Dead Europe (14 page)

The boy was praying. He was on his knees, rocking back and forth, his eyes closed, his hands held out. Michaelis dropped into the cellar and the boy sprang back. The eyes that turned to Michaelis were animal and desperate.

On recognising the man the boy's breathing calmed. He still sat crouched in the corner of the dark but there was something close to a smile now on his lips. He stretched out his hands and begged for food.

Michaelis, recoiling from the foul stench of the cellar, all shit and piss and sweat, seeing the boy's skeletal body, was suddenly aware that murder was the most decent act he could perform. He too smiled, crouched next to the boy, and slowly brushed the Hebrew's hair from his eyes.

—I have no food for you tonight, said Michaelis. But I have good news: the war is over.

The boy shrank back from the man's touch, his eyes wary.

—I tell you, the Germans have surrendered. You are free.

The boy looked down at his emaciated frame, at the rags that clothed his body.

—I tell you, continued Michaelis, your father is with us at the house. He has returned. Your family is waiting for you.

The boy began to cry. His hands fell across his crotch and he looked down at the dirt.

—What is it, you bloody fool Hebrew?

Michaelis rose and looked around the cellar. The boy had scratched Hebrew letters on the stone walls. Reminding himself that the stones above him were once part of Christ's church, Michaelis made a vow that he would return to remove the evil scribblings. Damn this, thought the man, let's get it over with. The boy had still not moved.

—Have you clothes for me?

Michaelis laughed.

—Aren't you the aristocrat? No, my boy, there's nothing for you. The Germans took everything from us. There's precious few clothes in your future.

Then, as he realised the truth within his lie, Michaelis hung his head low. Steel yourself, Panagis, he ordered himself, and lifting his head he demanded the boy come with him. The youth shook his head.

—I cannot see my family like this. He pointed to the rags he was wearing.

—Don't be an idiot, yelled the man, what the hell does it matter what you look like? You've been damn lucky holed up in here throughout the war. You haven't seen anything. And we fed you, didn't we? We fed you when even we did not have a thing to eat. You lousy Hebrew.

The boy began to cry.

Michaelis softened.

—Come, I'll take you home.

The boy came over to the man, and softly kissed Michaelis on the lips. The touch was only momentary, but the youth's lips were full and wet and it had been such a kiss that the man had been waiting for all his life. Lucia would never kiss him like this. The face she turned to him in the evenings was hard. The boy's eyes were open wide and the man took a step back.

—You are the Devil, he whispered, and he made the sign of the Cross. He pushed the boy roughly towards the hole in the ceiling.

Climb, he ordered.

But the boy was weak, and Michaelis had to push him up through the hole.

Once in the shell of the church the boy clung close to the man and when they entered the night the boy began to shiver. His wide eyes took in the black sky, the pearly stars, the world below: he moved closer to Michaelis.

—The world has changed, he whispered.

Michaelis looked out across the mountains and valleys, he looked across the dark.

—The world never changes, he answered.

They descended wordlessly. Michaelis urged the boy ahead and they made their way along the small thin rivulet, following the sound of the water upon the rocks. The lights of the village came into view and the boy's pace began to quicken. Michaelis grabbed him.

—Let's drink first, he whispered, and he took hold of the boy's arm and pushed him towards a small grove in the forest. The creek widened in the grove, and the trees provided shelter from the wind. The boy knelt, cupped his hands, and drank from the cold water. He drank and drank, and when finished he washed his face, his arms, his neck. He turned his face to Michaelis and his smile was rapturous and as large as the earth.

The dagger plunged deep into the boy's throat. There was a muffled scream of pain and the boy fell to the ground. Michaelis searched the boy's still breathing chest and when he found the beat of the heart he screwed the dagger hard into the body. The boy shook, a gurgle escaped his lips and then he fell still and quiet. The now empty eyes stared out at Michaelis from the hollow sockets. He moved his hands across the boy's face and shut out the night. But as he did so, the boy's face grimaced and shook and Michaelis shrank back in horror. Then he smelt the urine and the excrement. The body was again still. Michaelis made the sign of the Cross. Even if he were a filthy Hebrew, the body had once housed a human soul.

