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.

23f - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (Lazy Fanis)

At the other end of the dark corridor of the busy first floor, opposite to grandma's, was the door of the apartment of an unemployed slob and, by all indications, a lazy-born person: Fanis. From our point of view, he looked middle-aged and rather big, but age and stature are generally magnified in the eyes of a child, in proportion to the difference in years. He had gray-blond hair, which fell straight at the back of his neck without a parting and a fringe to his eyebrows. It was like a cheap wig. Could it have been one? He lived with his widowed mother in their small apartment, a mirror image of my grandparents’. There was a shallowness and a lack of cultural depth evident around Fanis’ personality, a biased opinion, it could be said, given the intellectual standards that Father had set in judging a humble environment, and he led an existence which many in our house, especially my parents, found socially marginal and irritatingly parasitic. His superficiality was further evidenced by the array of folk and light pop songs he enjoyed listening on radio or television, for the best part of the day: during working hours for most residents, as well as evenings. In warm summer afternoons, with his balcony door wide open, his music could be heard by housewives, children and traders, everyone on the street below, while he was enjoying his cup of Turkish coffee in the shade that our balcony above offered, usually still dressed in pyjamas from the afternoon siesta until sunset and his pair of beach flip-flops protruding through the rails. Watching us play ball and other games on the street below was one of his pastimes in those late afternoons. On a couple of occasions when his brother, a handsome young man with a more vibrant personality, was visiting from Athens, both left the apartment to participate in a makeshift footie, played on our alley downstairs or in the sandlot by the stream. A Peter Pan syndrome would be an apt term in the circumstance.

Any loud noise emanating from our living room -just above his, during the evening hours he normally spent watching TV, he found a nuisance -perhaps, understandably so given the poor sound insulation of the walls and ceilings. Whenever the three children, I, Brother, and my first cousin from next door got together into our relatively spacious living room, under my guidance, we improvised games, which often involved simply jumping around or aimlessly running back and forth from one end of the room to the other, carefree and tireless. Our piece of fun could not have lasted long; Fanis, with a broomstick, would knock at his ceiling, our floor viciously. On occasions, if noises from our living-room persisted for more than a few days in a row, he would complain vigorously to grandmother, who, however, conveyed his complaints with a gesture of the hand that meant: ‘Let him say whatever, don't pay too attention! Don’t bother!’, then tapping her index finger to her head as if to highlight Fanis’ empty-headedness.

Indolent, single, without mates, without major expectations from life, possibly without dreams or ambitions. His sole aim was to spend another ‘good day’ (whatever that meant for him) in peace and quiet -in the plainest definition of ‘good’, excluding the satisfaction of basic human needs. Goncharev's hero Oblomov was a personality I would most closely associate with Fanis, although Oblomov, unlike Fanis, enjoyed a rather wealthier lifestyle, had a few friends no matter how rogue, even once fell in love, although unreciprocated. We never got around to know about his main source of income and how he sustained himself. Bad rumours attributed it to a disability benefit fraudulently obtained without genuine medical grounds, as he always looked fit-to-work, or a rental income he was receiving from a parental property he inherited. Any income of his might have been complementing the mother's meagre pension while she was alive. In the eyes of my family, he was a personification of αραχτή [laid back attitude and aversion to strain] that on average terms characterizes Greek society at large and the αραλίκι [laziness and lounging] in extreme manifestation. In a plain English, Fanis was a loafer.

Echoes from the neighborhood we left years later whispered that he eventually got married and left behind him the idleness in the uneventful reality of the alley, which for him, as far as we could tell, fulfilled his life sufficiently in the apartment below ours. Before we left another tall building was being raised across from the narrow street, which would have eliminated the remaining traces of skyline visible from our balconies and blocked the last rays of sunshine in summer afternoons Fanis. Lost, along with the ghost of his mother on the threshold of their door gossiping with grandmother, along with Fanis’ figure on the balcony in his pyjamas and flip-flops drinking coffee and listening to Greek pop music of the 1970’s and, later, after the fall of junta, the formerly prohibited song ‘Good Morning, Sun, Good Morning!’, which became a favourite of his, evidence one would say of a progressive political inclination. Lost along with the sun and out kickabouts under his balcony with Fanis the sole spectator. 

