The Music of Greek Teaspons
Chapter One
Kostas has turned 82 today, but all his friends have died so we sit with strangers in the taverna in Aegina, and make new ones. Men the color of old burns in shirts the color of the sea.
“It’s already 11,” Kostas points out, tapping on his Bulgari from Karama, “so we can drink anything.” So we skip the ouzo and order Mastika, its resin sweetness sweating down the ice in the little glasses, washing down the salted sardines and dry bread, washing everything away till you’re half drunk and men you didn’t know before 11 are kissing you on the cheeks, and there’s someone new in the group who’s making music with two spoons and half his shirt buttons are missing like everyone else’s. And Kostas, with an ancient, ageless face, is clapping.
Koutalakias, the man named after the teaspoons he makes music with, would’ve clapped too except he’s got only one hand free, and two spoons in the other. His high point was when he was hosted by the TV presenter Annita Pania, who had once with her composer husband lead the police on a chase through multiple red lights, later alleging they were listening to the song that her husband had just written, the volume so high they were unaware of the sirens. Annita, who accused the police of an attitude so improper it reminded her of the Greek Junta, and who wrote the book The Revenge of the Toilet Paper.
And Marinos, the retired policeman from Evvia, who knows everything about everyone, is shouting out my name, showing me photos of the baptism of his half-Albanian godson Nektarios, named conveniently after both Marinos’ brother and the patron saint of Aegina. The miniature bottles are piling up by now, between Christos the bus driver with his rock-star hair and Vassilis the sailor who returns to Aegina for three summer months every year, to soak his memories in Mastika and the music of teaspoons, interrupted only by the rustle of a plastic bag an old fisherman in a straw hat is taking from table to table, showing off a fish still wet from the sea at our feet.
But the Mastika has washed away our appetites, so we lie in a surprisingly cold sea under the hot sun, and discuss the man who died while making love in his bathtub. Our hunger aroused, we clamber over Kostas’ private beach thick with generations of dead seaweed to the house he built in 1999, past the olives he planted 16 years ago, and the 45-year-old pistachios he inherited. Washed with a hose, Kostas sits under a crown of old bougainvillea snaking its way over the patio, cutting a loaf of crumbling bread with a massive knife a guest made him decades ago, on a thick wooden board he bought in a German fleamarket while working on nuclear physics. And there’s feta and tomato, and when this isn’t enough we drink Mastika again. Happy birthday, Kostas.
But Kostas is already deep asleep in the cool dark of the house he built to enjoy with his family and friends when everyone was alive. And by the time he wakes up and grills his dinner outside, alone, I will be across the water in Athens, driven by Giannis the taxi driver who bought a Mercedes when everyone else buys Škodas because his wife wanted one.
George prefers his cars unbuilt, though, so he can put them together himself, repeatedly, every night in the garage he built to keep busy after retirement from law. I find him pottering around late at night around his Moke, a failure of a four-wheel-drive that was named after a donkey. George, unstoppable in his Eighties, is deeply suspicious of iPhones and people who do not smoke, and drops his cigarette stubs on the floor, surrounded by a loo without a door meant only for him and his lone employee (“Only for men!” he says), music and tools.
There were other men too, lost in the haze of Athenian afternoons. Savvas, sitting like a Jelly Buddha half molten in the heat, in the three square meters of his shop where everything was from a handful of houses, the most exotic of which was owned by Russian immigrants. His shop on Plateia Avissynias Monastiraki has been in the family 6 generations, each one perfecting the line he uses on tourists: “This is my art gallery.” You can buy a medallion to offer with your prayers, with the figure of a person stamped in relief, or even an arm, or a leg, depending on what you wished healed. Savvas offers a discount if you take ten at a time.
And the man who has been selling old coins from a cart in Monastiraki for 60 years and can tell you all the stories of all the men on them: Aristotle on the 5 Drachma coin, Democritus on the 10, Alexander on the 100 and several kings of Greece before the last was ousted in the Seventies. But we have talked too much, and he yells, “keep the coin, darling. I’m hungry and have to go eat my tyropita!”
I’m sipping Tentura instead, a liqueur of soft spice that has been made in Patras since the 15th century. And I’m sipping it with Vassilia, in a studio three stories under the street that opens into a hidden garden dominated by a massive palm tree. We should be underground, but there’s sunlight filtering through the fronds, a massive table she made out of a circular saw from a mill, and that bottle of Tentura. And in the studio a massive white desk against white walls and white shelves, and her little tools on that desk. And strung over, bits of fantasy: metal, coral, stone, leather, cloth. Things found and put together in a way only Vassilia could dream of. Bags, jewellery. Things. A curtain of white hangers dividing workspace and kitchen. Books on the shelves. Books in the loo. A see-through bookshelf that you have to slide to shut off the loo, and populate with enough books so no one can see through. Dostoevsky’s Idiot. Kafka. Camus. Old books by Nancy. Kandinsky’s thoughts on spirituality and art.
