A journey of discovery through 1960s Greece

Dimitra Rouboula | Ethnos | 18 May 2013 The Greek 1960s, the dark sides of our modern history, such as the assassination of Lambrakis, figures who found themselves on the side of the defeated or the victors, dreams and disappointments, intersect and form a mosaic of situations, mindsets and behaviours that continue to shape today’s reality.All this fits into fewer than 200 pages in Dimitris Nollas’s latest book, his longest work to date, yet always dense and faithful to its theme, which is individual and collective memory, the search for identity within a hostile and envious world. The journey to Greece by the protagonist, an expatriate in Germany, was brief, lasting just a few weeks. Aristos wanted to explore his hometown, Thessaloniki, to seek out the place he had not had time to get to know properly before setting out to discover the whole world.But when the time came to return to Munich, ‘a small pebble had shifted within him’ when he decided to find out what sort of person he was and what sort of people others were, ‘plunged into that deep well, from which the bucket sometimes drew clear water and sometimes murky water’, but they circled round it, “as they all repeated the same myth, the same mundane daily story”.Aristos is one of those eternal students who survive on some family allowance and odd jobs and constantly postpone their studies until the next semester, as they spend their time discussing the struggles of the people. He plans to become a painter, perhaps a poet too, but above all he wants to observe what is happening around him. The infamous 1960s have begun in bloodshed, and Greece has been shaken by the murder of Lambrakis.The ‘restless wanderer’ finds himself accompanying Chrysanthi, a labourer and migrant to Germany since the war years of 1943, on the Acropolis Express to Greece; over the years, she seems to have lost her way. The mysterious woman becomes a pretext and then vanishes, as her own people have declared her to be, to whom he is obliged to hand her over. Aristos finds a city full of potholes from the ‘modernising reconstruction’. One of these is the house of his French grandfather, a pre-war publisher of a local newspaper. The absence of the house serves as a catalyst for memories to surface: of the vile loan shark Piza loading the living room furniture onto a cart with a labourer during the Occupation; of his brother hiding from Markos’s guerrillas and the government forces. But also the black marketeers, the informers, the members of the Security Battalions, the looters of Jewish property, the thieves who stole dowries. The plague of the city that is once again at the forefront and now ‘spews venom’. ‘‘As if they’d all been lumped together in the same account,’ as the narrator says of the first welcome that had weighed heavily on Aristo. But what follows is no better. In the ‘dive’, as he calls it, named ‘Bombay’, in the city centre, with a lobby filled with local and colonial delicacies, smoked meats and bunches of garlic, a motley human universe gathers, comprising contractors, estate agents, informers, uniformed officers, and gentlemen of high society who are rebuilding the country. ‘Here, an unknown side of the city pulsates.’ Here, Aristos realises just how dependent his own life is on the very types of people he despises, such as the Gendarmerie officer Tryfonas, who, in order to issue him with a new passport, forces him to denounce his former comrades from his brief stint in the Communist Party. Or the loan shark Piza, from whom, he learnt, his family allowance in Germany originated. Even the inheritance disputes with his brother are not innocent.The hero’s journey of exploration to his birthplace turns into a search for the self, the ego, within a social whole to which he is bound by ‘money, names, words and speech’, as the final chapter is titled. The place follows him and he leaves for Germany, leaving behind his own words, a collection of poetry...Bookmark‘...hundreds, if not thousands, of other people shared the same fate as Chrysanthi, finding themselves on the wrong side during that deadly decade, when the rebel insurgents were defeated, as it was impossible for them to return to protect their livelihoods without risking arrest and perhaps execution, with final convictions hanging over their heads. And so their relatives, their brothers and cousins, even their neighbours and distant kin, driven by the passion of jealousy, hatred and greed, would rush to declare them missing so that they could then get their hands on a few acres of land or many, (...), to pass into the ownership of those who had chosen to remain in their homeland and on the side of the victors’ (p. 131)