Ants on the Wall

by Antoinette Moses

The ants climb the wall one after the other. They march in a clear line up the faded lime-washed wall and in through the window, under the broken shutter. There’s no sign of them returning with crumbs or small flecks of feta cheese. Perhaps their route is circular, maybe they go to meet their death?  They don’t hesitate. They just keep on marching. Ant after ant in the March sun. 

I watch them without seeing them. I shouldn’t have come here. Perhaps there’s still a way to get out of this. I could get in the car right now and drive home. I could grab one of the kind and immensely tall Canadian film-makers.  

I can’t go through with it. I’m sorry. I’m very sorry to have wasted your time. 

Except I don’t say this. I can’t go. I have to stay here. Despite what I feel. Despite feeling I can’t bear this.

 “For Christ’s sake,” said Alexi last night. Was it only last night? “Jesus, Popi, You don’t have to do this. Don’t put yourself through this.”

 I love my husband. But he doesn’t work with me at the Centre. He doesn’t face the people I face every day. Damaged, hurt, silent, in pain.

 I do. 

Every day. And it’s because of them that I’m here. Because I can’t ever suggest to any of them that they should think of facing their abusers unless I’ve done it myself.

 This is what I tell Alexi. And see the pain on his face and wish I’d kept quiet. I hate myself for hurting him again. Oh yes. It’s so much easier to hate oneself, isn’t it? Hate myself for daring to share what I’ve been through. What I’m going through. Because I am going ahead with it. Because I must. 

“You’re not well.” It was his final card. His trumps were used up. He knew it. He sagged back into his chair, knowing that I’d deny the pain, the sickness. I’d lived with it so long that I could not allow myself the luxury of giving into it. Cannot.

 “Rubbish,” I told him. “I’m fitter than you are. Look at you. You shouldn’t smoke so much.”

He laughed because it’s true and told me again about his old doctor in Athens who smoked Karelia and wrote all his patients’ notes on the backs of the flat packets. “What happened to him?” I asked, though I knew the answer. He’d told the story many times before. Alexis smiled at me and shrugged. He knew I knew. The doctor died of lung cancer. It would be a bad joke if it wasn’t true. “And that’s meant to cheer me up?”

 “Fancy a glass of wine?” he replied and brought me one.

 He wanted to come with me, but I couldn’t deal with that. Having to worry about what he was feeling, having to worry that at some moment Alexi might suddenly behave in an entirely logical manner and attack Him.

 Him. For so long I could never give him a name even though I knew it. Stelios. The man who destroyed me on a chipped metal table in a dirty cell in 1973. After the Polytechnic massacre. When they knew I knew nothing, so that destroying me was all they could do.

 The man I’ve been trying to forget ever since, but who I’m meeting in the company of a Canadian film crew who are making another documentary about the aftermath of the Colonels and the use of torture by the Greek police. Another Amnesty-led film that will change nothing.

  The Canadians are here now with me in his village, a tiny place in the heart of the Peleponnese. They loom over me like protective storks and talk quietly as if they were at a funeral. The director has round glasses and an expression that’s so mournful it makes me want to laugh. Or it did till I got here. Every time I say something he nods, like one of those sad dogs you stick in cars. 

I’m very clear in my reasoning. I know why I’m here. Confrontation with the devil, a chance to say what I’d like to say to the person who destroyed me. It’s a chance to take back control. That’s worse than the pain, the fact that they control you, that you have no rights, no power. That’s what I tell the director, and he nods mournfully. He tells me how brave I am. But I’m not brave. I was brave. Back then. But that Popi died years ago. This is the Phoenix Popi, the post-Polytechnic version, the politician, the public persona, the woman who fights for the survivors.

 That was an early battle. Survivors not Victims. I won that one. But also have to win it in the minds of the victimised every day. They come to me, to the Centre with their stories. 

“It was morning...” “It was night...” “They came for me...” “They came for me...” That’s how it always starts. Just variations on the theme. “They dragged me out of my cell...” “They came into my house...” Every survivor with his and her own tale of horror, each one trying to find their own way back to something  I call humanity because I can’t find a different word. But humanity is meaningless, isn’t it, if those who do such things are also human? 

Human. Like Stelios.

 And what do I give them? A place where they’re safe. People who listen or who will allow them to be silent. And gradually somewhere where they can learn things that other people take for granted. Like laughter. Sometimes I think that the old Chaplin and Buster Keaton films are the best medicine I have. Though I also believe that Crete itself provides a magic. Crete has always been my magical island. But it can take time for some of them to even look out beyond the circle of cypresses and geranium bushes. When you’re damaged, you can’t look at beauty. It’s too painful, you don’t feel worthy of it. You have to learn to forgive yourself for being hurt. 

