The Greek Wall E-Book

Nicolas Verdan

• Herausgeber: Bitter Lemon Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 308

Beschreibung

A severed head is found on the Greek border near a wall planned to stop Middle Eastern immigrants crossing from Turkey. Intelligence Agent Evangelos wants the truth about the murder, human trafficking into Greece, and about the corruption surrounding the wall's construction. It is a mystery novel and a political thriller but more importantly it evokes the problems of the West incarnated in Greece: isolationism, fear of immigration, economic collapse, and corruption. While dark, it is also poetic and paints an indelible portrait of Athens, with its mixed fragrances of eucalyptus, freshly baked bread, and cigarette smoke.

Leseprobe

Nicolas Verdan was born in Vevey, Switzerland in 1971. He was a prominent journalist before turning full-time to fiction. He shares his time between Switzerland and Greece. He won a number of literary prizes in Switzerland and France for his previous novels, and The Greek Wall is his first work available in English.

BITTER LEMON PRESS

First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by Bitter Lemon Press, 47 Wilmington Square, London WC1X 0ET

www.bitterlemonpress.com

First published in French as Le Mur Grec by Bernard Campiche Éditeur, Orbe, 2015

The translation of this work was supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

Copyright © 2015 Bernard Campiche Éditeur

English translation © W. Donald Wilson, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher

The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental.

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

eBook ISBN 978-1-908524-867

Typeset by Tetragon, London

Printed and bound by Cox & Wyman Ltd. Reading, Berkshire

Often on my travels I have been in peril from rivers, in peril from brigands, in peril from those of my own nation, in peril from pagans, in peril in cities, in peril in deserts, in peril on the sea, in peril from false brethren.

(2 CORINTHIANS 11: 26)

Contents

Glossary

Prologue

Episode I

Episode II

Episode III

Episode IV

Episode V

Episode VI

Epilogue

Glossary

17N: A Greek terrorist group, the Revolutionary Organization 17 November, which assassinated Stephen Saunders, the British military attaché in Athens, on 8 June 2000.

Baglamas: A musical instrument with plucked strings.

Çifetelli: A dance of Turkish origin, still found throughout countries that were once part of the Ottoman Empire.

Colonel’s Regime: The series of right-wing military juntas that governed Greece from 1967 to 1974.

Egnatia Odos: Also known as the Via Egnatia, the Egnatia Odos was a Roman road running from what is now Durrës, in Albania, across northern Greece and into Turkey. A modern motorway across northern Greece (the A2, part of the European E90) is commonly called by the same name.

Episodia: A political demonstration accompanied by violent and destructive incidents.

Evros: The Greek name of the river Maritsa (or Meriç in Turkish), which runs through Bulgaria and then forms the land frontier between Greece and Turkey. It gives its name to the surrounding region.

Evzone: A soldier of the presidential guard, dressed in traditional uniform.

Gaida: A Greek bagpipe.

Great Catastrophe: After the fall of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, Kemal Atatürk led a Turkish war of liberation to prevent the dismemberment of Turkey by some major European powers and Greece. This resulted in the expulsion of much of the substantial Greek population of Asia Minor, including the burning of the Greek districts of Smyrna (now Izmir), and in many deaths.

KKE: Kommunistiko Komma Elladas, the Communist Party of Greece, founded in 1918.

New Democracy: The main centre-right political party in Greece, founded in 1974 by Konstantinos Karamanlis. It won a majority in the general elections of 2004 and 2007 and entered into coalitions with PASOK between 2011 and 2015.

PASOK: Panellínio Sosialiwtikó Kínima, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, is the Greek Social Democratic Party. It won a majority in the election of 2009 and entered into coalitions with New Democracy between 2011 and 2015.

Pomaks: A Muslim community living in Greece, the Pomaks are of Slavic origin (hence a minority among the Turkish Muslim minority in Greece). They are thought to be the descendants of converts to Islam under the Ottoman occupation of Bulgaria. Their language is a dialect of Bulgarian, though under Turkish influence many have also acquired Turkish. A mufti is a spiritual and secular leader.

