Niki Seth-Smith is a writer, freelance journalist and Deputy Editor of New Humanist magazine. Her fiction and poetry has been published in The London Magazine, Open Pen, and in the anthology Dove Release: New Flights and Voices (Worple Press). She is currently writing a work of auto-fiction based on living in Athens, Greece, during the tumultuous years of 2014-2016.

@NikiSethSmith

nsethsmith@gmail.com

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The following is a section from a work of auto-fiction, provisionally named “Exarcheia”.

I:

I open my eyes, awake again. I think I have been awake already, perhaps four or five times during the night. I have passed the windows, thrown open to catch the slightest breeze that could move the heat inside this house. I have come to in front of the sink, running water on a limp flannel, which I will carry back to bed and lay on my forehead, my belly, my feet, praying for momentary relief. But the liquid is warm, like my skin, like the air. I think: I am bathing in this city. Athens in Kalokairi, the fever month of August, makes everybody feel this way, as if we were moving slowly through the circulating sediment of one another: our breath and the sweat steaming from our pores, our lusts and minor irritations, the smell of our cooking and of our resentments, brewing in the warming months, hanging, fermenting, unable to rise above the concrete pushing its way to the sky – the cuboid residential blocks, product of the ‘70s construction boom, with their rows on rows of balconies cluttered with prams, deck-chairs, creepers.

Sometimes, when I wake, I find myself standing in the exact centre of the patch of yard at the back of our ground-floor apartment, naked apart from a pair of pants (even these I have chosen to be thin and lightweight), encircled by these towering forms.  Our home, Panos and my home, is an oddity in this place: we occupy the ground floor of a neo-classical town house – once stately, the white-washed plaster now cracked and crumbling. But still, it provides a gap in the teeth of the city’s skyline, a courseway for the moon to arch over. I find myself staring up at its sliver: an impossibly clean, untouched thing, riding high above the stench of uncollected garbage bins, stray cat piss, gyros and the lingering chemical tang of burnt rubber – the signature scent of the neighbourhood.

Yesterday, in the early morning, I found a black crop top emblazoned with the face of Nick Cave hanging on our wilting jasmine plant. A voice called down: “Yassu?” It was a girl hanging over the railings of one of the apartment blocks – not too high, the second floor. I smiled up “Nai?” and watched as the girl clocked my foreignness: my accent, my blonde hair. “You have my clothes?” she said. “Ah, yes!” There was a clothes horse on the balcony, from which the crop top must have fallen. She gestured to it and we laughed together, acknowledging our mutual clumsiness, the inadequacies of translation. I had not laughed for days. “You can throw it maybe?” she said. “I can try.” “Do like this,” she made a bunch with her hands. She was maybe 10 metres in front and above me and held out her arms, fingers splayed. Miraculously, the slip of cloth landed on the railings and didn’t fall off. “Eferisto!” she called. “Kanena problema”, I replied.

Kanena problema. It’s hard to remember a time when I didn’t hear the music of these words, which has something to do with a favour, a gift, but which reaches its purest form when the people involved are strangers, and have together conspired to outsmart a situation. Even at the supermarket, the till ladies, with their manicured nails and hair-nets, are delighted when I am eight cents short of the total I need for my basket. They will toss their head and assert their view that it’s nothing, no problem between friends, two souls who mutually recognise the needless, petty, trifling obstructions presented by everyday life. I don’t know how they get away with it, only that they are delighted to, particularly because of all the workers in the neighbourhood – the bartenders and hustlers, the small shop owners and farmers who travel miles every Saturday to sell on the streets – their position is most precariously close to the contemporary standard of the employee, homogenised throughout Europe: faceless, replaceable.

I have no desire to return to that world. The prospect of it stalks me, as I wake in the sunken hours, to re-fill my glass, again, again, blinking blankly, on my haunches, into the cold glow of the fridge. When I wake, I think I have not been asleep –  except that, every time, I remember what my conscious mind could not have forgotten. I remain, in Exarcheia. Panos is gone. My fingers reach out to confirm this fact. The amber light from the giant globes of the neighbourhood’s Halogen streetlamps shine through the bedroom’s wooden shutters, slanting stripes across the sheets, which are crumpled by my exertions alone.

