The woman sharing her house with me says, “Bombs are common. It seems like there’s one every week. Two of my embassy colleagues were targeted. Their car was set on fire then pushed off a cliff while they were in a restaurant eating. We’re all careful here.”
The room is dark, sealed away from the heat by heavy curtains.
I’ve already told her the basics – that Dad worked for the CIA in Athens and that I’ve come back to do some research, learn the truth about what happened during the junta. But I kept it light, didn’t go into my deepest fears and unanswered questions. Did Dad know about the coup before it happened? Did he know about the dictators’ dirty practices once the junta began – people dragged from their homes, metal bars swung into the soft soles of feet? They called this “falanga,” the treatment that maimed but left no scar.
The next morning, I pull out the list of locations I plan to visit – former detention centers, the U.S. embassy, our old house. The familiar panic sets in. What if I learn something I don’t want to know about Dad? You’re here, I tell myself. You’ve come all this way. Just do it. I decide on the embassy first and leave for the bus stop, keeping to the shade. At a small kiosk, I buy a ticket and ten minutes later, we roll out of upscale Filothei. Dad’s not here but I imagine him beside me. This may be my puzzle to solve but on some level it feels like a shared journey. He stands in the aisle and leans on his cane. The seats are hard and unyielding, too uncomfortable for his hip replacement, its metal buried deep inside his soft pelvis.
The bus turns onto Kifissias, the wide avenue that leads to downtown Athens, the same route Dad took to work every day, forty years ago. The same street too, where N17 killed its targets, pulled up to them at street lights, a bullet to the head, in broad daylight. If we had stayed longer, they might have pulled up to Dad one morning. I lean against the plastic bus window and close my eyes until we reach my stop.
The American embassy is set so far back from the street that I almost miss it. A high metal fence surrounds the building and thick bars cover the windows. My heart races. I feel exposed, as if everyone around me knows I’m the daughter of a spy. You’re fine, I tell myself, trying to dial down the panic. No one can tell anything.
In the near distance, I see a small guard house set into the earth like a bunker, and beyond, a glass door that leads directly into the building. That must be the entrance Dad used in the 60s before all the demos started. I pull out my journal to capture my feelings and help control my mounting fear. I’m just getting into it when a pack of guards rounds the corner and marches directly at me. My jaw clenches. They must think I’m planning some kind of anti-American demo. I brace for a confrontation but they pass without making eye contact.
The next morning, I call Dad.
“Yia sou korrrri mou,” he says when he picks up, letting his ‘r’ roll extra long. Hello my daughter. His playful tone makes me instantly guilty. I’ve told him but I haven’t. “I’m working on a book about the junta,” I said before my trip, when I couldn’t stand the guilt any longer. “Interesting!” He responded brightly, as if it was about something fun like hang gliding or surfing. How do I say, You, I’m researching you. And the CIA. And its connection to the dictatorship.
“Yia sou baba,” I answer. Hi Dad.
“You arrived safe and sound?” he asks, switching to English.
“Yep. It’s really hot.”
“I bet it is.”
“Hey Dad, what street was our old house on? Wasn’t it on a corner? I can picture it but have no idea which street. I want to try and find it while I’m here.”
“Let’s see. It was in the low numbers of March 19th Street,” he says. I jot down the street in my notebook.
A few days later, I plan to meet Zoe, a Greek-American friend, for dinner in Old Psychico, the neighborhood where my family lived so long ago. “Look for the metal sculpture at the entrance,” she says. When the bus gets close, I spot it – a collection of metal umbrellas attached to a huge wire grid. The umbrellas float up like lost birds.
I walk a few streets past the sculpture, look up to check the street I’m standing on and my stomach drops because I’m here. On March 19th. Our old street. Sweat drips under my shirt. I thought I would have to search for hours, maybe even have to come back another time. I check the map and the street sign again. Okay, March 19th starts here. The house in front of me has a solid wrap-around fence that sits on a cement wall and looks vaguely familiar. Could this actually be our old house? Except our fence wasn’t a wrap around. It had bars. I follow the fence down the side street, scanning for a crack and trying not to look conspicuous. An older woman at the bus stop eyes me.