As I did. But forgive Him? The black shadow in my dreams. Stelios. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that.

 It took hours to drive here to this village in the Peleponnese. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it’s ordinary. Just another small Greek village. The church, the main street, the cafeneion. There’s nothing different about it. And his house is like any other village house, small, just one storey with a flat roof, one window onto the street, grey shutters that need painting. The crew have gone on ahead and I follow. I walk along the pavement past a shop selling car parts and the door’s to his house is open. An old beaded curtain flaps slightly in the breeze. I glance inside and you can see there’s only the one room. The kitchen table covered in oilcloth with pink roses on it, the bed at the back. There are lots of cardboard boxes and a large old television in the corner, flickering. Black and white images of an afternoon quiz programme. There are plastic lace mats on every surface. Even from the outside I can see that it’s a dark room and I can almost smell its stale air. Without going in I know it smells of old soup and polish.

 I don’t know what I’ve been expecting. But it’s not this. This is the kind of Greek house I’ve seen a million times. Not the house of an ogre. Not His house.

 And he comes out. And again I’m shocked because he looks so much smaller. Maybe it’s partly because the Canadians are towering over him with their boom microphones and he looks terrified. Him! Small and scared.

 It’s too dark to film inside, so they’ve brought  two chairs out onto the pavement and set up the interview here in the street, in front of the house, open to the world.

 So here we are on two ancient taverna chairs, him and I sitting face to face beside the wall of the house. It’s very quiet, not even a car going by. Just a small procession of ants running up and down the wall. I can hear the music from a radio somewhere. There’s the smell of frying onions from another house. 

He says good afternoon and his voice is much smaller than I remembered. Where’s the bravado? He looks up at the Canadians as if they’re going to hit him, flinching from every question. Yes, he was in prison for five years. Yes, generally he’s been treated very well. He has no complaints. That’s now. I tell him. My voice seems harsh compared to his. I want you to think back. “It’s very hard to think back,” he says. “But how could you treat me like that?” I ask him. “I could have been your sister.”

 “No,” he says, very quickly. “No, please don’t say that. I could never hurt my sister. I had to believe you weren’t Greek, that you were a Communist.”  “I wasn’t,” I interrupt, but he doesn’t stop. “They were dangerous.” 

“They,” I tell him. “There never was a ‘they’. Only people. Young people. Students. Greeks.”

 He looks at me without seeing me. “Then you were not a Greek,” he says. “We were trained, you see…” And then the producer asks him about the training and he recites the usual horror. Photographs of his girlfriend trampled in excrement, stamping on everything that he held dear, fear of upsetting the peer group, pride when he did something to gain their respect – and the worse it was, the more glory. He’d done what he was trained to do.

 I’m about to ask him if he has any idea of what he did to me. How sticking that broom handle up me caused me to spend months in hospital, prevented me from ever having children and then I hear it, the sound of a baby inside the house. He has a child. I couldn’t have children, but he could. His wife comes out. A faded, tired-looking woman, a baby on her hip. A not very clean blanket around it.  

She’s very unhappy that I’m here; she glares at the Canadians.

 Then he says, “Thank you for coming. Thank you, Madame.” and goes back inside. It’s the ‘Madame’ that hurts. Before, I wasn’t a person, but now I’m Madame. Now I’m a woman. I feel sick. I just want to get away from here, but just as I’m turning away, his wife catches at my arm.

“He dreams of you, you know.” she says. “Ever since he saw your picture on television. You’re real now. He can’t pretend it didn’t happen. He cries in his sleep – just like this one.” She looks down at the baby.

 “You want me to apologise to you?” I ask. She sighs. I can see the bruised  ridges under her eyes. She’s painfully thin. “Who can say who’s to blame?” she replies. “I only know that we’re at the bottom of everything in this life. There’s no future for us. No one here will speak to us now. There’s nowhere we can go. But we have to go on for his sake.” She looks down at the baby on her hip. “But what will they say to him at school? That’s what frightens me. And when this film is shown, what will they say then? Is it his fault what his father did?” 

I shake my head.

 “You’d give him a good home, wouldn’t you?” she asks me. But then he comes back out of the house and she turns away again. “It would be better for the child,” she mutters, “but he’d never allow it. He adores the boy. It’s all he has.”

 We go home without speaking.  I can never tell Alexi about this child. He wanted children so much.