The Fig Tree (15 page)

I ask Kambanellis about the themes that weave through his plays and scripts. We seem to be circling the issue: the moment when life stopped in an extermination camp called Mauthausen. Whenever the word arises, Kambanellis pauses, draws breath. Yes, Mauthausen has pursued him all his life. It has remained the seminal influence that has informed his work. It had been his microcosm of the world. How could it be otherwise?

Mauthausen taught him that the human being is an individual who cannot be categorised. Kambanellis's characters are very private, yet always connected to a broader, universal fate. ‘The border between the personal and collective is thin,' Kambanellis claims. ‘Human beings do not fit easily within themselves. Their full complexity is revealed in times of crisis. Their behaviour takes unexpected twists.'

Mauthausen also showed him that even in the darkest of circumstances there are unexpected moments of humour and irony. There were times when all one could do was use one's wits to stay sane. But there were all too many moments when the faintest trace of light was absent. Mauthausen has remained a grim reminder of the depths of human depravity and cruelty.

And the song cycle? The poems? How did they come about? Throughout our ‘interview', I have been biding my time. I have my own agenda. It is time to come to the point. I tell him why the ‘Mauthausen Cantata' has been so important in my life—how it has followed me.

I tell him of my journey to the extermination camps that had claimed my extended family. Of passing through the gate of death, on a bleak autumn day in 1986, into a killing field called Auschwitz-Birkenau, where I had followed in the footsteps of those cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and extended family who were entrained there in the Polish winter of 1942.

On the fringe of my vision I note the patrons coming and going. I register their talk as a distant hum. The cafe is filling up for the midday meal. We are lulled by the ambience of gentle talk. The morning is slipping by. And the two of us have become an island unto ourselves. We have formed a bond. It is palpable, and it is time to move closer to the source.

First came the memoir, Kambanellis tells me. In 1963, by which time he was a well-known playwright whose reputation extended beyond Greece, he was invited to West Germany. During this journey, he noted that whenever he broached the subject of Mauthausen he received a wary response. He was feted, honoured, taken on a tour of avant-garde theatres, but he felt uneasy. Something was not quite right. His hosts were telling him to forget Mauthausen, to bury the past. Mauthausen embarrassed them.

Kambanellis returned to Greece determined to tell the story in full, so that it would not be forgotten. He recalls that after American tanks had finally entered the camp as liberators, on 5 May 1945, he, like so many inmates, would wake up every morning with the same agonised concern: ‘Who will I tell all this to? Who will listen? Where will all we have seen be delivered?'

Kambanellis revised the raw manuscript he had penned eighteen years earlier and employed his skills as a storyteller to weave the tale of his incarceration. He harnessed the river that had flowed so freely from him, and created a memoir as powerful as the works of Primo Levi, informed by a similar sense of detached passion, of bearing witness and remaining as true to the experience as the passing of time would allow. At least, this is what I was to discover when I read it.

And the poems? They were written in the wake of the memoir to coincide with its launch at the Gloria Theatre. The inspiration for the leading song was simple; a physical object, a photograph he had found in the dust of Mauthausen. He still has it to this day. He carried it with him through the many months of his incarceration, and it helped sustain him. It became his talisman, a secret love-object.

The photograph was of a girl, perhaps fourteen years old. She wears a plain dress, a schoolgirl's uniform with a white collar. It was merely a snapshot, a moment in time; but it was precious. It was rare to find anything of value in Mauthausen. The inmates had everything taken from them the moment they entered. They were robbed of their identities, and reduced to skeletal frames that ached their way through each terror-filled day. To find a remembrance of humanity such as this picture was a source of wonder. Out of this nothingness there emerged something that was yours, that you could gaze at in the depths of an endless night.

We were now at the heart of the matter. Here, in a cafe in central Athens, we had reached the point where all the layers that shield us, the categories and tribal differences by which we define ourselves, are pared back to expose a deeper truth. This is the still point, the space in which intimacy is able to flourish, in silent communion, between man and woman, mentor and disciple, between writer and composer.

