Dead Europe (3 page)

Michaelis turned to Lucia.

—Up near the summit of the mountain, near where you graze the goats, in what condition is the old church?

—Michaeli, stop this nonsense. Old Voulgaris, Basili Leptomas' youngest, they all graze their herds up there. We could not hide the child.

—We could, beneath the stone. The old monks had a room beneath the church. No one is fool enough to venture there. We could lock the cellar during the day and the child could roam free at night. We could do that.

Lucia stared across the table to where the older Hebrew was sitting. Jacova was looking only at Michaeli, a glimmer of hope shining in his eyes. The boy was staring at her. In the darkness his face was dark and only the white in his eyes was visible. Lucia shuddered.

—We cannot do it, Husband. If they catch us …

Michaeli ignored her. He was looking hard at Jacova.

—And what will you pay us if we decide in your favour?

The father nodded to his son. From underneath his tunic Elias took out a small parcel wrapped in black silk. Jacova took it from him, pulled away the silk and opened the lid of
a square wood box. In the dark room, the gold and the jewels sparkled like fire. Lucia drew a breath. Michaelis' eyes grew wide and delighted. Lucia rose from the bench and stood beside her husband. The men and the boy had disappeared. From the box she took out a small band, gold and studded with glittering silver stones, which she placed on her finger. She took a ruby brooch and held it close to her lips. All the time the boy's gaze did not leave her enraptured face.

—Ours?

—All of it, yours.

Lucia placed the jewels back into the box. Michaelis closed the lid and placed the box on his lap as if he feared the Hebrew would regret his offer and snatch it back.

—He will work hard for me.

—He works hard for me now.

Jacova placed his arm around his son.

—You will treat him fairly?

—Of course.

Michaelis rose from the table. He gave the box to his wife and beckoned the boy to come with him. The father and son were allowed a moment to say farewell and then Jacova began his trek back down the mountain. Lucia watched as her husband and the boy walked into the black night for their ascent to the summit. She cursed her useless womb, pounding her fists on her stomach, and then fell to the ground and began banging the stone floor. Her anger was so ferocious that on reaching to brush aside a wisp of hair that had fallen loose from her head scarf, she found that she had torn a clutch of hair from her head. In her fury and hatred she had not felt the pain. Her face twisted into a terrible grimace, spit falling from her mouth as she banged her head on the stone, until she finally exhausted herself from curses and lay trembling on the floor. Again she could hear the breeze spinning among the trees. Giving up her curses, her prayers to God spent, she now turned elsewhere.

—Satan, give me my own child. Give me my own child, Lord, and take away the demon Hebrew you've let into my house.

As soon as Lucia uttered her prayer, a peace descended. Slowly she rose from the floor and, gathering her hair tight under her scarf, she dried her eyes. The dawn was beginning. She went to light the fire and prepare herself for the day ahead.

I DID NOT like my hotel room. The bed was too small, the sheets were frayed and the glass window was stained with the dust and the perpetual grey residue of the Athenian air. Not that it really mattered much; the view outside the room was ugly as well. It looked down on a concrete apartment block, a billboard for the Agricultural Bank of Greece, and if I strained my eyes hard enough I could catch a glimpse of the neon from Syntagma Square. The airconditioning hummed at a consistent and annoying low pitch; water dripped dripped dripped in the bathroom. I opened my eyes and nothing had changed. The dull cheap white paint on the wall, the dripping water, the humming machinery.

Beside me, the boy was still asleep. His snores were light and a thin strip of dewy saliva coated his lips. His shoulders and chest were tanned piss-yellow from the Mediterranean sun. Fine blond hairs spread across his belly. He hardly stirred when I got up. I switched on the bathroom light and looked in the mirror. My skin was stretched tight across my face. On the floor, next to the full ashtray, there was still a shot of whisky left. I put the bottle to my mouth and drank.

—I have some too? He spoke to me in his terrible English, and I replied in my inadequate Greek that the bottle was now empty. His eyes were bleary and red. He rose and walked into the bathroom unembarrassed by his nudity. He shut the door and I quickly began to put my clothes back on. I put on my watch and saw that it was close to two o'clock in the morning. I was far from sleep. I waited impatiently for the youth to finish.

 

I had found him in the park across from the old Olympic Stadium. The day was giving itself over to evening and under the shade of a large English oak a group of young men were playing cards. They were all wearing jeans and most were naked to the waist. Only a couple of them looked Greek. The others could have been Slav. Could have been Russian. Could have been Polish. He had been wearing a singlet, a faded blue sweatshirt with the Adidas stripes. I found myself staring at him, the surprising dark thatch of hair under his arms, his keen concentration on the gambling. One of the other youths noticed me staring, and then so did a pretty transvestite with her arm around one of the younger boys; she winked at me. Embarrassed to be caught out, a little frightened by their youth and poverty, I kept walking.

I heard footsteps behind me.

—Have you cigarette?

I stopped and gave him one.

I didn't want to ask his age. His brow was lined and weary, his posturing was macho and confident, but his eyes and mouth betrayed his youth. As the sun faded and the warm Athenian breeze encircled us, I found myself drawn by the faintly unpleasant but intoxicating odour of sweat on his burnt gold skin. We negotiated prices in the twilight and smoked my cigarettes as we walked back to my hotel.

He had said hardly a word as we were walking, but once inside the room he was cheerful and chatty. He was Russian, he told me, and we spoke a combination of Greek and English in order to understand each other. His cheerfulness increased when I mimed to him that we would not need any condoms as I had no intention of fucking or being fucked. We drank from my bottle, he smoked more of my cigarettes, and he allowed me to shoot my come across his shoulders, his cheeks, his chest. He kept his eyes firmly closed and when I had finished he rubbed his face vigorously with the sheet.

—Your skin very white for a Greek, he told me.

—My family is Greek. But I told you, I am from Australia.

He traced a finger along my shoulder; he smirked as I playfully tugged at his balls.

—But Australia too is plenty sun, no? He moved away from me.

—It is winter there now.

He sniffed, eyed me suspiciously, then got up and went into the bathroom. I heard him pissing and I quickly hid my wallet under the mattress.

—Would you like to stay a little? In this claustrophobic hotel room, with the hot, crowded city outside, I was suddenly childishly lonely: I was scared to be on my own. But no more money, I warned. I don't have much.

He glanced around the hotel room, weighed his options, checked my watch, and nodded. We drank more from the bottle. He had been the first to fall asleep.

 

Now, he was taking a long time in the toilet. I glanced at my trousers lying on the floor but they were not in the spot I had thrown them when we'd gone to bed. I checked my pockets and discovered that a fifty-dollar Australian note I'd intended to exchange the night before was missing. I smiled to myself. The price did not seem unfair. I quickly checked under the mattress. The wallet was still there.

There was a flush and his steps were slow and hesitant when he emerged. He avoided my eyes. For the first time I noticed that there were tiny red scabs forming a grid along his arms. I felt crushed by my age, my thickening body, the sly strands of grey in my once jet-black hair. I could not wait for him to leave.

—I am going out now. We have to leave this room.

He put on his jeans, slipped on his sandals and rubbed his forehead. He sat on the edge of the bed, silent and sullen. I was afraid of him then.

—Okay, he slurred suddenly. May I have money for taxi? he asked.

—How about the Australian dollars in your pocket?

He grinned and I was struck again by his beauty. I sat next to him and kissed his neck, tasted pungent buttery sweat. He moved away.

—Taxi no take Australian dollar.

I handed him a crisp new euro note and we took the stairs together down to the small lobby. The concierge on duty called me over. He was a man in his mid-fifties, with a thick wide belly and wet moustache. An image of fireworks breaking over the Olympic stadium was dusty and mounted crookedly on the wall. He yelled at me in Greek.

—You've only paid for one person. Yours is a single room.

I blushed.

—I am the only one using my room. This is a friend.

His contempt was clear.

—After midnight, your friends, as you call them, they too will have to pay. He spat out the words.

Still red, not looking at him, not looking at the youth, I slipped another clean euro note across the desk. He glanced at it, then at me, then at the boy. He picked it up, slipped it in his pocket and turned his back to us.

—Fucking cunt! I was humiliated. The boy shrugged.

—He not like what I do. He said it casually, disinterested. It was then I cursed myself: damn, I should have taken his photo. I stretched out my hand and he laughed without taking it.

—I go. Thank you, Mister. His inflection was mocking and I watched him shoot across a crowded avenue and disappear into the shadows of an alley.

The streets of Athens were still choked with cars and people. It was late spring but it felt like high summer. I turned and walked without purpose away from the centre and towards Lecavitos Hill. I passed the main square in
Kolonaki, turned up a small winding lane and climbed the steep stairs that rose towards the peak. The clanking and throbbing of music and conversation, of cars and motorbikes dropped away and I sat on a small concrete wall and looked down to the city below.

I had arrived in Greece aware that I was going to fuck people, eager to engage in a bout of promiscuity, but the memory of the last few hours in the hotel room now shamed me. The experience of paying the youth for sex, while tantalising as fantasy—in fact, a fantasy in which I happily and often indulged in—in reality had proven cliched. It had been sordid and had made me feel old and disappointed. Not even the illicit memory of the boy's tough beauty could lessen my regret. I took off down the hill, past the young Greeks in their synthetic Italian clothes, past the fragile old faggots sitting patiently alone at coffee tables. At a kiosk I asked to use the phone and as the answering machine message began to play I also heard the rapid clicking of the kiosk's meter calculating my toll. It was only then that I asked myself what time it would be in Australia. Would Colin even be home yet?

—It's me, I'm calling from Athens. Are you there? I allowed a short gap of silence and then I continued. I'm safe. Nothing's changed, it's all still beautiful and mad. I'm ringing to say I love you very, very much. I will call again tomorrow. I waited hopefully for another moment, then I put down the phone.

