At Stony Brook I had developed a certain scorn for the glossy rich girls whose lunch plates I had to clear away, wearing a hairnet and overalls, for $3.75 an hour, and not just because of their habit of stubbing out their cigarettes in their leftover cheesecake. They were always shrieking with laughter, they had such an air of sucking greedily at all the goodies the world had to offer.
Now I realized that, for all their fancy clothes, they hadn’t been truly posh, whereas of course Isabel was, very posh, though I think she made conscientious efforts to play it down. But sometimes, if she was excited, or in fervent agreement with something I’d said, she slipped out of her pleasantly neutral accent and reverted to something closer to her mother’s. Once I was telling her about a show of roses at Kew Gardens I was writing up for some magazine, and she said, waving a rare cigarette, “Oh, it sounds too too riveting.” Later, when I came to introduce her to my new friends, there was always a subtle shift in their manner around her, a heightening of attention, as though metaphorically they were sitting up straighter.
Which may be part of what she’d loved about Greece, where she might not have been so easy to place, except as an Anglo. (I knew a little about that, feeling happily unplaceable in England.) But when she told me about it, it was always Stavros she talked about. It made me uneasy sometimes; she was so worshipful, telling me about his specialness, his wisdom: “At first I had this idea I was going to save him, heal him from his despair, only then I saw it wasn’t despair, it wasn’t some sickness in him but a kind of knowledge. A way of seeing things as they really were. Which I’d never had the courage for.” Maybe that was true. But it felt strange that she rarely mentioned being happy with him. Nor was there any of that wild carefree Zorba-the-Greek-dancing-barefoot-on-the-sand stuff (though she did say he took her on his battered old Vespa to watch the sun setting over the sea).
Instead he had set out to re-educate her. The first time they met, in the foreign-language bookshop where he worked, she had asked for a new translation of Cavafy, and he had told her Cavafy was a fascist. No he wasn’t, she said, shocked, but he insisted: yes, he was a fascist, he had accepted a medal from a fascist dictator. Furthermore, Mr. T. S. Eliot—she was carrying a copy of his plays—was a fascist also; did all English ladies have a liking for fascists? He could not agree to order her a copy of the poems of Mr. Ezra Pound, if that was what she’d like next. She laughed as she told me this, but her eyes were shining, as though it were proof of what a pure soul he was. Like Wittgenstein or someone.
A few days later, as she was crossing the street, he came around the corner on his Vespa, spattering mud all over her skirt; dismounting, he helped to brush it off—“This is a sin against civilization, to dirty an English lady’s clothing”—and then he asked her if she’d like to come for a coffee. That was the beginning. But for months, she said, he never talked to her about what he considered his real life: she knew about the other parts, his architecture studies at the Polytechnic, his work in the bookshop ten hours a week, but he never told her where he went on the evenings he wasn’t with her.
When she’d registered for her fellowship at the British School, she’d had to sign a form promising not to interfere in the country’s politics, but there had been so many forms; she didn’t give it much thought, nobody at the school ever mentioned it. If there was military music blaring from the cafés, if there were posters everywhere of a soldier emerging from the stomach of a phoenix, it all seemed part of the same foreignness as the street markets, with their piles of orange spices, and the bells that rang at all hours in the churches. Men in uniform, guns slung over their shoulders, patrolled the avenues, but the young ones could also be seen strolling with girls in the royal gardens, admiring the swans. To her, she said, the soldiers seemed less sinister than the priests, with their long beards and black robes; the priests never smiled at her, but the soldiers did.
Then, when Stavros was very late meeting her one night, and wouldn’t tell her why, she accused him of having another girlfriend; was that the reason, she asked, that sometimes, when she phoned him at his rooming house at a time they’d arranged, nobody could find him? At that he started shouting. What kind of a fool was she, he yelled, what Greece did she think she was living in, did she have any idea what was happening all around her? Or didn’t the Brits care about that, they were too busy with fucking Simonides and fucking Minoan pottery to see what was going on under their noses. In the military prison at Aegina, he told her, they were burning young men’s testicles, they were beating old men senseless; on the island of Giaros, they were herding children and pregnant women into cages too small even to lie down in, and leaving them there to bake in the sun.
“And then I remembered the man at Madame Evangelides’s flat—the woman who was teaching me modern Greek. She never strayed from the subject at hand, she only talked to me about the formation of the aorist subjunctive in the second conjugation, or the relative versus the absolute superlative. But one afternoon there was a knock at her door, and a man with a squashed nose and one eye swollen shut slid inside. As soon as he saw me, he started to back out, but Madame caught hold of his sleeve and walked him down the corridor, toward the rear of the flat. A minute later she came back with a saucer of quince preserves and we went on with the lesson as though nothing had happened. I assumed he was her ne’er-do-well son, or her drunken nephew or something. God. How could I have been so stupid?”