And Vassilia, in a soft dress of paisleys, talking of a problem she’s always had. “A problem of character. I’ve always been searching for something. What? Everything. A permanent lack of satisfaction, a constant urge to learn.” And you see that in her work, made up of things she has found, things looked for or things she didn’t know she was looking for.
Vassilia comes from Patras, like the Tentura, but she grew up knowing “that life was made by studying, not by hands.” So she became a lawyer, but found she didn’t want to be one any more once she started working. “But law had been my idea. Why? Because of the communication with people. This experience. You have to be a kind of psychologist to be a lawyer. Especially in Greece. Maybe psychology was the part of law I was interested in. Law itself was too academic, too stuffy.”
She’s always made things herself, with her hands. When she’d wanted a necklace she’d make one. And one day as a lawyer she’d thought of a special bag she wanted that could be tied around her waist and yet chic enough for the law office. So she made it. And she was wearing it when she walked into one of her favorite shops, and they asked her to supply them with some. They sold 7 bags in 15 days, and Vassilia made a month’s salary. And so she stopped being a lawyer and started her own studio.
And today she turns 46, but there’s no party because she doesn’t want one, or anything. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to wait for something.”
And far away, over the sea, another birthday: Kostas wakes up from a deep dream after our Mastikas at the taverna, our swim in the sea, lunch under the beaugainvilleas. An age seems to have passed but it’s only been a day with him, and a few more in the city. Decades ago they poisoned his dogs and he nearly died with grief, and now, in the empty house by the sea, a ghost of a last companion: Clara the cat, now 20, who outlived her brother and many humans and still goes on, with enough energy to jump onto the table and curl up in the fruit bowl for an afternoon siesta. And Kostas, when he wakes up, half forcing her to drink a few drops of milk and swallow a bit of cat food through a mouth with no teeth. And just when you think it’s all over, Clara will look at you through eyes that barely see, and respond to a touch and a kind word. Clara, the cat who refuses to die.
Chapter Two
Time was the only thing we had. And the only thing we didn’t. It was both absolutely useless and invaluable at the same time. And it flowed through our fingers as we sat on the steps in the half light until there was nothing more to say.
So she kept a diary of her character, and wrote a bit in it, every day, bits and pieces of other people and bits and pieces of her, each escaping and living and dying in the other.
And in her bag, a found bit of brown paper, the table mat on which the couple who had been fighting at the café had scribbled. Writing down a dream where they’d leave on a plane, a dream that died soon after, as it lived on in someone else’s bag that evening, someone else’s dream and someone else’s evening.
I was dreaming too. Dreaming of a girl in a café with a dark, electric green dress in the half light, and walls that absorbed the light and threw it off at the same time, so it splattered over my dreams.
Dreams of a dog who lived in the National Garden behind the parliament in Athens, behind Syntagma Square where the anarchists would delete my photos a year later: a dog sunbathing in the soft light, as a homeless woman fed the pigeons and then fed him. A great lion of a dog, old, ageless, nameless. A dog who reminded me of mine, who I had loved over lifetimes. A dog to haunt your dreams.
Chapter Three
The first group I came across were the anarchists, milling quietly and surprisingly peacefully, forming a large square in the middle of the deserted road, riot police on three sides, with their backs to the Akademie and the pillars of Greek education, facing the empty square that faced the next road, filled with a mass of people and a blur of Greek flags, all flowing towards Syntagma square. Much before I had got there, a policeman in riot gear had raised his eyebrows as I’d passed him, and now I saw why. By pure coincidence I was completely in black, like each and every anarchist. By the time I saw them I was already in no-man’s land, sticking out like a black mole on an empty road, with the police far behind and the mass of black in front. So I went towards the mass of anarchists, yet another black dot in a sea of black. Right at the edges a handful of them were milling around a stray passer-by, aggressively. I walked in.
