Dead Europe Read Online Free PDF Page B

Australia you represent seems very cold and very empty. Only that man, Stavros, seems happy. No one else smiles in your photographs. She took a cigarette from her bag and lit up. Her unperturbed smoking in a gallery space shocked me. I took one from her and we smoked together.
    â€”It is inevitable, living here in Athens, she continued,that we meet so many Greeks from Australia. I cannot bear most of them. They are vulgar, ignorant and très materialistic. They are what we fear we are becoming. She looked down at her dress, her leather shoes. Eurotrash, she muttered and smiled ruefully. Then there are some Australians who are innocents. Young girls still worried about their virginity, young men who still practise their Orthodoxy as though the twentieth century had never occurred. Them, I like. But I do not understand them. It is as if they have not left the village. We laugh at them but they remind us of the past. And then there are a few who are not like Greeks here, and who are not like the French or the Germans or the English. And, thank God, nothing like the Americans. They are of their own world. Your work reminds me of those Australians. She looked around the gallery, taking in my work.
    â€” M’aresoune poli. I like them a lot.
    My hangover was cured, my eyes ablaze, I was elated.
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    The afternoon was spent on lunch, and on two interviews that the gallery owners had organised with magazines. One of the owners, Mrs Antonianidis, was a heavily made-up matron in her mid-fifties who proceeded to tell me how much she had adored my art, though it quickly became obvious that she had no interest in the photographs whatsoever. Her husband was large and stern-faced and spent the whole of the lunch on his mobile phone. The first journalist who interviewed me was a suited young man barely out of his teens who did not take off his Calvin Klein sunglasses throughout lunch and spent the first five minutes complaining about the slack habits of his Albanian maid. He was disappointed in my Greek and when it came time to photograph me he took a few lazy snaps with an instamatic and wished me well. The second journalist was better prepared. She invited me for a coffee in a bar filled withMiro prints and her first question, when she snapped on the tape recorder, took me by surprise.
    â€”Isn’t the theme of homesickness, of exile and return, irrelevant to modern Greece?
    It was a good question and it did strike me, as we sat in the stylish bar, indolent dance music throbbing quietly in the background, that the Greece I knew in Australia was indeed largely irrelevant to these modern Europeans. I scrambled for an answer.
    â€”Maybe those themes are no longer relevant to you Greeks, but they are indeed relevant to Australians. In Australia we all ask ourselves where we come from.
    â€”Even the Aborigines?
    She was sorting through a series of black and white photocopies Anastasia had gathered of my photographs. She pointed to one of a young Aboriginal boy, a baseball cap on his head, a Tupac t-shirt on his chest. He was standing outside a Greek bomboniere store, scowling at my lens.
    â€”Is he asking himself where he comes from?
    â€”No, he’s asking me where I come from. I looked around the bar, at the Athenians elegantly sipping their drinks. What should I say to him? Am I from Greece?
    She too looked around the bar.
    â€”Certainly not from this Greece. This is not Greece. This is fucking marie-claire . She turned back to me. Do you speak French?
    I must have looked surprised because she laughed and told me that she did not feel confident in her English.
    â€”You speak it well.
    â€”No, I do not. My accent is terrible.
    We spoke for twenty minutes and then she shut off the tape recorder and asked me if I wanted a drink. She ordered gin and tonic for herself and a whisky for me and proceeded to tell me that she had cousins in Australia. She told me of how much she loved her cousins and how much she