POLITICS HAD SEE-SAWED in recent years between left and right, and Themis had been happy when the country got its first ever socialist government in 1981. Andreas Papandreou, the Prime Minister, began to face up to resentments that had lingered for almost forty years and officially recognised the courage of those who had resisted the Nazis during the occupation.
He also gave communists who had fled the country at the end of the civil war permission to return and lifted the threat of persecution.
The day she heard, Themis thought of Panos and Aliki and those with whom she had fought. Only with such people could she celebrate this moment. She reflected on the news with a mixture of joy and sadness. It was too late for so many.
More than with politics these days, she was preoccupied with the lives of her children. There were so many events and milestones.
Anna had long since qualified as a nurse and was soon to be married, Andreas had a good job in the biggest bank in Greece, and Spiros, who was in his final year at university, was hoping to follow his father into the tax office.
At the end of October, news arrived from further afield. Two letters arrived on the same day. One had a German and the other a US postmark.
After their grandmother’s death, Margarita had continued writing occasionally to Themis. She shared the letters only with Thanasis as neither Giorgos nor the children were very interested in them, having never met her.
This time, Margarita’s letter did not come from divided Berlin. In recent years, her occasional missives had become little more than veiled descriptions of austerity and dissatisfaction, but this time there was a different tone. Margarita had married for the second time and her new husband was the manager of a large State-owned printing company. She had moved to Leipzig to be with him.
He has some grown-up children who often come to visit with their children so life is busy at weekends.
We had just a few guests at the wedding and I enclose a photograph with me and Heinrich, our best man, Wilhelm, and two of the grandchildren, who were flower girls. We had a lovely day and went on a short holiday to a lake near Dresden afterwards. It feels like a new start and I must confess it’s nice to have moved away from Berlin. I can’t say much but it really was a very depressing place to live.
Leipzig is the city where a famous composer called Felix Mendelssohn was born and the buildings are beautiful. Even the village where we live outside the city has a fine square and everyone takes great pride in keeping the place clean and tidy.
My German is now good enough for me to work in the reception at the factory! I am there a few afternoons a week and it will give me rights to a pension and other benefits, which the government here is very generous with. My husband will retire in five years’ time and I will stop working at the same time so that we can enjoy our retirement together.
Themis still pictured her sister as a dark-haired beauty in her twenties. Now her eyebrows knitted together, as she tried to recognise the Margarita she remembered in the face of the silver-haired sixty-year-old. Her features were recognisable, though in a thinner face and she seemed to have shrunk to half the size. She looked more Eastern European than Greek now but was still beautiful, if in a different way.
Margarita had never openly complained about Berlin but Themis had always read between the lines and it was always obvious that her first marriage had not been a happy one. In the previous letter she had mentioned that her divorce had come through and her former husband had immediately married his mistress, who promptly gave birth to their child.
For the first time in decades, Margarita sounded content.
‘Happy, finally,’ said Thanasis sparingly.
Themis nodded in agreement, silently reflecting on the irony that it was her sister, rather than herself, who had ended up living in a communist state.
The letter from the US was equally unexpected. It was not on the usual airmail paper but instead was heavy, with the address on the envelope almost obscured by the number of stamps that had been needed to send it. As was traditional with Angelos’ letters, they would wait until they were all eating together before opening it. It was Spiros who now opened his big brother’s ‘missile’, as he called it.
‘It’s a parcel!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s not a letter!’
He carefully made a slice through the tape that sealed the package and pulled out an elaborate concertina of card. It was dove grey with an ornate arrangement of silver ribbon and shiny rosettes. Very gingerly he handed it over to his mother.
‘It doesn’t look as though it needs me to read it,’ he said.
‘It’s an invitation,’ beamed Themis.
With great difficulty (because her English was minimal), she began to read out the announcement of a forthcoming wedding.
Mr and Mrs Charles Stanhope
are proud to announce the marriage
of their daughter Virginia Lara Autumn
to Mr Angelos Stavreed
She stopped reading.
‘Stavreed?’
‘I think he’s changed his name to a version that’s easier to pronounce. In America anyway,’ said Spiros.
‘But that’s not our name!’ exclaimed Giorgos indignantly.
