“We are doomed to save the place”

Stavroula Papaspyrou | Eleftherotypia | 15 March 2013 Dim. Nollas’s ‘The Journey’ captures the Greece that wounds us. How much of Greece can fit into 180 pages? If we’re talking about Dimitris Nollas’s new novel, enough to make it fall on your head as heavy as an axe. A few months after his short story collection ‘In the Land’, which emphasised the call for solidarity, understanding and love, the 73-year-old author returns with a dense work that seems to embrace all his previous books.‘A Journey to Greece’, due to be published in a few days (Ikaros), is set in 1963, yet is brimming with references that probe the darkest aspects of our recent history. A mosaic of situations and mentalities from which much of our suffering has stemmed and continues to stem, and an attempt, at the same time, to reconcile us with the famous ‘Greek character’, which today seems more valuable than ever.The journey of the central character—Aristos, an aspiring poet living in Germany, supposedly to study— the aspiring poet Aristos—is set to last no more than three weeks, and however confused his feelings were upon arrival, they will be even more so upon his departure. By the time he sets off on his return journey to that corner of Bavaria, where until recently he was ‘scraping by’ on his share of the family estate, Aristos will have realised that the image he took away from Greece was at odds with the idealised notion he carried within him. Even those closest to him – let’s set aside the inheritance disputes – will disappoint him. In his attempt to understand what sort of person he is, he will realise that, in the end, he is anything but blameless...Old wrongsIt all begins in the compartment of a train crossing the former Yugoslavia, with Aristo reluctantly accompanying a rather frail woman twice his age, ‘a poor soul’, a former factory worker in Germany, and indeed since ’43. He has undertaken to deliver her to her family, but as soon as they arrive in Thessaloniki, his ‘baggage’, as he describes her, vanishes off the face of the earth. And because he feels indebted to the man who entrusted her to him, he will call upon every acquaintance he has in his hometown to track her down. This serves as the pretext for the main plot of the story to unfold, along with all its subplots.The first stop on the journey is a Thessaloniki undergoing ‘modernising reconstruction’, ‘riddled with chasms’, where Aristos, at the sight of his French grandfather’s once-imposing villa—his grandfather having been the pre-war publisher of a local newspaper— recalls images from his childhood, long repressed: the figure of the loan shark who, during the Occupation, stripped the villa of its heavy furniture; his brother hiding during the Civil War, sought after by both the communists and the government forces. Nolla’s hero does not mince his words about the city’s ‘plague’ – ‘the black marketeers, the informers, the members of the Security Battalions, the plunderers of Jewish property...’—of the very same city that has just been charged with yet another crime, the murder of Grigoris Lambrakis. Old injustices are always joined by new ones...In a ‘backwater’ with the exotic name ‘Bombay’, amidst building contractors, traders, estate agents, informers and ‘uniformed bumpkins’ with an effeminacy that catches the eye, Aristos will seek the help of a diminutive Gendarmerie officer, in whose face one can discern the ‘experience of a century of interrogations’. The moment when he realises the price required for the information he seeks has not yet arrived. However, his brief stint in the illegal Communist Party of Greece and his association in Munich with left-wing students will prove to be his Achilles’ heel.The next stop on the journey is a mountain village in Western Macedonia, where lives perhaps the only person Aristos’s missing ‘luggage’ would wish to meet: an intellectual-rancher of considerable wealth, who looks up to Tolstoy, someone who witnessed the Trial of the Tones in his youth and saw his father murdered by a gang of mountain bandits, a man who is now slowly dying and who is eager to pass on to Aristos a distillation of his own experience of fratricidal heartbreak. We are now at the heart of the book, where perhaps the whole essence lies. Can anyone remain neutral in a civil conflict? Are those who plan to take the place of the old masters, promising the poor and the outcasts the abolition of classes and inequalities, just as much liars and deceivers as their predecessors because they conceal the fact that people will always be in search of a shepherd? Does not every new ‘shepherd’, whatever he professes, tend to his flock in his own way? Will Evil ever end? Rowers in the galley of life, people are at the mercy of circumstances, Nollas seems to argue, hostages of History but also of their ‘self’, that inexhaustible reservoir which revitalises the way we move forward. Every time ‘the roof above us leaks’, whenever our homeland is threatened by familiar arrows, we are doomed to rally our forces to save it. This is the land we were dealt, as if to say, this is the land we must live in.