Dead Europe

Christos Tsiolkas' novel,
Loaded
, (turned into the feature film
Head On
, directed by Ana Kokkinos) was published in 1994 by Random House. He is the author of the novel
The Jesus Man
(Random House, 1999) and of the dialogue
Jump Cuts
(Random House, 1996), co-written with Sasha Soldatow. He has also published a monograph essay on the Fred Schepisi film
The Devil's Playground
for the Australian Screen Classics Series (Currency Press, 2002). Since 1998, Christos has also worked as a playwright, including co-writing the award-winning
Who's Afraid of the Working Class?
and
Fever
(with Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves and Irini Vela), and written the plays
Elektra AD
,
Dead Caucasians
and
Viewing Blue Poles
. His latest play,
Non Parlo di Salo
(2005), co-written with Spiro Economopoulos, is based on the censoring of director-poet Pier Paolo Pasolini's last film. Christos has also directed and written short films, and collaborated with photographer Zoe Ali on a series of exhibitions dealing with refuge and exile (
Destination Unknown 1, 2 & 3
). Christos currently works part-time as a vet nurse, tries to write full-time and lives with his partner, Wayne van der Stelt, in Melbourne.
Dead Europe
is his third novel.

Cover

About the Author

Praise for Loaded

Praise for The Jesus Man

Title Page

Copyright

Imprint Page

Dedication

Epigraph

ANTE-GENESIS

APOCRYPHA

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE WORLD

WHITE SKIN

CARNIVALE

THE SOLID EARTH BENEATH MY FEET

YOM KIPPUR

MISTER OLD TALK

THE THIEF

THE BROTHEL OF PRAGUE

THE SPARROW'S SONG, THE SERPENT'S COURSE

WAR CRIMES

IN THE GARDEN OF CLOUDS

THE NIETZSCHEAN HOTEL PORTER

THE BOOK OF LILITH

PURGATORY

ATONEMENT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To a saintly man

—So goes an Arab tale—

God said somewhat maliciously:

‘Had I revealed to people

How great a sinner you are,

They could not praise you.'

‘And I,' answered the pious one,

‘Had I unveiled to them

How merciful you are,

They would not care for you.'

Czeslaw Milosz

THE FIRST THING I was ever told about the Jews was that every Christmas they would take a Christian toddler, put it screaming in a barrel, run knives between the slats, and drain the child of its blood. While Christians celebrated the birth of Jesus, Jews had a mock ceremony at midnight in their synagogues, before images of their horned God, where they drank the blood of the sacrificed child.

—Is that really true, Mum? I demanded. I could not have been more than five years of age. My mother had been reading to us from an illustrated book of mythology. Her hair in those days was long and raven black; it cascaded down across her shoulders and her breasts. I would weave my fingers through it as I lay between her and my sister as she read to us. Mum had been reading to us about the gods of antiquity and I had demanded to know what had happened to them when Christ was born.

—They all went up in smoke and only God remained.

—And where did God come from?

—He was the Jewish God, she explained, but the Jews refused to accept his Son as their Saviour and for that they turned against him and followed Satan instead. They killed Christ and for that God will never forgive them.

—Is that really true, Mum? I asked again.

She suddenly burst out laughing. I knew then that it was make-believe.

—That is what my father told me and what his mother had told him. Maybe it is true and maybe it isn't. Ask your Papa. He knows about Jews.

—What do you want to ask your Papa?

The three of us looked up as my father entered the bedroom. In all of my childhood memories, my father is a giant, strong and lean and handsome, towering above me. He had just finished showering, and came out buckling the belt on his jeans. His skin gleamed like that of the gods in the plates of the mythology book.

I breathlessly recited what my mother had just told us about the Jews. He frowned and spoke harshly to her in Greek. Her face had crumpled. My hand instinctively reached out to her. My father sat on the bed and patted his thigh and I crawled across my mother and jumped onto his lap. I could smell the poppy-seed oil in his wet hair.

—What's this?

It was a regular test of my knowledge of the Greek language and I was anxious to do well. He was pointing to the centre of his face.

—Nose, I answered in Greek.

—And this?

—Mouth.

—And this?

—Eyes.

—And this?

—Hair.

—And this?

I was confused. I had forgotten the word for ‘chin'. He whispered the word and I repeated it to him. He then made a slicing motion across his throat.

—And if I do this, what would you see? What would come out?

I was silent. I had no idea how to answer.

—Blood, my sister yelled out eagerly in Greek.

—That's right, he said, now speaking in English. Jews have my eyes and my nose and my hair and my chin and we may all even share some of the same blood. I grew up with Jews,
I studied with Jews and Jews were my friends. He looked across at my mother.