Tavli: A Greek variety of backgammon.

Troika: The European Commission, International Monetary Fund, and European Central Bank.

Prologue

In normal circumstances he’d have gone on his way, paying no attention to the neon sign suspended in the moonless sky above the river. But at this moment, in the depth of night, the unexpected encounter with the word “Eros” strikes him like a portent. This is where the colonel has arranged to meet him. He turns off the engine and parks his rental car on the verge. The car that has been following him for the past twenty minutes or so has also stopped, but he doesn’t notice. Alone more than ever, he only has eyes for those pink letters, which seem at the cost of their meaning to spell out a recipe for unhappiness. At the moment, he no longer knows why he is here in this spot alongside a national highway, outside this brothel on the very edge of the Schengen Area. Perhaps, instead of discussing the wall inside, he might find a body like Christina’s? Not her face, no, he wouldn’t recognize it in that place. ‘But maybe her perfume? Just a woman’s perfume, a scent, just her scent, please, please tell me if there mightn’t be, here in this place, in the countryside, on the frontier of Europe, a girl wearing Rykiel Woman. Who knows, maybe a young woman, here, on this road to the north? I’d like to find a woman with her figure, with Christina’s substance, with that resilient quality of hers, with Christina’s earthy attraction, always resilient yet thrown back, the fall of Christina’s body, solid flesh in which to spill yourself.’

Which way to the entrance? On the side facing the river the brothel’s exterior is dark and windowless. Exploring to the right of the building, he comes to a deserted car park. Could the entrance be hidden on its western side? Suddenly impatient to enter the Eros, he retraces his steps and skirts the brothel in the opposite direction, failing to notice an exterior passageway leading to the door. Then he feels a glacial caress across his brow, the sudden contact of an icy chill that takes his breath away and makes him stumble. Suffocating in the smell of laundry, it takes him a few seconds to realize that he has become entangled in some large, wet sheets hung out to dry in front of the building. Freeing himself of the brothel’s clammy embrace, he tries to stand up, but his left knee doesn’t respond. A light seems to have gone on; he must have made a noise. Anyway, now that the terrace is lit up he can see his shadow limping on the concrete surface where the stained, crumpled sheets lie twisted.

A light fixed to the wall has come on; someone has switched it on, they are coming, she is coming, a young woman walking towards him, looking quite through him so that he doesn’t quite see her advancing towards him; at first he sees only her wide-open eyes and his reflection in them, he sees himself standing in her field of vision, but then he notices the axe the young woman is holding. As her face draws closer he sees himself more clearly in her eyes and suddenly takes stock of his situation: she considers him an obstacle, a looming impediment, he is an obstruction in the young woman’s dark-veiled eyes, an obstacle she must remove from her path in order to see behind him, gazing towards a vanishing point, and it suddenly it occurs to him that he had better get out of her way – fend her off, duck, dodge, sidestep her.

But the axe is already poised, suspended, all the more menacing in that its mass rests on the young woman’s shoulders, leaving her no choice but to unleash all the accumulated violence in the muscles of her lifted arms.

In the instant that follows, only a “No!” comes to his lips. Then something appears behind him, another presence in the eyes of the young woman – who is very young as far as he can tell in the fraction of a second in which she brings down the axe – and he cries out in Greek, “No! No!”

Someone – a man or a woman? – someone thinks, ‘Silence falls on the frontier, where now only the rolling river Evros flows.’

Episode I

The street rises and falls like a wave, surges again, swells, and falls again. These undulations give a sense of the neighbourhood, with its crests and hollows, its gentle slopes. It is a street leading into the city, when this story begins, once upon a time, at two in the morning, on a densely populated hill, on the night of 21 and 22 December 2010, on Irakleous Street, in Neos Kosmos, Athens, Greece.

