Greeks Bearing Gifts

me to await the return of Garlopis to his office. She told me he’d gone to the ministry in Piraeus, offered me a coffee that I declined out of respect for my delinquent heart, closed a filing cabinet that Garlopis had left open, and then went back to an adjoining office to sit at a typewriter beneath a large photograph of King Paul dressed in a British army uniform and wearing more stars on his chest than a Russian grand admiral, leaving me to take her employer’s chair, where I was faced by a phalanx of photographs on the desk that showed a younger Garlopis with his large wife and even larger children. It was a very uxorious display and a little at odds with a recent copy of Playboy I found under the blotter. I leafed through it idly, ignoring some probably worthy articles on jazz, Mexico, and women in business in favor of Miss January, a voluptuous redhead called June Blair who managed to promise a great deal while showing very little of what had made her the Playmate of the Month. You could probably have seen more on any German beach, even in winter, and this made me think that it took a certain kind of genius to persuade men to pay for a magazine like this: the American kind, probably. After a while I closed my eyes. I was feeling tired after my walk back from the Acropolis and I may even have slept a little. In my experience there’s nothing quite like an office chair to make a man feel that he needs to take a nap. Especially when Miss January’s shapely image is still imprinted on the insides of his eyelids.

A bit later on I heard the slow footsteps of a big man coming upstairs and, opening my eyes, I concluded that Garlopis had finally returned.

“How did you get on, sir?” he asked breathlessly. “Did you find out where he’s been living?”

I stood up, left him to his own captain’s chair, and went and sat facing the desk on a chair where I imagined Telesilla taking dictation under the lubricious eyes of Garlopis and, now that I considered the matter further, it occurred to me that she was not unlike the flame-haired playmate in the centerfold underneath the blotter. Maybe that was the reason Garlopis had bought the magazine in the first place. Either that or Telesilla had only been in the job since January.

“Pritaniou, number eleven, in the old town at the base of the Acropolis. I couldn’t tell if he’s living alone there or not. But at least now we know where to find him. And you? Did you see your cousin at the Mercantile Marine Ministry?”

“I did.” Garlopis adjusted his bow tie and allowed himself a smile. “And the news is—well, interesting to say the least, in that it provides us with a possible motive for a case of arson. I only say possible, sir. That’s for you to decide, of course. But people have long memories in this country. With the many centuries of history we have, we need long memories.”

He found a cigarette, rattled a box of matches, lit up, and removed a piece of paper from his pocket. “As we know, the Doris was formerly registered as the Carasso. I discovered that the previous owner was a Jewish merchant in Salonika, which, as you know, is now our second city, Thessaloniki. The Jewish merchant’s name was Saul Allatini and he bought and sold coffee. Before the war, Thessaloniki was home to a large number of Jews. Possibly as many as there existed anywhere in Europe outside of Poland. Sephardic Jews mostly, from Spain; but also a great many who had fled from Muslim persecution in the Ottoman Empire. But unlike most countries, Greece, I’m proud to say, gave its Jews full citizenship, and they thrived. As a result of all this, perhaps the majority of people in Thessaloniki—at least sixty thousand—were Jews.

“Anyway, I don’t want to embarrass you, sir, with a lachrymose tale of Jewish suffering in Greece—you being a German n’all—so, to cut a long story short, most of the Jews in Thessaloniki were deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and gassed to death. Meanwhile their property was subject to confiscation and resale by the collaborationist Hellenic government of Ioannis Rallis. Which is how the unfortunate Mr. Allatini’s three vessels—two of them merchantmen, and one his own private yacht, the Carasso—were sold to Greeks and to Germans at bargain-basement prices. Or rather to one particular German. The Carasso was bought by Siegfried Witzel for a pittance and he renamed it the Doris, and sailed it to Piraeus, where it remained after the war.” Garlopis paused and puffed at his cigarette for a moment. “Those Jews who survived the camps—less than two thousand, it would seem—returned to Thessaloniki and found their homes and property in the possession of Greek Christians who had bought them in good faith from the Germans. And any attempts at Jewish property restitution quickly failed when a British-backed right-wing anti-communist IPE government came to power in Athens. None of these men had much time for the Jews, and of course Greece collapsed into civil war soon afterwards. A civil war that lasted three years. Since when there has been little appetite to open up these scars and say who owns what. Certainly the ministry has no record of anyone from the Allatini family as having petitioned it for the return of the Doris. At least none that my cousin was able to find.

“In defense of my country I should also mention that this regrettable situation is complicated by the fact that many of the properties bought by Jews long before the war had themselves been owned by Muslims previous to the so-called diaspora that followed the Greco-Turkish war of 1919–1922. Many Muslims were obliged to sell up at knockdown prices and emigrate to Turkey, while many Turks, including thousands of Jews, were obliged to leave