‘Why pay for some tatty flat,’ her father had boomed, ‘when your grandparents only live half an hour from university?’
For this reason, like many undergraduates, Irini was in an apartment which had been familiar to her for all nineteen years of her life, with pastel-coloured stuffed toys neatly lined up on her pillow and childhood picture books lined up next to her philology textbooks; every object, on every surface, including the small vases of silk flowers, was perched on a circle of lace crocheted by her grandmother.
It already stretched her parents’ means to be putting her through university, so she had been obliged to admit this was a good solution. Her father had a government pension which meant that they were not hard up, but any savings had already been spent on giving his children all the private tuition they had needed after school. Like most Greeks, they were fiercely ambitious for their offspring.
It almost hurt to see her brother’s graduation photograph in pride of place above her grandparents’ electric fire, knowing that they would be so happy when they had another to place next to it. Her grandmother had already bought the matching frame.
‘Why do you have so many pictures of us?’ she asked one day as they sat at the mahogany dining table.
‘For when you aren’t here,’ answered her grandmother.
‘But I’m always here!’ she replied.
‘Not in the day,’ interrupted her grandfather. ‘You aren’t here in the day.’
In that moment, she felt suffocated, strangled, by the all-encompassing security her family gave her.
‘It’s great,’ she said now to Dimitra. ‘I’m really enjoying everything . . . a little strange some of it, but it’s good, it’s good. I’m getting used to it all. My grandmother’s dolmadakia are the best in the world.’
Every child was brought up to think that their grandmother’s stuffed vine leaves were second to none and Irini was no different. They ordered their coffee metrio, slightly sweet, and small pastries, and chatted about lectures and the syllabus.
From their table by the window, Irini had a good view up the street and she noticed that a group of photographers had gathered outside Zonars. As the phalanx of marchers approached, their cameras flashed in the faces of those who led the march. They were hungry for the following day’s front-page picture.
The noise from the street was muffled by the dense plate glass that separated the customers of the café from the outside world, but there was a growing sense of threat as the close-packed group of perhaps a thousand students moved steadily closer and now passed in front of them.
The procession had swept along with it a number of large shaggy dogs. These strays and mongrels that roamed the streets, slept in doorways and lived off restaurant scraps were spinning around barking and yelping at the head of the crowd. A few had been adopted and were held in check by a metre of string, and the canine over-excitement lent chaos to the scene.
The waiters in Zonars stopped working to watch them pass. Their neat, retro outfits, and the tidy rows of gleaming tables seemed a world away from the shambolic crowd that walked by on the other side of the plate glass.
Young men largely formed the brigade of marchers and were almost uniformly in leather jackets, with unshaven faces and closely cropped hair. Their low voices chanted but it was impossible to make out what they were saying and the lettering on their banners was equally incomprehensible. On some of them the fabric was ripped, by accident or design it was impossible to tell, but it added to the sense of potential violence.
‘Something to do with education reforms,’ muttered the waiter in answer to Dimitra’s question, as he scattered her change into a metal saucer on her table.
Irini felt slightly uncomfortable sitting here in this bourgeois café. She too was a student, like the people outside, but the divide seemed immense.
Dimitra noticed her expression change and realised that her goddaughter’s attention had drifted away.
‘What is it?’ she said with concern. ‘You mustn’t worry about these demonstrations. I know they don’t happen in Kilkis but they’re a day-to-day occurrence here. These students are always taking to the streets, protesting about something or other.’
She gave a dismissive wave with her hand and Irini felt a gulf open up between herself and her elegant godmother. It seemed wrong to belittle whatever it was that the people outside clearly felt strongly about, but she did not want to argue.
It took fifteen minutes for the protesters to pass, by which time their second coffees were finished and it was time to leave.
‘It was so lovely to see you – and thank you for my flowers!’ said Dimitra. ‘Let’s meet up again soon. And, don’t worry about those students. Just keep your distance.’
As she leaned forward to kiss her, Irini breathed in her godmother’s expensive scent. It was like being enveloped in a cashmere blanket. The elegant sixty year old hastened across the road and turned to wave.
‘Yassou agapi mou! Goodbye, my dear,’ she called out.
Irini glanced to her right and saw the tail end of the march still making its way slowly towards the government building, the chanting little more than a low humming now. For a moment she was tempted to follow but this was not the right time and instead she turned left up the empty street. Traffic diversions would continue for another ten minutes so she took the chance to walk down the middle of the road, placing her feet carefully along the white lines. Lights still turned from red to green, but for a few moments she was all alone in this wide avenue, completely and unexpectedly free.
Several times that week, her classes were half empty as students took time off to go out into the streets. It seemed strange to her, in their first term of university, to waste all these lectures, but it was obvious to Irini when she first stepped inside the foyer that the politics on the street were as important to most of the students as anything they might learn inside the faculty building. Thousands of identical red and black propaganda flyers were posted on the wall, their endlessly repeated message almost lost in an hypnotic pattern.