‘What does a severed head look like?’ wonders Agent Evangelos.

He is standing in the street facing the Batman, a bar diminished by everything about itself: the green phosphorescence of its sign, the cheap alcohol it serves and its regulars, all participants in the death of a world, still devoted to the songs of yesteryear, and their youth pinned up on the wall – a photo of Theodorakis, a view of the Acropolis taken from the terrace of the Galaxy (another bar, on the twelfth floor of the Hilton), the faded colours of Greek summers on ads from the 1970s, and the round yellow sun on Olympic Airways posters. Every evening in Athens, the Batman’s customers carry on as if nothing had changed, although so much is dead and gone and despite all the pitfalls that await, the menace outside, beyond the window of the bar, on this street where Agent Evangelos is standing, uncertain about what to do next.

If there hadn’t been that phone call, that conversation with his colleague – with that severed head to blame for it all – this story would have been very different, it wouldn’t have taken the same form, would have been impossible to relate, have had neither head nor tail – ouch! He’d have ordered another drink and sat with his eyes closed listening to Kazantzidis; and if he had waited a little longer he would have been joined by Irena, the owner of the only jazz club in the capital worthy of the name.

When she comes to the Batman, Irina makes her appearance around 1.30, accompanied by a few musicians, an employee and her barman, an entourage drawn along in the turbulent wake of a ferry to the islands. Not for anything in the world would she miss an “after”, as she calls it, rolling the “r”.

Agent Evangelos likes Irina, her plump figure, her outrageous assertions, her inexhaustible affections, her generous love for the masculine gender – a generosity of being that turns her corpulence into a distinction. It would have been a different story, set here in the Batman, but very soon Agent Evangelos must be on his way. He goes back inside, for he has left his jacket on a hook under the bar. He pays what he owes, and leaves.

‘What does a head severed from the body look like?’ he wonders. A phone call has come; he must leave immediately.

Just a few more minutes and Agent Evangelos might have encountered Irina. That approaching sound of an engine is she; with one finger she manoeuvres the four-by-four, which has just stopped in front of the Batman. The passengers on the rear seat look out; all of them have seen the same things: glimpses of the city, the confused message of the streets, voiceless graffiti on the filmstrip of the walls, the weight of lowered shop blinds, the greenish glow from the forest of balconies, the squashed oranges on the asphalt, flattened candle flames. They have seen all of it go by, but driving along they passed no remark.

Athens is their capital city, but they are not from here. They are Greek citizens, but they have Turkish names. Onstage this evening they sang in both languages: the language of their origin and the language of their passport. In administrative terms, they belong to the Turkish minority in Thrace. Words on an official stamp identify them as foreigners in their own land. Opposite that wall only their music rings true, and the public is aware of it. The applause was thunderous and sincere – a polite way, in other words, to conceal the uneasiness inspired by these Greeks who are not entirely Greek.

By the time Irena pushes open the door to the Batman, Agent Evangelos is already in his car. He has turned onto the first street on the right, a one-way toboggan slope that drags the high-rises of Neos Kosmos down with it until they encounter the crash barriers on Kallirois Avenue. At the intersection, the traffic lights flicker and turn green.

The taxis, catapulted up towards the city centre, assail the wall of the former Fix brewery with a fusillade of headlight beams. The abandoned plant is still intended to become the Museum of Contemporary Art, though the cultural future to which it is promised is in no hurry to materialize. Athens has run out of euros, and the concrete behemoth sits deserted, hemmed in by traffic.

On the other side, the multiple lanes of Syngrou Avenue, linking the city to the coast, are flanked by large hotels of glass and steel, and striptease joints. Driving towards Faliro, ablaze with lights like the overnight ferry to Crete, Piraeus to Chania, a twelve-hour crossing, scheduled to arrive in the early hours, imagining a siren blast in the muted torpor of the eucalyptus and perspiring pines; at the end of the quay a tanker with flat tyres, always the same dog nosing through the scattered remnants of a spilled load of tomatoes, twelve hours after the ferry’s left, about to close its loading doors with an articulated lorry appearing with a roar from behind a warehouse; a minute to go, with the ship’s propellers already stirring up the silt in basin E3.