Soon, the retired professor who owns this house will return from the islands and the Panagia, the festival of the Virgin Mary, and my grace period will be over. I will have to decide: stay or leave. I picture Stathis, his waistcoat unbuttoned, the wisp of his white forelock pasted sweatily to his crown, prancing around the Virgin’s icon, bedecked and festooned with Madonna Lily, pinks and alimatsa, on some rocky outcrop, or near the sea, at last permitted to revel in his natural state of impishness, which he attempts conscientiously to repress whilst attending to his duties as a landlord and honourable academic, but which expresses itself in bursts, as when – on that very first day in the house – he learned my name.

“Katerina! But that’s a Greek name. Ha! You know what it means?”
He glanced slyly at Panos first, then at me.

“Pure! Purity, pureness, pure. Actually, you’ll forgive me, it is rooted in the word katharsis. The same in English, no?

I nodded.

“But perhaps – and this is a theory, a proposition, you’ll forgive me – from Hecate, the goddess?”

Again, the look, from behind his glasses, which I first noticed then were stuck together in the middle with a piece of masking tape.

“Are you a goddess of magic, Katerina?” he chuckled, not expecting me to respond. “But of course you are. Of course you are.”

This outburst occurred in the middle of our attempts to sign our rental contract. The wad of papers, stapled together, was lying on the kitchen table in front of the three of us. We stood there, bemused, patiently, waiting for him to finish and sign. He had neglected to add me to the document – despite Panos swearing that an email had been sent with details for us both – and proceeded to fish a biro from his waistcoat and scrawl my name on the end, performatively blowing the ink and handing it to me with a flourish. I hardly had room to sign, and doubted its legal validity.

This house. This street. This neighbourhood. Three years of initiation, of learning, of striving to belong. And now that it had grown its tendrils into every living part of me, now that I feel that tearing away could cause my abrupt disintegration, sending me up in a puff of dust, now Panos announces its time to leave.

“This place,” he said, “is hell.”

When he said that I laughed bitterly, made a point of it – laughing into his face. Not only because I had suffered enough from the Greek talent for hyperbole, but also because of the frequency with which he used to call it “our paradise,” “our filthy little Utopia”, “our anarchist heaven on Earth.”

But maybe he’s right. Maybe it is. And maybe it’s perversity, evidence of my masochistic streak, that I still feel held, and comforted, by the drama of the street’s night-noise – so close, through the open window, barely a metre from my head: the familiar footfall as the last bars close, kisses sent across the street. Filakia! Kali nichta!, a bike backfiring somewhere in the distance. And just when you think it’s dying down, from the single holding cell in the police station on the corner, the mournful cry for a smoke, that was dreamy and wistful during the day, addressed to every passer-by, “Tsigaro? Tsigaro?” suddenly shoots out into the night, loud and guttural: “Ts-i-ga-ro! Tsi-ga-ro!” No longer a question or a demand, but a sound stripped of all relation to sense, a demonic utterance.

But soon, we will pass through the unmoored hours, and with the faintest aura of dawn, the mothers from the Orange house, a shelter for asylum seekers, will carry tables out onto the pavement, where they will sit and take their sweet tea, as the air becomes warm and hazy with light, a constant stream of chatter while their kids play football in the dust, making way – at 5.30am on the dot – for the priest who is always in a headlong rush, bent forward at an angle as if into a spiritual wind, his long black cassock trailing behind him, so that Panos (on the rare occasions when we have been awake to witness this spectacle, booze-blurry and stumbling home) drawls in my ear in his gravelly voice: ‘I’m Baaaatmaaan.’