Everyone was waiting, and so I waited with them. My camera hung from a shoulder, black on black clothes, and I left it there. I looked around, but not too much. When someone looked at me, I looked back at them, but not for too long. I crossed my arms, stretched my legs, looked up at the police helicopter circling. We were all waiting. If given a chance, I could make a book out of this crowd of a few hundred. They were kids, young girls who went to college, girls with sweet faces, with boyfriends. But there were other faces too. Tough faces, mean faces, faces that could do harm. They were also beautiful to me. And then there were the wooden sticks, sometimes with a red and black flag, with an ‘A’ in a circle scribbled in ball point pen on top, sometimes just a stick. And then there were the iron roads, rusted, short enough to hide beneath a jacket and long enough for anything. They scared me. They were kept propped up against the edge of the pavement, or a streetlamp, and every once in a while someone would knock one over and it would clang on the concrete, an unpleasant, metallic, unsettling sound. That scared me even more. I made my way to the edge of the crowd, facing the empty square, facing the direction everyone was facing. But this was populated by the most enthusiastic of the anarchists, the leaders, the shouters, the chanters of slogans, the wearers of tear gas masks. I moved a bit back, always keeping around the college girls, the softer groups of boyfriends and friends, the ones I would plead with if something happened.
Little things happened on the side. A short girl with a hoodie spray painted the side of a beautiful building. An elderly woman with her middle-aged daughter went by, but they must have said something, or made some sort of sign, because a wave of yells went out, and someone ran after them, stopping them, arguing. Then another anarchist left the group, and then another, and they threatened the women, aggressively but not overly violently. The rest stayed, waiting.
And there was the man who was mentally handicapped in some way. A middle-aged man with grey hair and specs and a brown jacket and beige pants. And he stood in the empty square a few meters from the anarchists, occasionally wandering up and down a few meters in front of their front line. And every once in a while there was a shriek, a shriek that seemed both far away and near at the same time, let loose through the empty square and deserted streets and silent crowd. At first I thought it might be a siren. But it was the man, screaming at the opposite side, where a line of police with armour and tear gas stood facing us, keeping us away from the crowd of flags flowing behind them. He taunted them and fired up the anarchists at the same time. And then an anarchist would yell an opening line, and the rest would roar their slogans, and the ground shook and I got ready. But then they’d fall silent again, and I still waited.
I stayed with them an hour. Towards the end, I heard a chiseling sound behind feet. The anarchists were using their iron rods to break up the edge of the pavement, and bits of concrete were collected into plastic bags. Others covered their faces. There were a lot of motorcycle helmets. And tear gas masks. Something was about to happen. As they gathered closer, I started shooting, quietly, within a meter of people. They ignored me. But the photos weren’t good. All I had was black on black, the light was bad, and nothing was really happening. But it was the first step. All I needed was time.
Then someone came up to me and made me stop. And the anarchists made me delete my photos. They were nice to me, but said they couldn’t trust me. So I got tired of them and left. Nothing was happening anyway.
There were a handful of press photographers hanging around by the side, but they weren’t shooting. And I walked up to one and he turned out to be a friendly guy. So I asked him what they were doing there if they weren’t shooting. Well, he said, the anarchists don’t like photos. But they didn’t have a problem with photographers. So the photographers stayed, and didn’t take photos. They waited and hoped something would happen. And when that something happened, the anarchists would be too caught up with the fight with the police to pay too much attention to the press. That was the general idea. But his prediction was that nothing would happen. So I left for the main rally. Don’t go straight across the square, said my new friend. Golden Dawn is over there. And they wouldn’t like you, unlike the anarchists. Go around through the side streets.
But I didn’t like this idea of going through side streets that I didn’t know, so I went straight ahead anyway, through another blank area of no man’s land, leaving the relative anonymity of the anarchists. There was the line of riot police, with their canisters of air and tear gas and armour and masks and shields, and they looked at me, in my anarchist black, with my camera, half foreigner, half accepted as Greek, half an anarchist. I did what I did with the anarchists, and met their gaze, and walked through their line. No one moved. And then I was through, in another group.
I couldn’t see any visible signs of Golden Dawn, so I stayed close to the side of the riot police, following the crowd. I spent the next few hours snaking through this mass, thicker and thicker as all the roads and flags and groups met in front of parliament.
It was hours later, at the end of the rally, that the ground shook with dull explosions. Some ran away, some ran towards them. I followed the crowd of younger men, following the sickening whiff of tear gas. There were a line of police buses blocking the street, enveloped in crowds and tear gas. And the buses were shaking, rocking back and forth. I got closer, scared, excited. Suddenly someone grabbed me. “Camera!” I froze. Another guy started running towards me. I did what I always do, half pretending to be an idiot, half being an idiot. Speaking in English, like a tourist. And then someone was grabbing a press photographer, multiple cameras and long lenses hanging down his sides. He was shouting in Greek, angry, scared. I got out.
When I got out into the safety of the spectators, I turned around and took a video. You can see the epicentre of the fight in the background, around the police buses.
Greece. July 2016, February 2018, August 2018