To his right the headquarters of the New Democracy party are all lit up, a ponderous, unmanageable vessel. In the grandiose entrance hall a lounging security guard has lost interest in the giant screen on which a formidable army of men in suits and ties processes in an endless loop, shaking hands on the triumphant worksites of a Greece sold off bit by bit to Chinese and Emirates capital while the European Union lags behind with its Siemens factories, Casino supermarkets and H&M clothing stores.

Then comes the black hole of a building long under construction, and then, on the sinister upper floors of commercial buildings with opaque windows, endless voids of office space awaiting tenants.

Finally, there seems to be an opportunity to turn onto Kallirois Street when a Pakistani face appears beyond the windscreen. Agent Evangelos is startled. He waves the window-washer away and then launches his vehicle across Syngrou Avenue. Usually he’ll give them a coin or two, but this evening, though he doesn’t really know why, he felt like punching the fellow armed with bucket and squeegee in the face.

Agent Evangelos listens to himself as he drives. His movements resound inside him, the external noise has permeated him, rumbling in his temples. A wave of weariness sweeps over him. Soon he’ll be in the plane to Alexandroupolis as it makes the wide turn over Attica, the sea filling the aircraft window, the island of Chios on the tilting horizon – could that forest of wind turbines be Euboea? Skiathos ahead, the Gulf of Volos below with its seafood tavernas, tablecloths with their crude maps of Greece printed in blue, the Macedonian wine in a copper jug, a gust of wind from the sea emptying the ashtrays, all of Greece, the orchards on Mount Pelion, seat 14D, Aegean Airlines, a private company, 31 Viltanioti Street, Kifissia, Athens 14564, twenty-nine planes, a fleet of twenty-two Airbus A320, four Airbus A321 and three Airbus A319, shares on the rise, new route to Azerbaijan recently introduced; his plane flying at cruising speed over a landscape of mountains and islands; the descent has already begun.

It glides over Samothrace, a rock emerging from the Aegean, a sheer, vertical cliff face, a rising vertigo, a steep shoreline marked by a thick streak of foam, a white garter stitched to the dry land; but then it’s the sea again, as if the Thracian coast will never come into view.

Shouldn’t he be able to see the Evros delta already? Agent Evangelos will certainly find out tomorrow. He knows he’s awaited on the bank of the river. In Alexandroupolis, the head of the regional section of the National Intelligence Service will be in the parking lot of Democritus Airport to meet him, but he has no idea what the man looks like.

His eyes are stinging; it is too hot in the car, and Agent Evangelos opens the window. Why did he close it? It’s true, that Pakistani had a strange look about him; Evangelos didn’t like his eyes.

‘What does a severed head look like?’ he wonders. He can still hear his colleague on the phone: “They’ve found a dead body.”

“Yes, I know, you said so already, but dead bodies are two-a-penny every week along the Evros, so please tell me why you’re calling at this hour of the night to let me know?”

“That dead body’s assigned to us.”

I think that in that moment I was angry. “Is this a joke or what? Since when have we been going off to the border to fish for dead bodies? There are illegals dying every week trying to cross the Evros.”

“Yes, but the police in Orestiada say this body’s different.”

Silence. The next question was inevitable: “What’s so special about this one?”

“All they’ve found is the head.”

Agent Evangelos asked his colleague to repeat what he’d just said, as the music was loud. There isn’t another bar like the Batman in all of Athens. That was where he’d finally found what he’d been seeking for months: an atmosphere like before the crisis. The bar is nothing but a narrow bottleneck with a high ceiling, enforcing sociability and offering an ideal repair for those who, like Evangelos, have resisted the first austerity measure imposed on the Greeks by Brussels: a general ban on smoking in public establishments.

