Another Life Read online

  She wasn’t a philosopher, she couldn’t even write her name—her signature was a cross. She was small and sickly and had lost all her teeth before she reached the age of forty. She chewed on hard roots with her gums so that I could manage them when I was three years old and there was nothing else to eat. That was in 1941, and it wasn’t grasshoppers that consumed everything but an occupying army.

  My grandmother lived through two world wars, several Balkan wars, and one civil war. When my father was taken away by the Nazis and we didn’t know where he was, my grandmother set off to look for him. Her provisions were a chunk of bread, some olives, and an onion. She found him in a prison far away from home. The guards refused to let her visit him, but she stood at the gate and said that she was going nowhere until she had seen her daughter’s husband. In the end they gave in.

  When people asked her how she had coped with all that, she didn’t answer with words. She pointed to the sky. She had faith. The icons in the village church were not valuable, but she would have defended them with her life. At home she had a miniature chapel where she kept her bridal crown and an icon of the Virgin Mary.

  How stupid would you have to be to claim the right to desecrate her icons, to spit on her bridal crown, on her faith, to denigrate her life and refer to such barbarism as democratic freedom? And as if that weren’t enough, to insist that you’re not doing anything.

  My grandmother wasn’t tall, but as far as moral height was concerned, she was unsurpassed. I wish I had a tenth of her stature.

  Opinions are actions or provoke actions, and not all statements are opinions. We ought to be able to support an opinion with logical and moral arguments, while taking into account known facts.

  In the leaflets distributed by the German occupying force in Athens 1941–1945, the Greeks were depicted as apes up in the trees. I have seen these leaflets, both as a child and an adult, and I was seized by rage and despair. I probably wouldn’t shoot dead the person who produced this propaganda, but I couldn’t regard it as art, or as an example of the Gestapo’s freedom of expression. I still can’t.

  I felt sick when it became fashionable in Greece to draw cartoons of Angela Merkel with a Hitler mustache. That’s not satire. That’s war.

  In Sweden we have been spared the worst for quite a long time. We are more or less entirely secularized; we have left a guilty conscience, shame, and honor behind us. The barbarians can concern themselves with that kind of thing. No one can get at us. No one can insult or offend us.

  Large parts of the world haven’t gotten that far. We can hold the view that they ought to have progressed, but we can’t force them. Opinions are not only actions but often lethal weapons. In all known wars, the opposing sides attack each other’s beliefs and symbols. There has to be a limit to how naïve we can allow ourselves to be. If democratic freedoms are to have a meaning, they must be based not on themselves but on another overarching standard. A culture, a civilization is judged equally on the freedoms it embraces and those it eschews.

  Everything that is not forbidden is not necessarily permissible.

  The standard that should carry the greatest importance for both the state and the individual is the equal value of all human beings. Every other principle should stem from this.

  I wrote an article about this subject, and there was something of a storm. How could it be that an author—me—was not prepared to defend Freedom of Expression? I was summoned all over the place to explain myself. I didn’t oblige. I had lost the will to do so.

  I had also lost respect for these matadors of the new liberalism. I had expected more generosity toward the weak, more empathy.

  I was wrong.

  * * *

  The world had taken a new direction. The new capitalism was winning on a broad front. Globalization, which in fact simply meant that capital could do whatever it wanted, became the guiding star.

  I spoke to young people, and most of them were tired of society’s focus on possessions, on the hunt for fresh pleasures, on the lack of ideology. They were searching, but without finding what they were looking for. The traditional left had lost its former luster. The Green Party showed clear signs of having lost its way, and the Social Democrats were offering only the same old thing. This left nothing but extreme movements to the right of everything, or militant Muslims. Young men and women, some born and raised in Sweden, turned to ISIS.

  My generation of Greeks left our country in order to escape poverty. Young Swedes were leaving one of Europe’s wealthiest and definitely most modern countries in order to…what? Presumably they didn’t recognize the ancient and the free, as the national anthem says. Sweden had become a marketplace where everything was for sale, but not to everyone.

  They were wrong, but that was how they felt.

  What was it Sartre had said? Either you die for something, or you die for nothing. The volunteers from Sweden preferred to die for something.

  Once upon a time long ago I had written that man needs a meaning in life, not so much in order to live but to be able to die. It may be that it is honorable to die for what you believe in, but not to kill others for those beliefs.

  Life both ends and continues, not in heaven or the Islands of the Blessed, but in the consequences of our actions.

  That was the kind of thing that went through my mind on those long walks, waiting for the evening, which was always a pleasant time. Gunilla and I chatted over dinner about our children and grandchildren, about the world in general, whether there was anything worth watching on TV—the answer was usually no if you weren’t a fan of crime series.

  Gunilla would settle down at her computer while I went out onto the balcony to smoke my pipe. I ought to give up smoking. My lungs have taken a hammering. But still I carried on, if not to the same extent as in the past. My pipe and I had been married for fifty-five years, and now I was trying to change it from wife to mistress. It was working—kind of. But not in the evenings after dinner.