This is what the ‘Mauthausen Cantata' captures, both in words and melody: our need to find intimacy in the darkest of times. It was a perfect collaboration. Theodorakis, too, was a prisoner of war during the Nazi occupation. He, too, walked, as a young man, through hell. His understanding of Kambanellis's words was based on shared experience. As soon as he read the poems, Theodorakis discerned their essence; and a legend was born.

The legend travelled to the most unexpected places. In May 1980, Kambanellis joined 30,000 survivors of Mauthausen on the thirty-fifth anniversary of their liberation. They walked together from the village of Mauthausen towards the site of their incarceration, to a place where 240,000 inmates had been murdered. They walked in silence, trapped within their own thoughts. They were in awe of what they had lived through and somehow survived.

As they neared the courtyard the marchers heard fragments of music. They floated towards them from inside the camp upon the morning breeze. The melody seemed familiar, Kambanellis recalls. Only when they were very close by did he realise that he was listening to an amplified recording of Maria Farantouri singing the ‘Mauthausen Cantata':

Girls from Mauthausen

Girls from Belsen

Has anybody seen my love?

Later, without revealing who he was, Kambanellis approached the camp's secretariat and inquired about the music he had heard that morning. He was told that it had been the camp's theme song for many years. His song cycle had come to represent the lingering memory of Mauthausen. It had become the expression of a legacy of suffering and hope.

Before we go our separate ways, Kambanellis and I embrace. The storyteller has passed on his tale. He has shared some of his hard-won wisdom. To be a writer, he tells me as we part, is to search for the contradictions that exist within us all, the subterranean rivulets that course beneath the surface calm. In fact, he does not regard himself as a professional. He just writes because he must—because injustice cannot be forgotten, because there are things that must not be left unsaid. Because he was in Mauthausen.

I leave the cafe and make my way to a bookstore that stocks his memoir in English translation. I return to Cafe Zonar, and begin to read it. The afternoon flows by, the evening settles in. I am on a frightening journey. We are being marched from the freight trains via a village, past churches, along country roads, over the idyllic Austrian countryside.

Shopkeepers, villagers, men and women are going about their business. Farmers are at work in their fields. The signs are promising. But the day grows chill. Night is falling. The fields have given way to a forest. And in the distance the gates are looming. We can see Mauthausen rising like a fortress on top of a hill. Kambanellis writes:

A long row of electric bulbs show us the way. As we approach the details appear. A high stone wall. Barbed wire on the top with electric monitors. High stone towers with machine guns. A skull and crossbones on the rooftop. A smoking chimney. Flashes of flame as from an oil distillery. The air smells of burnt meat.

All semblance of normality ceases. Beyond this gate, all rules of civilised behaviour are suspended. The outside world is now a mirage. We are stripped, shorn, showered—and thrust into a world where all human values have been turned on their heads.

The prose is taut, the author's observations precise; but he possesses a poet's capacity to notice the ephemeral, to distil the moment, and he guides the reader into the heart of darkness. Yet there are unexpected shards of light.

‘There was so much light in that May of 1945,' Kambanellis writes. And there was love. Between two former prisoners of the camp. Their affair begins in the immediate aftermath of liberation. Desire blossoms in the shadows of Mauthausen between a Greek inmate called Iakovos Kambanellis, and Janina, a Lithuanian woman who is partly Jewish.

It is late spring in Mauthausen when the lovers first meet. Their bond deepens as they stroll through sites where horrors had taken place, cruelties that they had witnessed. They tear at the heart, these cruelties. I do not wish to re-describe them here. They have been recorded in Kambanellis's memoir in unflinching detail. In this instance, I'd rather speak of light.

Iakovos and Janina first make love in a guard-tower that overlooked the sites of their recent suffering. The turret becomes their meeting place; a map of Germany, their bed sheet. They spend their nights there, exchange bitter memories, share their disturbed dreams, and awaken, reassured, in each other's arms.

As I read, I imagine Kambanellis as I had seen him just hours earlier. I recall his blue-green eyes, their unwavering gaze turned both within and without. I know now what they have seen. And he had been a man of great honour. He stayed on in Mauthausen for three months after its liberation in order to help his Greek comrades leave. He also stayed on to assist Jewish inmates who hoped to begin life anew in Palestine. He stayed on to help others in greater need.

