sideways as if he wanted to say something private to Pepe and rested his head on his shoulder. Maybe he was feeling dizzy from the wine. Maybe not. The confidences did not continue but the head stayed on Pepe’s shoulder and a voice which sounded more feminine than that of the women in the company sighed and said most distinctly, “Ach, how I suffer… how I su-u-uffer….”

He might have been suffering for a thousand and one reasons: as a result of the flat notes of the singer with the artificial roses on her sash, let’s say, or the dangerous dizziness brought on by the wine that came “from our own vineyards at Vilia” or the sad words of the song that was being sung just at that moment:

Night drives you out of your mind

Looking at the stars

I cannot sleep.

Only this will I remember… Adios!

No more guitars, no more banjos,

The ending of a wonderful romance… Adios!

But the sadness or the indisposition of the small man seemed to last forever. He continued to rest his head on Pepe’s shoulder and to sigh “Ach, how I suffer…” and by now it was perfectly clear that he was suffering from the sickness one might have imagined and that his cure depended on the rapidity with which the group of friends would decide to pay their bill and go their separate ways, enabling him to have recourse to his physician. Who wasn’t necessarily the subject of my investigation—it could be that he was someone else, not present, whose absence made the song about the end of a wonderful romance most apposite. I knew where Demarias lived. Now what I had to discover was where the man who was suffering lived.