© 2012 Ekdoseis Polis, Athens
I have to mention that on a damp evening in December, by now I can’t say for certain the hour, as the desire for a walk gripped me I abandoned the room where I’d been attempting to write, a room of ghosts, hastily descending the stairs to step out into a world that seemed no less cold or foreboding than the mood that followed in the wake of my first footsteps.
There are streets in every city. But whereas elsewhere they are made up of sidewalks, rows of houses and the lightly curved surfaces of the asphalt, the roads here refuse to be broken down into discrete elements. No matter their name, they seem the metaphors of the same insufferable, maddening abandonment, which levels everything to the ground.
I could add that as soon as I stepped out of the building I met a woman whose nerves were on edge, with that sleek skin and the chocolate tinge that those of mixed race usually have. She was looking somewhere vaguely towards the depth of the road and shouting over and over ‘Eva! Eva!...’ At regular intervals, with a powerful voice and unchanging tone that gave one the impression that she herself was not entirely there. As if her existence had contracted inside her and there remained now her voice alone to slavishly repeat the same single-word sentence. You couldn’t tell whether it was an exclamation or a statement. Whether she was shouting to some Eva in the distance or her affirmative tone was instead suggesting: ‘I’m Eva! I’m Eva!’
I glanced at her briefly. Her eyes were motionless. So I passed her and continued in the opposite direction, because I didn’t want that monotonous cry trailing me along my walk.
In Athens there are scatterings of ghosts that gaze at you with fear. From where do they arise, these frozen glances? Where did they come from? Why did they gather here in the city? Was there ever, in another age, such a dire need to search for one’s relief in the cracks and fissures of this unceasing reality? Why now, this litany of ghosts?
The wanderings of the silent in the roads, in buildings and stations, their presence and observation leave no marks on life’s surface. The only thing that remains is the sight of their expressionless faces.
Direct contact with these ghosts—with what lies in the great beyond—resituates life where before was only a thoughtless headline. The shadow-like existences that we avoid on the streets, turning our face or changing the direction of our walk, hint at what we are not. They remind us that here exists 'another.' And, ultimately, they teach us to live in caution, believing that anyone might replace any of us. Every step jars our ontological foundations. Every wall is a cry built of words. The walls have mouths.
From what I remember now, as I write all of this, when I stepped out into the open street, I was in a somewhat foul and angry mood. The evening city that lay before me seemed different, as if I were seeing it for the first time. Or rather, no, that’s wrong. The city didn’t seem foreign. I could easily recognize the spots that I’d always recognized so well. And yet, something seemed wrong. As if something had gone bad of late, broken down, ever so slightly. In the same way that engines break down—but before they stop working for good, something goes wrong, some sound goes astray or their rhythm suddenly slows.
Whatever I came upon seemed invisibly threatening. Even the inanimate objects, like the garbage in the streets, the broken stone slabs and the myriad iron columns shoved into the sidewalks.
I quickly forgot that just a few moments earlier in my room I was torturing myself over a white sheet. Every desire I had for recording, every hope I had for representing this pessimistic malaise had evaporated.
I couldn’t even find the courage to pull the notepad from the pocket of my bag, unnerved as I was from that unrelenting female voice and the name with the two vowels that it bore. My steps were measured and steady. I wanted to lose myself among the outlines of the walkers, reflected in the dark store windows.
*
I had crossed two blocks. The city’s characteristics these days are two: darkness and drifting. The city authorities are slow to light the street lamps in an attempt, you’d think, to save even the smallest amount of money. Or perhaps it’s the daylight savings that is to blame, which invites the evening an hour earlier these winter days. The hotels have shuttered their facades to protect their rooms. Behind the iron grating, everything’s remained untouched, as if they’d been hastily abandoned in the midst of an oncoming disaster: the forks still poised on the tables, the keys dangling by the reception desk.
Everywhere you meet people who move aimlessly without obvious destination or goal. They often take a few steps in a direction and suddenly stop, return where they started and afterward drift into an unfathomable vacillation, something like an autistic lullaby.
I try to hide my emotions from the eyes of my fellow humans. I try to become invisible.
I hadn’t made thirty steps when I stumbled over a human creature, doubled over, like a giant snail at my feet. In his hand he was holding the torn piece of a cardboard box. Crooking his body in half as he’d done, with his face nearly in contact with the sidewalk, it was impossible to read the writing on his sign. It must have been the refrain that he was mumbling, bent down: 'I’m hungry. I’m hungry.'
As if he were making his confession to the cement.
What’s happened here, such that everyone now speaks with orphaned words? I think of all those who wander the city aimlessly in the evenings, either mumbling their own, single word or holding it on a piece of paper. As if their existence has been reduced to a single, monolectic descriptor.
