My ghosts of Athens; a shooting and a royal wedding

Athens

This grimy semi-Levantine ancient city has its beauty spots, with childhood memories indelibly attached. There is a turn-of-the-century apartment building across the street from my house where in 1942 or ’43 I watched a daughter and wife scream in horror from their balcony as three nondescript assassins executed a man as he bent over to get into his chauffeur-driven car.

His name was Kalyvas and he was a minister in the Vichy-like Greek government of the time. He was bald and from my vantage point I saw the three red spots as the bullets entered his skull. His wife and daughter wore black from that day onwards. The daughter was a teenager — and a pretty blonde one at that. I was six and have never forgotten them or their screams of anguish. Last week I looked up at the third floor and it was all closed up. I wondered what has happened to the daughter. If she’s still alive she’d be in her late eighties.

Athens is full of ghosts for me. One is the greasy-haired man wearing a raincoat and carrying a rifle who someone killed from my house as he ran towards us in the black Christmas of 1944. He lay in the street for days. Was it my father, the policeman guarding us or the red-beret British paratrooper who crashed through our kitchen skylight  later, shot dead? He was barely 18, according to my mother. And then there was the man dying of hunger lying close by, who we tried to help, my older brother and I, by putting a yoghurt underneath his chin. He never touched it. Fräulein said wistfully that we had wasted a yoghurt. And the priest who stole a small loaf of cheap bread at the height of the hunger and was chased down the street by the baker for it.