Chapter 1: SCORCHED EARTH
Come home to Greece!
Greek Tourism slogan
The new highway to Athens was like a soft, steaming slick of black treacle. We had just driven off the ferry in Patras, and the airconditioning in the car was broken. It felt as though we were being roasted alive in a tin can. I wanted some sort of sign that we had arrived - a band at the port to mark the historic moment of starting a new life. Here we were, returning to the country we loved, and it all seemed wrong. I tried not to show my sense of anti-climax, but Vassilis, my husband, looked weary too.
"Well, we've just come to the country which invented tragedy," he said dryly, putting his hand over mine in a gesture of solidarity. We looked out at the stretches of charred, stinking hillside on either side of the road, where forest fires had been raging. Only the olive trees had survived the devastating scorching, their dense, twisted wood mysteriously blessed with the power to protect them from flames.
We turned on the radio. A strong, low, female voice was pouring out her torments in a song:
Torture, torture, every embrace
.. I grew up like Greece, in doubt and rags. Anna and Lara, our daughters, were now too tired to even complain, and had flopped into a sweaty, lethargic heap with the dog on the back seat.
It was early evening by the time we arrived at our new home a maisonette in Vouliagmeni, a suburb of Athens whose name means sunken'. Our removal lorry was due to arrive the next day, and we spent our first night on Lilos in the empty apartment. It was early July but it felt like deepest August. Police sirens, dogs and car alarms howled somewhere in the darkness. Outside the window an automatic watering system hissed on and off. It was spraying our neighbour's small manicured lawn, which he had fought against Greece's nature to create in his rocky patch of hillside garden. Suburbs, lawns, maisonettes. Was this the new Greece?
Ever since I met Vassilis, we'd dreamed about going to live in Greece. Now that it was actually happening, though, I was afraid it might turn out to be what it had always been: a fantasy. For Vassilis it was a homecoming to his fatherland and mother tongue after many years abroad. For me it was like a return to first love; the ground was less sure and the roots less deep. Greece had captured my imagination as a student, but no matter how much I embraced it, I'd always be an outsider.
Athenian friends had told us we were mad to want to bring up our children where they were bringing up theirs.
"Greece is good for holidays but not for living," they said. "It's impossible to work, and it's unbearably hot". I recalled various British friends who just thought that Athens was hideous and polluted. They imagined it would be hard for me to continue working as a freelance journalist in a Balkan back of beyond. The dream had already begun to look more like a nightmare.
Before our move, we had gone to Athens on a house hunting trip. Like increasing numbers of Athenian families, we'd decided to resist the pull of the centre and go for the suburbs; it was a chance to live near the sea, and to give our children some space and fresh air after years of urban existence. I risked sounding foolish, and told the estate agents that my ideal home would be something old. I didn't add that I was picturing a slightly dilapidated little neo-classical villa, with a garden full of lemon and fig trees, because I knew such a thing was practically non-existent. One agent replied most positively. "Yes, we have something old. It's in a block that was built at least nine years ago."
Athens may be an ancient city, but it is also uncompromisingly modern. And there's hardly anything else in between the two extremes. It's almost as though the Athenians went straight from carved marble to reinforced concrete, skipping the intervening centuries. Few people live in a building which is old, and out by the sea where we were looking, many homes were barely finished.
Searching for somewhere to rent quickly got depressing. We enjoyed the fireplaces disguised as the Parthenon and the plaster caryatids and classical columns that were scattered like icing sugar confections around brand new houses like wedding cake decorations. And we laughed about the ubiquitous and horrible, dungeon-like room known euphemistically in Greek as the playroom. But we didn't want to live in these places. Friends in the more traditional, inland suburbs of Kifissia, Maroussi and Psychiko in northern Athens were sardonic. They told us pointedly that the seaside areas we were exploring were especially popular with ex-basketball players, the nouveaux riches, and Russian Mafiosi. We'd never get through a winter there, they said.
Athens' new areas have frilled out around the edges like a skin disease. Aerial maps of even a decade ago show the coastline to the South of the city as including great expanses of open hillside on the tail-end of Mount Hymmetus. Now the land was covered with the wound-like cuts of new roads and construction sites, and one built-up suburb followed another. There was an incongruous and bewildering collection of cheap, speculative developments mixed with the expensive dream houses' of people who didn't know whether their dream was a Swiss chalet, a Mexican hacienda, or the White House.
