CHAPTER THIRTY

It is 14th April 1944, Zoë’s name-day, and though no one has celebrated her day since the Germans came, she has given herself a couple of hours to enjoy the luxury of sitting in the kitchen, reading an ancient copy of British Vogue, September 1937, that she has found stuffed into a cavity in the wall of her bedroom. Efi is at work and Voula has been in the mountains with the partisans since last summer. She stretches her legs under the table and stares at the cover of the magazine. A coincidence: it is Vogue’s 21st birthday edition, and today is what passes for Zoë’s birthday as well, since she has long forgotten the actual date of her birth. January 1916 is all she remembers. And a spring birthday is – used to be – so much nicer than a winter one. The cover is vaguely surrealist: a purple curtain flaps to reveal blue sky, across which a white unicorn is trotting towards a white birthday cake held aloft by a slender hand. Candles are detaching themselves from the icing and drifting away through the blue. Many Happy Returns, says the writing on the cake. ‘Thank you,’ Zoë murmurs, sighing in anticipation of PARIS FASHIONS from seven years past. It sounds almost normal outside: people coming and going, neighbours sitting on their front steps, chattering, gossiping.

But the lightness is an illusion. Partisans – fighters of EAM who now call themselves the Greek Peoples’ Liberation Army: ELAS – are operating in Kokkinia. There is fighting all the time, some of it against the Germans, some of it Greek against Greek, because there are new Security Battalions made up of Greek collaborators, some of them fascists, others fanatical royalists. Graffiti – slogans, political diatribes, the hammer and sickle – has changed the look of familiar streets completely. It is as though the city itself is sloughing off its skin like a snake and revealing its true nature. Just last month, ELAS fought the Battalionists up and down the streets of Kokkinia. The SS took over the school next to St George’s church, only a few short streets away, cordoned off the whole area and arrested three hundred men, who were all marched off to the concentration camp at Haidari. They heard, days later, that fifty of them had been shot. Zoë had known two of them: a young teacher, and the son of the man who owns the kiosk in Osia Xeni Square. Now the neighbourhood wears new clothes: bullet holes, the black starbursts of mortar explosions, the darkening blood in pools on the pavements or running in thick streaks down the walls. Efi slips out at night with a German medic’s bag to help wounded fighters. Zoë isn’t sure if Efi has joined ELAS or not. Sometimes she wonders if she ought to, but instead she keeps her distance. They can kill her, she has decided, but she won’t fight. She won’t add to the misery of the world. What had Tom said? He’d wanted to object. Conscientious objector. Is that what she is? She has these thoughts, and then she takes out Tom’s cap badge and stares at it. You fought, though, she thinks. Did they kill you, or are you still alive? Can you feel me here, thinking about you?