23e - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (Leonidakos)

For the L_’s living next door to Mrs. Evangelia, I always held the impression of a family in consonance with their fixed daily routines, their jobs and a quiet and peaceful life; the latter, at least, in contrast to our family –given Father's frequent outbursts in a thunderous voice, which often pierced the walls of the building and reached the street outside. I rarely met with the L_s within the building we shared: the couple was busy getting on with their jobs and chores, being, as they say, an honourable hardworking couple. The husband was a painter and decorator; I saw him on occasions in his stained with paint overalls on his motorbike loaded with brushes and buckets heading to work, whilst the wife took on temporary jobs caring for the elderly. They had a son, Leonidas, better known in the neighbourhood by the dimininutive but rather unfitting Leonidakos (little Leonidas). He was bigger and stronger than Brother although of the same age, both seven years younger than me. As such, they were rarely allowed to join me and friends in our street play. (Besides, they were growing up at a time when playing outdoors on the streets was dwindling, due to an incessant construction in the area, increased number of cars on the roads, and the side-effects of television. Detours from the short and well-trodden path from school to the house had its dangers and required the permission from parents and the accompanying by an adult. At their age, must be said, I enjoyed more luck and freedom with my outside ventures, but children’s lives were changing fast.)

One autumn afternoon, shortly after the end of the school day, Leonidakos, with whom I had barely talked in person till then, rang our doorbell. I opened the door and he asked straight for Mother to whom she announced, panting, with a face flushed from worry and a trembling voice that Brother had been ‘run over by a car’ -at the intersection of Xenofon and Gambetta Street, roads that the boys crossed every day from school on their way back home. He unwittingly sowed panic with his naïve and brutal phrasing of the incident. For Mother and me listening beside her, ‘run over by a car’ meant that a car not just knocked Brother out but also drove over him, leaving him seriously wounded and even dead on the tarmac. Leonidakos’ message without elaboration caused shock and distress, bordering hysteria, to Mother. I had not seen her that distraught until then and would not have ever since. It was, nonetheless, a natural and instinctive reaction for a Greek mother. For my part, I felt an agitation which triggered palpitations and my heart to bleed -so to speak. I was instantly moved by the news and tears filled my eyes; I might have taken away by a few sobs. The image of tiny Brother, lying somewhere pale and dead, flashed in my mind. I felt an unprecedented tumult, despite the age gap of seven years between us, our rivalries and the animosity that the daily friction between siblings inevitably causes, as they must share the attention and devotion of parents and a largely unexciting everyday life in a small apartment. Like the pain from the sudden and heavy blows of what we call fate (something not predetermined, but random, and often with inordinate consequences) can unexpectedly cause to off-guard human beings. Then again, vis-à-vis the emotional impact of Brother’s accident, as Greeks say, ‘family blood does not turn into water’.

Mother, overwhelmed herself as she was, paid no heed to my reaction to the news and my emotional state. She threw away her kitchen apron, took off her robe underneath, pulled and put on a random skirt from the bedroom closet, walked fast downstairs with her hands trying to zip up and straighten the skirt; she ran after Leonidakos, the big boy well beyond his years, lead her by two or three steps to the road intersection of Xenophon and Gambetta streets, where the accident occurred.  I followed them at a fair distance, inundated by the fleeting thoughts and premonition of a tragic and macabre spectacle that would traumatise deeply an unspoiled from misfortunes soul. A tragedy, indeed, was what was insinuated by Leonidakos’ restless demeanour and his laconically brutal and brusque account of what he witnessed.

Brother was fine! He was overcoming the shock of the hit by the car bumper that threw him a few meters down the road and over to the pavement. He was sitting on a chair at one of the tables, in the diary and sweet shop, with a glass of orange juice in front of him -courtesy of the shopkeeper, dried tears under the eyes and a skin pale from the shock, rather than pain or serious injury. There had been no further drama following up the incident. A lesson was learned and, in the future, Brother was told by all present and promised that he should be careful when crossing streets, no matter how narrow, no matter what time of the day. For me, the event was a first fleeting encounter with the spectre of death and his sickle by an insignificant road. Admittedly, shocking and unforgettable, yet of many more to come.  