It’s not a noise that wakes me this time. This time, when my eyes open, I find myself hugging a pillow – Panos’ pillow – my nakedness curled around it. I tense, with something like shame, and have to give my body permission to fall, to snuggle into the softness. It’s silent, still the dead of the night. I strain to hear, but nothing.  I never used to sleep in the nude back in England. I have vague, sumptuous memories of sliding in under the covers, the soft weight of my childhood duvet – care-bears, unicorns – the satiny slip of it on my skin. But at some point during puberty, I began to feel too vulnerable. It must have been around the same time that I had that teary row with my mum, when she decided it was time to insist that I cover up my chest for good.

“But there’s nothing there!” I had pouted, my legs firmly set apart, looking not at her, but in the full-length mirror: a feral child with short shaggy blonde hair, in nothing but my favourite pair of blue jeans.

Is that it – my stubbornness, again? Wanting to prove I can live here, as an activist, a journalist, as tough as the big bad boys. But waking up with his scent in my mouth doesn’t mean that I rely on him: the opposite, in fact. It gives me the pleasant illusion that he is easily replaceable – his garlic breath, his silly jokes – with a simple trick to soothe the nerves. Sleeping without Panos is just another survival skill, among the many I have had to learn: how to wrap a scarf around my mouth to protect my lungs from tear gas, disembowel a squid so its ink doesn’t spunk across the room, decipher the Greek alphabet and recite Cavafy aloud (I quickly discovered that poetry here is necessary for sanity). And, perhaps most importantly, we have learned together, Panos and I, how to grieve politically, to tend the wound of fury before the rot sets in.

And yet, now he is questioning this, as if we had never taken it as an article of faith. He is speaking of things of which we had dared not speak, as if he had not been the one who said we could make a home here: a place to take joy in struggle, to be free and still accepted, to exist in a kind of chaotic sympathy with the whole. Right now, at this very moment, he is setting up back in Hackney – crashing on a friend’s sofa while he waits for my permission to find us a flat, touting for work, bedding back in: a full circle to where we started, as if these three years were an interlude, a transgression from the path of real life.

I want to say: but it was you. It was you who brought me here and made this the centre of my world.

II:

November, 2014

The winter sky, shot with pink, flashed through the gaps of the high-rises. I wondered vaguely if I’d die before reaching central Athens. The driver was clearly drunk, despite it being not yet six. This had become obvious shortly after setting off from the airport, but the wide eyes I’d aimed at Panos, who was up front in the passenger seat, chatting away to the man as he swung wide on bend after bend, had been met with a happy shrug.

“We’re making time!” he’d hollered back.

A quote from Withnail and I. By then, I had long since ceased being surprised at Panos’ intimate knowledge of British cult culture. He was, in many ways, untypically Greek –  his sharp cheekbones and smooth chin, combined with a certain weakness around the eyes, gave him the air, which he exploited, of a tortured Indie frontman. What I hadn’t yet got a handle on was his fluxuating ego. The morning after we hooked up, he informed me, pulling on his jeans, that it was okay if I didn’t call him. “I’m ugly,” he said. “I don’t mind.” Yet not two months later, he was proposing whisking me away to his country, making gleeful jokes about wanting to impress his ancestors. “Not bad for a mountain boy, stealing a beautiful blonde from the barbarians!”

Part of me wanted to be stolen. The last five years of my life in London had been spent working as an editor at an online political magazine, hunched over a rented desk in a warehouse space in Dalston which was once an industrial printing house. For a while, I believed I was making change: giving voice to emerging thinkers, exposing Britain’s austerity program as a brutal and needless travesty, keeping up with what seemed to be an exciting and inevitable wave of revolt following the 2008 financial crash: Occupy Wall Street / London / the world, the indignados, the Arab Spring. I had an opinion on everything. I swanned around in a blue tweed jacket I’d bought on a rare day trip to Brighton, and sat at my screen well into the night, while Missy Elliot, the elderly pug that belonged to someone at the upcycle start-up in one of the booths nearby, nosed around in the bin under my desk, until the screeching and scraping from the sound artists playing at the café on the ground floor made my nerves raw as exposed wire.