The image of the bent man gave one the impression of a living piece of refuse. Nearby a stray dog had lain down on the cement, but its back was turned, gazing listlessly at the vehicles that passed, joyfully dangling its front legs on the edge of the sidewalk.
*
In general, the bent man’s stance—collapsed from disappointment, from hunger, from drugs, or lack thereof—gave off a sense of calm resignation, as if in one sense he felt no need to make his presence felt. Perhaps he himself understood his presence as human trash, while his outer appearances seemed—despite the callousness and harshness of his surroundings—paradoxically alluring, since I allowed myself to believe that people become perforce virtuous and worthy of trust when they find themselves on the edge of abject squalor. What I mean is inhuman, leveling misery. While in contrast there are those who act as if they are sympathetic and easy-going, plying that tremendous talent of smiling politely, prim and proper, while they do their neighbors wrong.
I bent over to pet the dog and felt a presence at my side. First, though, I should note the appearance of a priest. Then a public worker who passed by in a gloom and, immediately after, following at the same pace, an army officer. And one more passerby whom it would not be right to leave without record or observation: a scavenger.
The time: approximately eight in the evening. The city has grown silent these last few days. The public works have ceased and most leave their cars locked, preferring to walk or shove themselves into the buses that, full as they are, seem less dirty now.
Perhaps that’s why—because the city has grown silent of late—that this new, sharp sound, which appeared suddenly in the streets last winter, seems so threatening. A metallic shriek that we’d not known before. Wandering scavengers with their noisy grocery carts zigzag the streets looking for anything in the trash that might be converted into cash. Most often pieces of metal or cables.
One night the street had filled with small weightless pieces of a white, frothy material. Waves formed like those of the sea as they swayed in the evening wind and were drawn away by the passing cars. It was as if the road’s surface had blossomed or had been transformed into a film set with false snow. A dark man was trying to gut some mattress that had been thrown into the street, working quickly with his knife so as to remove the final metal springs that had resisted him before being thrown into his overloaded cart.
CRUSHED TO PULP INSIDE THE GARBAGE TRUCK.
Early morning Sunday yet another tragedy was recorded among the unseen destitute in Tavros, as a homeless man, who had climbed into a garbage container to protect himself from the cold, was torn apart by the garbage truck. The public employees had moved the container in which the man was sleeping without realizing his presence. As the trash was being emptied into the vehicle, the hapless man began to call out for help and the machine was halted. The fire and rescue team was alerted and the homeless man was disengaged and later transferred to a hospital, where he passed away due to grave injuries. His identity remained unknown through the night, though it is likely he was Greek, approximately 50 years old. In order to identify the victim, the results of a coroner’s examination and DNA analysis are expected today (Nov. 1, 2010).
To sell their metal, the scavengers must daily cross quite a few kilometers to the edge of the suburbs, where the scrap yards are. Despite this, they walk from neighborhood to neighborhood pushing their carts till morning. Ghosts among the ghosts.
The dog refreshed itself in the stagnant water on the sidewalk. Two elegant ladies with impressively short skirts and fine-stitched leather boots reaching up to their knees pass by, a momentary discordance. Time to continue my walk.
The city seems to have turned inside out. As if someone had stuck his hand in a sock and pulled. All that was once destined for that space protected from the public eye, all that had remained hidden—or rather private—within the four walls of the house, now takes place unshielded in the middle of the street. The care of the body, the basic functions such as sleep and food, confrontations and flirtations now spill out hopelessly all around us, driven by neither shame nor the audacity of pleasure, but a raw nervous spasm.
*
I open a parenthesis in my memory. I met A. a few days earlier in the bus depot. We were sitting on adjacent benches waiting for the same bus. He was around fifty and his hair hid his face as he bent over the cart with his belongings. He wore a blue shirt. He was lean, wiry and broken. His hands were thin and delicate, marked with gashes and bruises. He was looking at the asphalt as he spoke quietly with an employee who seemed to know him and to tolerate his presence in the station. As soon as the dialogue ended and the employee moved away, A. got up with slow motions and looked in the garbage bin next to us. He found a Styrofoam cup from a fast food restaurant with nothing but ice inside. He returned to his seat and began to chew the ice with jittery motions, ignoring those around him.
At some point he lifted his head and looked at me. He had a beard of two days. He gave off that sharp, unpleasant smell of the unwashed human body.
‘How are you?’ I said.
‘Okay,’ he replied, with his single word, looking at me. I hadn’t expected an answer.
I convey here what I recall from our conversation. The rhythms of his speech have faded from my memory, but he spoke with words both even and intelligible. He was not the worst of cases. We spoke of the weather and how long he’d been on the street. He asked me what I did and—with some reservation—I told him the truth: I wrote. It didn’t bother him to talk with a writer. He didn’t ask anything more.
'It’s been a year,' he continued, 'I’m 53, but I have chronic emphysema. I have trouble breathing. When things fall apart, it’s hard to pick yourself back up. You can’t get off the street.'
'How long have you been on the street?'
'A year, I told you. Since I came here.'
'Yes. From where?'
'Eh, from the country.... I decided to come to Athens because I’d been here before, understand? It’s tough being on the street here. But at least you can find something to eat every now and again.'
'What work did you do?'
'Plumbing.'
'And you’re okay here?'
'Yeah. Most often the police don’t care. Even if they take you in, they’ll just throw you back out. I asked them once to keep me. We don’t have room for you here, they say.'
'The police?'
'Yeah. ‘Let me spend a few hours during the night, won’t you?’ I said. ‘No’ they say.'
'Where do you usually stay?'
'In the street. Cardboard... In the park... I was sleeping on the benches too, and eating at the food kitchen. For months on end I couldn’t wash myself. No one takes in a fifty-year-old for work. So much the more when he smells of his own filth. Later I started collecting paper for recycling. I got a form from a doctor saying I’ve got a long-term illness.'
As he mentioned the form I noticed inside his shirt a white bandage high on his sternum. He started coughing.
'It’s good, this talking.'
'Really?' I said startled.
'Yeah. It’s good to talk with someone.'
I was mostly nodding my head, letting him say whatever came to him.
'So, a lot of them are new to the street. They get a small pension and they can’t do anything, they just can’t do anything, and so they sit out in the street and they stay here. They can’t pay rent. And they try to cheat you. If you try to share a room once every so often, they won’t pay, understand?'
'What do you mean? Share a hotel room?'
'Yeah, some night for a bath and a good sleep.'
'Yeah, I know. Tell me what happened when you got ill. You have family?'
'I don’t have family, no relatives either. I want to get off the street, but there’s no way.'
He stopped for a few seconds.
'I get 260 Euro from social services, but I didn’t get my check this last time. I don’t know what happened. There are others who get more and still wind up in the street.'
'Where do you cash it?'
'At a teller.'
'O.K.' I said.
'I didn’t get my check and everything fell apart.'
'Why didn’t it come?'
'I don’t know, I lost it.'
'Do you spend a lot of time here?'
'Yeah. As long as the buses are in service.'
'All right' I answered.
'It’s hard, you get old, you die, you don’t have family and you’re homeless and you can’t get off the street. Don’t ask... Honestly, I don’t want to live anymore. But I don’t want to get killed. Just today I thought, I’ll just throw myself in front of one of these buses, understand? But it’s nearly impossible to get off the street.'
'There’s no one out there to help you?'
His answer was a rasping chortle. He got up suddenly and approached someone passing by who had just tossed his cigarette on the ground. He stood there in the midst of the crowd, threw his head back and dragged hard on the cigarette.
*
My wandering had not yet reached its conclusion. The desire to lose myself in the repetition of the walk had not yet been sated. Friday evening is a strange hour. The night grows enigmatic as the day comes to a halt and Saturday is born from the darkness. There’s an expectation poised in the balance; the week seems expended or, rather, near its brief periodic stasis, before it spills itself again into the timeless cycle of the everyday.
The sky was clear as far as the eye could see. The apartment buildings were stacked the one next to the other with the same eternal, unchanging sequence. Only the circles of light from the vehicles in the street ruined the harmony of the darkness as they passed. I pressed my back up against the wall as a dark car slowed next to me. The driver turned off the headlights and the car rolled forward blindly. There was only a small gleam from the dashboard that cast its dull light into the cabin and the bursts of the blinker, like a mute siren. A gentle push of the gas and the car began to crawl backward to align itself with the curb. Suddenly a human figure appeared and began gesturing, directing the driver so as to execute the necessary maneuvers immediately.
The thin young man bent over the rear windshield until the driver could see him in the mirror; he held up his hand and showed him how many times to turn the steering wheel to the left. His right hand carved out an imaginary leftward circle several times over in the darkness, with his pointer finger hoisted up. When the car reached the appropriate point he raised his palm prohibitively and lay his other hand gently on the trunk as if to bring the car to a halt with his body. As yet not a word had passed between the two. All this choreography, to me unknown, was being carried out in silence, with an understanding that reached deeper than speech. The driver obediently followed the directions of this unknown man, without offering the slightest of objections. Without having come to some agreement beforehand. The strange gesture of help, completely unsolicited, was moreover unnecessary, since a large, empty stretch of curb lay before us. This small performance had three players: the unknown choreographer, the driver as dancer, and me, in the role of the viewer.
