The house on the cliff

recruited desperately, even including his toddler half-siblings as well as the village boys we played football with. We would all stand to attention in a row, saluting the flag while the others pelted us with rotten figs. My favourite role was that of the highest ranking rebel officer, one of the three who was executed. With my hands tied behind my back and my eyes bound as in blind man’s buff, I was led to the cypress tree opposite the firing squad. There, in a thunderous voice, I would demand that the blindfold be removed before the order was given to FIRE! There was a great deal of fuss when this aspect of the game reached the ears of parents, and the precious BB guns belonging to Evgénios and Grigóris were confiscated indefinitely, despite their swearing that they only ever aimed at the trees, far above our heads. We stopped playing the game after that, the effect was just not the same when the order to Fire! was answered only by shouts of “Bang! Bang!” Even I, as I fell dramatically to the ground, had been happier when I wasn’t entirely sure whether or not I had actually been shot. Tákis’ father had not lived out his sentence. Before the year was out, the dank darkness of the dungeon where he was confined in the company of any number of pathogens had undone him. His constitution had always been delicate - glandular fever they called it, back then. His unspectacular death did not feature in our games. In the social circle he came from, his name was spoken only in whispers, accompanied by meaningful looks, and his widow, the three years of mourning over, soon married the good doctor, unimpeachably royalist to the hilt. There had been talk, too, of Tákis taking his stepfather’s name, but there his paternal relatives balked, and Vryónis he remained. I have thought, since, on the rare occasions I had cause to recall these childhood games, that this macabre insistence on reenacting the stripping of rank and execution was a bereaved son’s attempt to hold on to the memory of his father in a society keen to forget his ever having existed. It was a brilliant, if almost certainly subconscious, gambit - the result being that no child who took part, however tangentially, in the game, ever forgot Tákis’ father, nor his unjust end. Tákis himself, at least to my mind, was rather unmemorable. Strong, to be sure, a capable athlete, he was never that enthusiastic a participant in our competitions. He followed us about cheerfully, offering an encouraging audience to our accomplishments, and the odd ingenious solution to our dilemmas. He was different, but somehow…respected by all. I can’t think of a better word. He would often offer up unsolicited bits of knowledge about our environment - the names of plants or minerals, the habits of birds, or random statistics. I can’t say we paid much attention, unless Daddy was there to reply and lead him into a discussion we were all drawn into. When Evgénios and Grigóris weren’t there, I spent more time with Tákis’ family. They would take me with them when they went swimming. Kyría Kokkíni, the little ones, Tákis and I, would all pile in to the big black De Soto the doctor used for house calls outside town, and the driver, raising great