—Your mother is a peasant. Scared of everything she doesn't know. And she knows nothing about Jews.

Sophie and I were quiet. We knew that for my father the word ‘peasant' was one of the worst insults. The word conjured up images of dark, cowed faces, of evil old crones and decrepit, toothless old men.

—I'm sorry. My mother's voice was low, chastened.

My father ignored her. He opened a bureau drawer, pulled out some money and folded the notes into his pocket.

—Where are you going?

—Out.

—When are you coming back?

—When I'm ready.

I understood that he was still angry. He kissed my sister and me and, without looking at my mother, he left the house.

I picked up the mythology book and started flicking through the pages.

—No more, my mother said, shutting the book, I'm tired.

I must have pleaded for one more story. She turned her fury on me and shouted at us both to leave her alone. Scrambling across the bed, my sister and I fled the room, slamming the door behind us. We must have put on the television. The set was new, the black and white images as crisp and sharp as the white shirts my father wore, the black shoes that he shone diligently every morning. We must have watched television till my mother had done what she needed to do to calm herself and then she would have emerged from their room, she would have kissed our brows, and then begun to make us breakfast.

I wasn't to hear about the Jews again until I was eleven and my father started making plans to move us all back to Greece. For a whole summer all he talked about was Europe.
He told us about Paris and Berlin, real cities, he explained, cities in which there were people in the streets day and night. He spoke about his own home, Thessaloniki, how it was the most beautiful city in Greece. His words painted pictures for me: I could see the crowded, dirty port with the ruined castle looking down onto it; I could imagine the tiny alleys and the sloping-roofed stalls of the old Hebrew markets; the crammed terraces of the old city. He said how he would take me on a walk under the Alexandrian Arch that was over two thousand years old. Imagine that, he kept repeating, two thousand years. What does this country have to offer that is that old? Nothing. Fucking nothing. We are going back to real history. Greece is free again.

I knew that my mother did not share his excitement about returning, even to a Greece that had just booted out the Colonels. She had lived most of her life in Australia, and she countered his excitement with concerns about money, about how we children were to cope with learning the language. He brushed her worries aside. He ridiculed her fear of flying.

—There's nothing to fear, he smiled. Aeroplanes are safer than cars.

—They terrify me.

—Peasant, he chided, but there was a smile on his face and he kissed her on her lips. I'll hold your hand the whole time, he promised. He lowered his voice to a whisper. You are so beautiful, I'll have to hold on tight to you in Greece. They're real men there, they'll want you.

I was blushing.

—Shut up, Dad.

My father winked at me as my mother laughed and pulled away from his grip.

—What if we get hijacked?

That summer the news was full of images of military-fatigued Arab men holding hostages to ransom. I found their
camouflaged faces, with only their steely black eyes visible, both terrifying and alluring.

—There's nothing to fear from the hijackers, he counselled her. Just remember, if the plane gets hijacked don't say a word in English. Just speak in Greek. They won't harm us then, they'll let us off immediately. They know we Greeks are their friends. Their comrades, he added.

—Why do they hijack planes? I asked him. What do they want?

—What the fuck do they teach you at school? He softened his tone. They want their land back. They're fighting to get their land back. The Jews have stolen their land.

Blood and land. Thus far, this is what I knew about the Jews. Jews were blood and land.

But with the coming of autumn, all talk of Europe ceased and I soon realised that we were not going. It may have been that Dad had lost another job. I can't remember and I didn't mind. The idea of travel had excited me but I did not want to leave either my friends or my home. Mum and Dad took us for a camping holiday to the prehistoric forests of the Grampians; climbing the abrupt ferocious mountains that jutted out of the desert landscape, I forgot all thoughts of Europe, of crowded, never-sleeping cities.

 

My father died before I reached Europe. We buried him in a civil ceremony; he was adamant he would not be buried as a Christian. My mother pleaded with Sophie and me to agree to an Orthodox funeral but we stood our ground. When I had been just a boy, around the time my mother had told me the heinous lies about the Jews, I remembered a morning when the house seemed to shake from the screams my parents were hurling at one another. Sophie and I peeked into the kitchen to see that, instead of their work uniforms, my father had on a shirt and tie and my mother was wearing her best dress. Dad was drunk, almost paralytic: he was
slurring and stumbling. My sister and I clung to each other, terrified. We listened to the argument. Someone had died. The man who had died did not want to be buried by the Church, did not want anything to do with the priests. My father was adamant he would not betray his friend's last wish. He threatened to upset the funeral, to insult the family, the priests, everyone. My mother did not want him to shame her in front of the congregation. You have to have respect, husband, she was crying, you have to show respect. My father was also in tears: They're all fucking hypocrites. Maybe, my mother had answered simply, but your friend is dead, it's the living that now matter. My mother got her way. Dad passed out on a kitchen chair and Mum took us off to school. But I never forgot the force of my father's fury, nor the conviction in his voice when he called them hypocrites.