Afterwards the young man lifted his palms up, parallel with the ground, and simultaneously began to direct the car backwards with a nod of the head, as if in approval. And then again the coming to a stop, the lifting of the right hand. The turn of the wheel. The stop. And afterwards the final reverse towards the vehicle’s final place of rest.
As soon as the driver killed the engine, the young man approached the window and held his palm out one last time. Having gained a few coins he closed his palm and turned, approaching me with a quick pace and throwing me a glance both unwavering and invisibly threatening. He passed a few centimeters in front of me. I tried to step back but I was already even with the wall, and he shoved me suddenly with his right shoulder. Not with force, but with intent. Without a word. He walked away, turning his face for one last glance, as if a reminder.
Only then did I understand what had happened. I approached the edge of the road and, looking into the distance, I was able to make out tens of young men standing at strictly predetermined distances every Two blocks, waiting for some passing car to stop and park, so as to offer the same peculiar service in exchange for a few coins. It was something I’d never seen. I don’t drive, so as a consequence this view of the city, the daily view of the driver, was unknown to me.
Only then did I understand the scenario of this short scene. The man had literally jumped in front of the car, since my presence threatened his own space, to which he’d long since staked a claim. He’d imagined I was there to steal a piece of his small dominion.
*
I decided to go home. I’d grown tired of this walk. It was not my body but my mood that had begun to deteriorate. The room where I was writing now seemed by far more appealing.
I lowered my eyes and walked slowly, faithfully following the ridges in the sidewalk for the blind. It was a game. You limit your eyes to a narrow field of vision and sharpen your remaining senses. It’s at this point that the microcosm of the city explodes into an entire universe. Thousands of forms are enclosed within the details of every sidewalk tile.
The rail for the long cane resembled a jagged train line as observed from the height of an airplane. It was as if I’d become as small as a toy and was flying slowly between the buildings. I jumped over someone’s legs, stretched out along the sidewalk. I turned the corner that I knew would lead me to the room where I was writing and suddenly a blast of awful music spilled out from the window of some passing car. Every so often a fissure would break the continuity of the channel in the pavement that was leading me: a water meter connected to the subterranean pipes, sticking out from the sidewalk; a shattered red tile like a splintered mirror. And further along, another impediment, a piece of trash, a piece of scrap iron.
I remembered the response of a Swedish friend, when she’d visited the city some years earlier and I’d asked her first impression: 'It is like a museum, but so much of it is destroyed,' she’d answered. Perhaps it was her bad English, but for a long time I couldn’t understand why she’d chosen the word 'destroyed.' Later I realized that in our own mind we’ve connected the everyday with ruins and we’ve grown accustomed to the sight of incompleteness, disrepair, or actual destruction. Perhaps that’s why the living, human ruins around us fail to leave an impression. In the end she was right: we’ve been transformed into a museum of ruins.
Moreover life next to ruins is for us unavoidable. Ruins are in a sense alive. We live among them, literally. We walk along ruined streets bearing ancient names that allude to ancient battles and disasters. In the summer we scurry off to the partially ruined ancient theaters. Our experiences are determined, usually subconsciously, by internalized doctrines and practices that have been constructed and reinforced by a forged image of the self or a false memory of our past as lived remembrance.
The rubble that surrounds us—not only the ancient ruins but the broken marbles of the squares or the facades of the hotels, the broken lamps, the metal rooted up from the ground, the human ruins—they become the mirror in which we make out our own likeness. We often end up hating a version of what we see, and so we simply choose not to look. This is likely the most essential complication: the continual feeling that our past constitutes both a reminder and an ineluctable cause of our condition today.
Our city might be described quite clearly along the lines of our own desire for it. It is nothing more than a heterotopia. In other words, a utopia (or a dystopia—depending on the occasion) that’s actually been realized. This is the framework, here in Athens, that absorbs, represents, is matched against and distorts the city itself, its historical layers, its symbolic content and our relations to them.
*
The last image from my walk was a scavenger searching in a wheeled trash bin with both hands, lighting its contents with a small flashlight he held in his mouth. I was at some distance and I couldn’t make out his figure clearly. He must have lifted his gaze for a moment, looking in my direction. The road that night was dark and the sky clear. The tenuous beam from the small flashlight shimmered momentarily like a star in the distance.
Afterwards he bent over again and turned his attention to the bin.
For a mere moment, the garbage had converged with the constellations.