Dead Europe (19 page)

It had been in America that he had first seen a map of the world. The paper was now browned and torn but he would look at the rainbow colours of nations and dream about journeys across the sea. The Hebrew Samouli had pointed out Greece to him; he now knew where the Turks lived and, of course, he knew where America was. He should have stayed in America, married a Greek there, but the bitch, Lucia, had bewitched him from a young age, and all his hard work had been to no avail. The wars had taken everything. He would have to start again. He looked at the island at the bottom of the world. The Hebrew had told him that no one lived there, it was all jungles and desert, and only black savages inhabited it. But it could not be true. It was the New World. Even some of the village men had begun to talk about going to this strange pink place in the middle of the ocean, at the end of the world. He would take Christos and Reveka. He smiled to himself as he thought of his still helpless baby daughter. His little Reveka, his beautiful child. His child. His
thoughts quickly returned to the jewels. It was good he had said nothing of them to his mother. He would only tell her of them when he brought her and his children over to the New World. Let Lucia rot here in Hell. With these dreams he fell asleep on the cold filthy ground.

 

When Maritha Panagis walked back to their house with her daughter-in-law after the funeral service, she immediately ordered Lucia to feed the baby. The young woman grumbled but she did as she was told. I'll put the boy in my bed, the old woman said. He is tired, he needs to sleep. Lucia nodded. Maritha took the boy in her arms and she kissed his brow, his cheeks. There had never been a healthier child, she thought to herself, and her resolve nearly left her. Then she reminded herself of the dead Kyriakos—this monster in her arms had fed on that poor child's blood. He is not Michaelis' son, she reminded herself, he is not your blood. She crossed the courtyard and a snowflake fell on her shoulder. In the dark room she laid the boy carefully on her bed, tears now streaming down her face. The demon had crouched next to the child, had wrapped its thin arms around it. Maritha placed a hand over Christos' mouth and with her other hand she pinched his nostrils shut. The demon awoke and his shrieks were deafening. He bit into her hands, scratched at her arms, but Maritha implored her Lord to hold her hands fast. The shrieks were thunder in her ears but she did not let go. It seemed to her that she lived infinite time in that room, in that moment, the demon attacking her, she murdering her grandson. She felt the boy's last breath, his last struggles, and then she felt his spirit rise. And then it was gone. The fiend had begun a piteous lament.

Maritha's heart was beating faster than she had ever known it to. There was a pain in her chest and she could hardly breathe. She swathed herself in layers of animal pelts, pulled her white thick hair tight beneath her headscarf. Her
arms and her face were bleeding. She threw the shawl across her head and shoulders. Lucia must not see, Lucia must not suspect.

—Is he asleep?

—He fell asleep immediately.

—And where are you going, Mother? It's snowing outside.

—I'm going to church.

Lucia laughed.

—You must have committed many sins, Mother; you are always needing to go to church. Or is it Papa Nicholas you really wish to see?

Lucia's grin was mean.

Maritha walked slowly in the cold. She wanted to lie down on the whitening ground. She was tired. She had been tired all her life. But she forced her feet to make the long walk down the path to the village. A few of the old women were in the church praying. They did not deign to look at her. She crossed herself, kissed the icon of the Virgin, and sat in the last pew. Papa Nicholas was in the vestry, she could see him reading from the Good Book. She looked up at the forbidding portraits of the saints. The Lord's unsmiling face looked down at her.

I have sinned, Lord, I have committed a great evil. Christ was silent. Maritha closed her eyes. She had vanquished Charos but he now had a greater revenge: she was beyond grace. And there, among women who had always distrusted her, in a church that was not hers, in a land that was not hers, under the vigilant gaze of her stern, unforgiving God, Maritha Panagis died.

