26a - The Old Neighborhood: Fast Changing Streets (Christakis' Place)

Our apartment building was amongst the first erected in the old neighborhood -the second in our little street, but the first with its façade and entrance on it. After its construction was complete, it looked monstrous amongst lowly houses with tiled rooftops. One of those houses, at the corner where our anonymous alley met Deligiorgi Street, belonged to the Tsiotas family, the family of my friend Christakis. They occupied the upper floor of the two-storey dwelling, whereas a widowed mother with her two boys rented the ground floor. Her younger son was a victim of thalidomide, as I later discovered; his limbs were deformed and without knees, his legs straight bones from hip to ankle. He moved them with hasty almost frantic movements with his feet tracing semi-circles above the ground, in his effort to keep pace with his brother and more able-bodied escorts. I vaguely remember the poor child on my visits to the Christakis’ yard, which, covered by a vine and an old acacia tree in one of the corners which felt cool even in the hottest of summer afternoons. I often found him sitting on a rag with his straight legs outstretched amongst the few toys scattered around at arm’s length. Less often we would sit and play together or organized the few games that he could participate, more out of a disguised feeling of pity. Compassion always found place in the hearts of common folk in the old Thessaloniki neighbourhoods, but was still uncultivated and latent in our souls. Tending to the disabled child did not last long. Our care free and lively nature demanded more from our boyhoods, our compassion waned, and we left him in the yard to continue with more elaborate play upstairs in the house or outdoors. On the way to school, he was accompanied by his older, twice as tall protective brother, who was walking with a deliberately slow stride so that he did not lag no more than a step or two behind. It was the last image of that child that survived in memory; his future in an unfriendly to disabled people city remained unknown, likely unhappy.

Christakis' house was the next one after my grandfather’s family that was demolished by the bulldozer in exchange of few gratis apartments for his family. The disabled boy, with his mother and brother left the neighborhood, never to be seen again. There were mere tenants and did not own a share in the plot. Within a few months a skeletal frame of a building was erected on the site of the old house, that became the focus of explorations for my insatiable childhood curiosity. From our balcony I watched the workers for hours, getting on with their jobs uncomplainingly, often laughing out loud at the jokes, exchanging insults, whistling melodies and singing songs, teasing any pretty girl who walked by. I saw them shoveling sand, cement, aggregate and lime into the noisy petrol-driven concrete mixer from stacks that a truck, which could barely fit in our alley, deposited. I saw them with a handcart or a large tin box on their shoulders climbing ramps to the first floors, filling columns framed with wood planks or filling floor areas on timber boards supported by scaffolds. After a few days, the workers removed the planks and the boards, and in a few months the solid concrete structure of the skeleton of a building emerged, gray and imposing, from the deep excavation.

In the absence of cranes and more modern and expensive machinery, which the majority of small-time builder could barely afford, and in the absence of space in an alley of a few meters wide for such equipment to fit, a small elevator was used instead, that went up and down from a petrol engine along two rails and transported in a bucket concrete and bricks and everything else needed to the upper floors as the constructions was gaining altitude. The progress was slow. With the cost of labour low, although construction workers were at the heart of the working class in Greece and one of its most militant sections and despite a perennially low productivity and the many working man-hours to completion, the business building apartment blocks would still yield handsome profits to the constructors, even after some of the apartments were handed to the plot owner in exchange. The construction process that I observed from day one to completion left an impression on me: the transformation of raw materials through labour and toil over several months, into use-value objects with shape and form. I was too young to form through childish observations a notion of the labor theory of value and influence any future ideology.

I went up and down the skeletal frame of the unfinished building several times through gaps in the constructor’s flimsy fence, furtively from family and neighbors. I wandered around through apertures into dark rooms of bare concrete and brick walls, with their floors littered with boards and nails and broken bricks, I fearfully stared down into the void below from the open balconies that had not yet had protective railings fitted. My imagination created images of the life of vagrants, who might have spent their nights in one of the bare cold rooms, amidst the pitch-black darkness that surrounded the empty building, patches of the dark sky through the window apertures. When the top floors were laid, I climbed up to the would-be penthouse and the rooftop, for an eagle’s eye view of the city reaching as far as the seafront. Climbing up the staircase made me sweat in hot summer evenings, but that gave way to the pleasant shivering sensation from the open evening sky and the sea breeze.

There were traces of human life everywhere: dirty overalls, bottles and scraps left behind by workers at the end of their working day. My heart shook in fear at each sound through the doors and windows from the street below and amplified through the staircase. Could it be someone who had sensed my presence in this strictly prohibited to trespassers site? Thankfully, no one ever took notice of those secret adventures. They were the moments of solitude in an unexplored and deserted environment, the terrifying empty skeleton of the building insulated from the lights and life and noises of the city expanse around that exerted a strange and inexplicable attraction, that at each visit caused butterflies fluttering in my stomach, before I was given in to a warm sensation amongst its bare cold. In this construction site, I discovered the hidden joys and the indefinable sensations on offer by solitude; that being alone could make me, perhaps, paradoxically, happy.