Michaelis knew that the wolves would soon smell the blood so he smashed the boy's face with a rock, smashed it repeatedly so the face was unrecognisable. Then he stripped away the boy's clothes, washed his own hands and face in the water, and then ran all the way home. Lucia was awaiting him in the cold, her arms wrapped tight around her body. When she saw her husband enter she sprang up and moved towards him. There was hunger in her eyes.

—Is he dead?

When Michaelis nodded, the joy in her was unmistakable. She clutched at her husband, kissed his neck and his face, his eyes and his mouth. She brought his hands to her lips and smothered them in kisses of gratitude.

—We are free, she whispered.

Lucia made a fire and threw the boy's clothes upon it. She took down a small vial of holy water from the mantelpiece and splashed her hands with it, and ordered her husband to do the same. Then when the clothes had been reduced to ash, she collected the remains and threw them deep into the shithole outside. As some of the ash caught in the wind and danced in the night air, she remembered the boy's skin upon hers, and she shuddered. She returned to her house and fell exhausted into bed. Michaelis soon heard her light snores beside him.

Sleep did not come easily for him. The moon's silver light played on the walls of the cottage, forming the strange signs of the Hebrew. It is only the moonlight, it is only your imagination, he told himself, but he had to keep his eyes shut tight in order to banish the evil hallucinations. Sleep did come, but when it arrived it was full of nightmares. He dreamt that he was a wolf, running in a pack, his body slick and grey. At first the dream was pleasing and arousing. But soon the pack came across the Hebrew boy's bloodied corpse and they attacked the boy with a ravenous ferocious lust. Michaelis awoke screaming, the taste of blood and meat and flesh still in his mouth, on his lips, on his breath. He looked down at his wife but she had not awoken. He forced himself back to his nightmares.

Lucia was not asleep. She had heard her husband's yells and she too awoke frightened. In her dream there had been no wolves, no spirits, no demons. Instead there had only been Elias' eyes, staring at her, watching her sleep. There had only been his eyes. There was no face, no body, no skin. Only his eyes watching her. The eyes and his smell. When she
woke, she could still smell him. She recognised his stench, the smell of him after he had finished, after he had been inside her. It was a smell that had always disgusted her. And as always, her eyes closed tight and ignoring her husband's screams beside her, it was a smell that aroused her.

Sleep did not return to Lucia. She spent the night staring into the dying fire, watching a final red ember slowly burn itself out. When the sun came at last, its glow was warm and reassuring. She jumped out of bed and walked outside, looking down on the green fertile valley below. There were wisps of smoky white cloud on the mountain, there was a farewell lament from the last of the nightingales. She breathed in the morning, she breathed in the fresh sun and air.

THE COFFEE SHE made for me tasted far too syrupy, but she assured me that was how Lebanese coffee should taste; unlike Turkish coffee, it should be honeyed and sweet. The cafe was called Beirut; her hands were old but her face was young. Her husband wore a crisp white shirt and wiped down the tables while she brewed the coffee. My photographs were spread across the table; I'd had them developed quickly, but certainly not cheaply, in a Kodak shop off the Piazza San Marco. As the woman brought me the coffee, she pointed to a photograph.

—Sicilia?

—Greece.

She put down the coffee and glanced up at the television screen above the bar. Three elderly Italian men were watching young men playing soccer. The men looked as if they belonged to the sea, with fishermen's caps and thick shirts bleached by the weather. Their bare arms were strong and tattooed. I felt relief that they were not in expensive business suits and more so that they were not tourists with backpacks like me. They shouted at the tiny men kicking the ball across the field; the sound was turned down on the television, and instead, Arabic music came from a tinny radio hooked precariously to the top shelf next to the bottles of spirits.