I ONCE HAD a teacher from Prague: I was a most fortunate student. I believe that he sought me out for instruction because when he looked at me, at my dark ashamed body, into my respectful olive eyes, he saw reflected back at him the image of his own children. Or at least, his hopes for his own children. Whatever the differences between my mother and my father—she of the mountain and he of the city, she of the land and he educated—they united to instil in my sister and me an unwavering belief in the importance of education; and, as a consequence of that faith, a respect for those who taught and who made it their vocation. When the teacher from Prague looked over to me, I was always listening patiently and keenly. The other kids were bored, they did not want to learn. They did not have my faith. I listened.

My teacher was alive to the pleasures of art, of reading. He believed in the importance of knowledge and this was indeed a rare thing, a startlingly rare and precious thing in Melbourne in the late nineteen-seventies. He was a brilliant man teaching at a suburban high school, trying to imbue a love of Shakespeare and philosophy in unruly adolescents who mocked his unfamiliar accent and who thought his scholastic ideals effete and irrelevant. But Mr Parlovecchio's teachings had already opened my eyes and ears to the music of literature. I was eager to learn more, hear more, be encouraged to see more.

But soon the teacher's smile left his face, his instructions became harsh and barking just like all the other teachers, and
he challenged the boisterous hostility of the classroom with his own furious contempt.
Stupid
became his most common insult,
You're all so damn stupid
. The class would break into titters and someone would mock his middle-European inflections. He gave up, I guess, but I am thankful that for a few of us he still blew magic into language and words. While paper planes flew across the classroom, while Wendy the Slut gave handjobs to Mano the Stud in the back of the room, while Costa beat up on Felix and while the girls discussed soap opera and the boys talked football, my teacher would stand before me and transform himself into Lear and Othello, Iago and Lady Macbeth. My rapt attention only increased my alienation from the rest of my peers. I had to agree with him. They were all so damn stupid. Along with my father's insistence that we as a family were urbane and sophisticated, not peasant and materialistic like other migrants, along with Mr Parlovecchio's elite instructions, along with the fact I was in love with a man nearly three times my age, it was no wonder that the teacher's encouragement took me further away from the concerns of the soccer oval and the mating rituals being played out at the Northland shopping mall. I was a snob, which for my peers was an insufferable affliction, but for my European teacher it was something he saw as natural, as obvious, as bloody necessary.
Your friends, Isaac
, he would tell me,
they are Neanderthals.

He often invited me to his house where he and his chain-smoking wife fed me books and thick Eastern-European stews of dumplings and sausage, and I would listen as they debated politics and film and the history of the Enlightenment. Outside their cramped, messy lounge room, the neighbourhood bus would roar down a sleepy suburban street, old Australian women would wheel shopping trolleys, and young men in Chrysler two-doors would burn wheelies on the asphalt. They did their best to shut out this world.
Thick red brocade curtains covered the windows and were never drawn. The house was dark and only lit by lamplight. There was always opera on the turntable. The world came in, nevertheless. Their daughter fell pregnant to an Australian; their son, forced to hide his knowledge and love of argument, attempted to assimilate to the dogged, proud ignorance of the Australian working class. That assimilation—it reminded me of my father's—took the form of narcotics. A conscious sleep. His parents took every blow with stoic resignation. The teacher taught me patience. One day, he said, I would move far away from the rumblings and exhaust of the 208 bus. He also, perhaps unwittingly, gave me the taste for a mythical city called Prague. He took me through its history, walked me through its streets. He told me what it was like to rush against the tanks in 1968. There was once hope in my city, he told me, and there will be hope again.

 