‘Virginia? Who’s Virginia?’ queried Anna.
Themis shrugged.
‘You can carry on reading it,’ she said, passing it to her son. ‘I can’t manage this swirly writing.’
Spiros continued, paraphrasing.
‘They’re getting married at All Saints’ Church, Bel Air and afterwards there is a reception in the Sunorama Hotel in Beverly Hills.’
‘. . . But wasn’t he engaged to Corabel?’
‘He’s never mentioned Virginia before,’ said Anna. ‘What happened to Corabel?’
‘And are we invited?’
‘Of course you’re invited, Mána,’ Spiros reassured her.
All their names, including Thanasis’, were squeezed in a row across the top.
‘Where is Beverly Hills?’ Themis asked.
‘In Los Angeles,’ answered Thanasis knowledgeably. ‘On the west coast of America. It’s a very, very long way away.’
‘Uncle Thanasis knows all about Los Angeles,’ teased Spiros. ‘It’s where all the film stars live!’
Thanasis smiled, unashamed of his favourite hobby. He revelled in the knowledge of American stars that came with watching television.
‘And when is it?’ Themis enquired.
‘September.’
‘September? Then we’ve missed it!’ she said with exasperation. ‘It’s already happened!’
‘Don’t worry, Mána, it’s for next September!’
‘You mean in a year’s time?’ Themis shook her head.
A son who had changed his name, getting married on the other side of the world, in almost eleven months’ time? She was bemused.
‘Well, we have p-p-plenty of time to think about it,’ said Giorgos with a wry smile.
‘Was there a letter with it?’ asked Themis, hoping for more explanation.
Spiros shook the package, but nothing else fell out.
‘You’d think he would have written to tell us what he was planning . . .’
Themis was hurt that her son’s marriage should be announced to them so bluntly.
A few weeks on, another letter arrived from Angelos.
I hope you will come for our big day! It will be very unlike a Greek wedding but I am sure you will have a great time. Virginia’s family are Catholic so I have had to convert. But on the whole we believe in the same things so I don’t think you will find it too alien.
Themis did not mind in the least about the religious aspect of the wedding. She minded much more that he was getting married so far away, to someone they had never heard of until the invitation had arrived and that his name had already been Americanised. It seemed a crime to deny his Greek roots in that way.
The following September, with their children’s encouragement but not their agreement to attend, Themis and Giorgos both boarded an aeroplane for the first time. Acquiring passports and visas had been trying enough, and after nearly two days of travel and several changes of plane, they arrived exhausted in Los Angeles.
They were greeted by a smiling Angelos in his gleaming new red Cadillac. He was excited that they had come and impatient to show them his new life.
Themis’ first observation was that he had put on even more weight than she had expected, but she covered her disapproval. ‘You look well, agápi mou,’ she said.
‘When will we m-m-meet Virginia?’ asked Giorgos.
‘Today,’ answered Angelos, brightly. Themis noticed that he now spoke Greek with an American accent. Despite her curiosity, she did not pluck up courage to ask what had happened to Corabel.
When they got to his home, a pretty house with a lawn out front, Virginia was waiting to greet them. They realised that they had already been living together for some time. Giorgos disapproved, but Themis felt that she was in no position to do so and greeted the perfectly coiffured blonde with warmth.
It may have been the jet lag, but their enthusiasm for almost everything except the climate was lacking.
The wedding was in three days’ time, and they spent a few hours each day with their son, mostly meeting various members of Virginia’s family and eating meals that they could not finish.
‘It’s n-n-not as if the food tastes of anything!’ Giorgos complained to Themis. ‘So why d-d-do they give you so much it spills off the plate?’
It struck them both as a waste, but also the reason that so many people seemed almost obese.
The night before the wedding, there was a formal dinner. Themis had brought some of the linen that she had been given by her own grandmother. It seemed appropriate to pass it on. The tablecloth and pillowcases were finely embroidered with delicate lace edging but she could see immediately Virginia opened the parcel that it was not to her taste.
‘It’s so . . . quaint,’ she said.
Angelos looked mildly embarrassed. The expression on his fiancée’s face said more about her feelings for the gift than the words that Angelos used to translate. Themis understood that the well-meant gift would be put in the back of the cupboard as soon as she and Giorgos had left. This was clearly the implication of ‘quaint’.