I had always assumed that Venice would be a modern metropolis grafted onto a Renaissance skeleton, that the medieval palazzi and sculptures would be dwarfed by shiny steel edifices and modern skyscrapers. So when I first
walked out of the train station and saw the ferries on the Grand Canal, I was taken aback by how small the city appeared. I climbed onto the first ferry I saw and began my journey through the guts of the city. The sun was shining and cast a clear brilliant light on the tiled walls on the canals. I dismounted at the Piazza San Marco, and began to knock on hotel doors. The prices were exorbitant, so even with the backpack getting heavier on my shoulders, I walked further, determined to find a manageable price. I crossed the Rialto Bridge and moving further away from the tourists and shops I found a small hostel in the north of the city, close to the markets where the Venetians shopped for their vegetables and toilet paper. The
pensione
was small, there was a shared bathroom in which the water was never better than lukewarm, and a midnight curfew; but it was affordable, and I figured as I didn't know anyone here to go out drinking with, the curfew wouldn't be a problem. I was not intending to stay. I was making a mad dash from the southern tip of this immense continent to the west, but I broke my train journey in Venice for it had always been a romance, a city I'd always wanted to see. I had no guidebook with me, and after the bouts of savage drinking in Greece, a midnight curfew was welcome.

I doubt I would have found the Café Beirut in a guidebook. It was a coffee shop a few hundred metres from the
pensione
, tucked between a butcher shop and a tobacconist. The seating was uncomfortable but the tables were large enough to spread my photographs over them. It was usual for me, when examining my own photographs, to concentrate first on perspective, then tone, rejecting immediately the shots which struck me as clumsy or cluttered. But it wasn't anything technical I first noticed when I studied the photographs spread before me. What I first noticed were the ghosts.

I picked up a photograph. It was of my mother's village. I had used a wide-angle lens, wanting a panoramic view of the
largely abandoned fields that criss-crossed the steep descent into the valley. I had judged the light well. Even the hasty processing had not dulled the rich greens of the valley, the cool azure of the sky, and the stark, stripped whiteness of the cottages. What I could not understand were the shadows that dotted my landscape. In one of the fields, a thin strip of roughly ploughed land, a figure crouched and stared furiously at the camera. The boy's face was haggard and lean, and even though he was simply an element in the background, his eyes shone brightly. I peered closely at the black ink of his eyes. Everything about him—his body, his face—was blurred and faint, except for that violence in his eyes. As the valley receded, a clearing of poplar trees became visible in the photo and underneath the wooded shelter, tall thin figures congregated. Of them, I could make out nothing at all: they could have been wisps of smoke. All I knew was that they had not been there when I had clicked the shutter for that shot.

Another photograph. Giulia and Andreas standing arm-in-arm in front of the coffee shop in the village. Behind them sit the old men at the table. But behind my cousin and her friend there is the boy again. He is mocking me behind the cemetery gates, his eyes again luminous, fierce and dark.

Cursed. Giulia had said to me, Did you know that your mother's family is cursed? I had attempted a laugh but she was serious, searching my face. There's no one remaining, did you know that? she continued. Everyone in your mother's family has disappeared. The old men say that it is as if they were never in the village.

I felt a weight on me then; I felt that the whole village—the heat, the dust, the mountain air and the stark sky above—were all weighing on me. Cursed. Your whole family is cursed. I had tried to shake that word from me.

Fairytales, I had dismissed. There's no one left because they've all migrated from this shithole. That's why no one's
left here. I walked away from her, my camera swinging alongside me, determined to bring this place to clear rational modern life with my flash and camera, through film and chemicals.

Cursed? What the fuck did that mean? That wasn't in my language, that wasn't part of my world. Fucking peasant shit. Not my world, not my clean rational world. I started, looked up; the men at the bar were shouting and screaming, laughing and yelling at the silent screen. Juventus had a goal.