  I made my way to the balcony, where I paraphrased Horace’s poetry to myself. “You do not know how many winters Zeus has given you. This could be the last.”

  Of course I couldn’t hear the waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea, as in Horace’s poem, but I could see the lights of my neighbors’ houses, the trembling leaves of the aspens, the fir tree trying to grow taller than every other tree around it, and I talked to myself, quietly and calmly.

  What does it matter if you die tonight? You have seen these lights and these trees for many years. Even when you are dead, you will remember them. Life is not a dream, merely a shadow between time and light. Death robs you of nothing. You have tasted all pleasures. You have seen your woman give birth to your children. You have seen your son become a man and your daughter become a woman. You have seen the cherry tree grow, the waves of the sea polish the pebbles, the snakes intertwine. What more does this world have to give you? Drink your wine, bless your beard, and close your eyes. Even if you die tonight, nothing will change and nothing will be lost.

  That is what I said to myself, and I grew calm. I reconciled myself with death every evening on the balcony, and I had forgotten it by the following day. The only incontrovertible truth—that I was mortal—lay beyond my reach. I saw it and understood it, but then I forgot about it, and the struggle for honor and food on the table began afresh each morning.

  “What are you thinking about?” Gunilla would often ask. “That I’m going to die,” I would reply, as undramatically as possible without really grasping exactly what I meant. Death is constantly present and always incomprehensible.

  One beautiful day I would lose her too. I would no longer be able to see her foot sticking out from underneath the covers like the devil’s claw in the mornings. She always sleeps that way. With one foot outside the covers.

  I would lose my children and grandchildren. It was best to leave first, not to experience more losses. There was already a small grave
yard in my heart for the dear departed. My parents, my older brother Giorgos, friends. Sometimes I was angry with them.

  My friend Diagoras, for example. We had known each other since we were twelve years old. One day we were sitting in our favorite café, Sonia on Alexandras Avenue in Athens, talking about the theater of which he was the director, his forthcoming projects, and the loneliness that surrounded us day by day. He had had open-heart surgery twice, but he was still alive, still drinking and smoking; our eyes met with inexpressible, sorrowful tenderness. Then we said our goodbyes. He went to work, and I returned to Stockholm.

  Giannis Fertis, the third member of our closed circle and a noted actor, called me three months later. Diagoras had departed, not without severe pain. Was I coming to the funeral? “But Giannis, I’m in Sweden,” I replied.

  That was how it was. I was somewhere else.

  I had always been somewhere else, for the past fifty-five years. I asked Giannis to place a flower on the coffin on my behalf. Not only did he do that, but he also made sure he included me in the short speech he gave. He wasn’t in the habit of making speeches. I am translating it here, because one of the longest and most beautiful chapters of our lives came to an end with Diagoras’s death.

  We had known one another since the first year of high school. The remarkable thing was that we knew exactly what we wanted to do in life. Diagoras wanted to become a director, Giannis an actor, and I a writer. Art was our god back then.

  I read the speech late one evening in a taverna in Athens. Marina, Giannis’s wife, presented me with a lovely icon she had painted. It showed “the three boys by the fireside,” three young Christian martyrs who had been burned alive. I was already deeply moved and felt that heaven was bending over us when this letter was placed in my hand.

  My friend Diagoras,

  You took your leave early on Wednesday morning, and I want to apologize for the fact that I had already forgotten you that evening. I went to the theater, I asked the girl in the box office if we had an audience, I played my role as if nothing had happened, and when I got home I forgot you again, because I watched the football on TV.

  I know that I will remember you less and less often during the years I have left to live, just like my mother, my father, and my brother. But when I do remember you I will travel back in time, to the days when we were in school. When at the age of seventeen, together with our beloved friend and classmate Thodoris Kallifatides, we sneaked out of our homes just after midnight, when our parents had fallen asleep, to go to one of the two cafés on Alexandras Avenue that stayed open all night. We drank coffee and smoked. But the most important thing of all: we talked only about theater.

  We crept back into our houses, making sure that our parents didn’t catch us. We slept for three or four hours, then went to school together in the morning, unless of course I was playing truant.

  I had to pause to catch my breath. I remembered our devotion, our passion, that irrepressible desire to achieve something.

  Where had it gone?

  Diagoras had all of that until he died. Plus the ability to get mad.

  That was why your friends Thodoris and I conspired to make you angry. I can still see the picture in my mind: you are walking twenty yards in front of us, refusing to have anything to do with us while we laugh behind you.

  Farewell, my friend!

  I remembered that picture too.

  I am ashamed that I wasn’t at Diagoras’s funeral, but I’m sure he would forgive me. Because he was capable of forgiveness too, and one day we will follow him, although this time we won’t be laughing.