When I first got to Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolutions had just spread through Eastern Europe. There was music and dialogue on every street corner, and a young girl kissed me on the mouth as the train entered the central station and said, in bright, broken English,
Welcome to our country—can you taste the freedom on my lips?
I stayed in a hostel at the edge of the city and every morning I would take the slow tram ride through the blanket of cold grey housing estates, cross the muddy polluted river, and spend hours simply walking through the narrow streets of the idyllic inner city. I fell in love with Prague. In the New World we had no layers of history to our architecture, no beauty in our concrete, steel and cement. Beauty was only in our skies and horizons. In the Czech capital I fell in love with a European city that had just emerged from a fairytale: Sleeping Beauty awoken from a nightmare of forty years. So smitten was I that I walked along alleys and through squares for hours and hours, trying to understand every part of the city, to know its guts
and its heart, its shadows and its glories. In a bank across from the gilded immense façade of the Opera, queuing behind bollards detailing the victories and memories of the Revolution, I waited patiently in line while behind me five American students, in Nike shorts and Gap t-shirts, debated the backwardness of the former communist states. Warsaw, they were braying loudly, was decidedly much more advanced than Prague for it had three McDonald's restaurants and they had found no difficulty in using their Visa card. Prague, they continued, was undoubtedly beautiful but service was deplorable. I bit my lip and felt smug. Fuck you, Yanks, I remember thinking to myself. This place will be the new way forward. Commerce to serve culture, a democratic socialism without totalitarianism and a liberal acceptance that would be the envy of all Europe. There was hope again in my teacher's city.

Now, ten years later, Czechoslovakia had been reduced to one syllable, there were McDonald's restaurants all over Wenceslas Square, the whores lined up outside the casinos and there were no Czech girls to greet me with kisses at the train station. The first thing I noticed on disembarking was that no one was looking anyone in the eye.

Sal Mineo was waiting for me, dressed in a singlet and jeans, his arms pale and thick with hair, a cigarette drooping from his lips and his hair shorn to a buzzcut. A taxi driver tried to grab my pack and Sal Mineo came running towards me. Fuck off, he yelled, his accent still thick with a Melbourne suburban drawl. He pulled me into his body and kissed me on the mouth and on my cheeks. Holding me tight, he dragged me through the station doors. The air smelt of stale tobacco. He pushed me towards a long red sports car, the roof down, the body elongated and curved, the scarlet paint as garish as a Eurotrash girl's bright red lipstick. I started laughing.

—That's not yours?

—Fuck no, it's the pimp's.

—Who?

—My boss.

—Your boss is a pimp?

—My boss is a cunt. A big fat Jew cunt.

He had slung my pack on the back seat, and with his hand at the driver's door, he was staring at me, challenging me to take offence. I was strangely elated. I was not home. I was far away, in cold harsh Europe. I breathed in the anonymity.

—At least he's not a big fat nigger cunt.

Sal Mineo started to laugh. He charged the ignition.

—At least he's not a big fat nigger Jew cunt.

—Or a big fat retarded nigger Jew cunt.

His small car weaved in and out of the traffic and came to rest outside a dark apartment building that overlooked the river and faced the elegant rising boulevards of the old city on the other bank. He pressed a remote and an old aluminium door began to rattle, shudder, and then rise. Sal Mineo was impatient. He cursed the door, then the remote, then the city and all its folk.

—You'll see, Isaac. Nothing fucking works in this hellhole.

With a skid of the tyres, a spray of exhaust and the stink of petrol, he parked the car. The door rattled shut behind us. He shook his head on seeing me lug my backpack over my shoulder. He winked at me.

—Isaac, baby, just a word of advice, don't walk around this town with a backpack.

—Why?

—You'll be less conspicuous. They've had enough of backpackers. He rolled his eyes. Can you believe it, the fucking gall of them? The only thing they've got going for them is bloody tourism, and they get all high and mighty about that. The fucking Czechs, they think their shit don't stink. He spat on the concrete and led me to the lift. He turned around to me.

—And fucking, they're good at that. Tourism and fucking. That's the Czech Republic for ya.

 

Sal Mineo and I had met in my first-year photography class. There were seventeen of us, all under twenty-one except for Sal, who was twenty-three and had ditched his job as a mechanic to become a photographer. He'd introduced himself as Steven. A group of us had sat on a long white table in the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology cafeteria and were introducing ourselves to each other with the mixture of bravado and nervousness which is part of the first day of any school. The table was crowded and he came up to us, a tray loaded with hot chips in his hands. G'day, he said, I'm Steven, I'm in your class. A blond sitting beside me, with chiselled cheekbones and wearing boardshorts, looked up at him.

