Authors: Kerry Greenwood
‘He’s going next door,’ said Daniel, ‘where they know him and, even as we speak, are putting their biggest pizzas into the oven.’
Timbo grinned, locked the car and lumbered off. I followed Daniel into a, well, a bathing pavilion, all light and glass and glowing napery. We were conducted out into a paved courtyard, open to the sea on most sides. Children were making a sandcastle. People were walking dogs. A few hardy souls were swimming. And we were sitting under an umbrella consulting an impressive menu. Privilege. And nice, too, in a way. I have spent such a lot of my life on the other side of that ornamental rope.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, scanning the available treats. ‘They all look delicious.’
‘Then we’ll have lots of oysters in several ways and a fisherman’s platter,’ said Daniel, gesturing to a waitress. ‘And a bottle of sauv blanc and a bloody Mary to start.’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘And an ouzo, if you please,’ Daniel added, as a large, blocky figure lumbered up and took a chair at our table. The chair whimpered, but stood her weight.
‘Just bring the bottle,’ said the woman.
She was as utterly unlike Georgiana Hope as it was possible to be, sharing nothing but the gender. She was strong and in her robust prime, seeming well able to pick up an ailing donkey and carry it home in her arms. She was clad in a man’s flannel shirt, work boots and Yakka trousers which had seen better years. She had a peasant’s strong shoulders, wide hips and short legs, but her face was purely classical. Her hair was black, striped with white, as coarse as a horse’s tail, dragged back off her face in an untidy bun. Her nose was a beak and her mouth showed a selection of gold teeth. Then she smiled. The last time I had seen that smile I was at Olympia, Greece, and it was on the mouth of the Goddess Athene.
‘
Yassus
,’ she said. ‘Daniel. You Corinna? I’m Chrysoula.’
‘The golden one,’ I translated.
‘All my gold is in my mouth,’ she said, and chuckled.
She sat like a manual labourer, knees apart, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette between forefinger and thumb. She was less a female figure than a force of nature and I wished that she and Meroe could meet.
The waitress brought the bottle of ouzo. Chrysoula poured a good slug into the glass, dropped in ice and just enough water, and watched as the spirit clouded. When it was the colour of coconut milk, she drank it off without a gasp. Then she poured another.
‘Food?’ asked Daniel. Kyria Chrysoula did not disconcert him in the least. I could tell that she admired him for this.
‘It’s rent this week,’ she said, and knocked back another drink.
‘My treat,’ I said. She gave me a shrewd look.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘For you. I don’t let men buy me dinner,’ she said, giving Daniel a wicked wink.
Daniel called the waitress and doubled our order. She was taking Chrysoula in her stride as well. She must have been a local character. I was dying to know what Daniel wanted with this Amazon. But it was not to be thought that we didn’t have any manners, so I began the required small talk by commenting on the view.
‘Look at the prospect,’ I said. ‘If this was anywhere on the Mediterranean, you’d have to pawn your watch just to sit here.’
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‘I tried living away from the sea,’ said Chrysoula, doctoring another glass of ouzo. To me the stuff tastes like kerosene, but I was glad that she was enjoying it.
‘No good?’
‘No good,’ she told Daniel. ‘Couldn’t sleep. Missed the noise of the waves. My girl, she bought me one of those machines which makes tide noises.’
‘No good again?’
‘All right until the battery died,’ she said, snorting with laughter. ‘Then I woke up, so we moved. My sister’s god-brother Johnnie rents me a house. Costs a fortune. Thieving bastard. But once I get back to work we’ll be okay. Hurt my back,’ she said, with the astonishment of very strong people when their body has let them down. ‘Had to take time off. Government gives me a disability pension until I’m better. This is a good place. Only, sometimes it’s either rent or food and I’m too old to sleep on the sand like I used to in Mytilene when I was a girl.’
‘And Cassandra, she’s all right?’ Daniel asked.
‘She’s a good girl,’ said Chrysoula. ‘A good girl, my Cassandra. Oysters,’ she said scornfully as a platter of delectable shells appeared. ‘You eating that stuff when you could have calamari?’
‘Yes,’ said Daniel, picking up a shell and emptying it into his mouth. ‘Your calamari is just coming.’
