The House on Paradise Street (2 page)

“I’ll take you to the hospital on my bike – that would be quickest.” Orestes’ spirits rose somewhat at the thought of his beloved motorbike, which he rode with verve, roaring and weaving through the city’s traffic.

“No, we’ll call a cab,” I said, picking up the phone to dial and observing his features fall. The taxi sped down Syngrou Avenue towards the sallow sea and then south along the coast road. Orestes rolled a cigarette, opened his window and puffed the smoke out in an exaggerated sigh. His legs juddered nervously. I experienced a bizarre clarity of vision in my fear, as though I were seeing things for the first time: the pale lines in the dusty roadside oleander leaves, the mauve tint of an old woman’s lips boarding the seaside tram at Faliro. I recognised adrenaline tingling through my skin; cold feet; an obstacle in the throat. The wind had produced a strange fog that drained the colour from everything, so you could hardly tell where the sea ended and the sky began, as though you might get lost in the greyness.

At the turning for the hospital we waited at some traffic lights where a slim tabby cat lay folded at an acrobatic angle in the gutter. Pink 1930s buildings and ornamental flowerbeds gave the hospital a seaside holiday atmosphere and the salty air was scented with pine and eucalyptus. At a window marked Enquiries, a garish blonde woman with purple nails was peeling an apple. I bent down to speak through the opened slot but the words came out curdled, as if I had forgotten my Greek.

“My husband, Nikitas Perifanis …” I paused, recognising how this language that had such a deep hold on me, and which I had started learning twenty years ago, could still retreat in moments of stress or exhaustion. It was not enough to be devoted to it, to read poetry, to dream in it, sing in it, fight in it and make love in it; Greek would never be my mother-tongue. She could become a faithless deserter in times of need.

We were sent to the Ward Sister’s office, told to wait for the doctor, and stood hunched and trembling outside it by a row of patients drooped on orange plastic chairs. A medic in jeans and white coat appeared and led us a little way along the corridor, squeezing himself up against the wall in an attempt at privacy. He might have been only a few years older than Orestes, though it was obvious that he had already seen more ugliness and pain. His gaze of sympathy tempered by exhaustion was enough for me to grasp the gist of his announcement before he spoke.

“The news is not good.” A distant buzzing sound of live wires touching. My body felt hollowed out then so heavy that my knees almost gave way.

Nikitas’ car left the road at some point in the night. It rolled onto the rocks at the Limanakia – the Little Harbours – near Varkiza. A swimmer spotted the wreck from the sea in the morning. My husband was already dead. No other cars were involved, but there would have to be an enquiry, an autopsy. The facts appeared quite simple, he said, but we should see the local police to give a statement. Orestes gripped my forearm too tightly, like a child who doesn’t want to be left at the nursery. His skin was so white it was almost blue.

I had often imagined Nikitas’ death; he was twenty years older and I knew the odds. But I had used his seniority like a shield as he took on the battles of age ahead of me. When I reached forty a couple of years earlier, it seemed gratifyingly youthful compared with his sixty. Although Nikitas took it for granted that I’d be the one left behind and enjoyed teasing me with “when I’m gone…”, he did not appear old. I noticed the signs that his body was ageing (his solid torso slightly softer, his chest hair sprouting white), but his presence was as powerful and vigorous as it had been when we first met. And if Tig was sometimes embarrassed that people assumed he was her grandfather, he was not; he’d swing her up in the air, making her squeal.

“Don’t care what others think – they’re usually wrong.”

I signed several pieces of paper without understanding what they were and was given the contact details of the police who were dealing with the case. I could not think of any reason why Nikitas would have been driving down that way at night. A man who might have been a nurse took us to the hospital’s small morgue. He didn’t speak, but his movements were deft as he pulled a lever down to open one of several metal doors and then slid out a long shelf. He peeled back a coarse white sheet and retreated discreetly. The dead man didn’t look like Nikitas. It wasn’t just the dark bruises on his face, but more the stillness. Nikitas was constantly moving. Even asleep, he sighed, rolled and twitched, letting out small yelping noises like a dog dreaming. When awake, his facial expressions were exaggerated, his gestures more expansive and voice louder or dramatically quieter than other people’s. He ate more, drank more, embraced us all with hugs that expressed affection, but that also hinted at the potentially threatening strength of a bear. The only time he became still was when he was very angry; then he was the bear before the chase. Now he looked like a polite stranger. I put my hand on his chest until Orestes pulled at me.

