The Manuscript

In the afternoon of a Bangkok day, I opened an envelope and read a few lines, and couldn’t decide if I was the subject of a thousand pop songs, or I had been asked to pay up for a long-outstanding debt. In my hands was a manuscript, handed to me in a brown envelope which bore my name in capitals, British stamps, and no return address. I didn’t recognise the handwriting, and ripped it open with indifference by the side of my car in a parking lot.

The opening, ornate and Athenian, was enough to know it was by an ex, a Greek girl I hadn’t heard from in twenty years.

Pop love is hard, you can’t have it, then you get it and it hurts and you don’t want to lose it, or it’s over and you wonder where it’s gone. Here I was, re-living an old love; spent pleasures, broken promises, forgotten obsessions – all best forgotten.

I read a few more lines before tossing the manuscript onto the passenger seat. Heading off, I thought about her as I drove past the City Pillar shrine. As I plied my way home, I found myself threading Athens to Bangkok, running from the Chaophraya river to the corner of the Grand Palace, by the Chapel of the Emerald Buddha, turning at the magnificent banyan in the park, towards Chinatown, from there to Rama IV road and soon up onto the expressway and out to the suburbs.

I met her in 2003, the night Iraq was invaded. I had recently moved back to Athens from London and was out at a taverna, with a large group of friends. Everyone started getting text messages, except for the two of us, hold-outs against mobile phones. People were looking glum; we had been anticipating the invasion for weeks. Despite the mood, she smiled at me – pulling me back from memories of the first Gulf War, when I was a kid, living in Athens. We met properly at a party in Koukaki later that week.

Just as I was getting home, a few fat drops hit the car window, then the storm came in, a cataclysm of noise and water. I read hovering in the hallway by the shoe-rack, tempted to get rid of the thing. From that opening paragraph I had understood she was writing about us, it was peppered with allusions, my morbid preoccupations, my attraction to decay and dysfunction.

I can see us at the top of Lycabettos; her profile is at the centre of an urban vista, the south and west of central Athens below us, her face becoming a restless line framed by a wash of crystalline tenement buildings under a brutal sky. We are arguing about the city out there – childish – as if either of us could have had enough inside to comprehend a thing of such magnitude.

In her story, it’s Boy meets Girl, with classical frills. It’s us: my ex-girlfriend plays the spoiled Athenian, while a lost kid with a connection to Athens is me. She mocks, lifting a line from one of my old notebooks into her character’s mouth, “I want to be a joy-rider crying out in pleasure, like a shooting star in the dark heavens.” It took me straight back to a beach one July night with her to my side.

The characters are caught in the northerly breeze, surrounded by flowers, tombs, and sightseers grazing on the shiny flagstones of Plaka. I flicked through the loose pages hoping for a note. There was nothing, not even her name on the title page. Was this book – a relic from 2004 – revenge, or an exorcism?

Outside it poured. There was thunder. A foreboding scene, except that Thai storms are soothing, the way they break through the constant flat heat. I flicked back and through her book at random. It rained throughout the night; I stayed up until late reading, before falling into a troubled sleep.

The Next Day

When I got up the next morning it had stopped raining. The street was a foot under water in front of my house. I had slept poorly, befuddled by the story. At one point, just before it began to get light, I imagined a figure looming at the end of my bed. A girlfriend come to haunt me.

The flood brought bad traffic. Unable to cancel my appointments in town I steeled myself for the ordeal. Taking the long route to the highway, that avoided a dip in the road, where I had witnessed several cars drowning over the years, I joined the logjam of cars and trucks, my blood pressure rising as I settled in for the grind towards the U-Turn bridge.

After a time, finally on the upper expressway, I scanned the grey vista. Not long ago it had been marshland, and orchards; all replaced by warehouses, factories, and housing complexes. “Midway upon the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood.” Like Dante, I was another aging man in search of a girl from my youth.

I see her at the seat beside me. We are in Athens, near Karaiskaki Square, three addicts slope up through the cars. A tall man with a ragged shaved head, and a stringy girl knock on car windows, panhandling without conviction, a third limps along behind. “Don’t you think they have some other-worldly purpose about them?” She says.

Life in Bangkok is all about the car; it’s a solitary world, in which the drivers are obscured by tinted glass windows; sometimes in the early evening, when the expressway flows it has a lyrical quality: the fast-changing colours of the sky, those pearly street lamps, the glinting refinery with its flames and piping at Klongtoey.

Likewise, you can’t know Athens unless you drive. We went to out of the way places, like a couple having an affair. Sometimes I thought she was ashamed, the way she kept our relationship in constant motion.

Ultimately, I let us down. That was clear to me now, reading her manuscript, being brought back to those times. She never told me that she was writing a book but I saw her scribbling out pages; she used a cheap ballpoint pen and looked intense but also fragile. I was wrapped up in my own projects.

Even though it had been tacitly agreed from the beginning, increasingly I found it impossible not to make demands. I thought she was cheating. When I confronted her, she smiled at me, and refused to engage with my accusations. It was childish, because I wasn’t exactly faithful to her all the time either. She seemed so distant, and I felt her condescension, that I was not worth the explanation or considerations that a real boyfriend would be given. That’s essentially how we parted.

Bangkok was changing. It wasn’t just the skyline, which from the expressway resembled a row of jagged teeth: pushed up over the recent years. Like everywhere else, there was the city before and after the Pandemic. It was hard to say what had been lost, and why. The electric charge of Bangkok had dulled, less street-life, less atmosphere. Covid had not hit especially hard, but there had been a lot of suicide; now that was over, the despair and desperation weren’t talked about. It occurred that I may have felt the city was slipping away because I was attached to the Bangkok of a specific era, just as I was attached to a certain Athens – and these places were contingent on factors that cannot be reproduced.

*

The book was on my mind throughout the working day. If the boy was meant to be me, it was cruel. The character was a mess, he was precious in a way that I hadn’t been. Vain yet self-effacing – I hated him and his luke-warm masochism. But he was familiar enough too. I couldn’t be sure if she was drawing a portrait, or making a spoof. It was possible that the whole thing was a parody within a parody – her manuscript an act of post-modernity recalling Edgar Allen Poe’s MS Found in a Bottle and Potoki’s Saragossa Manuscript, a film she admired. Her story was riddled with details from our life together, moments that had felt important, and small things that only we could have enjoyed, and only I could now savour. But it was 2004 in pill-form, and to that extent I was gratified.

She described protests like an oral historian of exciting non-events:

The air prickled with tear-gas, a toxic spritz over union members, Trotskyites, and splinter groups, representatives of the main leftwing political parties, anarchists, communists, greens, celebrities and nonentities. Many of the marchers had converted their anti-Nato banners, left over from the Kosovo demonstrations, to anti-anti-terrorism flags; some groups marched in formation, carrying their staves like guns, others danced.

A volley of tear gas canisters hit the street splitting the crowd, and teams of green clad riot police charged to push the protestors back. Soon a series of large rubbish bins on wheels had been set alight and were careening into the police, who retreated, and into the space came Molotovs that splashed liquid flames on impact.

Elsewhere, our relationship was described in streams of expletives – likened to an act of possession, the workings of a succubus.

*

Her book wanted to be a thriller, in the gory, stylised tradition of the giallo; and she had no qualms about alluding to films we had liked by Brian De Palma and Dario Argento. I discerned an even clearer source to her tale: we both loved Japanese ghost stories. I had a VHS of the sumptuous colour film Kwaidan, by Misaki Kobayashi that we must have watched three or four times together. This was an anthology film, based on a book by Lefcadio Hearn – a 19^th century Irish-Greek who had ended up in Japan, where he collected and rewrote Japanese ghost stories. The opener in Kwaidan featured a samurai who is dissatisfied with his wife, she is a good person but without the wealth and connections he craves. The samurai leaves her for a noblewoman, who helps him advance, but is cold and mean-spirited. He finds himself haunted by the memory of the woman he left, the one he had loved. Eventually the samurai returns to his former home, where to his surprise everything is as he had left it. His wife is still there, she does not ask questions, he is relieved and content, that in spite of his actions he has not damaged anything; they have a meal together, and go to bed. When he wakes, he is in a ruined house, the place has been empty for years, he goes white with terror realising that he has bedded a ghost.

One night we caught Mizogushi’s Ugetsu Monogatari in Exarchia. We had been arguing, and I saw the listing in Athinorama, translated into Tales of a Pale Autumn Moon, I wanted some space but she wouldn’t let me go alone. At the cinema, the screen rippled in the breeze, and she must have been watching the way I shivered and stared through the story about a man who sleeps with a female spirit, who refuses to let him go.

Coming out of the cinema we were hungry and ended up at a fast-food joint near Syntagma, it was bright, like being in the filament of a light-bulb, with the night streets looking in. “You believe in ghosts,” she asserted, and was kinder for a time.

Reading on, the story became feverish. Beneath the erratic plot I discerned Athens taking on an agency, subverting the narrative. Forgetting the human characters, she makes a proposition:

An understanding of the landscape and sites of Attica is important when attempting to discern its emotional character. Can a place have feelings, character?

She can’t decide for us; instead the reader is presented with a list of myths relating to places:

At the modern suburb of Halandri, with its apartment blocks and access to Kifissias Avenue, there was once a temple dedicated to the goddess Rhea. Her devotees, all women, would go into trances and cut themselves. In remembrance of the death of a beautiful man, who died under a pine tree, they sprayed the goddess’s altar and sacred tree with their blood.

During the rite, it was not uncommon for a man to be inspired. He would castrate himself with a ceremonial blade, then charge off and throw his severed penis into a random house, whose occupants would provide him with women’s clothing – then he could join the other priestesses.

Dionysos gave the secret of the vine to a farmer in Attica. The locals tasted the farmer’s drink and thought they had been poisoned and murdered him, burying his body by a tree. In grief, the farmer’s daughter, Erigone, hung herself from a branch of that tree and Dionysos sent madness over the locals, causing their daughters to copy Erigone, and hang themselves from the trees near their homes. The area would eventually be known as Dionysos.

Agamemnon angered Artemis, when he killed a deer in her sacred grove. It was Artemis who stopped the winds that Agamemnon needed to sail to Troy, and it was for this that he sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia.

Here the narrative shifts, and Iphigenia – though dead – has been saved by Artemis, who hides her, and later brings her to the temple at Braurona, in Attica.

At this sanctuary of the goddess, it was customary for Athenian girls to pretend to be bears for a time, and then return home. This play acting was a memory of an insult, an atonement for mistreating the wilds. Without the bear-girls, it was believed that pestilence would come, the furious side of nature.

Not far from the celebrated temple of Braurona was another cult where, in honour of Artemis, girls performed a ritual. At night they danced and drew blood from a man’s throat.

*

Although she had little interest in worldly matters, I wanted clarity. I wanted to understand why she had sent me the manuscript. I thought perhaps she had been sick, that the book had been sent from an institution, or after her suicide.

The way we had lost each other had been wilful. It was easier then, without social media. Hoping at least to find her alive, I went online but there was nothing. It was likely that she had married and changed her surname since I last knew her.

After searching one of my boxes I fished out an ancient address book. I had the landline for her family house. I tapped the digits out with a grin on my face, beginning to rehearse the words. My bad Greek was not needed. Instead, I got a recorded message. The number you are calling is not in use. Naturally the line had been disconnected.

I trawled through Greek friends’ Facebook accounts, looking at their contacts in the hope that I might spot her. She was a blank. I had never been close to her friends. Only a few of my people might have met her in the time we were together. Theo and Orestes, both were surprised to hear my voice though neither remembered meeting her.

The envelope had been sent from London. Perhaps Athens was no longer her home. I felt as if I had made her up. I went through my things again, that same box where I had kept the address book. I had no photos of her, or letters, this was not unusual, since we were together in the time just at the end of film photography, before digital cameras took off. People weren’t snapping every passing moment and we were too busy messing around to think of getting a shot of it. As for letters: well, we were young.

For the sake of myself, and the fictional characters consigned by her lack of resolution to an incomplete universe – I tried to bring about a conclusion. I felt she would have wanted something punchy at the end, and began to rewrite parts her story.

*

Taking a break, I went outside for a brief walk. I needed to clear my head but Bangkok was bleached-out, toneless and hot.

I wanted to discover a form that worked. All I could do was add words on top of hers, glossing a story which she had failed to master.