I ate various oysters, which were kilpatrick and lime and dill and even tequila, which I considered interesting but not wise. I drank an elaborate and lovingly made bloody Mary, nibbling on the celery stirrer. I watched the children flying kites across the sand. The sea sighed and rolled. It was lovely.
Then we tackled a Brobdingnagian fisherman’s platter which had bits of every sort of seafood, raw and crumbed and fried and grilled and sauced with three separate sauces, with a huge green salad. Chrysoula ate politely, managing cleanly with her fingers. The food was wonderful, varied and perfectly cooked.
When there was nothing left to eat, Chrysoula cleaned her plate with a piece of bread, poured herself a new ouzo, belched with pleasure, and said to Daniel, ‘You want to hear the story now?’ and Daniel said, ‘Yes, please.’
‘When I was a little girl my father took us north to Thessa
loniki, where his mother came from,’ Chrysoula said. Her voice assumed the singsong tone of the storyteller. ‘This was in the bad old days when there was a war and the Greek government sent all the army away, so when the Germans came there were no brave Greek soldiers to defend us. It fell, that city. For us kids it wasn’t too bad to start because the Germans were just ordinary soldiers then and they had chocolate sometimes. We didn’t like the Germans as much as the Italians. They just wanted to go home to Mamma, those Italians.’
She paused as she rolled another cigarette. I wondered how old she was. Sixty? Seventy? Surely not older?
‘My father was a teacher and in the Resistance, of course, and he had to run. We ran too, and hid, because by then the Germans were taking hostages and we heard that in Crete they had killed the villages of the Amari Valley. Men, women, old people, babies, even the dogs. Everyone dead. And they put up a sign saying “Here stood Kandanos, who defied the orders of
17
1
the German government”. So then we knew what sort of
people they were.’
Again she paused, looking back over gulfs of murder.
‘Our friends were Cohens. They were Jews. They had to run too. My mother went to see the administrator, a man called Mertens. She took gold with her, her dowry jewellery. She took me with her as well. We knew this Mertens would take money to let people go. We took him money, he gave us permits. This was in the morning and by night we were far away on the train, going south. With us went the Cohens and my friend Rachel. She cried when we made her change her beautiful clothes. Silk, they were, a wrap and an apron and a headdress, and we made her wear my second best dress and an old scarf. And changed her name to Athena.’
‘You took the train?’ prompted Daniel.
‘Yes. Father said, take the train, fast but dangerous, and stay near the doors, and if the Germans board and try to grab you, jump, and maybe some of us will escape. That train was stuffed with people hanging out all over it and on the roof. We did as Father said, though. Stand near the doors and so we did that and the saints held their hands above us. We got all the way to Athens. Then the Gestapo did get on the train and we did jump off and all of us found each other in the bushes and then we set off to walk to Corinth. We had to get across the Corinthian Canal and into the Pelopennesus, where Mother had relatives.
‘We weren’t alone. There were many many people on the roads. Some of the villages had shut their gates and yelled at us to go round. The Cohen baby was sick and cried all the time. One night we were sleeping in a barn and an old woman came from the house and told us to get out before dawn because we had been betrayed. Mrs Cohen said that the baby
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would die, and the old woman took the baby in her arms and kissed him and said, “No, this one will live to be famous,” and gave him back, and we went out. She gave us bread and wine and cheese, that old woman. The Germans took her into the main street and shot her when they found us gone.’
I poured her another ouzo. The story was utterly compelling in its simplicity. Still, I wondered why Daniel wanted to hear it.
‘So we went on,’ said Chrysoula. ‘Walking, walking, walking. Took us almost until Easter. Then we got to Kalamata and got a boat down to the village. We were all right then.’
‘Were the Cohens still with you?’
‘They were family by then,’ Chrysoula chuckled. ‘The Archmandrite, he told all Greeks to care for their Jews because they were Hellenes like us, not barbarians like the Germans. When we were in Volos there came a man crying, saying, “If you seek for the ghetto of Hania it is two hundred fathoms down”. The bishop of Hania was on that boat. And after that the priests never let the Jews go with the Germans. Not from the mainland, not the islands, except those godless bastards on Corfu.’ She spat. ‘They sent them away and had a festival. But they are corrupt, not true Greeks, it is well known.’
‘Where did you end up?’ Daniel asked.