  * * *

  There was also the question of those who would lose me. The person who would have experienced the greatest pain—my mother—was already gone. Gunilla would grieve for a while, there would be days when she would call out to tell me that dinner was ready even though I could no longer eat, and the children might remember the jokes they hated, or the times when I used to cheat in our card games, or when we all used to engage in wrestling bouts on the double bed. But time eases all sorrow, the present takes up all of our time, the dead become more dead with each passing day until nothing remains but the tradition of celebrating a birthday, discreetly raising a little flag on the balcony. “Dad would have been ninety-five today,” Gunilla would say before everyone drank coffee and ate cake.

  And what about the grandchildren? My grandson had already talked about the matter at length. He was thirteen years old. We had been on an excursion to Fårö, and I had told the children about my schools, including the high school teacher who called me “garbage” because I was so skinny. They laughed, and then my grandson said, “Grandpa, I’m going to give a speech at your funeral. Everyone else will talk about your books, but I haven’t read a single line that you’ve written, except for the little verses on our Christmas presents. But you’re the funniest person I know. That’s what I’m going to say.”

  That’s what he said, and it brought tears to my eyes.

  Emigration is a kind of partial suicide. You don’t die, but a great deal dies within you. Not least, the language. That’s why I am more proud of not having forgotten my Greek than of having learned Swedish. The latter was a matter of necessity, the former an act of love, a victory over indifference and forgetfulness.

  I had thrown a black stone behind me, as they say in my village when a person has decided to leave everything. And yet I couldn’t forget. I missed Greece and Greek more and more. In a drawer lay a few letters from Maria, who had been my dearest love before I left the country. I took them out and read them slowly. Not to recall that youthful love, but to enjoy her Greek, and because she had hidden a ticking time bomb in my brain.

  “Come back, we still have many fine walks to take,” she said when we were no longer lovers but something even more valuable. We were the best of friends. I read her letters in order to taste my language. When all my longing had deserted me, I still missed my language. The feeling didn’t go away, but grew stronger over time.

  I could see it in my everyday life too. I would call my friend Giorgos on the flimsiest pretext just to exchange a few words in Greek, even if the language was the result of a distillation after several decades in Sweden.

  “How’s it going, Boss?”

  He’s a mechanic, and looked after my car too.

  “Crap! I’m sitting here dying!”

  In fact the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him, but he could no longer walk unaided, and he was unable to drive. He’s the best driver I’ve ever seen in my life. Guaranteed. Half an inch is enough for him to overtake at full speed. His workshop had a very narrow entrance. Most of us were capable of driving in, but reversing out was a different story. We left it to him, and he went for it as if he were on a freeway. But these days he didn’t drive anymore. His last love—an olive green Saab that he had modified and improved to 350 horsepower—stood trapped in a garage. He went there at regular intervals to visit it.

  Giorgos has a big heart, but his soul struggled to accept the situation.

  “Sell it and you’ll have peace of mind,” I would say to him. We had gone to the garage together several times. The car was covered in a tarpaulin to stop it from gathering dust. It actually shone.

  “Nobody wants it. It uses too much fuel.”

  In this Saab he used to drive down to Germany, where he would play cat and mouse with all the flashy Mercedes and BMWs as they attempted in vain to overtake him.

  “Take it easy, my Giorgos,” his wife would beg.

  “You don’t know what they did to us during the war,” he would reply, putting his foot down so that his made-in-Sweden olive green Pegasus flew away from his pursuers.

  All that was over now. When he started talking about selling his workshop, saying that he was tired of it all, he held up his hands.

  “They can’t do it anymore.”

 
That wasn’t entirely true. Things weren’t the same as before, when he could tear the phone book in half, but shaking hands with him was still a painful experience.

  We had met back in 1966, when he ran his workshop with another Giorgos. For some reason he called himself the Worker and this other Giorgos the Employer. I called Worker Giorgos “Boss” and Employer Giorgos “Giorgos.” They had become an institution among the Greeks in Stockholm, and I thought the world of them both.

  Since I left Greece I had subconsciously been searching for a big brother. Someone who was stronger, more courageous, more secure. It wasn’t that easy to find someone more sensible, if I may say so myself, and it’s probably best to do so because no one else is going to say it.

  During the dictatorship, this workshop had become a hub for democratically minded Greeks in Stockholm, and Employer Giorgos revealed unsuspected talents. Within a short time he became one of the most influential leaders of the fight for democracy in Greece. After the fall of the dictatorship he continued to work politically in Sweden; he left the workshop and never returned.

  Worker Giorgos was left to run the business on his own, and moved closer to the city center. We would go there when we had nothing better to do. There was always coffee on offer. We chatted, and the cabdrivers told amusing stories about their night shifts.

  “Stockholm is Stockholm until one o’clock in the morning. After that it turns into Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  People who didn’t have a car, had no intention of buying a car, and couldn’t afford a car also came to the workshop. The guy from the East, for example, an elderly Turk with big, gentle eyes, a soft voice, and a persistent cough, which was probably the reason he had been pensioned off early. He lived alone, read a little, and didn’t have much to say, but it was clear that he enjoyed spending time with Giorgos, who had designated him Principal Coffee Maker.