Dead Europe E-Book

Christos Tsiolkas

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

From the international bestselling and Booker Prize nominated author of The Slap comes a blazingly brilliant new novel. Winner of the 2006 Age Fiction Prize Winner of the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award Part long-forgotten myth, part meditation on the violence and tragedy of contemporary Europe, Dead Europe is an unsettling story about blood lust and blood revenge; a novel of blazing brilliance from the acclaimed author of The Slap. Isaac, a young Australian photographer, is travelling through Europe. His whole life he has longed for the sophistication and wealth of the Europe of his father's stories, the Europe at the centre of civilization and culture. But behind the facade of a unified and globalized contemporary society, he finds a history-blasted wasteland, a place forever condemned by the ghosts of its unspeakable past. In the mountain village in the Balkans where his mother was born, he unearths ancient terrors that have not been laid to rest, and perhaps never can be.

Leseprobe

DEAD EUROPE

Christos Tsiolkas is the author of three other novels: Loaded (filmed as Head-On), The Jesus Man and The Slap, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2009, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010, and was shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the ALS Gold Medal. Christos Tsiolkas is also a playwright, essayist and screenwriter. He lives in Melbourne.

Also by Christos Tsiolkas

Loaded The Jesus Man The Slap

‘Dead Europe sets sharp realism against folk tale and fable, a world of hauntings and curses against a fiercely political portrait of a society. The energy in the writing, the pure fire in the narrative voice and the fearlessness of the tone make the novel immensely readable, as well as fascinating and original, and establish Christos Tsiolkas in the first rank of contemporary novelists.’ Colm Tóibín

‘A novel of the most astonishing and disturbing eloquence … shocking but beautiful.’ Sydney Morning Herald

‘Breathtakingly good... One of Tsiolkas’s strengths is the ability to reveal gentleness lying where none might be expected. his prose is... achingly tender and beautiful.’ The Age

‘Brilliant ... unsettling ... It can shake you out of complacency, it can make you search your own soul to discover what’s lurking there and what you really believe. And it can radically alter your view of the world... This blasphemous, disturbing, in-your-face book does all three.’ Canberra Times

Christos Tsiolkas

DEAD EUROPE

First published in 2005 in Australia by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

First published in Great Britain in 2011 in paperback by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Copyright © Christos Tsiolkas 2005

The moral right of Christos Tsiolkas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-0-85789-1-228 eBook ISBN:978-0-85789-5-646

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

ww.atlantic-books.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Ante-Genesis

Apocrypha

The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

White Skin

Carnivale

The Solid Earth Beneath My Feet

Yom Kippur

Mister Old Talk

The Thief

The Brothel of Prague

The Sparrow’s Song, the Serpent’s Course

War Crimes

In The Garden of Clouds

The Nietzschean Hotel Porter

The Book of Lilith

Purgatory

Atonement

Acknowledgements

For ‘Mitsos’ Litras and Dimitris Tsoilkas, in gratitude

To a saintly man

—So goes an Arab tale—

God said somewhat maliciously:

‘Had I revealed to people

How great a sinner you are,

They could not praise you.’

‘And I,’ answered the pious one,

‘Had I unveiled to them

How merciful you are,

They would not care for you.’

Czeslaw Milosz

ANTE-GENESIS

THE FIRST THING I was ever told about the Jews was that every Christmas they would take a Christian toddler, put it screaming in a barrel, run knives between the slats, and drain the child of its blood. While Christians celebrated the birth of Jesus, Jews had a mock ceremony at midnight in their synagogues, before images of their horned God, where they drank the blood of the sacrificed child.

—Is that really true, Mum? I demanded. I could not have been more than five years of age. My mother had been reading to us from an illustrated book of mythology. Her hair in those days was long and raven black; it cascaded down across her shoulders and her breasts. I would weave my fingers through it as I lay between her and my sister as she read to us. Mum had been reading to us about the gods of antiquity and I had demanded to know what had happened to them when Christ was born.

—They all went up in smoke and only God remained.

—And where did God come from?

—He was the Jewish God, she explained, but the Jews refused to accept his Son as their Saviour and for that they turned against him and followed Satan instead. They killed Christ and for that God will never forgive them.

—Is that really true, Mum? I asked again.

She suddenly burst out laughing. I knew then that it was make-believe.

—That is what my father told me and what his mother had told him. Maybe it is true and maybe it isn’t. Ask your Papa. He knows about Jews.

—What do you want to ask your Papa?

The three of us looked up as my father entered the bedroom. In all of my childhood memories, my father is a giant, strong and lean and handsome, towering above me. He had just finished showering, and came out buckling the belt on his jeans. His skin gleamed like that of the gods in the plates of the mythology book.

I breathlessly recited what my mother had just told us about the Jews. He frowned and spoke harshly to her in Greek. Her face had crumpled. My hand instinctively reached out to her. My father sat on the bed and patted his thigh and I crawled across my mother and jumped onto his lap. I could smell the poppy-seed oil in his wet hair.

—What’s this?

It was a regular test of my knowledge of the Greek language and I was anxious to do well. He was pointing to the centre of his face.

—Nose, I answered in Greek.

—And this?

—Mouth.

—And this?

—Eyes.

—And this?

—Hair.

—And this?

I was confused. I had forgotten the word for ‘chin’. He whispered the word and I repeated it to him. He then made a slicing motion across his throat.

—And if I do this, what would you see? What would come out?

I was silent. I had no idea how to answer.

—Blood, my sister yelled out eagerly in Greek.

—That’s right, he said, now speaking in English. Jews have my eyes and my nose and my hair and my chin and we may all even share some of the same blood. I grew up with Jews, I studied with Jews and Jews were my friends. He looked across at my mother.

—Your mother is a peasant. Scared of everything she doesn’t know. And she knows nothing about Jews.

Sophie and I were quiet. We knew that for my father the word ‘peasant’ was one of the worst insults. The word conjured up images of dark, cowed faces, of evil old crones and decrepit, toothless old men.

—I’m sorry. My mother’s voice was low, chastened.

My father ignored her. He opened a bureau drawer, pulled out some money and folded the notes into his pocket.

—Where are you going?

—Out.

—When are you coming back?

—When I’m ready.

I understood that he was still angry. He kissed my sister and me and, without looking at my mother, he left the house.

I picked up the mythology book and started flicking through the pages.

—No more, my mother said, shutting the book, I’m tired.

I must have pleaded for one more story. She turned her fury on me and shouted at us both to leave her alone. Scrambling across the bed, my sister and I fled the room, slamming the door behind us. We must have put on the television. The set was new, the black and white images as crisp and sharp as the white shirts my father wore, the black shoes that he shone diligently every morning. We must have watched television till my mother had done what she needed to do to calm herself and then she would have emerged from their room, she would have kissed our brows, and then begun to make us breakfast.

I wasn’t to hear about the Jews again until I was eleven and my father started making plans to move us all back to Greece. For a whole summer all he talked about was Europe. He told us about Paris and Berlin, real cities, he explained, cities in which there were people in the streets day and night. He spoke about his own home, Thessaloniki, how it was the most beautiful city in Greece. His words painted pictures for me: I could see the crowded, dirty port with the ruined castle looking down onto it; I could imagine the tiny alleys and the sloping-roofed stalls of the old Hebrew markets; the crammed terraces of the old city. He said how he would take me on a walk under the Alexandrian Arch that was over two thousand years old. Imagine that, he kept repeating, two thousand years. What does this country have to offer that is that old? Nothing. Fucking nothing. We are going back to real history. Greece is free again.

I knew that my mother did not share his excitement about returning, even to a Greece that had just booted out the Colonels. She had lived most of her life in Australia, and she countered his excitement with concerns about money, about how we children were to cope with learning the language. He brushed her worries aside. He ridiculed her fear of flying.

—There’s nothing to fear, he smiled. Aeroplanes are safer than cars.

—They terrify me.

—Peasant, he chided, but there was a smile on his face and he kissed her on her lips. I’ll hold your hand the whole time, he promised. He lowered his voice to a whisper. You are so beautiful, I’ll have to hold on tight to you in Greece. They’re real men there, they’ll want you.

I was blushing.

—Shut up, Dad.

My father winked at me as my mother laughed and pulled away from his grip.

—What if we get hijacked?

That summer the news was full of images of military-fatigued Arab men holding hostages to ransom. I found their camouflaged faces, with only their steely black eyes visible, both terrifying and alluring.

—There’s nothing to fear from the hijackers, he counselled her. Just remember, if the plane gets hijacked don’t say a word in English. Just speak in Greek. They won’t harm us then, they’ll let us off immediately. They know we Greeks are their friends. Their comrades, he added.

—Why do they hijack planes? I asked him. What do they want?

—What the fuck do they teach you at school? He softened his tone. They want their land back. They’re fighting to get their land back. The Jews have stolen their land.

Blood and land. Thus far, this is what I knew about the Jews. Jews were blood and land.

But with the coming of autumn, all talk of Europe ceased and I soon realised that we were not going. It may have been that Dad had lost another job. I can’t remember and I didn’t mind. The idea of travel had excited me but I did not want to leave either my friends or my home. Mum and Dad took us for a camping holiday to the prehistoric forests of the Grampians; climbing the abrupt ferocious mountains that jutted out of the desert landscape, I forgot all thoughts of Europe, of crowded, never-sleeping cities.

My father died before I reached Europe. We buried him in a civil ceremony; he was adamant he would not be buried as a Christian. My mother pleaded with Sophie and me to agree to an Orthodox funeral but we stood our ground. When I had been just a boy, around the time my mother had told me the heinous lies about the Jews, I remembered a morning when the house seemed to shake from the screams my parents were hurling at one another. Sophie and I peeked into the kitchen to see that, instead of their work uniforms, my father had on a shirt and tie and my mother was wearing her best dress. Dad was drunk, almost paralytic: he was slurring and stumbling. My sister and I clung to each other, terrified. We listened to the argument. Someone had died. The man who had died did not want to be buried by the Church, did not want anything to do with the priests. My father was adamant he would not betray his friend’s last wish. He threatened to upset the funeral, to insult the family, the priests, everyone. My mother did not want him to shame her in front of the congregation. You have to have respect, husband, she was crying, you have to show respect. My father was also in tears: They’re all fucking hypocrites. Maybe, my mother had answered simply, but your friend is dead, it’s the living that now matter. My mother got her way. Dad passed out on a kitchen chair and Mum took us off to school. But I never forgot the force of my father’s fury, nor the conviction in his voice when he called them hypocrites.

Sophie and I would not be shaken from our determination to bury my father as he wanted. Please, my mother beseeched us, do it for me. What does it matter? Your father is dead. She was on her knees, she was banging the floor with her fists, she was tearing out her hair. I could tell that Sophie was wavering. I remembered that my mother was a peasant.

—His soul would never forgive you.

We got our way. My father is buried on unconsecrated ground.

For his headstone we ordered a small rectangular stone inscribed with his name and the dates of his birth and death. Underneath, in Greek, we had the words: husband, father, worker. We asked the cheery Croatian stonemason to carve the hammer and sickle into the stone but the burly old man refused. On the day of the burial my sister and I painted the symbol crudely on the stone in her scarlet Max Factor nail polish. Like blood, it washed away in the first rain.

On the third anniversary of my father’s death, I took my lover to his gravesite. I crouched and pulled out the weeds around the headstone. I had not long returned from Europe. On my last night in Thessaloniki, my cousin Giulia, the daughter of my father’s brother, had placed a small red pin in my hand. It was my father’s Greek Communist Party membership badge, she told me. He never wore it. He didn’t dare. It had been hidden behind a portrait of my grandfather and grandmother. My aunt discovered it and was going to throw it away but my cousin saved it. For you, she told me, I saved it for you.

I took that pin with me across Yugoslavia beginning its descent into civil war, through Hungary and Czechoslovakia just emerging back into history. I travelled with it through Italy, Germany and France, flew with it from London to Melbourne.

Colin watched me as I dug a small hole in the ground, placed the badge in the pocket of earth and covered it over with dirt.

—Steve’s buried here in this cemetery.

—Who?

—Steve Ringo.

I said nothing.

—I’m going to visit his grave. Do you want to come with me?

—No.

I didn’t dare look at him. I was furious. Colin walked away and I sat cross-legged on the ground, took a joint from my shirt pocket and lit it. Steve Ringo had been the first man Colin had ever loved. At nineteen, Steve had been arrested for manufacturing and dealing amphetamines. He emerged from seven years in prison with dual faiths: the teachings of the Christian God, and the doctrines of Aryan Nation. He was the only one of Colin’s Mum’s lovers to show any interest in her child. He forced the teenager to learn to read. He was adamant, Colin had explained, that the kid wouldn’t end up like him.

—He couldn’t read, he was fucking illiterate. He made me read from the Bible for half an hour every evening. He forced me, told me he’d bash my lights out if I didn’t do it. So I did, it took me a fucking year but I read the whole thing.

On Colin’s fifteenth birthday Steve got him drunk on bourbon and took him to a tattooist mate who carved a swastika on the boy’s right arm. Faded to a watery blue, the swastika was still there. I wanted to erase that tattoo. I hated the barrier it placed between myself and Colin. I hated its history, I hated its power.

—You have to get rid of it, you fucking have to get rid of it, I screamed at him when we first got together, I will not go out with you while you still have that evil on your body.

He was pleading with me to stay, crying.

—I can’t, he whispered. This is my history and this is my shame.

And I stayed. His shame and his tears made me stay.

Colin believed in the Old Testament God, in punishment and vengeance and sin.

—What happened to Steve Ringo?

—He went back inside and OD’d in jail. I never saw him again.

I finished the joint and was looking at my father’s name carved in stone. I suddenly laughed. How did it happen, Dad, I said out loud. How did all this happen? When Colin came back he found me laughing and crying. He offered a hand and pulled me up. Our arms across each other’s shoulders, we walked to the car.

That night Sophie asked us to babysit the kids. While I cooked dinner, Zach curled up in the hollow between Colin’s armpit and broad chest, and my lover read to him from the old mythology book. He was reading the ancient Egyptian creation myths when Zach interrupted him.

—Uncle Colin, didn’t God make the Earth?

—Some people believe that, I hollered from the kitchen. But I don’t.

The boy ignored me.

—Is He the same God as Zeus?

—No. He is the Jewish God. Zeus is the ancient Greek god.

I lowered the flame and went into the lounge room. Zach was looking in bewilderment at Colin.

—The Jews created God, he explained. They called Him Jehovah—now he is our God.

—Who are the Jews?

I found that I was holding my breath, waiting for Colin’s answer.

—They’re God’s chosen people, he said simply, and began to read again from the book.

I had promised Zach that he could stay up late and watch Star Wars. He was so excited that he had to go and piss twice before we could start it. Lying between Colin and me, his legs were shaking in anticipation as the first bombastic notes of the score thundered through the stereo. Colin read to him as the yellow letters scrolled across the screen.

—A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . .

The boy turned to him, his face flushed, his eyes shining. Uncle Colin, he asked, does that mean Europe?

APCRYPHA

THE MST BEAUTIFUL WMAN IN THE WRLD

HIGH IN THE mountains, where the wind goes home to rest, lived Lucia, the most beautiful woman in all of Europe. Now one must not simply dismiss this claim as an exaggeration, a parochial and ignorant testament from the villagers and Lucia’s kin. It is true that most of the village had not travelled far beyond the mountain ridges which formed their world. But the fame of her beauty had spread wide, from village to village, from village to town, from town to city, until carried in whispers through the roaming of commerce and war, it became a legend that began to cross even borders. Word of Lucia’s beauty circulated slowly, but it did circulate, and men and women began to swear by the moon-milk complexion of her fair skin, her slender long hands, the coal-black hair that swam down to her waist. By the time of her thirteenth birthday Lucia’s myth had spread so wide that travellers would go miles out of their way, circumnavigate the precarious mountain ridge, to stop at Old Nick’s cafe, order their coffee or chai, and sit in hope of glimpsing the radiant girl.