“Can we leave? It stinks here.”

We fled, leaving the nurse and the pungent smell of public swimming pools and school science labs. I said, “Thank you.” I wasn’t brought up in England for nothing.

Orestes strode ahead, out of the hospital doors and over to some bushes where he threw up. I put one hand on his back and the other on his forehead, as I did with Tig when she was sick. When he had finished, I led him slowly over to a bench under a canopy of jasmine by the hospital chapel. Nearby, two young nurses chatted as they ate cheese pies from paper bags. Pigeons danced at their feet, darting at the falling flakes.

Lately, when I sit in the chair by the window, I find that rather than looking out at the familiar grey towers of suburban Moscow, I am transported back to the Athens of my childhood. I have spent my life straining to look ahead, fighting for the future, for a better world. I believed in a new dawn that never came. Now that I am getting towards the end, where the only thing that is sure is the grave’s dark night, I go backwards towards my own dawn. Mostly, I think of the good things, the early years, my parents and our house in Paradise Street before the war. I try to stop there, before everything else.

Russia has been good to me. Part of me belongs here as though there was never anything else. Half my heart is Russian. Even during recent years since Igor died, I find small pleasures and consolations. The apartment is not large but it is warm and comfortable. The view from the tenth floor allows me to see the vast Russian skies that are so different to the intimate landscapes of Greece. Moscow’s ring road may not be the most beautiful place in this country, but I am able to see past the neighbouring apartment blocks to the woods. I used to go there for walks with Natalya until her legs got too bad. These days I don’t see many people, but Natalya is like family – I have known her for longer than my own flesh and blood. We meet most days, and are close enough to be able to sit together drinking tea and not talking – not that she is often at a loss for words. My inclination is more towards the written word and I still write in a notebook most days. God only knows why. Perhaps it is to prove I am still here. Certainly there is quite a collection of them in the cupboard now.

When I first became friends with Natalya we were both in our late twenties. She had rosy apple cheeks and a voluptuous body that matched her generous character. These days she has put on so much weight that she rocks like a boat as she walks. Sometimes we still go for a steam at our local baths, and while we sit dripping in the fug, I take in the expanses of her flesh. Heavy breasts reaching to the sparse remnants of her pubic hair, calves solid and pink. In comparison, I feel like a fruit that someone forgot in the sun until the flesh became dried out and the skin hard and creased. My skeleton juts out where once it was invisible, reminding me that bones are all that will remain. Back in the changing rooms, Natalya puts on her capacious underpants and spreads out “a little snack”: black bread, some left-over
bitki
wrapped in waxed paper, a lump of curd cheese. And, of course, a small bottle of vodka to toast one another’s health with a cigarette or two. These small pleasures have become more significant with time.

Yesterday we sat together in my kitchen, watching the afternoon light wane until it was the colour of iron. Natalya’s words washed over me like gentle waves and I only came out of my thoughts when she repeated a question.

“So, Antigone, what do you think? Should I go?” She slid another biscuit into her mouth and waited for my answer.

“Well, that depends.” I searched for a platitude so as not to betray my absent-mindedness. “Going is the easy part… it’s the return that is hard.” Luckily, Natalya didn’t notice and launched into a topic I have heard far too much of in recent times – her daughter, Lyuba.

Lyuba’s husband is one of the new rich – a breed of men we saw appear out of nowhere in the 1990s, like the cockroaches from the rubbish chute by my kitchen. We always knew him as some kind of engineer and then one day he was driving a Mercedes, hiring bodyguards and going off for holidays in Italy. When the Soviet Union disintegrated around us, carrying all those ideals and sacrifices with it, we hoped something positive would emerge. Nobody thought it was perfect before, but we old-timers still spoke in terms of freedom and justice. But the new Russians weren’t like that; they were nothing but cowboys. Now there are no convictions or principles, no aims but acquiring money. The rest of us have been left behind like flotsam washed high by the storm, our battles and beliefs useless. So, what with all the other cowboys and their gun battles, Lyuba’s husband upped and offed to London, taking Lyuba and their daughter with him. Too many flying bullets for comfort.