In the smoke-filled Batman blackened lungs could breathe the air of freedom. Agent Evangelos has given up smoking. But his grandfather once owned a tobacconist’s shop in Smyrna, and he can still hear him describing, between coughing fits, how he used to plunge his fist into the bales of Macedonian tobacco and sniff it before pointing at the one that met with his approval.

The moment Agent Evangelos stepped outside the Batman he regretted having left his jacket inside. A cold wind laden with moisture from the sea made his voice catch as he asked his colleague to go over everything from the beginning.

“The police in Orestiada have found a head, you say?”

“Yes, on the bank of the Evros, near the marshes.”

“A head, all by itself? What about the rest, the body?”

“Nothing, sir. Just a head, in Orestiada, found beside the river.”

“But who found it?”

“A Frontex patrol.”

“What kind of patrol, exactly?”

“You know, surely: the European Agency’s frontier guards responsible for patrolling the borders…”

“Yes, I get that, but who was it exactly? What country’s police did they come from? The French? The Dutch?”

“No, no, they were Finns, I think. They were patrolling with their Alsatian when it suddenly got all excited.”

Until the creation of the Schengen Area in 1997 each country was responsible for its own borders. That all changed in 2004, when the Olympic Games were held in Greece.

‘All the fault of that damned Amsterdam Treaty, allowing free movement of citizens between member states,’ Agent Evangelos often tells himself, doubtful as he is of the effectiveness of police and judicial cooperation in combating illegal immigration.

“Don’t we already have an officer on the spot in Thrace who can look into it?” asks Agent Evangelos.

“Yes, he’s spending the night in Orestiada.”

“But if I understand properly, his presence isn’t enough?”

“Well, actually, as I was saying, sir, this isn’t a run-of-the-mill fatality.”

“Just get to the facts, good God!”

“The head, the guy, well, the head, the dead man, well, he’s not a migrant.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“That’s what the police captain in Orestiada says.”

“He says what? Just come out with it, for God’s sake!”

“He says it’s not an illegal, and it’s a suspicious death.”

“Well, of course it’s suspicious! And what allows him to say it’s not an illegal?”

“Because it looks like a Westerner.”

“And what does a Westerner look like, according to you?”

“Like a European, like a Greek, I don’t know. Our officer on the spot is of the same opinion.”

“It’s because you think you look like a European, is that it? And what about me, have you ever seen my eyebrows, my dark complexion? A European! So what?”

“I don’t know, sir, but in Orestiada they’re saying that the case is over their heads; they say it’s for Athens. It’s for us.”

Agent Evangelos knows that his colleague is right. It would take less than a decapitation in a military zone on the Greco-Turkish border to alert Directorate C of the National Intelligence Service, the branch responsible for counter-espionage, counterterrorism and organized crime. And the matter of looks makes no difference. Illegal or not, this head seems likely to raise a stink around the frontier question. Greece has already been accused of doing a poor job in the Evros delta. How many illegals manage to cross the river every day? Two hundred, three hundred?

Several European countries, such as France, have accused Greece of allowing too many migrants across the border with Turkey. President Nicolas Sarkozy has even said that a country that can’t control its borders should be excluded from the Schengen Area.

A severed head. They’ll have to look for the body. The reverse would have been more difficult, of course. But Agent Evangelos will have to deal with his fatigue, a recent phenomenon, along with his tendency to view everything in context and his ability to procrastinate.