Just as we were becoming despondent, an agent took us to Eurydice Street in Vouliagmeni Athens' version of a Riviera, about 18 kilometres to the south of the centre. Evrydiki (as the name is in Greek) led predictably perhaps, to Orpheus a Street making a vertiginous descent to the sea, if not the underworld. We climbed up a long and steep flight of external steps past several interlocking apartments cut into the rocky hillside, until we arrived at the last one. On one side of the mezonetta (maisonette) was a gateway giving onto the open hill, which was covered in spring flowers. On the other, a spacious terrace surveyed what looked like half of Greece.
It didn't seem to matter that the flat was new, dull and badly laid-out, with too many small rooms on too many levels. In fact we hardly bothered to look around. We just gazed transfixed, across the small, strangely tropical bay at the bottom of the hill, and the surrounding palm trees and sandy beaches. Beyond the bay was the wide expanse of the Saronic Gulf, with its distant traffic of boats leaving for the islands and returning to the port at Piraeus.
Over to the north we could see the sprawling lower end of the Athens basin, capped with a delicately lilac-tinged mist.
"Is that the nephos?" I asked Vassilis, referring to the horrible noxious cloud that had plagued the Athenian atmosphere for years. It sometimes combined with summer heat to produce air so heavily poisoned that you could wake up in the morning and feel as though you'd just smoked a packet of cigarettes in an engine room.
"No, the nephos has practically disappeared now," replied Vassilis optimistically. "That's just a haze. But look, come here." He held onto my shoulder, and stretched his arm out in front, pointing at something in the massive, urban cluster.
"Can you see that little lump sticking up on the horizon?" he asked. "It's the Acropolis." Somehow it was ludicrously pleasing.
The sun was going down like a great blood orange slipping behind the mountains of the Peloponnese. If a film had shown these colours I'd have thought the cameraman was cheating with filters ("a bit more vermillion over there, and add some tangerine glow to the water"). Directly opposite this irresistible eagle's nest of a terrace I identified Aegina, the island where my mother became engaged to my father at the age of 17. Her mother was supposedly chaperoning her, but was content to let her teenage daughter be swept up by a mad Russian' 10 years her senior. A few months later my parents were married in London's Russian Orthodox Church. Crowns were placed over their heads, and the beautiful child-bride's veil caught fire from one of the tall candles. Like the sinister bird flying over at Orpheus and Eurydice's nuptials, this was thought to be an omen.
My parents did separate, but not before they had produced three children. I was the first, born the year after they were married. When I was three days old, a mysterious telegram arrived for me at the Royal Northern Hospital in Holloway. It read: Welcome Eurydice,' and was signed: Orpheus'. Later, when a Russian Orthodox priest submerged me in the baptismal font, I was named after my grandmother, with a second name in honour of Orpheus' tragic, snake-bitten wife.
As a child I learned of my father's fascination with the mystifying, shamanic bard. He even wrote an epic and wildly complex libretto for an opera called The Mask of Orpheus'. I used to sit in his work room, painting characters and episodes out of the myth, where I still half-believed that my first telegram had come directly from Hades or Lesbos, or wherever Orpheus had ended up, after he was torn apart by the Maenads, the crazed and promiscuous female followers of Dionysus. Later, I started to appreciate how the myth contains many of the most dramatic human emotions, which I saw lived out with an extra degree of intensity in Greece. It is no chance that Orpheus' tragedy has been dramatised so much, with its compelling, universal elements of erotic love, accidental death, desire, grief, the ruthlessness of the gods, and the power of music.
Vassilis and I agreed that the view and the address were both too good to miss. Eurydice Street was like another welcome for me; it was a return to the enormous, bright skies of a living Greece, which the elusive, original Eurydice never managed, after Orpheus made his fatal mistake of looking back to see if she was following him out of the Underworld. But if I was getting romantic about mythological associations, the agent was quick to bring me down to earth. The realities of renting somewhere in Athens involve an annoyingly predictable degree of financial intrigue, and we had found that even the agents were playing games with us, trying out outrageously hiked-up prices to test the level of our gullibility. They all explained that we would "of course" declare one amount on the contract and pay twice as much rent to the landlord. "It's what everyone does."