—Hey, he said, do you know you look exactly like Sal Mineo?

The truth is he did. Steve was short, dark and had thick, coiffed hair that shone from poppy oil. But Steve frowned at the blond. Later I was to find out that he was terrified that first day. He had spent the last seven years of his life rising at six, working on cars with gruff, tough men who teased him for his youth, his love of art and his inability to give a damn about football. In those seven years he had nurtured a dream to become a photographer, a desire he had expressed to no one. He was terrified of the young blond kids, scared that he would not be smart enough, good enough, talented enough to compete with us. But I only realised all this much later. When he was staring down at the blond, his frown creasing his forehead, his eyes dark and angry, he looked fucking scary.

—You mean like the actor?

The table had gone quiet. The sounds of the other students laughing and arguing through the cafeteria seemed to come to us as if through glass. The blond slowly nodded.

—You mean the actor who was the fag in
Rebel Without a Cause
?

The blond was now squirming; I could feel his thigh shaking next to mine. I stifled an urge to laugh.

—Do you mean the fag wog actor? Steve's voice was cold and insistent.

The blond coughed, then nodded again.

Steve placed the tray on the table. A young woman quickly shifted her seat to make room for him but Steve did not sit down. Instead he touched the skin on his cheeks.

—I guess I am a greasy wog, he said.

Someone stifled a giggle. Steve looked around at us. He winked at me.

—You know, he continued, they say Sal Mineo had one of the biggest cocks in Hollywood. Did you know that?

The blond was looking down at his coffee.

—Did you
know
that?

The blond shook his head.

Then very slowly Steve dropped the zipper of his jeans, fumbled in the cotton of his white y-fronts and pulled out a very impressive, long, thick member. The blond's thigh had stopped shaking. Steve was silent, looking down at his prick.

I extended my hand.

—Well, I guess you're Sal Mineo then, I said. How the fuck are ya? I'm Isaac.

Steve started laughing, the blond let out a relieved groan and one of the girls ordered Sal Mineo to put it away, just put it away. Sal Mineo and I were the best of friends after that.

 

His apartment was on the top floor. Two plain white double doors opened up to a room that looked over the river and city. Evening was falling and I gasped at the sight of the castle on the hill opposite silhouetted against the smoky orange sky. Sal Mineo's bed, his stereo, his television and his bookcases were crammed tight against the window. A small
kitchen area was on the right. He had turned half of it into a darkroom. The bathroom extended beyond it. To our right was a small room, a cavity, in which I spied a single mattress on the floor. I walked towards it.

Sal Mineo stopped me and pointed to the double bed flush against the long scenic window.

—No, mate. You sleep here.

That was Sal Mineo. Generous. I shook my head.

—Nah, I'll sleep in there.

—Fuck you, Isaac. Sal Mineo put a cigarette to his mouth. I have this bloody view every night. You're sleeping here. He threw my pack on the double bed, clicked on a switch to the stereo and Run DMC's ‘It's Tricky' came thundering out of the speakers. Shower, Sal Mineo yelled at me. Then I'll show you Praga.

He took me to a small pub on the other side of the King Charles Bridge, a basement club filled with assorted punks, hippies and ravers, and he ordered me absinthe. By the second swig I was high. At some point he shoved a small vial of white powder under my nose.

—Slowly, slowly, he urged me, the shit they put in their speed in the Eastern Bloc can fry your brains.

I took a small dash of powder and sniffed. Not the Eastern Bloc, I called out to him, the Eastern Bloc doesn't exist anymore. This is all Europe. I stretched out my hands.

Yeah, yeah, nodded Sal Mineo, pocketing the vial and watching a young woman twist her body to the slushy music that sounded frighteningly close to Supertramp.

—Is that Supertramp?

—What I tell you? It's still the fucking Eastern Bloc.

The music segued into techno. I sat back, relieved. That's better, I said. Sal Mineo was laughing. You reckon? I watched him make his way to the bar, pushing aside bodies, and ordering us another round of the luscious jade liquid.