I examined the negatives by holding them up against the light streaming in from the cafe window. The boy's face was there as well. I shivered, ice fingers down my spine. Then I let out a slow, relieved laugh. Not a curse, not magic: a technical error. Superimposed. They fucked up my bloody film. They fucked up my mother's memories. I'd got somebody else's memories superimposed on my film. I silently cursed the sullen bitch at the kiosk off the Piazza San Marco. Then I laughed again, and forgave her. I thought of the millions of snapshots she had to process, had to see, endless identical shots of pigeons, wet stone, the same fucking cathedral again and again and again. I'd fuck up as many as I could get away with as well. I gathered up the photographs and stuffed them into the envelope. This was a technical, scientific world. There was no evil eye. I was not cursed.

I hadn't slept much since leaving Greece. Giulia had wanted me to travel with her to Thessaloniki but I had declined. On returning to Athens I had found myself restless and increasingly irritated by the Greeks. I was angered by their indifference to the sight of beggars and gypsies on the streets; I detested their sour disapproval of the new immigrants in their country.

I could not bear their obsession with the accrual of possessions: Prada, Gucci and Versace. I could not get settled back in the city. It was as if my time in the village had unclogged my senses, had cleansed my perceptions. I felt
I was sensing the world through another's skin. The noise and dirt and dust of the city all seemed amplified: I could not find peace.

On my first night back in Athens, trying to fall asleep on Giulia's narrow sofa, I had closed my eyes and felt a touch on my face. I'd opened my eyes sharply to find myself alone in the room. I hadn't been able to sleep after that; instead I sat near-naked on the cement balcony and listened to the incessant traffic and belligerent exuberance of Athens below. I smoked cigarette after cigarette on the balcony, furious at myself for fearing returning to bed but too scared to lie back on the sofa. I watched dawn arrive and only with the refreshing spring sun streaming into the room did I allow myself to sleep again.

The following night I told Giulia I was leaving Greece and resisted all her objections. She understood that something had changed for me and when I attempted to explain my feelings she grew angry.

—Fuck you, she thundered. We finally have some money in our pockets and the bloody immigrant cousin from the New World comes back to tell us how he regrets the changes. What's wrong with fine clothes, fine food, a decent living?

—Nothing, I yelled back, but there's nothing fine about dressing up like some
nouveau riche
trash.

I stopped then, ashamed. I apologised. She softened and caressed my cheeks. Greece is dying, she whispered to me, this is Europe now. Then she snapped back to anger and slapped me hard on the cheek. We were hungry, for years we were hungry. Even those of us who were lucky went hungry. Do you understand? Her eyes flashed and I nodded my head in contrition. She smiled ruefully.

Pouring an ouzo, she handed it to me, and kissed me on my lips.

—Drink, cousin, who knows if we'll still be drinking ouzo when you next return.

 

Before I left, Giulia gave me a small gold crucifix on a chain and put it around my neck. I spent the long hours the ferry took to get from Patra to Kerkira, and from Kerkira to Brindisi gazing on the smooth blond-haired legs and arms of young Danish and Swedish tourists. I listened to music on my walkman, I caught snatches of sleep underneath the ferry stairs, but even then I was certain that someone or something was lying next to me, caressing my cheeks, kissing my eyes, but when I opened my eyes it was only the sharp sea breeze. The crucifix hung heavy on my chest. I thought I'd remove it as soon as the ferry left the dock. I hated jewellery on me. But I kept it on. Even though it was only superstition, I was glad for it.

I ate very little, even when the ferry stopped at the port at Kerkira. The harbour was dotted with little cafes and restaurants for tourists and even though the fresh fish and produce looked inviting, I found that I could eat little of it. Some distasteful residue, coarse and thick, seemed to coat every morsel of octopus and every strand of salad that I had chosen for lunch. I was hungry but everything tasted of this sour fluid. It had the consistency of phlegm, of blood. It had a human stink. I hardly touched the meal. I was getting sick.