Virginia’s mother, sisters and aunts all wore bright colours to the wedding and Themis felt dowdy in her pastel-blue dress and jacket, even though she had had it specially made by a Kolonaki dressmaker. The man-made fabrics people wore in America were as unfamiliar to her as the ubiquity of blond hair. The food, the whiskey and the music were similarly alien, as was the language. Both Themis and Giorgos tried to speak a little English, but the Californian accent made it almost impossible to understand what people replied and, although the Stanhope family did their best to make them feel at home, Themis and Giorgos felt out of place from beginning to end.
Themis kept wondering how Nikos would have viewed the gathering and wished he was there with them. Although the boys would not resemble each other so much now (Angelos would probably be twice Nikos’ size and his hair was clipped shorter than ever) it would still be evident that they were brothers.
It became clear to Themis during conversations that Angelos had written Nikos out of his own history. Virginia and her parents knew only of his three living siblings.
Apparently Nikos did not fit the image that Angelos wanted to cultivate, and when she listened to the political opinions expressed by the Stanhopes she realised why. They were staunch supporters of Ronald Reagan (‘Uncle Thanasis would definitely approve of him,’ quipped Angelos, ‘a Hollywood actor turned Republican president!’).
Themis and Giorgos stayed on in Los Angeles for three days after the wedding but were relieved when the time came to leave and even happier when they eventually arrived back in Patissia. They faced a barrage of questions from their children. Was it the land of plenty that they imagined? Was everyone glamorous? Did people drive round in huge cars? On three-laned highways? The answer to all their questions was a simple ‘yes’. America had seemed like another planet. Even Thanasis was curious to know what the United States looked like in ‘real life’, but what he really wanted to know was whether his father, Pavlos, had turned up.
‘I don’t think Angelos invited him,’ said Themis. ‘He hasn’t met him since he moved there so . . .’
The next letter from Angelos announced that Virginia was pregnant with their first child and in the following half-decade, every letter was accompanied by the announcement of a pregnancy or a photograph of a new baby or a toddler taking first steps or attending playgroups or on swings or in the swimming pools of flashy hotels. They were not framed and placed on the dresser. Themis was still annoyed by Angelos’ lack of loyalty to his brother’s memory. Perhaps one day if she met Nancy or Summer or Barbara, she would change her mind, but for now they seemed no more than distant relations. When they received a note one day saying that another baby had arrived, they were shocked by the name. Nikos.
‘Why now?’ asked Themis quietly to Giorgos, as her eyes ran over the lines. ‘I hope this boy knows what he has to live up to.’
She was mildly affronted by Angelos resurrecting his brother in this way.
‘I am sure he h-h-has his reasons,’ said Giorgos, putting his arms round her. ‘It’s nice that he wants to r-r-remember him.’
Themis had her own theory. She suspected that the birth of a son had brought out the more traditional side of Angelos. She could think of no other reason for him to revert to a Greek name for this child.
Themis was not upset for long. She contemplated this baby thousands of miles away in a cot. Perhaps he had very curly hair.
Anna, Andreas and Spiros all married over the following years too and Themis soon found herself with five grandchildren who all lived in the city of Athens. She was a model grandmother and everyone relied on her for childcare. Given that they had all stayed in the same neighbourhood and within ten minutes’ walk of each other, this was never hard to arrange. The old table was full again and hungry children jostled to fit. Only Uncle Thanasis had an ‘official’ seat. Even when the stairs became an enormous effort, he came down each day. Everyone loved to see him in spite of his crookedness, and the smallest children liked the fact that his food had to be cut up for him just as it did for them.
When he did not appear as usual for dinner one day, Themis sent Anna’s oldest up to check on him. He returned ashen-faced. Within seconds Themis was in her brother’s apartment but she could see immediately that he had gone. A catastrophic heart attack meant that he had not suffered. In death, she caught a glimpse once again of the good-looking boy he had been and knew that he was totally at peace.
Themis’ affection for Thanasis had grown immeasurably these past years and she mourned him deeply. Her brother’s unequivocal love for Nikos had swept away all other memories of their conflicts and differences. He was laid next to Nikos, and Themis made sure to tuck their mother’s embroidered handkerchief in his pocket before the burial. She had found it in his hand the day he died. For a second time, Themis took the bus each day to visit the nekrotafeío.
