The house on the cliff

into whole tales with a narrative flow and a moral, others rougher, more primitive, still reeking of blood. I take on the role of family chronicler, not in order to write the official version, just to set down the latest, most recent one. I hope there will be later versions. In my family, we don’t talk. We communicate, of course, about everyday things, we discuss practical matters. Some of us will also tell stories about the past, ideally the very distant past, many of them handed down the generations. There are also some who have made a profession of it, Aunt Eléni for example. Her stories about the old days, mainly the years of her childhood, form the backbone of the famous series of children’s books, colourfully illustrated in her own hand, which made her, as “Eleni”, a household name in the 1950s. Even today, many years after her death, they remain in print and the royalties provide her heirs with a modest annual income. Look at me talking about Aunt Eléni making a profession of storytelling, when I too earn my living writing stories. Mine, of course, are based on what is demonstrably true, on undisputed facts – and they have nothing to do with our family and its past. As a journalist, I specialise in a sort of verbal portraiture – interview-based, my profiles of people in the news are detailed, precise – they have been described as photographic. I write in English, and, these days, I am established enough to choose my own subjects, people I find interesting and enjoy writing about, no more than five a year. These profiles appear in the Sunday magazine of a prestigious American newspaper with a wide circulation. I am free to work as I like, not subject to the management of any editor, and this allows me to make my own schedule, with a great deal of free time. I don’t have any dependents, or only borrowed ones, and my New York apartment is minimally furnished and easily maintained. I like it that I can lock the door behind me and leave whenever I want, for as long as I want. It feels strange to be writing in Greek. I haven’t done so since my father died, putting an end to our correspondence. It is to him, to our regular letters back and forth, that I owe my remaining sense of Greek as my own language despite a lifetime abroad. I can sense his presence beside me as I write, always ready to correct my spelling or to point out that I have succumbed once again to my most frequent sin, translating from English! Back when Eléni was still alive, we always wrote to each other in English, since her Greek was even worse than mine. Our family has spoken English for a long time, but I, at least, attended a Greek school for quite a few years before my exile began at the age of fourteen. I won’t make excuses for the quality of my written language in this text. I don’t write professionally in Greek, and I never studied the language beyond such basics as are taught to schoolchildren. I am Greek, and I write as I speak…in Greek. I take no ethical position as regards the use of demotic Greek or katharévousa , there are good people writing in the formal and the informal idiom alike, and we