I kept boredom and hunger at bay by taking more photographs. I had only two rolls of cheap film I'd bought at a kiosk in Patra and so instead of snapping the attractive blond tourists or taking pictures of the sky and the sea, I took photos of the white-uniformed staff on the ferry. I was not interested in taking photographs of horizons and clouds that had been shot at a billion times. I wanted to capture faces. The seamen were initially suspicious but I spoke to one of the stewards and explained I was a student of photography, and he spread the word that I was an Australian Greek and that I should be supported. I took a photograph of him: his black hairy arms. I snapped the deep white grin of a porter. I shot the squatting man who was cleaning the toilets and
who, on hearing the click of the camera, spun around, stood up, and smiled obscenely, grabbing his thick crotch and asking me if I wanted to film it. I photographed that pose as well. I took a photograph of an aged sailor, his body sinewy and strong, his hair grey and thick, who was smoking a cigarette on deck and watching a gypsy family spread a meal across a blanket, a meal of sausage and olives, tomato and egg. The gypsies would not let me photograph them. They cursed at the camera. The old man turned to me and I caught him against the sky, just as he was about to speak. I snapped.

—You're the Australian photographer?

—Yes.

—How old are you?

—Thirty-six.

—You are like them, he said, pointing to the gypsies, the old women napping in the sun, their children draped over the adults, sitting on their mothers' thick woollen skirts, grabbing at the food. At thirty-six a man must be a sailor or a gypsy or an artist to journey on a ferry alone.

I am still not sure if he was insulting me.

 

Within an hour of landing in Brindisi I saw a boatload of Albanian men being shipped back across the Adriatic, their pleas and insults ignored by the impassive young Italian soldiers. I saw a barely teenage girl giving a blowjob to a sailor in an alley; I saw a young boy shooting heroin on the docks who then threw his bloody syringe deep into the Mediterranean waters; I watched a man pick the pocket of another. Soldiers and police, their rifles splayed against their chests, their enormous pistols in black holsters, wandered lazily up and down the dusty salt-drenched streets. They ignored the junkies and the whores, they ignored the drugs and the sex, and eyeing me quickly and contemptuously, working out I was neither refugee nor terrorist, they ignored me. The train north was not due till late in the evening so I rented a room
in the Hotel d'Amour for which you could pay for by the hour. Climbing the stairs I saw a Russian whore leading a priest to a room and I was accosted by a Greek sailor who clutched at my balls. I took him to my room and he sniffed at me, then ordered me to wash. There was no shower or bath, only a small basin in the hall with cold running water, and I washed under my arms and scrubbed off the flecks of white grit from underneath my foreskin. When I returned to the room the sailor had squashed a small mouse with his boot. We both stared at the bloody flesh.

—
Broma Itali
. Dirty Italians. I wouldn't let him fuck me or come in my mouth and he left as soon as he had finished. I wiped the semen off my shoulders and pulled up my trousers and discovered that I had run out of cigarettes. I went out on the street, lugging the backpack as I feared it might be stolen if I left it in the room. Three whores, who might have been Romanian, who might have been Albanian or Macedonian, niggers from the Balkans and the East, rushed at me and in English and Greek and French and Italian, asked me if I wanted sex. When I refused, the youngest woman wrapped her arms around me and felt up and down my arse, looked for the zips on my backpack, searching for my wallet, searching for anything. I attempted to be polite, then I snarled and told her to fuck off, and finally I pushed her against the wall. They yelled insults after me as I entered a small grocery shop, they yelled insults when I emerged, they screamed insults as I stepped up to the Hotel d'Amour. Another Greek sailor came through the glass door, more attractive than the man I had just been with, but he did not look at me and the three whores rushed towards him. The youngest one again placed her arms around his neck but he was much more experienced than I. He slammed his palm so hard across her face that she fell to the ground on all fours, gagging. The other women went silent. The sailor seemed to be skipping as he sauntered down the street.