The House on Paradise Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

return to a parallel ghost life – the one I would have had if I had not left England. That way, the disaster could be left behind. But even as I fantasised, I knew it was impossible. After all these years, Athens was home. It no longer mattered that I would always be a xéni – the word that used to haunt me when I heard it said of me in offices or shops. It always seemed an explanation of what I was not, what I lacked: a stranger, a foreigner and, above all, not Greek. I had struggled for a long time, trying to fit in, to do the right thing, to adapt, though eventually I preferred to embrace the freedom of existing on the margins. Still, in spite of everything, I loved Greece and I knew that going back to England could not be a solution. I had become an awkward hybrid who belonged nowhere – what an Italian friend called ne carne, ne pesce – neither fish nor fowl.
    My decision to come to Greece twenty years ago was somewhat chancy. I was embarking on a PhD in social anthropology and most of my contemporaries at Cambridge were planning to paddle up the Amazon to find lost swathes of rain forest or build their own mud hut in a forgotten African province. When I chose to examine “changing rites of passage on a Greek island”, it looked tame in comparison. My fellow students enjoyed teasing me about what was evidently my intention to live the good life in the Mediterranean – beaches and buckets of bright pink taramasalata. There’d be moustachioed men dancing, the twang of bouzoukis playing The Boys from Piraeus , and a Kodachrome backdrop of the sun-drenched Acropolis.
    I knew my decision irritated my grandfather. Desmond had been a classicist, teaching for many years at King’s College, London and was a life-long scholar of ancient Greece. His obsession was Parmenides – Socrates’ teacher and the so-called “father of Greek philosophy” – and he used to quote obscure phrases that meant little to me as a child. His favourite concerned the “wise mares” who were “straining at the chariot.” He thought this was a good explanation of life; as charioteers, we need to give our horses enough freedom to run, but also to control them so they kept on track. “And maidens were leading the way,” he would add, gnomically. When I became what he called “emotional,” he would say: “Tighten the reins on the horses, Maud. Don’t let them take control.” If my grandmother, Lucy, heard, she’d add: “Let the bloody horses have a good time, that’s what I say. Let them run wild.”
    My parents were not much in evidence. Having met at the Royal College of Music, they were just getting their first concerts with an ensemble that played early music on original instruments, when I was born. To add to my youthful resentment, they gave me a name I hated for its sturdy, old-fashioned quality. Nobody else of my age was called Maud, and it was no comfort that it cropped up through the generations on my mother’s side. Her paternal grandmother was a Maud and her death soon before my birth (plus an inheritance of £5,000) had made the choice almost a moral obligation. My grandfather never tired of quoting Tennyson’s poem Maud and “Come into the garden, Maud” was something I was sick of by the time I was five. Maud Thomas. It sounded solid and English, though my surname should have been Tomaszewski; my father’s grandparents had tried to shed their Polish past as quickly as possible when they arrived in London before the First World War. Although I had often thought of getting rid of Maud in much the same way, I never quite managed. Later, as it was almost impossible for Greeks to pronounce, it was Hellenised. I was called Mad, Maood, Mood, Moody, but more often Mod or Mond – Μοντ – which in written Greek ends with “nt” because there is no single letter for the sound of “d”. In practice, even Mond was frequently feminised to Mondy. At least it wasn’t Maud.
    My parents tried taking me on tour with