23g - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (The Distant Upper Floors)

Both floors above ours housed penthouses with large terraces. As a child I wished for a family home with a terrace spacious enough to accommodate improvised ball games and set up, at one of its corners, a tent to sleep in hot summer nights under the starry sky. Unfortunately, that dream did not materialise until I was too old to want to spend time at home with my parents.

My family's social contacts with the owners of the penthouses of the top floors were rather scarce. Their status in the building hierarchy, so to speak, and the one or two flights of stairs that separated us raised a minor barrier, more psychological than physical, whilst it harboured some envy towards the more privileged living environment, aggravated by the fact that the economic status of the families occupying them was on par with ours -as far as I could tell. In any case, there had been clauses in the contracts grandfather signed with the builder when he relinquished his plot of land, that limited the selection of the three apartments for him and his two sons out of the lot.

On the third floor lived a widow, apparently a dowager Mrs. Eftychia, whom Mother paid visits after rare casual invitations for a chat, whilst coffee drinking, taking place in her terrace in late summer afternoons or, in winter time, in her living room, which I felt not only dwarfed ours, but also boasted more expensive and comfortable furniture. Mrs. Eftychia had two boys much older than me. One had the glorious name of Cleon. He was a high-school student and of superior stature and whenever he came across me and my mate Costas, both of us still in primary school, sitting at the steps by the entrance of the building and chatting, he would pause at the threshold looking down at us. Then, he would say a few words, in condescending tone of voice and with an air of intellectual superiority, which we listened to silently. But his intentions, it seemed, were always well meaning.

Cleon had a younger brother, Nikos, ostensibly shy and barely spotted in the building or indeed the neighborhood. After our family relocated to the Harilaou district, we found out from a brief mention in a paper followed by a call to an old neighbour, that Nikos was killed in a side street off the ill-reputed Syngrou Avenue of Athens where he was allegedly loitering as a transgender prostitute. For the motives of the unsolved crime, one had to look in the largely untouchable underworld of pimping and drugs, the ‘world of night’, as they say in Greece. Those dark margins of society that common people normally stay away from, along with the secret passions and phantasies they foster, eventually engulfed Nikos’ life. He was the son of a respectable widow and brother to solemn Cleon and who would have expected this denouement!

The Aslanides’ family on the very top floor concluded our microcosm. Contacts with them were almost non-existent, limited to formal ‘good mornings’ or ‘good evenings’, for the sake of courtesy when you meet a neighbour on the stairs or the street, and, also, during the Residents’ Assemblies to discuss the allocation of shared expenses and service charges. Those gatherings were organised by a nominated resident-administrator (I remember my aunt being permanent in that position of power) took place periodically at the common entrance. It frequently ended in confrontations and petty-quarrels (typically over financial matters), and the occasional loud exchange of words, invariably between Father and the awkward head of that Aslanides family. These squabbles often reached my room through the staircase. A reason, on the part of Mr. Aslanides, could have been that he considered most of the residents as beneath him, and insulated himself from the trivial demands of cohabitating and sharing a building and contributing to a budget. Or, perhaps, from a different point of view, it could by that my family, Father in particular, was seeing the Aslanides’ as parvenues lacking in education credentials. For me, Aslanides’, that featured at the very top of the list of name badges at the entrance intercom, was nothing more than a hellenized surname of Turkish root, dissonant to my Greek ear, despite its decorous ‘Son of a Lion’ meaning.

I saw Mr. Aslanides on our street only a handful of times during my childhood, most often from over our balcony railings. He had the reputation of a difficult and awkward man, with a gloomy countenance usually facing down, attributes that would have inexorably made him Father’s adversary in the clashes over the economy of our building. His innate nature came further to the fore and his behaviour and manners worsened, after the stroke he suffered, which manifested itself with incomprehensible groans of frustration and indignation towards his wife and daughter, that could be heard from his apartment or the street when he was taken out for a walk. He eventually became bedridden and disappeared altogether from public view. Nobody noticed.