It is the search to reunite with life that drives the narrative, and a desire to maintain one's humanity in the face of evil.
Mauthausen
depicts the inmates' struggle to nurture hope against impossible odds.

‘Read the memoir,' Kambanellis had urged me, just hours earlier, when I pressed him for more details. ‘It is all there.' And it is clear now: those songs were born out of lived experience. Leaning against the turret, while waiting for his lover in the spring of 1945, Kambanellis recalled those Sundays, months earlier, when the men and women of Mauthausen would gaze at each other from a distance, separated by high-voltage electric wires and barbed wire.

They had been reduced to sallow skin and bone. The men had been emasculated through slave labour and hunger, the women deprived of their capacity to give birth by food laced with poison. Here were men and women who had been robbed of their right to couple, to become as one, men and women whose eyes burned with incredulity. Yet, writes Kambanellis, those ‘endless hours gazing at each other caused desire, in all its sanctity and anguish, to rise into those great deep eyes'. Somehow, those ‘Sundays were days of love at Mauthausen'.

At nightfall I make my way back to our room, in a pension, just off Syntagma Square. How strange it is that I have emerged from Zonar's, and my reading of Kambanellis's memoir, infused with a heightened sense of what is precious in life.

I am more alert to it. I see the couples who stroll by in the midst of the crowd, linked together as if fused. How long will it take for them to lose their bond? To forget the yearning which spawned it? And become too cynical and world-weary to acknowledge it?

I feel attuned, also, to the invisible people, to those who cower in the shadows, a new generation of outcasts. An elderly woman, clad in black, lies full-length on the sidewalk. One leg is amputated at the knee. She holds out her hands, while many pass her by. On the busy corner of Syntagma and Stadiou, a black-hooded woman kneels on the pavement; her forehead touches the ground. Her face cannot be seen. She, too, holds out a hand in silent despair. And again the crowds move past without seeing, without wanting to see.

‘Get out of my way, you gypsy,' says one shopkeeper to a street vendor who has parked outside his shop. But, in the next moment, a passer-by says, ‘Ah, it is good to see you again. I know how hard you struggle.' This is how the pendulum swings, from a coarse bluntness to unexpected tenderness. These are the two sides of our warring natures, the cruelties and kindnesses that govern our lives.

I make my way across the square into the narrow streets of the Plaka. From various angles I catch sudden glimpses of the Parthenon. It rises large and luminous, a fleeting vision of decaying antiquity. It is the sentinel of the city, lit by spotlights that stream up from below.

In the square, outside the Athens cathedral, a crowd of guests waits for the bride and groom to arrive. Perfumed ladies, men in tailored suits, greet each other with embraces. Children peer from the shoulders of their fathers as the musicians come near. They herald the arrival of the bridal party on clarinet, violin and drum. And a huddle of gypsy boys stand in a group to the side. They are outsiders. They gaze at the guests. They linger in the shadows as if, for this fleeting moment, they can be attached to the company of the elite, to those who possess status and wealth.

I approach the pension. The foyer is a haven from the cold. I climb the stairs, and enter our room; and they are there, Dora and Alexander, my wife and son, radiant in their moment of welcome.

And in this instant it seems clear. This is the legacy of Mauthausen, the one ray of light we can take from its blood-ridden century: to be alert to suffering and heed the cry of those in need; to cross the boundaries and to see the common humanity that lies beyond our tribal divisions. And to see again, as if for the first time, the face of the beloved:

How beautiful my love is

in her plain dress

with a fine comb in her hair.

Nobody knew how beautiful she really was.

Walking Thessaloniki

At Tsimiski 10, in the heart of Thessaloniki, stands the oldest bookshop in the city. The shelves are crowded with books in Greek, English and French. Newspapers in many tongues sprout from an array of stands.
Le Monde
,
Der Spiegel
and
The Times
lean alongside obscure literary journals and magazines. The remaining spaces on the walls are papered with posters of Joyce and Hemingway, Proust, Lessing, Kafka and Cavafy, and other contemporary saints of the written word.