After forty days she stopped. She had to clear out Thanasis’ apartment. Her brother had few possessions, so it took only a short time. She left his old television where it was and the only thing she kept for herself was his stick. It had become such a part of him and now it stood in the corner of her living room.
Anna and her husband gave up their rented place in a nearby street and moved into Thanasis’ former apartment with their three children. The place was cramped but no more so than it had been when Themis was growing up there with her siblings. The children ran up and down the stairs to spend time with their grandparents and Themis cooked enough for them all. The doors were always open and there were tolerant neighbours who rarely complained about the noise. Anna was nursing full time at the Evangelismos Hospital and relied on her mother to keep her family filled with gemistá, and spanakórizo. Themis vainly hoped that if they were eating tasty food made with produce from the laikí, they would not be tempted to grab something from one of the fast-food restaurants popping up all over Athens.
Since suffering a mild stroke that had left him slightly immobile, Giorgos was unenthusiastic about going out and mixing with other people. Themis spent much of her time caring for him but frequently went out with her children and always sat at the head of any table. She was the matriarch and still full of energy.
These days, usually with one or two children under her feet and school collections to do, Themis had no time to read the newspapers and if she had the radio on, it was to listen to music.
One day in the summer of 1989, Anna came in to see her parents on her way from work. Giorgos was ill that week so she brought in some fresh spinach from the market, knowing that her mother had not been able to get out that day. Themis had mentioned that she wanted to make spanakópita, spinach pie. They drank some cold lemonade together and then Anna left.
It was a hot afternoon and the ingredients for the filo pastry stuck to Themis’ hands. Eventually she put a cloth over the mixing bowl and left it to rest before preparing the strong, green leaves that Anna had so thoughtfully purchased for her. She took them out of the newspaper in which they had been wrapped, put them in the sink and ran them under the cold tap, splashing her face with water as she did so to cool down. Once she had dried her hands, she picked up the scrunched front page of Eleftherotypia to throw it away. Something caught her eye. It was a word in the headline: Symmoritopólemos. Bandit war. She winced. It was an expression she loathed. Would she ever be able to put those memories behind her? Forty years on the word brought back the pain of being sadistically lashed, sym-mor-í-ti-ssa, 1-2-3-4-5. With each syllable a soldier had brought down his whip hard on her bare back. ‘Synmorítissa!’ ‘Criminal bitch!’
Leaning against the kitchen worktop, she ran her eyes over the article. Next to the word she hated so much, Symmoritopólemos, was another. Emfýlios. Civil war. This was the very first time she had seen those years of conflict described in such a way. In a gesture of reconciliation, the government had proposed a law to formally recognise those five years of vicious conflict in which her brother had perished and her comrades had died as something other than a ‘bandit war’. From now it would be officially referred to as a conflict between the government army and the communist army. Themis saw the drops of her own tears falling on to the page and smudging the type. After all this time, it had been recognised that she, Panos, Katerina and so many others had been soldiers, not brigands. This was a huge step towards the healing of old wounds and something she had never imagined could happen. A coalition that comprised both the centre-right and the Communist Party was currently in power and had proposed the change, and it was not going to be contested by other parties.
She looked across at Giorgos, who was asleep in his chair and wished she could share her joy with him but he would never fully understand, especially now. She sat down at the table and spread her hands across the page to flatten out the creases. There was something else she wanted to read and with almost total disbelief she took in the implications.
In a paragraph on the same crumpled page, the journalist referred to the files on communists and detainees. All these records were still held by the security services but were now to be destroyed. Themis knew hers had always been there, somewhere, gathering dust in a cabinet. All these years it had hung over her like the sword of Damocles.
Only the briefest details on this decision were given. For the next hour or so she occupied herself with cooking and soon the intoxicating smell of her spinach pie drifted out of the balcony doors, rose and entered the open windows of the floor above, summoning Anna’s hungry children down. All the while, Themis thought of what she had read.