Soon a resistance cell was holding meetings at the flat her mother had rented for her in Kolonaki—her idea, her way of keeping Stavros safe, or at least safer. Nobody expected the revolution to be planned where the rich women shopped, and besides, her building even had a rear entrance. One by one, the others could slip in the back door and up the stairs after dark, though Eleni, also an architecture student, refused; wearing short spangly skirts and fishnet stockings, her face smeared with bright red rouge, she rang the front bell. Dressing like a tart was the best disguise, she said, everyone knew that all the tarts in the city were fascists. Later Eleni would be Lucy’s unofficial godmother.
At first Isabel shut herself in the bedroom when they came, to give them privacy. But one night Eleni knocked on the door and said she’d brought some homemade retsina from her grandfather’s village, why didn’t she come out and drink with them? The next time she made herself useful by helping Grigoris, the sternest Marxist of the group (a banker’s son, Stavros had told her, the richest of them all), unjam the primitive mimeograph machine they used to print their leaflets; it squatted permanently by then on what had been her dining room table. A week later, when a salesclerk demanded to see Eleni’s ID because she was asking for suspicious amounts of paper, she came to Isabel: “Tell them it’s to perform The Bacchae at the British School, you will all dance naked for this, but first there must be printed many copies of the script. Make a pretty English smile. ‘Yes madam,’ they’ll say, ‘certainly madam’…born slaves they are.” And that was exactly what happened.
Then it was spring, the air was full of scented mildness, and her period was ten days late.
She said nothing to Stavros, who would accuse her, rightly, of carelessness: she had neglected to take her pills for several days running. She would have to return to England, get an abortion. Maybe she wouldn’t come back. She would leave him a note, saying the rent was paid through June, saying it was for the best, saying she loved him, or not saying it, in case he didn’t want to hear that. Not since the spring when Maddy died had she felt so lonely, she told me, as though surrounded by too much space, and the light was hurting her eyes.
A month before, a letter had come from Stavros’s mother in Patras, announcing the birth of his sister’s second child. He’d crumpled it up and thrown it across the room. “And this is supposed to make me hopeful,” he said bitterly, “yes, our children are our future, the world is being born afresh, let us rejoice for the little miracle God has sent.” Now there she was, hormones surging through her body, gazing foolishly at a baby kicking its fat little heels against its stroller, a boy with curly dark hair like Stavros’s chasing a ball in the royal gardens, conviction growing in her against her will, against all good sense, that she wasn’t going to abort this baby. She was going to have it. Somehow. Somewhere. In England, because there it would not be so shocking, things had changed, not just rock singers but lady doctors, lady dons were giving birth to bastards.
When she could no longer keep the secret—he’d stood in the bathroom doorway two mornings running, watching her throw up in the toilet—it took him about half an hour of pacing the living room, running his hands through his hair, to stop muttering ominously and begin to laugh: what a wonderful baby it would be, a really extraordinary baby, his and hers. (It just went to show, Eleni said, rolling her eyes, that he was a typical Greek male after all.) Throughout her pregnancy his black moods were not as frequent, he read the poems of Seferis aloud as she chopped onions, he even hammered bits of wood into a cradle. Long before the baby could have developed hearing he put his head against her stomach and sang the songs of his childhood: “Cloudy Sunday, you are like my heart.” The singing continued into the first few months of Lucy’s life; when she woke in the night, he’d bring her into their bed and croon to her. “He never got bored with singing those songs to her, which was strange, since he was easily bored. Not someone known for his patience.”
People were in and out of the flat all the time, unannounced, no peace, no order. She wasn’t cut out for any of it, she had always craved silence, her realest life had gone on inside her head. And now, when she was exhausted as never before, her nerves on edge, looking after a colicky baby, and then, when Lucy was asleep, checking every few minutes to make sure she was still breathing, this craziness. But there were moments of pure joy too, she said, the three of them lying together in the early mornings, and even beyond that, she told me, she was conscious of feeling more hopeful, less afraid of the dark center, than ever before. It seemed impossible that Stavros and the others, all those dozens of people meeting in cellars across the city, ferrying fugitives between safe houses, smuggling false papers inside the prisons, wouldn’t triumph in the end. History was on their side, they were doing something great and necessary. “Whereas I’d never been part of anything that mattered,” she said. “I’d never even thought of trying to change things. All my silly little struggles had only ever been about myself.”
How could I answer that? Don’t be so hard on yourself? So I said nothing, I let her go on with the story. But it made me remember what Julian had said, about her gazing raptly at Stavros, while he hardly looked at her.