‘Why don’t you come with us?’ some of them asked her.
As far as Irini’s father was concerned there was only one political party, only one view of the world, and to take sides against it, even in an argument around the dining table, took more courage than she would ever have. Communists were detested, anarchists despised. This was the view she had no courage to question, so when a huge group of her fellow students went off regularly and cheerfully with their makeshift banners, she could not join them. For them it was a way of life, passing through the graffiti-daubed corridors where even the walls joined in the protest.
There were many days and nights, though, when marches and politics were forgotten and every student, whatever their views, ate, drank, danced and looked for love.
That Friday night, in a bar in the Exarchia district, Irini caught sight of a pair of pale green eyes. The low light accentuated their pallor. She smiled. It was impossible not to. A perfect face such as this made the world a better place.
He smiled back.
‘Drink?’ he gestured. The volume of noisy conversation in the bar was almost deafening. Irini and her friends joined his group and introductions were made. The boy’s name was Fotis.
The evening passed, with bottles gradually forming a glass forest on the table and smoke curling closely around them. Irini was happy to be meeting some people from other faculties, and even happier to feel the strong beam of this beautiful boy’s attention on her. On a raised area in the middle of the room, singers and musicians came and went, their prodigious talent hardly acknowledged by the throng of high-spirited young people.
At four the bar was starting to close and Irini stood up to leave. She knew that one or other of her grandparents stayed awake until she returned and this pricked her conscience. Out on the pavement, though, Fotis took her hand and Irini immediately knew she would not be going home that night. She was always urging her grandmother to believe that she was
old enough to take care of herself and tonight she hoped that the sweet octogenarian would take those words to heart.
Close by in a crumbling apartment block, built well before the invention of the lift, Fotis, his flatmate Antonis and Irini climbed nine flights of stairs. The walls were covered with a pattern as intricate as lace, but on close inspection Irini saw that the design was made up of a thousand tiny letters. Just as at the university, even the yellowing walls of the landing screamed a political message.
Irini resisted the urge to look over the low banister rail down into the sickening depths of the stairwell and was relieved when Fotis opened the door to their one-bedroom flat where a trail of dirty crockery led from sofa to sink and the air reeked of stale ash. There was nowhere for the fumes to escape.
Like her, these boys were studying at the university. But there the similarity ended. Irini breathed in the scent of grubbiness, the aroma of this reality, this proper student way of life.
Fotis’ windowless flat, with its low ceilings and dark paintwork, seemed far less claustrophobic than her bland if airy home. This struck her on the first and on every subsequent occasion when they strolled back to his place after an evening in the bar. It was always with Antonis that they walked home, three abreast with Fotis in the middle and when they got in, the routine was the same. Antonis would switch on the television and settle down in front of it, pulling his duvet out from underneath the sofa which would then become his bed and Fotis would lead Irini into his bedroom.
In the narrow confines of his bed, she was scorched by the blaze of his passion. It was annihilating, wordless, and the muscularity of his slim body amazed her. This was more than she had ever expected from love.
Not once did she see Fotis during daylight hours. They always met up in the same bar which attracted a huge crowd most evenings and then returned to his dark apartment and unyielding bed. Unlike the bedroom in her grandmother’s home, where a gap in the curtains let through a chink of light to wake her, there was no window here. It was the coolness of sheets that disturbed her in the morning, not sunshine. The incendiary heat and sweat of the previous night had chilled the bed linen to icy dampness and the clammy solitude made her shiver. Fotis had gone.
The first few times she got up and crept quietly out of the flat, careful not to wake Antonis, but one morning as she opened the bedroom door, she saw him sitting at the small kitchen table. In these weeks of knowing each other, they had scarcely exchanged a word. Irini had sensed the possessiveness of an established friend and detected a whiff of hostility. It had made her unsure of Antonis and now for the first time they were alone together.
‘Yassou . . .’ she said in a friendly greeting. ‘Hi . . .’
He nodded in acknowledgement and drew deeply on his cigarette.
Though it was still early, he had put on the radio and the tinny sound of a bouzouki tinkled away in the background. There was a pyramid of cigarette butts in the ashtray in front of him and pale ash sprinkled across the table top like icing sugar.
‘Have you seen Fotis?’ she asked. ‘Do you know where he has gone?’
Antonis shook his head.
‘’Fraid not,’ he said. ‘Not a clue.’
Slowly and deliberately he took another cigarette from the packet in front of him and, without offering her one, lit up. He inhaled deeply and looked up at her. She had not really looked at Antonis properly before. He had the same beard and almost-smooth head as Fotis, but in other ways they were very different. She took in that Antonis was broader, rounder, and with a nose that seemed disproportionately small for his wide face.
‘Right . . . OK,’ she said. ‘Bye.’
And with that, she headed out into the pale dawn and walked the few kilometres back to her own home, shivering.