For the first time in many years, she bought a newspaper each day and surreptitiously scoured the pages for more details. When there were none, she immediately disposed of the paper in the bin. In the following days, articles began to appear that reported some opposition to the impending destruction. Some believed it was a magnanimous gesture of forgiveness, others claimed it was the gratuitous destruction of a historical archive, others said that such an act protected all those who had collaborated or informed. The files were said to contain detailed notes on people’s comings and goings, eavesdropped conversations carefully transcribed and lists of every suspects’ acquaintances. It seemed that millions of people had been happy to exchange fragments of information for even a minimal fee. There were even some government ministers who were insisting that their own files should be located and saved. Themis was obsessed by the issue but said nothing to Anna, or to Andreas and Spiros when they called in to see her and their father.
It was 29 August, the anniversary of the final day of the Battle of Grammos, the last day of the civil war. More importantly for Themis, it was the date of the death of her brother. As she did each year, she went quietly and alone to light a candle in Agios Andreas.
There was no one in the church and she stood for a moment contemplating how it might have been to die on those mountains. Did Panos know at that moment that the war was lost? Did he die in pain? No matter how many years had passed, she always asked herself the same questions.
The temperatures were soaring that day and as she emerged from the semi-darkness she was momentarily blinded by the sunshine. She did not see old Kyría Sotiriou, who still lived in the neighbourhood, coming towards her. At first, she just heard her voice.
‘Kyría Stavridis,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Kyría Stavridis! Have you heard?’
Themis stopped.
‘Heard . . .?’ she said.
‘They’ve done it . . .’
The elderly woman was struggling to breathe and Themis realised that she was overcome with extreme emotion.
‘Do you want to sit for a moment?’ Themis asked, leading her to the bench just by the door of the church.
‘They . . . They . . . They’ve burned them. They’re all gone . . .’
For a moment, Themis wondered if she was talking about a forest fire. Some of them had been devastating in recent years, possibly started deliberately and, in this heat, trees could easily go up in flames.
With one or two more gasps, Kyría Sotiriou finally managed to get her words out.
‘All the files have gone. Millions of them. They’re gone.’
It was unspoken between them, but Themis knew that Kyría Sotiriou had her own reasons for celebrating this.
The older woman sat there, shaking her own head from side to side, as though she still could not believe herself what she had just heard. Themis could scarcely take it in either.
After a few minutes, Themis helped her up and they walked together to the corner where they went their separate ways.
As soon as she was back in the apartment, Themis put on the radio. Her hands were shaking so much that she could scarcely turn the dial from her usual music channel to the news. She knew that, on the hour, someone would read the headlines. It was ten minutes to two. She helped Giorgos to drink a glass of water and then sat at the table and waited.
Sure enough, the newsreader confirmed what Kyría Sotiriou had told her. Names, evidence, records had been incinerated. Eight million files had been destroyed in Athens and a further nine million in cities around Greece. A reporter gave a first-hand account from a factory in Elefsina just outside Athens, describing how truckloads of files had been loaded into the furnace. There had been protests from people wanting to retrieve their own files. For Themis, it was the ultimate act of forgetting. Her final release. It was almost beyond belief.
That night the temperature in Athens hardly dropped from the daytime high and Themis went to bed feeling almost feverish.
She had a vivid dream. She was standing in front of a huge conflagration. Fire was licking hundreds of metres into the air and men in overalls were stoking the pyre with armfuls of cardboard files, carelessly chucking them on to the flames. She could feel the heat as pages and pages with lists of names curled and rose into the air, disintegrating into small shreds of ash that were blown away by the wind. When she tried to catch a piece the fragments melted away. Then she saw an entire sheet rising into the air. It was a photo of Panos. He was in army uniform, smiling and strong, his hair made fair by the sun and his skin darkened by exposure to the elements. She wanted to seize it in her hands but she could not grab it in time and it floated out of her reach. Then she saw a drawing of Aliki. It was an exact likeness. She was radiant, just as she always had been. Both these images were lifted up higher and higher, dancing and twirling in the breeze, further and further out of reach. Finally the blaze died down and embers were all that remained.
Themis woke. It was still dark in the bedroom and she lay there for a moment before quietly getting out of bed to avoid waking Giorgos. Desperately needing some air, she went out on to the balcony.
Dawn was just breaking as she stood watching a brightening sky.