It’s true that three years from now he’ll be turning in his badge. A well-deserved retirement, as they used to say when you could be sure of getting your pension. But nowadays, with the crisis…

The crisis… a word Agent Evangelos finds it difficult to utter. The debt crisis. Words that fail to explain how Greece has been reduced to this. Wasn’t it just in 2007 that the mandarins of the International Monetary Fund said that the Greek economy had “made remarkable strides”? Evangelos can still hear the first head of the Central European Bank, Wim someone or other… Yes, Wim Duisenberg. Hadn’t he said in the early 2000s that Greece’s economic performance was “admirable, remarkable”? They almost pointed to Greece as a model of growth. ‘And then,’ he remembers, ‘one October morning we woke with a bad taste in our mouths.’ Agent Evangelos can still hear George Papandreou’s voice as he announced to the Greeks that their right-wing government had been cooking the books. “The truth is,” he had said, “that our country is deeper in debt than you have been told.” Everyone in the country knows what came next. Athens called on the help of the good doctors from the IMF and the European Commission approved Papandreou’s austerity plan, placing Greece under close oversight. The euro nosedived, and Greece with it. There followed a succession of European rescue plans, and the Greeks demonstrated in the streets. The great international moneybags was called to the rescue. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel adopted a tougher tone: Germans couldn’t be expected to pay higher taxes to bail out the wastrels in southern Europe. It was a crisis. ‘The crisis,’ thinks Evangelos. ‘Maybe that’s why every day feels so overwhelming? The fact you have to search endlessly for words to describe what’s wrong.’ Something’s not right; there’s a sick feeling in the pit of Evangelos’s stomach – maybe the sixty-something crisis? ‘The crisis, the crisis everywhere. No, it’s something else. For a year or two now, since the start of the crisis… No! For a year or two, ever since petrol went up to over two euros a litre, since my salary was reduced by a good quarter, since I’ve seen little old men poking through the bins in front of my apartment building, since…’

Why does Agent Evangelos keep looking beyond his constant nausea? ‘No, it’s with myself that something has gone wrong. And it has nothing to do with the present chaos. Nothing to do with Merkel, nor the Troika, as they call the IMF, Brussels, and the World Bank, all the banks bought out and sold out, and the politicians sold out with them, and on top of it the directorate requiring all the agents to pay for coffee out of their own pockets.’

He can’t say when it began, but Evangelos feels the angst welling up in him. ‘And this dull fear affecting me like a beta blocker.’

Orders are issued: A severed head on the banks of the Evros; a crime on the Schengen frontier. Alert! Emergency meeting, reports, ministerial orders, make telephone calls, make contacts on site, organize the personnel in Thrace, get there by plane, first a debriefing with the top military command, maps of the zone, files, what’s the name of the officer responsible for the Evros region? Who knows how the head was found? Establish relations with the media in case there’s a leak, ask Ria who works in the head office of Public Relations to clamp down and let nothing get out.

Have the Turks been informed? Who’ll oversee communications with Frontex, that goddamn agency with its headquarters in Warsaw? Alert! Agent Evangelos must go, he hasn’t any choice.

And always the same angst. But when did it start? A weary feeling that drains his energy. Evangelos can see his familiar landscape changing: the filthy windows of the agency building that never get cleaned. And that persistent rumour of drastic reductions in personnel.

Evangelos thinks this matter of the severed head bodes him no good. They’ll hold the slightest misstep against him. In the meantime, he has to get organized. He has a plane to catch tomorrow, and he must establish a list of the people to contact on his arrival in Thrace, a thousand kilometres from Athens. He has no appetite for this.

Agent Evangelos gets a grip on himself. ‘What’s the explanation? What’s the hang-up? Why the resistance? The thing is, I don’t want anything to do with this severed head! But why? Because memories return. Yes, that’s it, old memories returning: dawn, an island, a harbour. No choice but to obey, and ask no questions. No connection whatsoever: that was forty years ago. Where’s the link?’

He stops searching; Evangelos knows why he is feeling so weary: it’s his sense of déjà vu. For years he thought he could forget the whole business, block it out. ‘Yet today, with all that’s going on in the country, I have to try twice as hard to forget about it, now that it all seems about to happen again. Those raised arms in the slums, the militia hunting down emigrants, and the directorate continuing to target anarchists. It’s odd; nowadays it’s not men in masks heading for Syntagma Square to attack Parliament.’