But Lucia’s father had no intention of allowing any man to covet his daughter. He himself began to be enamoured of the exquisite cast of her delicate face, intoxicated by the emerging abundance of her young flesh. His wife, noticing the stark hunger in her husband’s eyes, kept a vigilant watch on her youngest daughter. Between the twin sentries of her father’s ravenous desire and her mother’s fearful jealousy, Lucia spent most of her days cloistered in silence. She was forbidden to go to school, as were all her sisters, and she was only allowed outside the family courtyard if escorted by her fathers or her brothers. To speak to any man, or even to a boy who was not a relative, was a sin to be punished with the most savage of beatings. She was allowed basic formalities with male relatives but even then she was ordered to not look them directly in the eye and to keep her face lowered at all times. Her mother’s eagle gaze immediately noted any indiscretion on Lucia’s part, and the punishment that followed was always swift and harsh. Both her eyes were blackened when she had laughed at her cousin Thanassis’ impious joke. Her father’s belt drew blood from her back when he whipped her on hearing that she had spoken to Baba Soulis’ boys after church one Sunday. While thrashing her, Lucia’s father would be deaf and blind to her agonies and her laments, exhausting himself with his brutality. Only afterwards, his rage spent, would he crawl on his knees in front of her, kissing her feet, pleading for, demanding apologies, licking clean her bloodied hands or brow or back. Watching all this was his increasingly terrified wife, who silently crossed herself and implored the saints that a suitor would come soon to take away this treacherous daughter. And if the saints won’t help, she added, then let Black Death take her.

It should not be thought that Lucia was oblivious to the effects of her beauty. Her sisters, her brothers, her own father had shown enough devotion for her to understand that her looks were indeed powerful. She may have been forbidden to glance at men, but she took any opportunity that arose to break this command. When the priest fed her the communion wine she looked him boldly in the eye, causing his hand to shake; when her older brother hoisted her on his shoulders for a ride, she threw her skirts over his head; when she kissed the cheek of her just-wed brother-inlaw before the altar, her whole family was shamed. Fotini, the eldest of the sisters, had been betrothed to Angelos, the oldest son of the widower Kapseli. Fotini’s dowry had cost the family dearly—fifteen of their finest nanny goats, their cherished store of carpets and blankets. But the Kapselis family owned vast fields along the valley and it would be a prosperous match. When the marriage vows were completed and the families lined up in the church to kiss and bless the married couple, Lucia kissed Angelos twice chastely on his cheeks, but whispered her blessing close to his ear. The youth blushed and shivered, and almost fainted. And immediately underneath the thick black cloth of his grandfather’s Constantinople suit, his erection flared. As the remaining guests kissed him and shook his hand they could not help but notice the awkward lump pressing against them. An initial sniggering, then laughter, and then howls of mirth followed the newlyweds outside the church. That night, on returning home drunk from the celebrations, her father’s savagery had been so fierce that Lucia lay bleeding and unconscious for days. She was locked in the cellar, with the wine and the snakes, and only her mother was allowed to see her. And even she was forbidden to speak to her. Silently brushing her blood-matted hair, stroking her bruised face, Lucia’s mother nursed her daughter back to life, forcing her to eat wet bread, splashing water on her lips, all the time imploring God and the saints and the Virgin to find a husband for her daughter. And if there were to be no one to the liking of the feverish possessed man who paced the floor above them, contorting in knots of guilt and self-disgust for the damage that he had inflicted on his most prized possession; if there were no acceptable suitor to be found, the mother prayed, let the Devil take her.

—We should marry her to Michaelis Panagis.

Lucia’s father snorted, drank from his wine, and climbed into bed next to his wife. She turned her back to him. She smelt alcohol, sweat and sex on him. The embers in the kitchen fire were waning and she could hear her two daughters in the bed next to them quietly snoring. Lucia was still banished beneath the house. The boys were asleep, four of them on the one bed, in the room across the courtyard. Her husband touched her shoulder and she lifted her nightdress and slightly raised her leg. He entered her quickly, fucked her like a hare. He began snoring as soon as he had finished. She shook him awake. Lucia was not responding to her ministrations, was sickening. She must be married.

—We should marry her to Michaelis Panagis, she repeated.

—We have two others to marry off first.

—No, she insisted, Panagis is a good marriage. He’ll bring wealth. It will be easier to marry the others after that.

—He’s a bastard. I won’t give my Lucia to any bastard.

—You won’t give Lucia to anyone.

Michaelis Panagis was the child of the idiot Panagis and his Albanian whore, Maritha. It had been assumed that Panagis, who still dribbled and slurped when he spoke, would never find a wife, but his father had returned one morning with a young Albanian girl whom he had purchased across the mountains and whom he offered to his son. Within two years they had three children. As people could not believe that the idiot Panagis had it in him to sire a child, it was assumed that all three offspring were bastards, children of the Albanian whore and her father-in-law. They were all sickly children, living in filth and poverty, but the youngest, Michaelis, had surprised the village by disappearing when little more than a child and emerging years later fat and rich from his travels abroad. He had worked in Egypt and in America and on returning to the village he had paid for a pew and a gold icon for the Church of the Holy Spirit. Now every Sunday the idiot Panagis and the whore Maritha sat in front of the congregation, ignoring the envious glares behind their backs. Michaelis had built a huge house high above the village. Though he was still insulted behind his back, there was no one in the village who did not greet him with a friendly word, who did not offer him the choice of any of their daughters.

—In the name of God, Husband, he has money.

He was silent.

—She is dying. It’s a curse. It’s a curse because you want to sin against your daughter.

The force of his fist on her face was so loud in the quiet mountain night that it woke the sleeping girls, who began to cry. He left his wife moaning, pulled on his trousers and descended the cellar stairs.

Lucia was lying still on the solid dirt ground. Her face was pale and her eyes dark hollows. He crouched before her and she hardly stirred from her stupor. He touched first her cheek, then her shoulder. He felt the firm curve of her breast. She did not stir but her frightened eyes looked straight into his soul. He closed his eyes, whispered his love for her and pulled her listless hand towards him. Quickly he stroked himself with her cold velvet hand and he spilt over the black dirt. He was crying.

—If he will take you, Daughter, you are to marry Michaelis Panagis.

He grabbed the child and kissed her harshly on the lips and face. Lucia pulled away.

—You are the most beautiful woman who has ever lived. Satan take you.

He raised himself and pulled up his trousers. Don’t forget I am with the saints, Lucia. I am a saint for not raping you.

He climbed the stairs and locked the cellar door.

What is the use of being the most beautiful woman in the world if I’m barren?

The moon was high in the sky, and a slight breeze brought forth a keening from the pine trees that echoed through the mountains. Lucia and Michaelis had been married four years and she had yet to produce a child. The envious whispers and jealous curses that used to follow her along the paths of the village were now replaced by mutterings of pity and self-righteous joy.

Curse the damn lot of you. Lucia found sleep impossible; her dreams were filled with nightmares of demons and dead children. She cursed her father, her mother-in-law. She blamed her sorrow on the evil done to her by years of jealous occult mischief. She cursed her envious sisters and her embittered cousins. Surely it was one of them who had cast a spell on her womb? They were all bitches, jealous ugly bitches.

Every Sunday Lucia offered another promise to God should he make her pregnant, and every Sunday afternoon she and her mother would work together to undo the damage of the Evil Eye. Her mother would drop a touch of oil into the vial of holy water and she would read the villagers’ gossip and spite in the dispersion of the oil. Then Lucia would pray in hope of undoing the evil; she would send down her own curses to the women who envied her. But still nothing stirred inside her. And every month when she felt her body flushing out her blood, she cursed the names of every woman in the village, spitting out each one.

But still nothing stirred inside her.

As she lay there, sleepless, there was a scratching on the door and she went cold. She held her breath. From the outbuilding she could hear bleating from one of the goats. Then the scratching continued. She shook Michaelis awake.

—Michaeli, there’s something outside.

Her husband jumped out of the bed, reached for his hunting knife and opened the door. Two shivering figures stood under the moonlight.

—What in the devil are you doing here?

Lucia hid under the quilt. She knew one of the men at the door. It was Jacova, who worked as a tanner in Thermos; it was to Jacova that Michaelis sold the skins of the wolves and the minks that he hunted. Beside the Hebrew was a young boy, his eyes large and black. She could not hear the whisperings between her husband and the Hebrew.

Don’t let them in, Michaeli, she prayed. Don’t you dare let them in. But her husband beckoned her to rise and to bring out some wine. She pulled a shawl across her shoulders and, without looking at the strangers, she made her way into the dark cellar to fetch a pail of wine. She placed two glasses in front of the men and she and the boy sat apart on a bench near the dead fire while the men talked to each other in whispers. They did not dare light the lanterns. Lucia peered through the shutters at her mother-in-law’s house across the courtyard. No one stirred. She came and sat back on the bench.

She looked the boy up and down. She had never been so close to a Hebrew and was surprised at how ordinary he seemed. His features were not so different from those of her own brothers. His brow was wet, as indeed it would be if he had just completed the long walk from Thermos up into the mountains. She could smell his fear, and the keen hint of his trade, the bitter reek of pelt and leather. Though still only a child, he was developing the strong forearms of his father. He was destined to be a handsome man. She smiled at him but the boy blushed and immediately looked down at his feet. Lucia smiled to herself. She was still beautiful.

—I will forget him. If you take him he will be as your son.

Lucia strained to hear more of the conversation.

Michaelis shook his head.

—It is too dangerous, Jacova. The Germans are everywhere and all the region knows that Elia is your son. We cannot hide him.

Lucia nodded to herself. Good. Good answer, husband. All the harpies in the village will be lining up to denounce us.

—Michaeli, I have known you a long time. Yes, the Germans are everywhere, that is why my wife and daughters and I must flee. But up here in these mountains there are many hiding places. You can hide the boy. And this war will not last. Once it is over, once the Germans have gone, the boy is yours to keep.

Lucia shook her head in disbelief. The man was a fool if he thought that they would be taken in. Everyone knew that the Hebrews could not be trusted. Even if the Germans were to be conquered, nothing would stop Jacova returning and claiming his son. No, throw him out, Michaeli, throw out the Hebrew and his bastard child.

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.

WHITE SKIN

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.

—This is very homo-erotique.

I was annoyed. I had wanted the photograph to represent something about the discontinuities in the Australia I had lived in. The incongruity of this young man, his appearance and demeanour belonging to the highlands of Scotland, framed against an unyielding ancient red desert, his clothes and attitude no longer suited to a working life spent largely behind a computer. I was also annoyed that she had summed up the photograph so perfectly, perceiving immediately the reasons for the young man’s reluctance in front of the lens.

—Just because I am homosexual doesn’t mean my work is homosexual.

Anastasia dismissed this statement with a yawn.

—That is a boring conversation and I will not indulge in it. Great art is homosexual. The ancients knew it. Even the Church knows this.

—And how about women? Do they have to be homosexual to be great artists?

—Of course, she snapped angrily, as if I had stated the obvious. And not only artists. We have to be homosexual to be businesswomen, to be anything but a mother or a hausfrau in this world.

Her pace increased and it seemed to me that in her rapid glances at my photographs, she was silently rejecting them. When we had completed our circle she drew me close to her and kissed me again on the cheek.

—You are very talented.

—What do you really think of them?

—I am saddened by them. The Australia you represent seems very cold and very empty. Only that man, Stavros, seems happy. No one else smiles in your photographs. She took a cigarette from her bag and lit up. Her unperturbed smoking in a gallery space shocked me. I took one from her and we smoked together.

—It is inevitable, living here in Athens, she continued, that we meet so many Greeks from Australia. I cannot bear most of them. They are vulgar, ignorant and très materialistic. They are what we fear we are becoming. She looked down at her dress, her leather shoes. Eurotrash, she muttered and smiled ruefully. Then there are some Australians who are innocents. Young girls still worried about their virginity, young men who still practise their Orthodoxy as though the twentieth century had never occurred. Them, I like. But I do not understand them. It is as if they have not left the village. We laugh at them but they remind us of the past. And then there are a few who are not like Greeks here, and who are not like the French or the Germans or the English. And, thank God, nothing like the Americans. They are of their own world. Your work reminds me of those Australians. She looked around the gallery, taking in my work.

—M’aresoune poli. I like them a lot.

My hangover was cured, my eyes ablaze, I was elated.

The afternoon was spent on lunch, and on two interviews that the gallery owners had organised with magazines. One of the owners, Mrs Antonianidis, was a heavily made-up matron in her mid-fifties who proceeded to tell me how much she had adored my art, though it quickly became obvious that she had no interest in the photographs whatsoever. Her husband was large and stern-faced and spent the whole of the lunch on his mobile phone. The first journalist who interviewed me was a suited young man barely out of his teens who did not take off his Calvin Klein sunglasses throughout lunch and spent the first five minutes complaining about the slack habits of his Albanian maid. He was disappointed in my Greek and when it came time to photograph me he took a few lazy snaps with an instamatic and wished me well. The second journalist was better prepared. She invited me for a coffee in a bar filled with Miro prints and her first question, when she snapped on the tape recorder, took me by surprise.

—Isn’t the theme of homesickness, of exile and return, irrelevant to modern Greece?

It was a good question and it did strike me, as we sat in the stylish bar, indolent dance music throbbing quietly in the background, that the Greece I knew in Australia was indeed largely irrelevant to these modern Europeans. I scrambled for an answer.

—Maybe those themes are no longer relevant to you Greeks, but they are indeed relevant to Australians. In Australia we all ask ourselves where we come from.

—Even the Aborigines?

She was sorting through a series of black and white photocopies Anastasia had gathered of my photographs. She pointed to one of a young Aboriginal boy, a baseball cap on his head, a Tupac t-shirt on his chest. He was standing outside a Greek bomboniere store, scowling at my lens.

—Is he asking himself where he comes from?

—No, he’s asking me where I come from. I looked around the bar, at the Athenians elegantly sipping their drinks. What should I say to him? Am I from Greece?

She too looked around the bar.

—Certainly not from this Greece. This is not Greece. This is fucking marie-claire. She turned back to me. Do you speak French?

I must have looked surprised because she laughed and told me that she did not feel confident in her English.

—You speak it well.

—No, I do not. My accent is terrible.

We spoke for twenty minutes and then she shut off the tape recorder and asked me if I wanted a drink. She ordered gin and tonic for herself and a whisky for me and proceeded to tell me that she had cousins in Australia. She told me of how much she loved her cousins and how much she wished they would return to Greece. But, of course, she added, they are like you. Not Greek like we are. She then told me that her cousin Thomas had told her of the Aboriginal flying men and asked me if I had ever seen them. I shook my head. It is the desert I would like to see, she said to me. When she finished her drink she shook my hand and I kissed her cheeks and wished I could kiss her eyes. She thanked me for my time and told me that her father had a brother and sister in Australia and that at every wedding, every baptism, every funeral and every celebration her father would prepare his suit, brush his hair, take her mother by the arm and on leaving the house would mutter, I wish my brother and my sister could attend as well.

—How many more interviews do you have to do?

—I just had the two. You are my last.

She shook her head.

—We Greeks have forgotten what we owe to exile. But I will not forget what it has cost my father to lose his brother and sister.

—People have short memories.

—Pardon?

—People forget. I spoke in her language.

The last thing she said to me, as she was rising to leave, was that I should improve my Greek.

Only a dozen people turned up for my opening and five of them were staffers from the Ministry of Culture who had paid for my ticket to Europe. I was asked to say a few words and I stumbled through as best I could. As I spoke of migration, the history of the Greeks in Australia, as I watched the happily nodding faces, I realised that nothing I said was of interest to them, that what they were seeing was some nervous young foreigner mangling their language and pretending to speak with commitment on a subject that had long ago become ossified. They were not interested in my