23d - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (Mrs. Evangelia)

 On grandmother's floor, at the other end of a narrow corridor, was the door of the L_s and next to it that of Mrs. Evangelia’s. A plump lady Mrs. Evangelia was, past her reproductive years; a simple uneducated housewife with a heart of gold, who at every opportunity displayed a special fondness for my little brother, the youngest creature in the building. She went on to look after the toddler he was for a while, for the pitiable fee child minders in petty-bourgeois neighborhoods command (a thousand drachmas or so per month) during the days when both parents were at work. Grandmother was disinclined to take care of him; understandably so, after tending an all-male family (and myself for a short period) for the best part of her life. I and my younger first cousin were also thereabouts, and required some supervising. To Mrs. Evangelia’s doting cries ‘Oh! My little love! My little sweet love!’ and her juicy kisses on the cheek, after she lifted and grabbed him in a tight embrace, little Brother retaliated with insults (in incredibly colorful language for a toddler, must be said), pushing her face away or turning his away in disapproval, and on occasions even delivering blows. In her tiny kitchen, on school mornings, I used to eat quietly my breakfast: a bowl of milk, mixed with a cocoa powder to moderate the taste of boiled milk with a skin I found disgusting, with crumbles of Papadopoulou biscuits or a slice of bread with butter, sprinkled with sugar. I left for school, after a brief stop at grandma’s apartment, whilst Brother, upset and angry from being left alone with Mrs. Evangelia, was crying for his mum. A similar breakfast and her son’s more agreeable attention would have eventually calmed him down.  

Mrs. Evangelia’s husband, was one of those toilers struggling for a living: a peddler who roamed the cafes and tavernas and squares of the city selling lottery tickets. His meagre income was complemented by that of his son on part time jobs whilst also attending an evening technical college. Their lives, however, were transformed one day, when they won the lottery from one of the husband’s unsold tickets. They bought a property in Kalamaria, the relatively more affluent, middle-class suburb of eastern Thessaloniki. Since then, only a couple of times did I see again Mrs. Evangelia; without the everyday apron she used to wear when she looked after my brother, but in a flamboyant dress. She was visiting grandmother, her next-door neighbour for years and daily companion in morning coffee sessions, chatting over the rails of their adjoining kitchen balconies. I heard from Mother that they behaved like nouveau riche. Then again, I had no idea then what it meant to be such a person and whether it was something bad or good. It sounded derogatory, but I found later that change in human behaviour and lifestyle is perfectly natural to those who, following a smile from Lady Luck, experience a steep social ascendancy, shaking off a seemingly predetermined miserable existence, and out of the blue finding themselves wealthy. Eventually, the family distanced themselves from the social circles of their poor old neighborhood, where the city’s relentless development and expansion to the suburbs were deteriorating quality of life. Mrs. Evangelia and her lottery ticket seller husband disappeared in the richer edges of the city and they must have concluded their own book of life in a better way than the one that might have been extrapolated from the morning experiences in Mrs. Evangelia’s kitchenette or the coffee-drinking sessions in their small balconies at the unseen from passers-by, dark rear of our building. 

23c - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (The Gloomy Lower Floors)

My grandparents lived the rest of their lives on the first floor, in a small one-bedroom apartment less privileged than those of their sons on the second floor; primarily because of the fewer hours of bright sunlight through the front balcony enjoyed by their sitting room, and even less by the interior. Father and my uncle, both men in their prime and heads of growing families, no doubt, were given and occupied the best cuts from the builder’s compensation for the plot of land the family relinquished.

The apartment building did not feature an elevator and the floors were joined by a U-turns staircase, with steps and landing made of what the builders called ‘mosaic’ -nothing more artistic than gravel in different shapes and colors within a mixture of refined cement. The glorious Greek summer sun did not shed much of its light in that staircase, especially on its turns from the mezzanine to the second floor. A faint sunlight managed to escape through a square opening of the rooftop into the blue of the sky above and through the windows of the small interior light-duct, but it looked tired and oppressive. This duct was like a rectangular deep well few meters wide, and from the windows at each landing one could see small white balconies of concrete walls hanging outside the main bedrooms. The layout was designed, as the architect might have reasoned, with the intention of guarantee precious afternoon siestas for the hard-working residents, uninterrupted by the intrusion of the bright Greek sun, especially in the summer afternoons, when both sunlight and heat can become unforgiving enemies. The residual rays of light that penetrated through the opening of the duct at the roof down to the lower floors were ultimately blocked by shutters firmly shut in the afternoons; with the sunlight thus attenuated, a darkness as thick as that of a dungeon and coolness even in August afternoons prevailed in the bedroom of Mother and Father.

But as one climbed to the two topmost floors and their penthouses, the diffused light intensity increased, until, at very top floor under the roof, a square patch of sky became visible, the sun from the windows was blinding in the relative darkness of the corridors and the staircase. At the rooftop, a place of longing and hiding and refuge of solitude in my childhood, only light, a light cloudless blue sky above and the freedom to gaze over and explore the skyline of Thessaloniki, through the forest of TV aerials on the rooftops, all the way to the waters of the bay of Thermaikos and the cranes of Thessaloniki’s port; a view in clear transparent days extended beyond the sea and across the bay to the peaks of Mount Olympus.

