Free The House on Paradise Street by Sofka Zinovieff Page B

fraction of a sleeping pill before I put him in his carrier and luckily he had snored peacefully all the way through the journey at my feet. There were no customs problems bringing him into Greece, but it looked as though he had woken in a resentful mood. He flicked out a paw in an attempt to scratch me, but I managed to zip him up before he reached his target.
    The main road into Athens looked more like Moscow than anything I remembered from the 1940s, and it was only when Dora pointed out the mountains that I began to get some sense of orientation. Hymettus, Pendeli, Parnitha. I understood where we were but I didn’t recognise anything – it was like arriving in a different city that had been dropped onto a familiar landscape. Tall apartment blocks loomed like strangers in the house.
    “You can throw a black stone behind you, but sometimes it calls you back rather than keeping you away.” Dora understood why it had taken so long and why I had returned. The day was warm and I was already sweating in my woollen clothes and winter boots, but there was no time to go to Dora’s to change. The traffic was worse than Moscow and as we edged along, the driver sounded his horn in frustration and other drivers joined him until it sounded like a tuneless band. Dora told me news of her children: Panos lives in France and has lung cancer, and Evdokia is up in Thessaloniki and has recently got divorced. Dora didn’t complain. She looked sprightly and said she was getting on with her life.
    “I have my health, Glory to God. I’m still strong.” Her hand was light on my sleeve, but I could see it had strength.
    As we approached the cemetery I recognised my old neighbourhood – the streets I had played in as a child. It was more built-up, but through the window there was even the smell of resin glue from the marble-cutters. The taxi stopped outside the cemetery and the driver agreed sullenly to wait for us with my luggage. I removed my thick cardigan and left it with my coat on the back seat by Misha, still in his bag. As we shuffled through the entrance, my heart began thudding as it used to when we were waiting for the fighting to start in the mountains. My breath came fast and shallow. This was my son’s funeral.
    We were late. Dora made enquiries and we were told to proceed straight to the grave. There was already another service taking place in the chapel. Dora led the way, but we made several wrong turns until we found ourselves at the back of a large crowd of people, most of whom were straining to get nearer to the grave. There must have been several hundred mourners – so many people who cared about my son. I looked at them, wondering what they had been to him. We were standing next to a smart young woman who was wiping tears from behind her dark glasses and two men who smoked furtively and muttered to each other.
    “How many wives are there up there?”
    “Not as many as there are girlfriends back here. The old fucker.” I think I flinched and the first man noticed Dora and me. He coughed and nudged the second into silence.
    The priest’s chanting stopped, and after a pause came the sounds of earth hitting wood. Then the mourners parted and the priest came through, followed by a foreign-looking woman holding hands with a girl, who looked as I imagined my granddaughter might be – pretty but rebellious, with tangled dark hair and a powerful gaze that she turned on people who looked at her with pity. I backed away, holding on to the edge of a tall tombstone, just as I saw my sister coming, walking with an authoritative step. Alexandra saw me, but there was no glimmer of recognition and she kept walking. Why should she think that some old woman lurking in the shadows was the past returned to haunt her? I noticed that she was wearing my mother’s earrings – the diamond rosettes from Constantinople. I could never forget them. Her hair that absurd shade of blue that certain old women make the mistake of thinking