Greek Wall - Softcover

Verdan, Nicolas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908524855 ISBN 13: 9781908524850

Verlag: Bitter Lemon Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A severed head is found on the Greek border near a wall planned to stop Middle Eastern immigrants crossing from Turkey. Intelligence Agent Evangelos wants the truth about the murder, human trafficking into Greece, and about the corruption surrounding the wall's construction. It is a mystery novel and a political thriller but more importantly it evokes the problems of the West incarnated in Greece: isolationism, fear of immigration, economic collapse, and corruption. While dark, it is also poetic and paints an indelible portrait of Athens, with its mixed fragrances of eucalyptus, freshly baked bread, and cigarette smoke.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nicolas Verdan: Nicolas Verdan was born in Vevey, Switzerland in 1971. He was a prominent journalist before turning full-time to fiction. He splits his time between Switzerland and Greece. He won the Prix Bibliomedia Suisse 2006 for his first novel, Le Rendez-vous de Thessalonique, which was translated into Greek. Also the Prix du Public de la RTS 2012, Prix Schiller 2012 et lauréat du Roman des Romands 2012-2013 for his novel Le Patient du docteur Hirschfeld. The Greek Wall is his first work available in English.

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The Greek Wall

By Nicolas Verdan, W. Donald Wilson

Bitter Lemon Press

Copyright © 2015 Bernard Campiche Éditeur
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-908524-85-0

CHAPTER 1

Episode I

The street rises and falls like a wave, surges again, swells, and falls again. These undulations give a sense of the neighbourhood, with its crests and hollows, its gentle slopes. It is a street leading into the city, when this story begins, once upon a time, at two in the morning, on a densely populated hill, on the night of 21 and 22 December 2010, on Irakleous Street, in Neos Kosmos, Athens, Greece.

'What does a severed head look like?' wonders Agent Evangelos.

He is standing in the street facing the Batman, a bar diminished by everything about itself: the green phosphorescence of its sign, the cheap alcohol it serves and its regulars, all participants in the death of a world, still devoted to the songs of yesteryear, and their youth pinned up on the wall – a photo of Theodorakis, a view of the Acropolis taken from the terrace of the Galaxy (another bar, on the twelfth floor of the Hilton), the faded colours of Greek summers on ads from the 1970s, and the round yellow sun on Olympic Airways posters. Every evening in Athens, the Batman's customers carry on as if nothing had changed, although so much is dead and gone and despite all the pitfalls that await, the menace outside, beyond the window of the bar, on this street where Agent Evangelos is standing, uncertain about what to do next.

If there hadn't been that phone call, that conversation with his colleague – with that severed head to blame for it all – this story would have been very different, it wouldn't have taken the same form, would have been impossible to relate, have had neither head nor tail – ouch! He'd have ordered another drink and sat with his eyes closed listening to Kazantzidis; and if he had waited a little longer he would have been joined by Irena, the owner of the only jazz club in the capital worthy of the name.

When she comes to the Batman, Irina makes her appearance around 1.30, accompanied by a few musicians, an employee and her barman, an entourage drawn along in the turbulent wake of a ferry to the islands. Not for anything in the world would she miss an "after", as she calls it, rolling the "r".

Agent Evangelos likes Irina, her plump figure, her outrageous assertions, her inexhaustible affections, her generous love for the masculine gender – a generosity of being that turns her corpulence into a distinction. It would have been a different story, set here in the Batman, but very soon Agent Evangelos must be on his way. He goes back inside, for he has left his jacket on a hook under the bar. He pays what he owes, and leaves.

'What does a head severed from the body look like?' he wonders. A phone call has come; he must leave immediately.

Just a few more minutes and Agent Evangelos might have encountered Irina. That approaching sound of an engine is she; with one finger she manoeuvres the four-by-four, which has just stopped in front of the Batman. The passengers on the rear seat look out; all of them have seen the same things: glimpses of the city, the confused message of the streets, voiceless graffiti on the filmstrip of the walls, the weight of lowered shop blinds, the greenish glow from the forest of balconies, the squashed oranges on the asphalt, flattened candle flames. They have seen all of it go by, but driving along they passed no remark.