Sophie and I would not be shaken from our determination to bury my father as he wanted. Please, my mother beseeched us, do it for me. What does it matter? Your father is dead. She was on her knees, she was banging the floor with her fists, she was tearing out her hair. I could tell that Sophie was wavering. I remembered that my mother was a peasant.

—His soul would never forgive you.

We got our way. My father is buried on unconsecrated ground.

For his headstone we ordered a small rectangular stone inscribed with his name and the dates of his birth and death. Underneath, in Greek, we had the words: husband, father, worker. We asked the cheery Croatian stonemason to carve the hammer and sickle into the stone but the burly old man refused. On the day of the burial my sister and I painted the symbol crudely on the stone in her scarlet Max Factor nail polish. Like blood, it washed away in the first rain.

On the third anniversary of my father's death, I took my lover to his gravesite. I crouched and pulled out the weeds around the headstone. I had not long returned from Europe.
On my last night in Thessaloniki, my cousin Giulia, the daughter of my father's brother, had placed a small red pin in my hand. It was my father's Greek Communist Party membership badge, she told me. He never wore it. He didn't dare. It had been hidden behind a portrait of my grandfather and grandmother. My aunt discovered it and was going to throw it away but my cousin saved it. For you, she told me, I saved it for you.

I took that pin with me across Yugoslavia beginning its descent into civil war, through Hungary and Czechoslovakia just emerging back into history. I travelled with it through Italy, Germany and France, flew with it from London to Melbourne.

Colin watched me as I dug a small hole in the ground, placed the badge in the pocket of earth and covered it over with dirt.

—Steve's buried here in this cemetery.

—Who?

—Steve Ringo.

I said nothing.

—I'm going to visit his grave. Do you want to come with me?

—No.

I didn't dare look at him. I was furious. Colin walked away and I sat cross-legged on the ground, took a joint from my shirt pocket and lit it. Steve Ringo had been the first man Colin had ever loved. At nineteen, Steve had been arrested for manufacturing and dealing amphetamines. He emerged from seven years in prison with dual faiths: the teachings of the Christian God, and the doctrines of Aryan Nation. He was the only one of Colin's Mum's lovers to show any interest in her child. He forced the teenager to learn to read. He was adamant, Colin had explained, that the kid wouldn't end up like him.

—He couldn't read, he was fucking illiterate. He made me
read from the Bible for half an hour every evening. He forced me, told me he'd bash my lights out if I didn't do it. So I did, it took me a fucking year but I read the whole thing.

On Colin's fifteenth birthday Steve got him drunk on bourbon and took him to a tattooist mate who carved a swastika on the boy's right arm. Faded to a watery blue, the swastika was still there. I wanted to erase that tattoo. I hated the barrier it placed between myself and Colin. I hated its history, I hated its power.

—You have to get rid of it, you fucking have to get rid of it, I screamed at him when we first got together, I will not go out with you while you still have that evil on your body.

He was pleading with me to stay, crying.

—I can't, he whispered. This is my history and this is my shame.

And I stayed. His shame and his tears made me stay.

Colin believed in the Old Testament God, in punishment and vengeance and sin.

—What happened to Steve Ringo?

—He went back inside and OD'd in jail. I never saw him again.

 

I finished the joint and was looking at my father's name carved in stone. I suddenly laughed. How did it happen, Dad, I said out loud. How did all this happen? When Colin came back he found me laughing and crying. He offered a hand and pulled me up. Our arms across each other's shoulders, we walked to the car.

 

That night Sophie asked us to babysit the kids. While I cooked dinner, Zach curled up in the hollow between Colin's armpit and broad chest, and my lover read to him from the old mythology book. He was reading the ancient Egyptian creation myths when Zach interrupted him.

—Uncle Colin, didn't God make the Earth?

—Some people believe that, I hollered from the kitchen. But I don't.

The boy ignored me.

—Is He the same God as Zeus?

—No. He is the Jewish God. Zeus is the ancient Greek god.

I lowered the flame and went into the lounge room. Zach was looking in bewilderment at Colin.

—The Jews created God, he explained. They called Him Jehovah—now he is our God.

—Who are the Jews?

I found that I was holding my breath, waiting for Colin's answer.

—They're God's chosen people, he said simply, and began to read again from the book.