“Lyuba has promised I’ll have my own apartment next to hers with a maid just for me.” Natalya tried to talk herself through her fears with the idea of a little luxury but didn’t quite succeed. We didn’t mention Lyuba’s drink problem, her trips to the special clinic and her husband’s temper. Problems.
Problemi. Provlímata
. They’re all the same whatever the language. What can you do? It is what it is. Poor Natalya looked down and examined her hands – pudgy but always well cared-for. She still applies
Pearly Cloud
polish on her nails – the same colour for decades – convinced that a good manicure makes all the difference to a woman’s appearance.

“I’ve never even been abroad.”

I didn’t answer this time and Natalya managed a small laugh.

“Lyuba said that so many Russians have moved to London they call it ‘Moscow-on-Thames’.”

I first met Natalya in April 1952 when I arrived in Moscow. So we’ve been discussing her problems for over half a century. She was the technical manager at the international radio station where I worked. On the morning of my first broadcast on
Moscow Here!
she saw how nervous I was and came up to me smiling.

“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” she said, “but always accept one from a Russian.” She offered a small glass of vodka and though I’ve never been a drinker, I downed it and accepted the lump of black bread – “so you don’t get drunk”. Then I read the news bulletin in Greek and tried not to think of who might be listening in Greece or, worse, of who could not listen because they were locked up or dead.

“You are a beacon, sending out light across the
monarcho-fascist
darkness,” said the producer. So I thought of myself as a lighthouse, working on automatic, like a machine, and after that I was never nervous again. Onwards, upwards, tractors to plough for a better world, rockets to penetrate outer space, plans, strength, work. We were filled with optimism. I had two colleagues at the broadcasting centre whose parents had named them in honour of Soviet ambition and glory: Elektrifikatsia (Electrification) and Pyatiletka (Five-year-plan). Nobody thought that was ridiculous.

Natalya and I became friends. She took me out to walk in the birch woods at weekends and taught me about picking mushrooms (“never tell anyone where you find them” was rule number one). In good weather we’d take picnics and when we’d eaten, we’d lie about smoking Aurora cigarettes, which she liked for the picture of the laughing sailor on the box. Our conversations were often about her unsuitable boyfriends and whether she should sleep with them. We looked like two carefree young women with our lives ahead of us. I didn’t speak about the past. I didn’t tell Natalya anything more than the bare facts of our struggle in Greece, of defeat and our escape into the huge embrace of Uncle Jo and the Soviet Motherland. Stepmother-land? Why dig into the depths? You can’t change what happened. It is what it is.

Although I had already been living in the Soviet Union for a while, Natalya was the first Russian I got to know well. The Greeks in Tashkent stayed close together. It was a reaction to what we had lost; when you lose your fight and your country you are afraid you will lose yourself and your past. We were exhausted from years of war and imprisonment and we were humiliated. But we clung to what we thought made us Greek. We might have been dropped down in the middle of Uzbekistan, but we made Greek newspapers, sang Greek songs, cooked Greek food and soon we even had Greek weddings. The Russians liked watching us dance and recognised some of the Orthodox rituals they no longer used. But I didn’t want to cling to the place I had left and to which I had promised I would never return. Not for me the dreams of going back. I was young and stubborn enough to want to forget the past and to keep looking ahead towards the promises of a better world. So it was a relief when the authorities chose me to go to Moscow to work at the radio station.

I had already been in Uzbekistan for nearly two years when they came to the factory. Many of us Greeks were employed there, manufacturing the machinery for
hydroelectric
energy – my early Russian lessons were dominated by technical terms that acquired a sort of poetry. “Turbine generator shaft, pumped storage, laminated steel stacks…” The unit manager said, “Please come with me, Antigona Petrovna,” and I was taken into a room where a man and a woman from Moscow asked me to read a document aloud in Greek. They concluded that my voice was suitable and a week later I was on the train to Moscow. Although I said goodbye to people who had suffered in ways similar or worse to me, I was relieved. It was like winning the lottery – leaving the wind-lashed steppes and the sub-standard housing given to political immigrants who thought they’d find their dream made flesh in the Soviet Union. I could finally shut the door behind me and start afresh.