I was editing, not writing –  shaping and tweaking the work of others: a little more colour here, perhaps? could you get me a source for that? maybe give us the full name of the Cuban justice minister? I began to feel like a hollow vessel – torrents of words passing through me, into the maw of the internet. I was literally, physically, stiff, in my neck and hips in particular, so that much of my energy outside work was spent in carefully rolling around on the floor of my drafty bedroom, attempting to lengthen my muscles and ease away the knots that had formed through being, as I increasingly thought of myself, an extension of a machine.

On a wet September afternoon, I handed in my notice– a surprise to myself as much as my colleagues. They were doing good work, I thought, with a jolt, as I mashed the button on the temperamental lift for the last time. We had been doing good work. Still, at my first house party after quitting my job – a media party of course, as all my friends were media – I’d felt strangely liberated from the need to inquire about this or that story, or dissect the latest twitter spat. I found I had very little to say. It was a bit like walking an air: dissociative, unnerving, but not at all unpleasant. Drifting into the kitchen, I’d gone to the sink for a glass of water, contemplating sobering up before the night bus home.

“Absinthe?”

The blue tongue of flame, flickering. His grin showed a crooked set of teeth: pointy, a little nicotine-stained.

“I can’t help myself,” he said. “I’m Greek. Setting fire to things is our national sport.”

It would be months before I saw this opener for what it was: a defensive strategy, reaching for the cliché before someone else could, developed over years of attempting to woo, and find work, in the supposedly cosmopolitan but decidedly insular London press. In the moment, I thought it was bold. I remember making a show of taking the glass from his outstretched hand, inspecting it with playful suspicion. But when he blew his out and knocked it back, I had smacked my glass down on the counter before seeming to make any kind of decision.

“Editors are parasites,” he’d said later, the two of us sprawled on the couch, after I’d unburdened myself – unsure why, of all people, I was trusting him with my fears for the future. “Quitting was the right thing to do. They’re terrible creatures, criticising from their thrones.” He pointed to the left, then to the right, “Not this, that. Not that, this,” his lips pulled into a pucker.

I was nodding. It was such a relief.

“Come be an honest hack like me,” he continued. “Get nice and dirty down on the ground. It’s fun! And the best thing? We’re paid precisely jack and shit.”

By the time we’d reached my front door, steering each other through the rain, he’d already announced his intention to return to the mother country.

“I’m done with this drizzly piss hole!” Catching me by the waist.

And now I was on a backstreet shrouded in darkness (a flickering streetlamp, moving shapes in a doorway), about to be introduced by this man to what he called, with no evident irony, “the best of the Greek left”. The taverna where we were headed was distinguished from the shadowy buildings around by its flat, tiled roof and the golden glow spilling from its windows.

“You’ll like it,” Panos said, as we crossed the empty street.  “It’s called Konservakouti, Tin Can, because during our civil war, the guerrilla fighters used rusty old cans to – ” he made a sharp gesture across his neck. I zipped, and unzipped my leather jacket, worried about the dress beneath: a bright blue, long-sleeved bodycon. Striking, but not too feminine – or that’s what I had thought when I packed it this morning. Now it seemed all wrong.

Panos’ hand, pushing on the rough-hewn, wooden door. Smoke. Heat. Noise. The sizzle of frying meat. The taverna was a simple square room, with prints of retro ads on the walls and a gramophone in the far corner. Despite the high ceilings, the air was fuggy with cigarette smoke. I tried not to gawp at the rollies hanging from lips, from ash trays. It was like walking into the past – I vaguely remembered something about Greeks breaking the smoking ban.

Panos’ friends hailed us and jumped up from their table to embrace him in turn, pulling back to shake my hand.

“This is my partner, Katerina.”

A parade of black beards and bear-like palms: “Hello, Katerina.” “Yassou, Katerina.” “Please, put your bags here.” “A beer? Raki?”