‘Little village no one has ever heard of,’ Chrysoula answered. ‘My mother came from there. Called Koroni. Tell you something? One day the Germans ordered all the Jews in Kalamata into trucks and they went and the bishop put a priest in each truck and they sat there in the sun all day. The fear in their eyes, it was terrible. The Germans didn’t know what to do. “Where they go, we go”, said the bishop. When it got dark we let them out and the Jews ran away. We hid them and in the morning when the Germans asked where are the Jews we said, “There are no Jews here, just Greeks”, and he
said nothing and forgot about them.’
‘But they emptied Thessaloniki,’ Daniel prompted.
‘We didn’t know. The Germans took over and suddenly the Jews were taken away,’ she said. ‘It was that Mertens. I never forgot him. His eyes were like a snake’s eyes. Cold. Then a girl came and said she had gold which belonged to me.’
‘And you recognised it?’ asked Daniel.
Chrysoula reached around her neck and drew a thick, twined gold chain out into view. It was a thing of great beauty, perhaps Venetian work, with delicate spirals of gold wire all along it and a double clasp composed of lions’ heads, locked mouth to mouth. She unfastened it and handed it to me. I nearly dropped it. It was very old and heavy, a much richer alloy than today’s.
‘Yes,’ she told Daniel. ‘And I want to know how my mother’s dowry necklace came here.’
‘Oh, so do I,’ said Daniel. ‘I want to know that very much indeed. How did you pass the rest of the war?’
‘We stayed in Koroni,’ said Chrysoula, refastening the necklace and hiding it under her flannel shirt. ‘Two of my sisters joined the convent there. The Germans stole all the food but there was still a little to eat, and there are always fish. And we used to glean the rubbish bins for leftovers. I’ve never been that hungry again,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Never will be, while I can work or steal.’
‘And the Cohens?’
‘The girls went up to the convent. The sisters were hiding a lot of Jews there,’ she said. ‘He took up fishing, him and his sons and my brothers. Then after the Germans lost the war my father came back and we came to Australia and I never knew what happened to them. But they must have been all right,
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unless they got on the wrong side of ELAS. There was a civil war,’ she explained. ‘Greece was not a good place to be after the war. Here is much better. But I always wondered what happened to that baby. Joshua, his name was.’
‘Did you ever see Mertens again?’ asked Daniel.
‘Once I thought I saw him. I had taken the fish into Methoni to market. Not much fish and a lot of seaweed. You can boil seaweed and eat it. I could have sworn I saw that monster, in a fisherman’s clothes, on the road ahead of me. I yelled and ran, but I didn’t catch him, and maybe it wasn’t him. After all, what would he be doing in Methoni? Now, Adelphos Ebraios, I’ve drunk your ouzo and eaten your food and told my story,’ she said, getting up without showing any sign of the huge amount she had eaten and drunk. ‘So I’ll thank you for my mother’s gold, and I will go.
Athios
.’
‘
Sto kalo
,’ said Daniel. ‘Go to the good.’
Chrysoula kissed me on both cheeks, shook Daniel’s hand, and went.
‘You know what happened to that baby, don’t you?’ I accused. Daniel poured another glass of wine and smiled a cat-who-has-eaten-not-just-common-goldfish-but-several
imperial-koi smile.
‘He’s Mr Justice Joshua Cohen,’ he told me. ‘And he’s been looking for Chrysoula’s family all his life.’
‘So she needn’t worry about next week’s rent, then,’ I said.
‘Not for the forseeable future.’
‘Good.’ I drank some more wine. ‘Where did that gold necklace come from?’
‘Thessaloniki.’
‘Ta, ta, ta,’ I said, making a Greek gesture, brushing one forefinger across the other. ‘Po, po, po! You are toying with me. Tell me the whole story.’
‘The whole story I do not know,’ said Daniel, ‘but this is the scenario so far. The Nazis, as you know, kept meticulous records. They filmed concentration camps. They kept the train schedules for Belsen. The Germans are, as someone says in a John Buchan novel, a careful people.’
‘Yes,’ I encouraged. ‘It’s Peter Pienaar, by the way.’
‘So it is. Max Mertens, the snake-eyed man, kept a register of the jewellery he extorted from Thessaloniki. In it he put the name of the “donor”, the weight in gold, and so on. This register still exists.’
‘With you so far.’
‘So, when the gold necklace was found, it corresponded to an entry in Mertens’ ledger and related to Chrysoula’s family, and it was, indeed, her mother’s dowry gold.’