Athens is their capital city, but they are not from here. They are Greek citizens, but they have Turkish names. Onstage this evening they sang in both languages: the language of their origin and the language of their passport. In administrative terms, they belong to the Turkish minority in Thrace. Words on an official stamp identify them as foreigners in their own land. Opposite that wall only their music rings true, and the public is aware of it. The applause was thunderous and sincere – a polite way, in other words, to conceal the uneasiness inspired by these Greeks who are not entirely Greek.

By the time Irena pushes open the door to the Batman, Agent Evangelos is already in his car. He has turned onto the first street on the right, a one-way toboggan slope that drags the high-rises of Neos Kosmos down with it until they encounter the crash barriers on Kallirois Avenue. At the intersection, the traffic lights flicker and turn green.

The taxis, catapulted up towards the city centre, assail the wall of the former Fix brewery with a fusillade of headlight beams. The abandoned plant is still intended to become the Museum of Contemporary Art, though the cultural future to which it is promised is in no hurry to materialize. Athens has run out of euros, and the concrete behemoth sits deserted, hemmed in by traffic.

On the other side, the multiple lanes of Syngrou Avenue, linking the city to the coast, are flanked by large hotels of glass and steel, and striptease joints. Driving towards Faliro, ablaze with lights like the overnight ferry to Crete, Piraeus to Chania, a twelve-hour crossing, scheduled to arrive in the early hours, imagining a siren blast in the muted torpor of the eucalyptus and perspiring pines; at the end of the quay a tanker with flat tyres, always the same dog nosing through the scattered remnants of a spilled load of tomatoes, twelve hours after the ferry's left, about to close its loading doors with an articulated lorry appearing with a roar from behind a warehouse; a minute to go, with the ship's propellers already stirring up the silt in basin E3.

To his right the headquarters of the New Democracy party are all lit up, a ponderous, unmanageable vessel. In the grandiose entrance hall a lounging security guard has lost interest in the giant screen on which a formidable army of men in suits and ties processes in an endless loop, shaking hands on the triumphant worksites of a Greece sold off bit by bit to Chinese and Emirates capital while the European Union lags behind with its Siemens factories, Casino supermarkets and H&M clothing stores.

Then comes the black hole of a building long under construction, and then, on the sinister upper floors of commercial buildings with opaque windows, endless voids of office space awaiting tenants.

Finally, there seems to be an opportunity to turn onto Kallirois Street when a Pakistani face appears beyond the windscreen. Agent Evangelos is startled. He waves the window-washer away and then launches his vehicle across Syngrou Avenue. Usually he'll give them a coin or two, but this evening, though he doesn't really know why, he felt like punching the fellow armed with bucket and squeegee in the face.

Agent Evangelos listens to himself as he drives. His movements resound inside him, the external noise has permeated him, rumbling in his temples. A wave of weariness sweeps over him. Soon he'll be in the plane to Alexandroupolis as it makes the wide turn over Attica, the sea filling the aircraft window, the island of Chios on the tilting horizon – could that forest of wind turbines be Euboea? Skiathos ahead, the Gulf of Volos below with its seafood tavernas, tablecloths with their crude maps of Greece printed in blue, the Macedonian wine in a copper jug, a gust of wind from the sea emptying the ashtrays, all of Greece, the orchards on Mount Pelion, seat 14D, Aegean Airlines, a private company, 31 Viltanioti Street, Kifissia, Athens 14564, twenty-nine planes, a fleet of twenty-two Airbus A320, four Airbus A321 and three Airbus A319, shares on the rise, new route to Azerbaijan recently introduced; his plane flying at cruising speed over a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bitter Lemon Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1908524855
• ISBN 13: 9781908524850
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 276
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland