Kolonaki, as wikipedia will tell you, is a ‘wealthy, chic and upmarket’ neighbourhood of central Athens. Kolonaki Square, or to give it its polysyllabic Greek name Plateia Filikis Etaireias, is a place where the sort of person who likes to see and be seen goes in his best gear to shell out on poncy beers, extortionately priced scotch and designer food. Ten minutes walk away is Marasli* Street. There in the nineties you had Mario’s restaurant, where the clock told nine forty-five, all day everyday, and the where the menu and the tablecloths were never changed. You had the Smallest Café in the World, a shop just big enough to accommodate a fridge, a counter, a three foot diameter round table and a few beer crates to sit on while you drank your Amstel. There was a dark, poky supermarket run by an irascible elderly couple, and a wine shop whose proprietor was never seen to smile. Other establishments sold surgical gloves, crutches, slings, trusses, bedpans, catheters, pulleys, inflatable rubber cushions and other tubes, props, pads, supports and aids for aching, ailing, leaking bodies, for on Marasli stands the Evangelismos Hospital, and if you are in third class accommodation there, your relatives will have to do most of the nursing care for you. Wherefore enjoy seeing and being seen over in the plateia while ye may, for Marasli is where ye could well end up.

 

In 1995 I was forced by my poverty and improvidence to leave my much loved top floor flat in the central district of Pangrati with its big terrace and view of the Acropolis, and take a basement garçonnière just round the corner from Marasli. I had acquired a prestigious Kolonaki address but very unprestigious quarters indeed, one small room with a single bed and a desk. The French windows gave onto a whitewashed wall. There was the prison bathroom, bleak with worn enamel bath and hideous off-white tiles bordered in snot green. The kitchen had the proportions of a generous sarcophagus. From it, a small door opened onto a black and cobwebby space, the bottom of a dark well from which ascended the steel staircase of an internal fire escape. There were a few cockroach corpses scattered like mucky leaves. Maybe they had died of old age, or maybe they had decided to end it all, and plunged from the sixth floor. If my friend Jeni from Taiwan had ever seen the place, she’d have warned me off it. It was subterranean, damp, close to a hospital and under six storeys inhabited almost exclusively by elderly spinsters. The feng shui was therefore highly unpropitious, and Jeni would have prescribed any number of mirrors, wind chimes and strategically-placed calligraphies to mitigate the baleful influences. I made the place as cosy as I could with candles, posters, plants, throws and incense. Only that ghastly bathroom was beyond saving.

 

The spinster-women were suspicious of me at first, suspecting, horror of horrors, that I might be Albanian. Soon after I moved in, one matriarch came to see me on some pretext or other. She spoke excellent English, and having ascertained that I was not Albanian, and was in fact a teacher and trainer of teachers, she seemed satisfied. ‘I am very pleased to have met you’ she said, peering over a metaphorical lorgnette, chin held high, smiling stiffly. ‘And I am so glad that you are somebody.’ She withdrew with a gracious sideways inclination of her head, acknowledging a fellow Somebody, as Lady Bracknell might have done had Jack Worthing not screwed up by telling her all that stuff about the handbag. It seemed I had passed a test, and she must have communicated her verdict to the other ladies, because from then on they thought the sun shone out of my arse.

 

*****

 

‘Ειναι τρελη αυτη. She’s crazy, that one’ said Kyria* Fofo, who had become my biggest fan among the old ladies. She had asked me to walk her to and from the corner kiosk, and her remark was in reference to Mrs D, who lived on the third floor and who was just letting herself into our building. ‘She’s always on about people stealing millions from her.’

 

I did not see much of the allegedly crazy Mrs D until the summer. In August, Athens empties like a flushed toilet, and everywhere was blessedly quiet. At home, I became aware of a noise, as of someone knocking on a door, repeatedly, obsessively, but couldn’t decide where it was coming from. I went up into the entrance hall and to the alcove where the concierge, if we had still had one, would have sat. Here a door led to the spooky fire escape and from within, somebody was knocking.