23b - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (The Mezzanine Floor)

The right side of the staircase led upstairs to a mezzanine of a single, small one-bedroom apartment with a proportionally small balcony by the main entrance, at a tall man’s height above street level. This belonged to an old man called Iatrides, who crumped in there for a while with a wife and a daughter. Mother frequently referred to the ‘nasal mucus’ of old-Iatrides, I presume metaphorically, to point out his low hygiene standards. Perhaps, such a derogatory remark had more to do with the conspicuous poverty of the family and a rather unwarranted insolence stemming from covert class prejudices of Mother and other residents from the more privileged top floors. A micro-apartheid had already been established between the poor Iatrides family on the mezzanine floor and the rest of the building residents, a regime still evident in the communities of apartment blocks in the city's petty-bourgeois neighborhoods. Yet, every single resident had to pass by their front-door of when entering or exiting our building, therefore, encounters and interchanges were inevitable.

The Iatrides’ did not stay long enough to get better acquainted with their ways, the family members themselves, and ultimately find out a bit more about their cleanliness standards. They could not bear their relative poverty, whilst the attraction of decent employment and prospects of wealth that Northern Europe offered must have enticed their daughter and her fiancé. They left their small apartment in the early 1970’s, amid the years of dictatorship in Greece, and emigrated en masse to Sweden. We have not heard from them ever since, and the small apartment of the mezzanine floor remained uninhabited and haunted for the rest of our stay in that address. The labels bearing the family name on the front-door, at the top of the first short flight of stairs, and at the very bottom of the intercom residents’ list by the entrance remained for years after their departure, testament that someone named Iatrides owned and once upon a time lived in that mezzanine apartment.  

23a - The Old Neighborhood: The Microcosm of our Apartment Block (A Dark Basement)

The main entrance to the building, a low-cost minimalist design devoid of superfluous features, was through a transparent glass panel door with a pale-green metal frame that opened to the U-turn landing of the staircase. Its left side led to a dark basement comprising two apartments, whose windows, the only source of light and air, opened level with a minuscule pavement. The narrowness of the alley in front did not lend itself for daring architectural interventions at and around the entrance of the building -at the time of its construction, and for decades after.

During our stay none of the basement apartments had I seen occupied. They were abandoned by the builders at their poor original states: undecorated and unfinished, dark and cold, forsaken. At a time when local and state authorities, in the name of growth and development, were sweeping under the carpet the last remnants of postwar poverty, most basements were not designed for humane occupation in their darkness and dampness; in our childhood imagination they were habitats of ghosts and monsters. Decades later, around the turn of the millennium, on the first wave of immigration from Albania and Eastern Europe, in one of my rare walks by our old street, I saw for a first the shutters of the two basement apartments open and curtains hanging from behind the window panes: human beings, immigrants or homeless or a gang of delinquents made it home -I thought. Later in the history of the city, after several booms and busts in the construction industry, on another visit to the old neighbourhood, the two basement apartments had their shutters firmly closed. They were left deserted again, as they were half a century ago, abandoned by their tenants, whoever they might be, or, less likely, after police having enforced eviction of any squatters.

What looked like a long corridor separated the two basement apartments. Pitch-black and suffocating by its dampness and frightening ended to a concrete wall dead-end. The light from the central lighting system was too weak to illuminate more than a few steps down the flight of stairs to the basement. Neither the builder, nor any of the permanent residents bothered to install some lighting that would alleviate our childish fears in the long winter evenings by the entrance, I spent with my friend discussing horror and ghost stories. Towards its dead-end, that corridor opened through a permanently locked iron door to the main light duct on the side of the building, not visible by passers-by, where skylight and open air conflicted with the darkness and stale odor of the unventilated basement. Occasionally, one of the residents would go downstairs to the duct through the basement corridor and its door, to pick up clothes fallen from the balcony airer or a children’s toy thrown through the railings.

The only life in that dirty and neglected space consisted of mice and rats, seen from our balconies scurrying across from one corner of the duct to another, and the occasional stray cat wandering aimlessly or in search of food. There had been occasions when mice overcame their fears of humans and climbed the drainpipes, in daring wanderings for food in the kitchens and toilets of the apartments of the first and even the second floor -our floor! The sight of them, even the idea of their presence in our apartment, triggered a sense of panic mixed with disgust in Mother and the child in me -and it still does. Father was brave enough to chase them away or even try to kill them with a broomstick.