I return to March 19th and follow it down the other side. The fence and wall extend all the way to the end of the property. At the end, I find a gate and in front of it, a step. I look around, place my finger tips on the gate and step up. The sky is darkening fast but I can make out a yard and a modest size house. This could be it, the place I played for hours, where I felt most whole. About twelve feet in front of me, a yellow light bulb illuminates a small side porch and a carved, wooden door. My mind flashes to a black and white photograph taken years ago, one I’ve stared at hundreds of times. Mom stands in front of the house in a short sleeve summer dress, her dark Jackie-O hair neatly combed. She holds me, still a baby, in her arms. Both our faces look content, open. Behind us is a wooden door with six carved panels, just like the one I am staring at. My pulse races. This is it. I’ve found it.
I rush back toward the umbrella sculpture and find Zoe in a loose fitting dress, her dark hair long and wavy, looking completely at home here, as if she belongs nowhere else.
“Hey Zoe!” I call out, walking fast.
“How are you?” she asks in a thick New York accent that gives her away.
“How are you?” she asks.
“I think I just found my old house,” I say, out of breath, hugging her.
“You’re kidding,” she says. “That was fast.”
There’s almost no light now but I want to show her. We go back to the gate, step up, and side by side, peer into the yard. “Wow,” she says, taking it in, “that’s a nice place.”
At the restaurant a few blocks away, Zoe requests a table outside then scans the terrace. “A lot of politicians come here. I thought maybe we’d see someone I could introduce you to. By the way, I wouldn’t tell anyone who your father worked for. You never know who you’re talking to here.”
A few days later, inside an air-conditioned Internet kiosk, I wait for Susan to scan and email the photograph of Mom holding me in front of the wooden door. I picture Susan standing in blue plaid pajamas, a cup of decaf in hand, pressing the buttons of our scanner, helping me as always. More than ever, I need her love, her reassurance that I will survive this descent into the junta and my own past. The list scribbled inside my journal shows all the places I plan to visit. Normal tourists list things like “beach” and “museum.” No one writes “former detention center.”
I step outside to call Dad again. Maybe he’s wrong. The house behind the fence becomes a mirage.
When he picks up, I ask, “Hey Dad, are you sure we lived on March 19th?”
“Eeme sigouros, kori mou.” I am sure, my daughter.
His playfulness irritates me. I’m sick of him being sweet, goofy Dad, while I’m the bad, treacherous daughter investigating her own father. I don’t feel like talking. “I think it was on a corner but do you remember the house number?”
“Gosh, no,” he says, “but I know it was on March 19th.”
Back inside, I find the email from Susan with the photograph of our house. I see the stairs and dark wooden door. The same door. It’s right there in front of me. The house on the corner of March 19th is our old house.
The next morning, on my way to the city center, as the bus passes the umbrellas of Old Psychico, I see the clay tiles of our roof. All day, I think of the house, carry it with me like a smooth pebble, a voice retrieved from my own warm depths.
A week later, I thumb through a museum brochure and find one I’ve never heard of or even imagined existed: The Museum of Anti-Dictatorial and Democratic Resistance.
“We close in an hour,” a man’s voice says when I call.
“I’m coming,” I say. “Wait for me.”
I rush to the bus stop and climb on. The driver opens his paper and spreads it wide across the steering wheel. The schedule says we should leave now. I curse him under my breath. Minutes tick by and the bus sits. Drive the fucking bus, I want to scream. The driver turns the pages slowly. To distract myself, I close my eyes and picture a museum with glass cases, a shop to buy postcards. Once I’m there, maybe, just maybe the pieces of my research will come together. Maybe I’ll learn there was no connection between the CIA and the dictatorship. Hope rises in the center of my chest. I want to hold onto its promise and warmth until it melts away the Cold War that sits between me and Dad. The bus engine roars to life and I open my eyes.
Twenty minutes later, I rush to the top of the park and find a medium-sized municipal one-story, cement structure. The plaque by the door reads: The Museum of Anti-Dictatorial and Democratic Resistance.
Dust hangs in midair inside the filtered sunlight of the building’s narrow hallway. There is no air-conditioning, no glossy gift shop, no modern café for well-heeled travelers. The whole place seems below low budget. To my right, a line of grim photographs hang unevenly across a wall with peeling paint. People with bruised faces and mangled bodies stare somberly at the photographer and at me. I hear voices from somewhere nearby. When I step into a doorway, the murmuring drops away.
“Excuse me, is the museum still open?” I ask.
A group of older men sit in white plastic chairs along the wall, staring.
“You’re the one who called?” a man with pure white hair asks, using slowed-down Greek, as if speaking to a child.
“Yes.”
“Do you know what kind of museum this is?” he asks.
My purple sun hat and the camera in my hand give off the wrong impression, I know. I glance at the sparsely furnished room and at the serious faces. Besides these elderly men, I sense I am the only one here. This is the Anti-Dictatorial museum, the plaque outside makes this clear enough, but there is something else implied by his question. The man’s face is weathered, his eyes intense and sad. That’s when I get it. I’m not inside a museum in the usual sense of the word. I’m inside a building that was once used to detain and torture.
“I know exactly where I am,” I answer, looking him in the eyes.
Another man, thin and energetic, jumps to his feet. “Come, I will show you our museum.”
He ushers me down a hallway that has no doors, only doorways and arches. Inside the building’s large central room stands a wooden partition. Old newspaper clippings, ragged and brown, have been stapled to it.
“Where are you from?” My guide asks.
“Ameriki,” I answer, kicking myself for not using the more politically correct but longer ‘United States of America.’
His face brightens and he says something about Bill Clinton. I squint. Maybe I’m not getting his Greek. Why is he talking about Clinton?
“Clinton came to Athens for a few hours. There were many protestors there – against the United States and the CIA,” he explains.
“Bill Clinton came? What did he say?” I ask.
My guide’s Greek speeds up and I lose the gist.
“Did he talk about the junta?” I ask, trying to understand.
“This is what I am telling you,” a child-like smile creeps across his face. “He apologized.”
I knew Clinton traveled to Athens but I hadn’t realized he apologized. I look into my guide’s open face. His eyes shine. The elation is clear and I see what can happen when a U.S. leader, a former president, acknowledges a decades-old U.S. transgression, the U.S.’s complicity in a brutal dictatorship. Such a simple gesture but so important.
Next he leads me to a small room, no more than eight feet square. In the rooms we’ve passed, I’ve noticed memorabilia. This one’s empty. No furniture or photographs, just a bare cement floor. I feel a chill. A chain with a rusted metal sign hangs across the threshold. I read the sign and breathe hard. Kratistiria Basanaton. Torture Chamber. I can’t focus on what he’s saying to me. I stare at the crumbling walls, the sagging chain. People were brought here, to this exact spot. Whipped and beaten for wanting their government back. I’ve studied the junta and its torture methods, read books and articles, written about it over and over in my journal but standing here makes it real.
He points to a thin whip nailed to the wall and draws back his arm, releases it, and draws it back again. I know how whips work. I want him to stop. He keeps going with his cartoonish gesture, swinging his arm up and out. My heart pounds.
“Katalaves?” he asks.
“Katalava. Katalava.” I say. I understand.
He points down the hallway, toward the room of old men. “We are all volunteers here for an organization.”
Organization? I give him my pen and notebook. “Grapsto parakalo,” I say. Write it please.
Hand shaking, he writes out each word slowly. The script sits jagged like my heart: Union of Imprisoned and Exiled Resisters, 1967-1974.
They were all here. Or somewhere like here. All detained and abused. And now they spend their days showing people around these flimsy display boards with brown newspapers that will soon turn to dust. I don’t know what to say to him. How to acknowledge what he’s telling me, the pain inside the place I’m standing.
“Thank you for the tour,” I say, after he leads me back to the entrance. The men in the room beside me are talking now, oblivious to my presence. I turn toward the door.
“To vivlio!” The guard’s plea makes me turn back around. He points to a small spiral notebook on a stand. A long list of signatures runs up and down the pages, visitors from around the world. I stare at the last name, someone from Norway. Then it registers. He wants me to sign. What if one of the old men recognizes my last name and thinks I’m some kind of undercover CIA agent? They might run after me, chase me for being the daughter of a spy. A spy who did or didn’t help set up the coup. A spy who did or didn’t help the dictators once they came to power. I want to push through my fear and shame, push past all the questions I’ll probably never answer and just meet this moment. Stand in it despite it all and say I was here, that I know what happened in this place. I want it to be my apology for things I didn’t do but know occurred. My own country implicated.
Dad hovers beside me. Forget your shame, I tell myself. Forget him and sign your name. I pick up the pen and write Amerikaniki Sungrafeas. American Writer. Then my name. If they stone me, they stone me. I open the door and step out into the overwhelming brightness of the relentless sun.
An earlier version of “The Book” was originally published in Bellevue Literary Review as “Torso.” The piece has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
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