My friendship with Natalya helped me understand my adopted country. Although Russians have many things in common with Greeks, there is a dark, still well at their centre. We Greeks are all movement. When we have a problem we go away, we climb over the mountain, take a boat to foreign lands, search out the new. A Russian stays put, believing the problem will climb up the mountain with him if he tries to leave. He is convinced he is the butt of a huge joke in very poor taste. The whole world is against you anyway, so why bother? Greeks always suppose there’s a way out. Like Odysseus, we are convinced we will outwit the Cyclops or sail past the deadly temptations of the Sirens. Of course we Greeks are also inseparable from our particular brand of nostalgia and grief at being far from home. We leave, but all the time we dream of returning, even if it is only to be buried in the same ground that ate our forebears’ flesh. I was always determined that I would do no such thing.

It was through Natalya’s circle that I met Igor. He was milky pale with blonde hair and a lanky, boy’s body. “North and South” they used to call us, because I had the colouring of the Mediterranean, with almost black hair and a complexion that went brown the minute I went out in the sun. When I met Igor, he had recently started teaching at the secondary school where he would spend his entire working life. He taught literature and carried around a large shopping bag filled with dog-eared copies of Pushkin and Chekhov, and folders overflowing with students’ essays. He was gentle and respected my silence about the past. In the early days, he still lived with his parents, so he would come to visit me in the apartment I shared with two girls from the radio station. We lay in my narrow bed under the wadded quilt, making love quietly so as not to disturb the others, listening to records, reading books, getting up to make an omelette, sleeping in a gentle embrace. We were companions from the start. Comrades. And that is as good a basis for a shared life as any.

After Natalya married Arkady, the four of us used to take holidays, often staying in the radio station’s sanatorium near Sochi. The smell of the Black Sea reminded me of home, of day trips with my parents to Faliro. Salty rocks, hot, resinous pine trees, skin warming in the sun. Arkady was a joker, and he could make us laugh so much that we would cry. Then I would get sad because I hadn’t laughed like that for so long, not since before the war. It made me think of Markos and how we would hide from our parents when we were small, letting them shout threats into the street, until we had to smother one another to prevent them hearing our giggles. By then, Arkady would be onto the next story, or would be squeezing Natalya until she screamed, and I would get up and walk away so they couldn’t see my face.

“Ah, the tragic Greek heroine with the mysterious past,” Arkady would say, in mock-theatrical tones.

When Lyuba was born, Igor wanted a baby too, but I didn’t get pregnant. I didn’t tell him about Nikitas. How could I? Where would I have started? What kind of woman leaves her child? Every time I saw Lyuba, the pain was so extreme I could hardly bear it. The creases on her chubby legs, the soft belly rising and falling like a puppy as she slept, the grunts and slurps while she fed – they opened up the wounds I hoped had closed. Natalya thought I was jealous and that all would be righted when I had my own “little darling”, while Arkady gave humorous tips to Igor about what he should do to get me on my back and “knocked up.”

Of course, Igor knew about my “women’s troubles”. I had suffered since my time in the mountains. All the women did. Eventually, Igor insisted that we visit a doctor and when my excuses ran out, we went to Natalya’s gynaecologist. She filled in the form about my medical history and one of the questions was “number of pregnancies”. I replied “none”, but after Olga Konstantinovna examined me, she was frank.

“If you are going to lie to me, Antigona Petrovna, I cannot help you.”

Igor looked at me. They both waited for an answer. I focused on her white coat, the badge with her name, her hair in a tall bun.

“I did have a baby, but he died.” After that I had to tell so many lies that I lost track of them and even Igor’s patience dried up.

“I can’t change the past, but we can leave it undisturbed,” I told him. “It is what it is.” Igor loved me, but after that he was more reserved.

Olga Konstantinovna gave me some medicines and sent me for a two-week rest-cure in Yalta. But I never did get pregnant. Igor became very attached to Lyuba and she called him “Uncle”, asking him to read her stories over and over, as young children do. Sometimes he would take her out for an icecream or to a museum, and she would hold his hand. Lyuba came back from London for Igor’s funeral and cried as much as she had at her own father’s. As for me, I always kept my distance from Lyuba. Once she was over three, it didn’t matter any more as there were no recollections of Nikitas to compare. Gradually, her podgy, dimpled limbs elongated and slimmed into those of a schoolgirl, and there was nothing to provoke the physical memories of holding Nikitas, of washing him or tempting him to eat. Naturally, I tried to imagine how he would be growing, what he would be doing.