It wasn't true that nothing had changed. It had been over twelve years since I had been in Athens and even after only two days I was aware that this was not quite the same city I had visited when I was twenty-three. The bilingual blue street signs had not changed, nor had the sun and the dust. But the alleys and arcades behind Ommonia had been cleaned up. A giant inflatable corporate clown floated high above the entry to the old market square. Its monstrous grinning face
mocked the Greeks smoking and drinking below. The five rings of the Olympic movement were everywhere, as were the red and orange circles of MasterCard. Arabic and Mandarin calligraphy competed with the ubiquitous Cyrillic and Latin scripts. Athens had changed.

 

I awoke the next morning with a hangover. I had to be at the gallery by ten. What time had I fallen asleep? It must have been well after four. After my phone call to Colin, I had walked around the square, drinking, smoking, listening in to conversations. A young man in tight black pants winked at me. An older woman smiled and stretched out her leg towards me, her partner oblivious to the flirtation as he spoke vehemently into his mobile phone. I drank another whisky and then I walked the streets for kilometres. I walked until I was sure I was lost and when I finally grabbed a taxi to take me back to the hotel, the driver picked me for an Australian, told me I was standing on the wrong side of the road for where he was driving, and took me on a route that seemed tortuous and slow. I didn't care. When I reached the hotel, the man at reception was smoking another cigarette and spat as I walked past. I didn't fucking care. I jumped into bed and fell immediately to sleep.

 

I was ten minutes late to the gallery and I had to wait another twenty minutes before anyone else showed up. The gallery itself was on a small side street off Panepistimiou and I sat on the stoop chain-smoking cigarettes and making my headache worse. A young woman walking towards me lifted her sunglasses and started shouting.

—Why the hell are you sitting there?

I extended my hand and introduced myself. Immediately her face softened, she kissed me warmly on both cheeks and asked if I wanted a coffee. She took my arm and led me down the street.

—Don't you have to open the gallery?

—We have plenty of time, darling, she told me in her faintly American-tinged English, no one buys art before lunch.

Anastasia had flaming red lipstick, dressed herself in a short tight black skirt that clung to her plump tanned thighs, and spoke as she smoked: incessantly. I drank my sweet Greek coffee, chomped into my rich oily pastries and listened to her talk. She told me that she was born in Kozani but her parents had moved to Athens when she was very young. Of course, she told me, Kozani is the most beautiful part of Greece but what kind of work can I do there? It's provincial, of course, and that is sweet but tiring. She told me how she had travelled to Morocco, to Rome, to Paris, to Sofia and to the United States. She told me that only New York as a city could compare to Athens. I asked her if she had ever been to Australia.

—No, darling, never. It's too far. I detest aeroplanes and you have to fly a ridiculous amount of time to reach Australia, no?

I said she could always stop over in Singapore or Bangkok.

—Not interested. But, yes, China. I would love to see China. Have you been?

I told her no.

I had assumed Anastasia, whose aristocratic manner and decadent sangfroid I found enchanting, to be a spoilt rich kid and I was surprised, later, as we examined my photographs hanging in the gallery, when she told me that her father had tended goats and that she was herself born in a village. She had been looking closely at a photograph of a Greek man in overalls. Stavros had been a friend of my father's and I had photographed him at work, with a grin on his face and the half-assembled bodies of cars behind him. I had taken the photograph during his lunch break; his blue overalls were stained with grease. He was well into his fifties
but his round, beaming face was still handsome and his wide-armed embrace of the camera's lens made it appear as if the world behind him—the world of assembly lines, clanking machinery, shadowy workers—all belonged to him.

—
Gamouto ton andra.
This is a real man.

Yes, I agreed, Stavros was indeed a real man.

—How long has he worked there?

—Most of his life. He migrated in the late sixties.

—I have an uncle in Australia.

I waited. This was not an unusual statement in the eastern Mediterranean.

—We have not heard from him in years. My father has attempted to find him, but we have had no luck. Possibly he doesn't want us to find him. She was still staring hard at the photograph.

—I think he might be a
gai
. That or a criminal. Why else would he ignore us?

I was silent and stepped up beside her. She smiled at me and we continued to walk past the photographs. Hanging there, large and colourful on the white walls, I was struck by how inconsequential they seemed. Stray figures, urban landscapes. A miniature Orthodox crucifix magnified to an immense size. Anastasia had not yet commented on my work and I badly wanted to hear her opinion. I was unsure how I fitted into this large, foreign metropolis. I doubted that my work belonged here at all.

She stopped again in front of another portrait, this time of a solid young Australian man in an Akubra hat, holding a blue heeler pup in his arms and wearing an open-necked blue-checked shirt. Fair down coated his pudgy cheeks, his blue eyes were cold and suspicious. I had not been able to make him relax in front of the lens. Instead, I had shot him as he was, tense and distrusting. He was standing against a window and outside was the red Australian desert. Against the wall, to his left, a bank of terminals and keyboards.