 

‘Who is it?’ I asked

 

‘Hello! Is anyone there? It’s me!’ An elderly, cheery female voice.

 

‘The door’s locked, I’ll have to find someone who’s got a key.’

 

‘Oh, that’s fine!’ said the voice, happily. ‘Do take your time!’

 

Christ knows who’s got a bloody key, I thought. Luckily I managed to catch the last remaining resident in the otherwise empty building on the day before he was going to move out for good. We opened the door and Mrs D stepped into the hall from the dank, spidery fire escape. Imagine Prunella Scales as Miss Mapp, fast forward her to the age of eighty-six and you have something like Mrs D.

 

‘Thank you so much, gentlemen! I’m just going down to the square. Can I get you anything? Pastries? Liqueurs?’

 

I had to leave the following day to teach a four week course in another town. Had Mrs D locked herself out on the fire escape a day later, she’d probably have died there.

 

Fucking hell. Imagine the whiff when everyone got back in September.

 

One autumn night my doorbell rang. Then I heard other people’s doorbells, each one ringing three times before the next one, mine, next door’s, upstairs, in rotation. I went up to the entrance hall and outside, leaning against the big wrought iron and glass door, was what I took at first to be a guitar case but was in fact Mrs D, locked out again.

 

‘Now, I do do the code’ she explained cheerfully as I helped her to her feet, ‘One-two-three, one-two-three, so they know it’s only me, but they’re still suspicious, you know!’

 

It began to piss with rain and the electricity conked. I had to help Mrs D up to her flat, hoping she had her keys about her somewhere. In the dark it wasn’t hard to locate her door, because from beneath it there always wafted a smell like that of the pachyderm house at Whipsnade. Ping! Sudden connection: earlier in the week I had found a newspaper parcel of human shit, complete with used sheets of pink bogroll, stuffed into the concierge’s alcove. As you would expect, it chuffed a bit. It was the same aroma as emanated from Mrs D’s flat, into which we now got. She hadn’t locked it after all.

 

‘Have you got some candles?’ I asked.

 

‘Oh, yes, lots, in the kitchen!’

 

The kitchen floor was covered with shards of glass from the broken door, and that bloody hell-hole of a fire escape gaped blackly. I asked how the glass in the door had smashed, and got something about 'μου πήραν εκατομμυρια, they took millions off me', but nothing about who they were and when they had robbed her, if indeed they ever had. After a few moments of crunching about in the dark on shattered glass, I found the cupboard. Mrs D was right about the candles. She had lots. Boxes and boxes and boxes of them. She could have opened a shop. I fished one out and tried to find the living room.

 

‘What's that? Is that the bathroom?’

 

‘I’ve already been’

 

Too bloody right you have, darling. Probably as well I can’t see a hand in front of my face.

 

‘Will you be OK?’ I asked, lighting a candle in the sitting room. Family photos everywhere. Where were they all?

 

‘I’ll just go to sleep. Ο θεος μαζι σας, κυριε! God be with you, sir!’

 

I left, at first relieved to get away, then questioning the wisdom of leaving a dotty old lady alone with a lighted candle. Fortunately, she must have slept as she said she would, and we all survived the night.

 

Soon after, they came to take her away. Now, probably most of those ladies are gone. If not yet dead, they will be too frail to live alone, and will have been put away in homes. They bitched endlessly about one another, but they were united in worrying constantly about the transient population of the basement flats, male and foreign, therefore doubly foreign. They were genuinely scared of the two friendly Albanian lads who lived next door to me. I was only ‘somebody’ because I was not Albanian, and they would have disapproved utterly of my fascination with Albania, and love of its language and open, upfront, hospitable people. Anyway, I hope they are all as happy as they can be, and let me hereby apologise for tricking them into thinking me ‘somebody’. Fuck’s sake...

 

*****

 

*Kyria is ‘Mrs’ but in Greek it can be used with a person’s first name, thus combining familiarity with respect in a way we cannot in English. I think this is a very endearing habit of Greek. This does not mitigate my contempt for the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis.