The house on the cliff

harping on the hostilities, on “government forces” and “insurrectionists” or “brigands” as many called them. I should say that this peculiar war that was going on had in no way affected the reality of my life. If it was a war, why didn’t they call it a war? All the references were to “clashes” in the “mountains”, “the unpleasantness”, “the incidents”. My father tended to say “the adventures”, probably using the word in the ancient sense of sudden or catastrophic events. When anyone said “the War”, they always meant World War II. It’s true that when driving from Athens to Kifissía we had to stop at a roadblock in Maroússi for our papers to be inspected and stamped. There were soldiers there with machine guns. It wasn’t scary because they would joke with the driver, and it didn’t delay us much because there weren’t that many cars on the road in those days. It’s also true that sometimes, when I was coming home from school, I’d find angry crowds of people in dark clothes gathered at the corner of Akadimías Avenue and Mavromicháli Street, surrounded by lines of policemen. They were shouting slogans which, to me, were incomprehensible, just garbled cries. I knew they had something to do with the fighting in the mountains, but my black school pinafore gave me the freedom to make my way through the mob unmolested, careless, self-absorbed. Once in a while I would hear of someone we knew who had “gone to the mountains” or “joined the army”, the respective euphemisms indicating which of the two sides had recruited him. In many families, there were members in both camps. Of course I knew that Uncle Víctor, the famous Colonel Velissáris, was considered the tactical brains of the armed forces, and responsible for many victories. In an attempt to wriggle out of reading her the newspapers, I suggested Jules Verne instead. She used to enjoy that in the old days. But no, she wanted to know what was going on. When we were out in the country like this she was cut off from her usual network of information, the service stairs, the shopkeepers and concierges of the neighbourhood, even my father, when the two of them would whisper together in the kitchen of Omírou Street late into the night. In Corfu, when she went to town once a week for the shopping, she chatted with the stall holders in the market and the other customers, but the news was usually unreliable, the facts disputed, leaving her with many questions unanswered. Lately we didn’t have a radio, either. The heavy batteries that powered it had run down, and the bike shop in town was taking a long time to recharge them. There was no way out. Resigned, I went and got the latest papers from the corner where she kept them. She had them stacked in chronological order, with the headlines she was interested in marked. I started reading, distractedly at first, without paying much attention to the articles, but slowly I started to understand the portent of what I read - the ragged retreat of the insurrectionists, how they were