As Lucy’s first birthday approached, he became restless and nervy, pacing the flat, striking his forehead with his fist and declaring more and more trivial mishaps a “katastrophi”—a broken corkscrew, an exam on which he’d done less than perfectly. Once that had been his word for recounting to her, proudly, the history of his family, which was also the history of Greece in the twentieth century: a series of catastrophes. (His father’s great-grandfather had been hanged by the Turks during the War of Independence; his mother’s family had been part of the mass expulsion from Smyrna; her brother, part of the resistance during the German occupation, was shot after a collaborator cousin turned him in. His father’s two brothers had been on opposing sides during the civil war.) Now he snapped at her for leaving the butter out of the fridge, for using the wrong olive oil; it was all she could do, exhausted as she was, not to burst out sobbing. She worried that he was growing tired of domesticity, even of Lucy’s demands, what her mother would call the whole shooting match. He was no longer singing. She could feel the tension in his body. They hardly ever made love. But after the uprising at the law school that February, after posters and leaflets against the government started proliferating even on the broad avenues leading to the parliament building, she woke one night to find him leaning over the cradle he’d made and whispering to their sleeping child that everything was about to change, she was going to be eleftheria, free, like her name.
In the third week of November Eleni phoned just as Stavros was about to leave for a stint at the bookshop and told him about a demonstration under way at the Polytechnic. “Now it begins,” he said exultantly, when he hung up. “So you’ll go,” she said, and he nodded. Should she phone Themis at the bookshop, she asked, and make some excuse, but he brushed this away impatiently, he was already heading for the door.
All that day she kept the radio on, and then, suddenly, new voices came through—the voices of Polytechnic students who had locked themselves in and rigged up a radio station somehow. Over and over, the same three voices, none of which she recognized, urged the public to rise up against the colonels. “People of Greece, join with us…we are unarmed…our only weapon is our faith in freedom.”
Stavros didn’t come back that night, nor the next. On the morning of the third day, she put Lucy into the fluffy red coat Helena had sent and pushed her stroller to the Polytechnic. Crowds had gathered outside the gates, shabby men of all ages, old women in black, with headscarves, the men stamping their feet, shouting out support for the students. But now she was a foreigner again, without Stavros and Eleni and Grigoris she had no place there, people looked at her suspiciously, and the shouting made Lucy cry. She tried to tell her it was all right, it wasn’t bad shouting, it was cheering, Lucy should cheer too. “Let’s sing a song,” she said, “the one about cloudy Sunday,” but Lucy only cried harder. She took her home and gave her lunch; then she listened to the radio some more, the crackling voices fading in and out, exhorting their fellow Athenians to join them. She put Lucy down for her nap and fell asleep in the armchair. When she woke the radio was blaring static; no amount of fiddling with the knobs could bring the voices back. Only the official stations, with the same martial music, the same old folk tunes they had always played.
After breakfast, she dressed Lucy in a hat and mittens as well as her red coat—“even in Athens, November can be chilly”—and went downstairs. Her landlady was standing in the doorway, talking to a woman from the building opposite. She had always greeted Stavros politely when she came to collect the rent, she had cooed over Lucy and called her an angel, a little darling. But there was a look of malice on her face as she asked Isabel if she’d heard the news. What news? Isabel said stupidly, and the other two started talking over each other: the tanks had entered the Polytechnic just before dawn, the students had been taken away. “Thank God,” the landlady said, crossing herself. “We don’t need any more riots, we had enough of those with the Communists. Put them all in the army, that will teach them respect.” The other woman spat on the sidewalk. “Prison is where they belong,” she said. “Lock them up, maybe that will knock some sense into them.”
When Isabel told the fat man at Security Police Headquarters on Sofias that she was there to inquire about one of the students, he laughed heartily, he patted her hand and winked at Lucy. “Take your little girl and go home.” Her former professor at the British School went stony-faced when she knocked on his door and pleaded for help; he could not interfere in the politics of another country, he said. In desperation, she phoned the consul, a friend of her mother’s whom Helena had urged her to get in touch with when she first arrived, but he was out of the country, they told her, shooting in Scotland. She went back with Lucy to the Polytechnic, deserted now, the iron gates dangling off their hinges, canisters of tear gas strewn around, the smell still lingering, burning her throat. People hurried by with handkerchiefs held to their mouths. A bent old woman in a black dress and shawl, looking as if she’d just come down from the mountains—to search for her son, her grandson?—stooped down painfully and picked up one of the blood-smeared leaflets that lay on the ground, examining both sides, as though it might tell her what she needed to know. Isabel wondered if it had been printed on the paper she’d bought.