Bringing back the past, all this Atticising, felt kitsch. Neither of us could reclaim our youth. Athens was different now; the world had moved on. What was the use in trying to capture lived experience within this fiction? The topography of Athens was symbolic for most people, made up of goddesses and heroes, not naïve twenty-somethings, trying to get laid. If there was something important about this, worth preserving for posterity, which I still believed there was, it would be a greater task than bringing back ancient Theseus and the witch Medea.

I found common ground with Marguerite Yourcenar, in the introduction of her book Fires, she refers to her 1930s Greek friends: “people who represented then contemporary reality, seem to me today more removed and abolished by time than the myths and obscure legends that personify them.”

I toyed with a trip to Athens to dispel the mood. Even spending a few hours online searching for cheap tickets. As I looked at the aggregator sites, images of Athens popped up, it looked glossy and far removed from the place that I knew. Athens was desirable but the filters and algorithmic tricks of digital photography made it the same as everywhere else. The same perfect sky, the same vivid colour palette, and flattened shadows.

When I first met her Athens was a great enigma. Even in its ugliness it was dramatic, generously polyvalent, worth knowing in its details. I obsessed about the small things, like the way the briny winds tore through the city during spring, bringing extreme clarity. From a high point a person could see all the way from the centre of town up to Mount Pendeli, and Parnitha, a pristine carpet of grey buildings in between. Looking south, Piraeus and the sea beyond appeared almost at an arm’s distance, while the island of Aegina jutted reassuringly like a volcanic mass. I understood these places to be perfectly as they were and should be and needed to be.

Our relationship had been about sensation, ultimately the aesthetic revelation we desired through each other was to do with everyday things: A cloud of yellow pollen rising as pine trees spring back from the wind. The summer day, with the shutters closed, feeling the coolness of the naked floor, and eating peaches, which melted from our fingers.

“Now is never here in Athens.” I once told her. “I find here, that while the moment is ongoing it turns into memory; experience becomes nostalgic even as it occurs.

The thrill of a simple, everyday moment, was so intense that it not only brought back the past, but it spilled over into the future, into our lives – so we were young but getting stooped over with recollection and reminiscence, which wasn’t even ours.”

*

Through the total appreciation of the sensory world, we hoped to transcend it – a contradiction inherent in aesthetics, and love.

Not knowing what to do with this tentative knowledge we tried to record it believing that it had something to do with the landscapes of our youth. But this is the problem, because Attica has always mocked people. That’s what many of those old stories are about, people trying to get close to the divinity, and getting shredded, turned into animals, cursed, driven to self-immolation, and mutilation.

It mocks because it wants simplicity. All our attempts at channelling the place’s character turn to garish ornamentation.

I flicked through the old address book where I had found her defunct number, it was leather bound; something you get at Christmas, too precious for use. As I glanced at forgotten names and addresses, I came across a photograph wedged between the pages. It was hers. I had stolen it from her kitchen, where she kept it wedged in the corner of a cupboard.

The photograph is black and white. I cannot say when it was taken, except that the pathway running down the centre of the shot is dusty, and that there is a bus running along Areopagitou, which has been pedestrianised since the early 2000s. Here we can see the Acropolis, the Roman theatre of Herodes Atticus, Lycabettus in the background, and part of Mount Hymettus. In the shade near the foreground is a shack, and a few people are further down the track. I would say it’s anytime between the late 1950s and mid 1960s. Before the dictatorship, before my era.

I can tell that the sky must have been a perfect blue. Shadows are lengthening from the west. It is the afternoon. I am sure that it is September. The ground is dry but people are wearing dark clothing, unsuitable for the summer. This is my favourite time of the year. But this is not an invitation to a holiday.

The blue sky, the late September weather, the breeze, the scent, the sound of the distant bus, and that pine tree whistling.

The most important thing in the world is right there in my mind for an instant. Then it is gone. It comes back when I’m not expecting it but refuses to be committed to the page.

How can this matter so much? That specific quality of existence is inside me. I do not come from there; this is before my time. I cannot own it; it cannot be given. It is both inside of me and outside, waiting to be felt. Calling it a Madeleine, after Proust, is not enough.

This sense, which is part of everyone, and ultimately is not confined to Athens, Attica, Greece, Greeks, me, travellers, people who like Georges Perec etc. this sense, is universal. And what is it, this beatific, maddening, impossible thing if not the presence of a spirit?