The Greek Wall Read online

  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.r />
  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.