Her friends quizzed her about Fotis, but there was nothing she wanted to tell them. All she knew was that the temperature of her infatuation for him rose by the day and the attention he gave her when they were together was new and overpowering. She accepted that a few days might pass without him contacting her, not even with a text message.
After one such gap in their meeting, she collided with him outside the university. He smiled his broad smile and took her arm.
‘Irini mou, my Irini, where have you been?’
Disarmed by his friendliness, she felt herself melt beneath the warmth of his hand. As they walked to his flat later that night, he stopped to light a cigarette. In the dark side-street the bright flame of his lighter cast sinister dancing shadows across his face. It was ghoulish, macabre but no more than a trick of light.
The following dawn, she woke as before to find him gone. Once again, she found Antonis keeping vigil at the kitchen table.
‘Don’t either of you two need any sleep?’ she asked Antonis, trying to make light of it. ‘Are you insomniacs or something?’
‘Nope,’ said Antonis. ‘You’re not even warm.’
‘Right. Well, never mind. It’s just odd, that’s all. Just odd.’
With that, Irini was about to leave but Antonis had something more to say.
‘Look . . . take care. Please take care.’
His tone of genuine concern seemed strange and she had no idea what to make of it.
Classes at university began to become increasingly disrupted. Even when students turned up to seminars, the professors were not always there to teach and if they were, some of them seemed disappointed in those that had made the effort to come.
‘So you’re not on the march?’ one of them asked her. ‘Why?’
Irini had no answer. Explaining why she was not doing something seemed much harder than justifying why she was.
‘I had your seminar to attend,’ was all she could think of to say.
The real reason was her fear of her father’s reaction if she decided to go out on a demonstration. His disappointment would be bitter. And her mother would literally make herself ill with worry. Parading down Panepistimiou street and being spotted by her godmother holding a banner was something she would never risk.
In the past few weeks, the reason for marching had changed. The police had shot dead a fifteen-year-old boy in the street and the mood was a new and uglier one. There were many more occasions when classes at the university were empty of students and the streets were full of protest. Now the demonstrations became more violent. In the city centre, the stink of tear gas permeated the streets, shops were being set alight and every cash-point machine had become a blackened hole in the wall. Every capitalist institution was a target and even the city’s huge Christmas tree became a flaming symbol of the protesters’ anger.
One evening, after a journey home disrupted by road closures and police barricades, Irini got home later than usual. She crossed the polished floor of the hallway and through a scarcely open door, she caught a glimpse of her grandfather reading in his study. She heard him call her name.
‘Is that you, Irini? Come in to see me, would you?’
Even though he had been retired for twenty years, her grandfather still had the manner of a government official and spent hours of each day reading at his desk.
‘Let me have a look at you,’ he said, scrutinising her face with a mixture of love and curiosity. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Getting back from the university . . .’
‘You seem to be out a lot at the moment. More than usual.’
‘It takes a while to get home when there are demonstrations.’
‘Yes. These demonstrations . . . That’s what I really want to talk to you about. We haven’t ever really discussed politics but—’
‘I’m not involved in them,’ interjected Irini.
‘I’m sure you’re not,’ he said. ‘But I know what your faculty is like. It has a reputation, you know. For being radical. And your father—’
‘Well I’m not a radical,’ she said. ‘Really I’m not.’
Even from a distance she could feel the eye of her father on her. Irini knew that he would probably already h
ave heard that she often did not return until light.
A newspaper, which had been the catalyst for this discussion, lay on her grandfather’s desk. She could see the headlines:
CITY CENTRE BLAZES
‘Look at what’s going on!’ said her grandfather.
He waved the newspaper that had been lying on his desk in the air.
‘These koukouloforoi! These hooded kids! They’re a disgrace!’ His voice had risen. ‘They’re anarchists!’
The kindly old man could quickly lose his gentle air once he was on this subject.
And then something caught her eye.
There were two images on the front page. One of the burning tree and a second of someone falling beneath the baton blows of two riot police. Their anonymity was guaranteed – their faces were concealed behind the perspex globes of their helmets – but their victim’s features were caught vividly on camera, contorted by a mixture of pain and rage. If his eyes had not been so distinctive, so clear, so pale, the image would not have grabbed her attention so forcibly.
She took the newspaper calmly from her grandfather. Her hands were shaking and her heart pounded as she took a closer look. It was Fotis. It was undoubtedly him. What shocked her was that in his hand he clung on to a flaming torch. This was making the job of the police, who clearly feared that they might go up in flames, much harder. The picture showed that Fotis’ knuckles were white with determination. He was not going to let go of his weapon.
‘You see!’ said her grandfather. ‘Look at that hooligan!’
Irini could scarcely speak.
‘It’s awful, yes . . . awful,’ she whispered.
With those words she put the newspaper back on her grandfather’s desk.
‘I’m just going out for a while,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you later.’
‘But your grandmother has made supper—’