There are no more rockets fired at the banks, no more Molotov cocktails setting the streets of the capital on fire. Why aren’t there more street demonstrations? So much anger – the white-hot metal sheath of the Christmas tree reduced to ashes on Syntagma Square, the stones thrown at the police, Stadiou Street in flames, the strategic retreat behind the railings of the Polytechnic, the fading anger. There’s no one left to be surprised.

“I’m so dog-tired,” he sighs.

But Agent Evangelos will travel to the border. He’ll do his job.

He’ll leave tomorrow; in the meantime, he’ll go somewhere else. The shortest route is the Sacred Way, and if it wasn’t for that train he’d be there already.

Where?

Agent Evangelos would be there already, if it wasn’t for that level-crossing bell. He’d already have reached the big intersection and driven under the ring-road bridge before heading diagonally through Peristeri, the great western suburb that rises ungracefully to the stark slopes of Mount Aigaleo.

A moment later, the barriers come down. A long horn blast announces a goods train. Agent Evangelos can see the outline of the driver inside the cabin of the diesel locomotive, which is followed by an endless succession of graffiti-covered wagons, its clatter sawing the city in two.

There’s not a soul to be seen this evening in this quarter full of former warehouses where the only stocks of merchandise are relics of Greek pop music: faces with make-up and gelled hair frozen on huge, outdated concert posters, and the trampled carnations on the stage at three in the morning when the dancing is done, when Parios and his group always ended by playing the nisiotika, the songs from the islands – Parios, the little king of Naxos, playing it up the way he would in his village every 15 August, except that here a bottle of whisky costs three hundred euros. But this evening, outside, at the dead street-corners, the wasteland car parks are empty. The bouzoukia have closed, and that little gang only sing and dance on invitation – open-air concert tomorrow, free for the good people, the obligatory party in the private amphitheatre of some ship owner, his way of buying the right to take off five times a day in his helicopter, he takes off and lands, he takes off from some bald pebble in the Cyclades on which he has set down his villa. Everybody to the port this evening, it’s the rich guy’s treat! A good guy, there’s not a word you can say against him: thousand-euro gifts at baptisms, a gift of new windows for the village school, and the fish in the taverna yesterday evening too. This generous individual’s yacht is anchored in the dark water of the little inlet. It flies the Australian ensign. What a patriot!

And in the meantime, on the Sacred Way, in front of the deserted club, only the roasted-corn vendor tries to keep up appearances. He turns his corn like on Friday evenings, when the avenue becomes an amusement park with its merry-go-round of four-by-fours in front of the club entrances.

Where is he off to now, Agent Evangelos?

Agent Evangelos isn’t on his way home; he’s not going to sleep in his own bed, on Makriyanni Street. He is heading directly west; he simply knows that he has the keys with him. He always has, since his parents died.

From the outside the house is the same as ever. Inside, he has gutted it completely. It’s an empty shell, like a cradle with only the frame remaining, not even a smell. Where is he going? He is going home. He feels at home there, which isn’t surprising, since he has made a clean sweep inside: not a single memory remains; there’s nothing to remind him of his childhood; it really is somewhere new. But then why did he keep it? He could have sold it, replaced it with a four-storey apartment building. No, he has kept his parents’ house as it was out of reverence for the view, with its panorama of Athens, a spot from where he can measure the city’s evolution. Four walls and a flat roof built by his father, a rampart to protect him from himself.

If Agent Evangelos had demolished his parents’ house he would have lived with its memory. He would have missed it, and that would have recalled pictures of his childhood, but if he had left it just as it was he would also have been overwhelmed by nostalgia. He had preferred to make it his lookout. From the heights of Petroupolis, sitting on the terrace, Agent Evangelos can see the city’s rise and fall, he can feel it vibrate. To see Athens evolve you need a stationary viewpoint. We always consider things from the same vantage point. Adopting a new one means condemning yourself to refuse change. But change inhabits us all.