They were occupying the largest table, a dozen or so on long wooden benches. As they moved over to make room for us, someone held two fingers up to a chubby man behind the bar who was wearing a Marvin the Martian T-shirt. I noticed that he nodded, but made no move to comply. So that was it: no-one obeyed the rules. Why had I expected anything else? My momentary relief on spotting a few women, seated at a small corner table, was immediately dashed by their attire: all three were draped in dishevelled black, their flashes of occasional colour (a burgundy scarf, an amber necklace) emphasising the general rule. I was boiling in the heat from the kitchens and the many bodies squashed together. The jacket had to come off. At least now I was sitting on a bench, it could pass as a top, not a dress.

“I hear you have come to join the chaos.”  The man who had ordered them beers was a little older than the rest, with kindly-looking laughter lines and a silver stripe in his neat beard.

“Sorry?” I said.

“You are moving here?”

I snuck a glance at Panos, but he had already switched to Greek with the guys at his end of the table. They were ribbing him about something or other. He grinned, ducking slightly, as one of them thumped him on the back.

“We’re thinking about it,” I  said.

“You must,” silver stripe said. “We have a great need for allies. International allies, yes?”

I attempted to articulate something about solidarity, how the troika couldn’t be allowed to get away with how they were treating Greece. I knew that’s the word they used here, for the ECB, the IMF and the European Commission. He nodded, brushing over the statement as if it was a commonplace.

“If you guys need help finding a flat,” he said, “I can put out the word.”

My beer had arrived. He was pouring it into a giant frosted tankard.  It was possible, he was telling me, to rent a one bedroom flat, with a balcony and rudimentary air-con, for as little as 350 euros a month. Apartment blocks across the city had been standing vacant since 2010. “The brain drain,” silver stripe explained. “Our youth may have fled the citadel, but at least we have cheap digs.”

I was growing increasingly aware that we were the only ones at the table still speaking English. Silver stripe was clearing enjoying demonstrating his mastery of the language, but soon enough I lost him too, as something Panos said caught his ear.

“Seriously, malaka?” followed by a torrent of Greek.

The food was arriving, mercifully – little clay plots brought out in waves by the man in the Marvin the Martian T-shirt. I was suddenly ravenous. Everything I tried was delicious: crispy sweet fries with fresh oregano; sticky morsels of beef sausage in pools of orange syrup; some kind of deeply nourishing green, soaked in nutty olive oil. Everyone was lunging across the table and spearing forkfuls from the little pots, leaving drip-trails of oil and meat grease, criss-crossing the rough brown paper thrown over the wooden surface. For a while, I felt like part of the group simply by dint of joining the chaos. People would drop back into English to waft new plates in my direction – “This is Dakos. You’ll like it, for sure.” “This is like spinach but better, much better”. Sometimes I would reach for a tid-bid of mushroom, or another hunk of firm brown bread, and would bump elbows or clash forks, provoking chuckles and much hand-waving. “Ela, take it! Yours, yours!”

Occasionally, Panos would check in with me –  “Are you okay? Do you want more beer?” – but never as a private aside, so I found myself smiling and nodding along, conscious of his friends watching this exchange, as I silently willed him to do what I kept on expecting he would: introduce me properly, bring me into the circle somehow – after catching up on the gossip, perhaps; after ordering; after the food had arrived. Most of the people around the table were bound to be practically fluent – reporters, radio presenters, novelists, heads of small NGOs, leaders within the youth wing of Syriza – the new party that Panos and I had discussed and debated at length, snuggled up under the duvet to ward against the London damp. Young people were mobilised, he had said. Politics was in the streets, in the bars – Greece was the new great hope of the left, Athens was alive!

And now I was here, on the streets, in a bar – with the people he had raved about. By the time it had finally dawned on me, it was already too late: the loud voices, shouting over each-other, a continuous stream of syllables, above the clatter of plates and glasses, formed a thick weave of sound over my head, amongst the cigarette smoke and steam, impossible to penetrate, closing around my head, holding me down and under.