covering myself from the evening chill. It was something I often did with Nikitas, whose life was a constant movement towards the open air and away from the confines of a room or house. Whether it was to eat, talk or sleep, he considered it to be improved if he had the sky overhead instead of a ceiling. He enjoyed dragging a mattress onto the terrace so we could fall asleep under the stars, stumbling drowsily to our bedroom when the sun rose high enough to wake us. We both loved the terrace and though it was also Orestes’ domain, next to his studio, we had turned it into a beautiful roof garden, full of plants. Each year, on Nikitas’ name day, I gave him a tall olive tree in a pot and there were now fifteen up there, marking our life together, their trunks growing sturdier as my time in Greece lengthened. The oldest were starting to acquire what Seferis called “the wrinkles of our fathers” on their bark, while the newest was a spindly sapling still tied to a cane. The older trees produced a crop of large Kalamon olives each autumn. They fell, making wine-coloured stains on the floor, until Chryssa taught me how to preserve them and I gathered jarfuls each year.
Athens looked peaceful with its orange glow and rumble of traffic. I could see over the green expanses around the Zappeion and the National Garden to the looming mass of Lycabettus, with its white church on the summit. I was reassured by the familiarity of this scene, less ravaged by the terror that had gripped me earlier on. But it was hard to believe what some of the visitors had said, trying to be comforting, referring to their own, older griefs: “It will get better.” “It will pass.” Before long, Orestes came out of his studio smoking a joint, and tried to disguise his discomfort by offering it to me with a casual air. I suppose he assumed I would refuse – I had told him that the stuff didn’t agree with me, and years ago, when Nikitas and I first noticed that Orestes was smoking, we tried arguing that weed is bad for the brain, in the hope of putting him off. This time however, I took the handmade cigarette from him and inhaled.
“My cousins brought it from the village today,” said Orestes. “That’s why it’s so sweet. They’ve got plantations hidden in the fields – it’s becoming quite a crop for them. They’ve found their ‘medicine’.” Blowing out the smoke, I tasted the bitterness on my tongue as warmth spread through my limbs and gravity weighted me down. Neither of us spoke. Orestes lay near me, his long hair spread across the dusty tiles, and we shared the joint until it was finished and I felt as immobile as the terracotta figures at the corners of the terrace.
Orestes reached his hand over and stroked my arm, then held it. I sensed his grasp as a sort of possessiveness in the vacuum left by Nikitas’ death. The king is dead, long live the king. Nikitas adored Orestes, but he could not help trying to dominate him. He would never admit it, but he envied his son for his youth and freedom – the sound of Orestes’ motorbike arriving at the back gate in the early hours of the morning was a provocation, the confrontation of the new to the old, the fast to the slow. If Nikitas liked to see himself as the anti-authoritarian rebel, he knew his son saw him as the system itself.
We stopped speaking and as I drifted in and out of sleep, I thought of myself twenty years earlier, like a foreign but well-known country. I was younger than Orestes when I first came to Greece. In 1988 Athens had been full of young men with wolfish expressions and black leather jackets, drinking Nescafé frappé and trying out their English on foreigners. “Europe” was thought to be a long way away. The city smelled of the néphos pollution cloud and Camel cigarettes. I had recently arrived and was preparing to go to the northern island of Thasos for my year of fieldwork.
I managed to acquire a room at the British School, an academic institution
Athens looked peaceful with its orange glow and rumble of traffic. I could see over the green expanses around the Zappeion and the National Garden to the looming mass of Lycabettus, with its white church on the summit. I was reassured by the familiarity of this scene, less ravaged by the terror that had gripped me earlier on. But it was hard to believe what some of the visitors had said, trying to be comforting, referring to their own, older griefs: “It will get better.” “It will pass.” Before long, Orestes came out of his studio smoking a joint, and tried to disguise his discomfort by offering it to me with a casual air. I suppose he assumed I would refuse – I had told him that the stuff didn’t agree with me, and years ago, when Nikitas and I first noticed that Orestes was smoking, we tried arguing that weed is bad for the brain, in the hope of putting him off. This time however, I took the handmade cigarette from him and inhaled.
“My cousins brought it from the village today,” said Orestes. “That’s why it’s so sweet. They’ve got plantations hidden in the fields – it’s becoming quite a crop for them. They’ve found their ‘medicine’.” Blowing out the smoke, I tasted the bitterness on my tongue as warmth spread through my limbs and gravity weighted me down. Neither of us spoke. Orestes lay near me, his long hair spread across the dusty tiles, and we shared the joint until it was finished and I felt as immobile as the terracotta figures at the corners of the terrace.
Orestes reached his hand over and stroked my arm, then held it. I sensed his grasp as a sort of possessiveness in the vacuum left by Nikitas’ death. The king is dead, long live the king. Nikitas adored Orestes, but he could not help trying to dominate him. He would never admit it, but he envied his son for his youth and freedom – the sound of Orestes’ motorbike arriving at the back gate in the early hours of the morning was a provocation, the confrontation of the new to the old, the fast to the slow. If Nikitas liked to see himself as the anti-authoritarian rebel, he knew his son saw him as the system itself.
We stopped speaking and as I drifted in and out of sleep, I thought of myself twenty years earlier, like a foreign but well-known country. I was younger than Orestes when I first came to Greece. In 1988 Athens had been full of young men with wolfish expressions and black leather jackets, drinking Nescafé frappé and trying out their English on foreigners. “Europe” was thought to be a long way away. The city smelled of the néphos pollution cloud and Camel cigarettes. I had recently arrived and was preparing to go to the northern island of Thasos for my year of fieldwork.
I managed to acquire a room at the British School, an academic institution
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