And, when he considers Athens, Evangelos no longer thinks of anything. His parents are dead and gone; his mother died ten years ago, taken by cancer, long before his father. He had lasted much longer. He’d died in January of this year, in his eighty-ninth year. He was born in Smyrna, in 1922, the year of the great calamity, when Atatürk’s troops drove the Greek population into the sea.

But is that really the history of his family? His own history?

Agent Evangelos isn’t too sure any more. After long weeks spent wandering the islands and the first Greek ports on the mainland, his grandparents had existed for months and years in hardship and poverty. Evangelos knows the story off by heart: ruined financially, meeting hostility in a mother country that viewed them as Easterners with peculiar customs, they had to create a place of their own. For a long time they lived in a shack in Nea Ionia, an inhospitable landscape far from the city centre, in what was for years a refugee camp, a herd of white canvas tents amid an expanse of wild grasses.

Agent Evangelos knows what came next: his father grew up in poverty. He found a job as a page in the Hotel Grande Bretagne shortly before the Nazis entered Athens. In the 1950s, not long after Evangelos was born, he was promoted to maître d’hôtel. By 1962 he had accumulated enough savings to build a little house on a stony, still uninhabited hillside directly west of Athens, in Petroupolis.

Agent Evangelos was ten when he moved there with his father, mother and grandmother. ‘She lived with us for five years,’ he repeats to himself. ‘I’m pretty sure she died the year the Colonels seized power.’

The neighbourhood Agent Evangelos knew in his youth is unrecognizable today. Only the tiny house and its minuscule garden remain unchanged. In 1972, a developer tried to convince his father to sell him the land. He planned to demolish the house and erect an apartment building in its place. His father would have received two apartments in exchange.

‘But my dad refused. He didn’t want that.’

Almost forty years have passed. ‘It’s 2010, and what have you got?’ Agent Evangelos asks himself. ‘A severed head on the banks of a frontier river.’ He launches his car into the labyrinth of one-way streets leading to the heights of Petroupolis. ‘It’s time to leave it behind, that whole history, Greece. Those refugees from Smyrna, from the Great Catastrophe, mean nothing to me any more. For too long I thought my future had been compromised definitively by that exodus. I’ve had enough of the tortured history that’s supposed to be ours as Greeks, and apparently my own. What an excuse! Our history books are poisonous, our songs and novels are filled with venom.

‘Forget, I must forget the books and take up the story as I see it, not get involved in other people’s memories. I have to learn a different language, change my vocabulary. My job is delving into earlier lives, spying on people’s lives, the lives of the ones I interrogate, the ones I wiretap. Report, record, Agent Evangelos, but don’t get involved. Keep out of it. Never discuss your private life! It’s the motto of the National Intelligence Service.’

Evangelos has led several lives, and there’s nothing to connect them. Their narratives are irreconcilable, which is why he tries never to talk about his past. Why would he want to remember his childhood? What’s the use of evoking his teenage years? His education? His divorce? All so many successive, incompatible stories, a series of accidents of the kind we all experience and that finally get us lost if we try to reread them. ‘Our lives are made of bits and pieces,’ he murmurs. ‘Trying to reconcile them means disassembling ourselves, agreeing to become other than what we are.’

Evangelos has never made public mention of the young man who was conscripted, compelled to enlist, on the double, on the docks one morning in August 1972. He was only twenty. ‘How could you refuse?’ At that age, you become a soldier, that’s the way it has always been, standing at attention after getting off the ferry, chin raised, eyes fixed on the Turkish coast, so close, carrying a letter he’d started to write at sea in his canvas kitbag, expressing all his love for a girl who would soon, every morning of his existence, still be sleeping in another man’s arms at this moment. The engines of the turning lorries, the end of a first life and the beginning of a new one beneath the walls of Kos, among shouted orders, and the boat for Athens already on its way, its hold still open.