For a whole week she could learn nothing. And then Eleni came, entering by the back way this time, her miniskirt abandoned for jeans. One of her eyes was swollen shut, her arm was in a makeshift sling, bright red and orange. “What happened to you?” Isabel cried, and she shrugged. “The same thing that happened to everyone else. This”—she pointed to her eye—“was a rifle butt. This”—gesturing at the sling with her other hand—“was a truncheon. I don’t have time to give the whole story. I can’t stay long.” Someone had seen Stavros loaded into an ambulance, she said—the soldiers had shot at the tires—before the final invasion by the tanks. Nobody knew where he’d been taken. “I didn’t see him myself, there were fires everywhere, the guys were pissing on them to put them out. I couldn’t see much of anything. But I trust the person who told me. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear.” She kissed Isabel on both cheeks and ran down the stairs.
And so she waited, she waited. She had Lucy to look after, she couldn’t afford to fall apart completely. She cried only at night, when Lucy was asleep. Sometimes she managed to sleep herself. On the fourth day she phoned his mother, who had come on the train from Patras six months before to meet Lucy, though only once, since she did not share Helena’s unorthodox views on marriage. In her eyes, Isabel had brought disgrace on the family: thanks to the colonels, Lucy had been born a bastard—civil marriages were outlawed, and the church would not perform a marriage to a Protestant. “So no godparents could reject Satan in Lucy’s name by spitting in the church doorway.”
Nor, as Stavros’s concubine, was she entitled to make inquiries. But his mother was; her cousin, she said—the collaborator?—was in Athens seeking information. She would be in touch when they knew anything. “You understand?” she asked sharply, several times, and Isabel wasn’t sure if she meant, Do you understand my Greek? or Do you understand what this might mean? Or even, Do you understand how crazy he was, my son, to put himself in that danger? “And I couldn’t say he was right to do it, it was for his country, it was in the cause of freedom. Because I didn’t really believe in freedom and heroism and the shining light of truth right then, I didn’t believe in anything. I just wanted Lucy to have a father. I was a little bourgeoise after all.”
She told herself he must be a prisoner somewhere, she was waiting for the British consul to return from his grouse shoot and make his own inquiries: her mother promised to talk to him herself.
And then Stavros’s sister, whom she’d never met, phoned, her voice hostile, as though what had happened was somehow Isabel’s fault. They’d had bad news, she said bluntly. His name was on a list of the dead. That same week the government was toppled, but not to usher in democracy: the generals had seized power, there would be no referendum, no eleftheria. Nothing worth dying for. Their child had been made fatherless to no purpose.
And still she thought there might be a mistake, if she just stayed put he might show up, bruised and bloody but alive. The following month his sister phoned again: they had filled out the forms and paid the fees, his body was on its way to Patras. She made no mention of Isabel coming to the interment.
When Eleni emerged from hiding, a week later, she insisted they must hold an agrypnia, a wake, for his absent body, with a koliva, the traditional sugared cake for the dead, though they could not go from door to door in Kolonaki offering spoonfuls to the neighbors. Eleni’s eye was only a little puffy by then, her arm was in a neat white splint. The tattered remnants of the group—the ones who were still alive, still able to walk, not locked up somewhere—came to the flat bearing plates of fava and stuffed vine leaves and bottles of cheap retsina to go with Eleni’s cake. They kissed Isabel once, twice, three times; they threw their arms around each other, weeping. A woman she had never seen before sat cross-legged on the floor, under the poster of Lambrakis, the resisters’ hero, rocking back and forth and wailing like the chorus in The Trojan Women: she could have written a paper about it, Isabel said, for her seminar on classical drama. She was the only one with dry eyes, a dry throat.
“Once, when I was pregnant, I went with Eleni and Stavros and the others to a cellar in Kaisariani where they played the old wailing rebetiko music. The Germans had banned it as a threat to order, it was too wild and sorrowful, and then the junta banned it too. Sometimes the police came and smashed the players’ bouzoukis. But that night in Kaisariani there were no police, no soldiers, only old men and young students. And everyone was smoking, and singing, and the men were dancing together. I must have looked totally out of place, the only foreigner, but I’ve never had such a sense of what you might call universal brotherhood. At one point I whispered to Eleni, ‘I think I must have been Greek in some other incarnation.’ I meant it as a joke, I wasn’t serious, but she threw out her arms and said, ‘Of course! Of course you were! I knew it from the first time I met you. Our little blonde Greek, like the ancients.’
“But that day I couldn’t bear the smoke in my living room, all the smeared plates, and that woman moaning. I opened a window to let some air in, but the smell from outside was even worse, exhaust and day-old fish and burning plastic. And the loudspeaker on the corner was blaring martial music.” She thought with longing, she said, of the green lawns of England, the pale yellow roses climbing the orchard wall at Sidworth. The white eyelet sheets of her childhood. She never wanted to hear anyone cry again. Two weeks later she and Lucy were on a plane to London.