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Back The Black Earth Save as PDF
Chapters (56)
  1. Cover
  2. THE BLACK EARTH
  3. Dedication
  4. Contents
  5. BOOK I
  6. CHAPTER ONE
  7. CHAPTER TWO
  8. CHAPTER THREE
  9. CHAPTER FOUR
  10. CHAPTER FIVE
  11. CHAPTER SIX
  12. CHAPTER SEVEN
  13. BOOK II
  14. CHAPTER EIGHT
  15. CHAPTER NINE
  16. CHAPTER TEN
  17. CHAPTER ELEVEN
  18. CHAPTER TWELVE
  19. CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  20. CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  21. CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  22. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  23. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  24. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
  25. CHAPTER NINETEEN
  26. CHAPTER TWENTY
  27. BOOK III
  28. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
  29. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
  30. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
  31. CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
  32. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
  33. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
  34. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
  35. CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
  36. CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
  37. CHAPTER THIRTY
  38. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
  39. CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
  40. CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
  41. CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
  42. BOOK IV
  43. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
  44. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
  45. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
  46. CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
  47. CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
  48. CHAPTER FORTY
  49. CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
  50. CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
  51. CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
  52. CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
  53. CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
  54. About the Author
  55. By Philip Kazan
  56. Copyright

‘He couldn’t take the world any more, Efi mou. It was like he foresaw all this. And he said that the rembetika was leaving him. Maybe he knew about Feathers – she’d have betrayed us all …’ A thought jerks her back against the wall, as though the sniper has found his target. ‘You don’t think it was Feathers who put Sólon’s brother up to having us arrested? Sólon told me that Ioannis joined the X the same day the Germans left.’

‘Holy Virgin! But why would she do something like that?’

‘She’s always known what I think about her. Because … oh, my God. To get the house? No, that’s too horrible.’

Efi whistles. ‘It makes sense to me. She thought Pavlo belonged to her, so his property did too. Burn it down, build it up again in her name.’ They look at each other. There have been plenty of stories, over the past two years, of collaborators turning friends or even close relatives in to the Gestapo so that they could steal their property, or to settle old scores, or just out of sheer malice.

‘I don’t think it can be true,’ Zoë says. ‘Feathers is a bitch and a schemer but none of her schemes have ever come to anything. She only cares about smack.’ A boy starts shouting that the sniper has been killed, and long live EAM! Zoë hugs Efi and runs the short distance back to the house, feeling the back of her head tingling. She feels like that all the time: skin prickling, the sensation of being watched, of an eye, a finger, a trigger, a mind deciding whether she is to live or die.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Tom wakes with a thin, whining hangover. He doesn’t get up straight away, but lies under the stiff sheets, stretching the pain from his limbs and taking stock. After his grim epiphany in Syntagma Square he hitched a ride in a tank up to the Acropolis, where he found his old colonel conducting business from his HQ in the museum. They looked out over the city, at the rising smoke and the diving planes. A machine gun nest between the Caryatids of the Erechtheion was firing down onto the neighbourhoods to the north, shabby streets bisected by railway lines and bracketed with factories and gasworks. Tracer, pale sparks in the sunlight, sprayed over the roofs like water from a garden hose.

‘General Alexander wants to flatten the whole city, like the Luftwaffe did to Rotterdam,’ the colonel told him. ‘We won’t, because there would be riots in London and I’m pretty sure my men would refuse. But it’s a mess here, Tom. Your timing is impeccable.’

‘I’d hoped I could get into Piraeus.’

‘Hitch a ride with a convoy.’

‘No, I mean the suburbs. Kokkinia.’