Nicholas Papandreou

Threepenny Review, 2009, Summer Issue

TABLE TALK

On George Papandreou, the elder

Recently I went to purchase a high-tech computer backpack at the new electronics mega-store called PUBLIC, located, appropriately enough, in the heart of Athens, Constitution Square. At the entrance of the large, refurbished nineteenth-century structure, where people sip coffee at a bar perched strategically in front of the store, stands a big bronze plaque:

From this building, on October 18, 1944, George Papandreou, Prime Minister of Greece, gave the Speech of Liberation that marked the end of the German occupation.

At the time he gave that speech—and in fact up until the end of his life—my grandfather lived in a house located in the area of Kastri, a suburb north of Athens. Not being a rich man (for he had been born into poverty), he built his home far from Athens, where in the 1930s real estate was dirt cheap. Back then, there were practically no other homes around. Today it is my sister’s home: my grandfather left it to her, his only granddaughter, as a dowry in his will. The neighborhood is now considered extremely upscale, and builders covet the only remaining pre-war home, with its two acres of untouched pine forest.

Each Saturday of my childhood—once we had returned to Greece from Berkeley, where I was born—our family would have lunch at the house in Kastri. The family seemed fully united, and this particular constellation, consisting of father married to mother, grandfather divorced from grandmother, and us four kids, felt engraved in granite. We were usually served chicken with rice and a bechamel sauce, while my grandfather and my father, who had decided to enter Greek politics and abandon his academic career in Berkeley, discussed the issues of the day. Some time was allotted to us kids, but the high point for me was when lunch was over. That’s when the old man would give us an allowance of a hundred drachmas, worth three dollars and thirty three cents. With this injection, on the return trip I would stop in Kifissia, at a kiosk that still exists forty years later, to buy American comic books. They went for a dollar each, which meant I could and did buy three each Saturday, saving the change for three weeks to buy yet a fourth. I amassed quite a collection in those years, but was not able to bring it with me the night we fled the country in 1968, with my father’s life in danger from the military dictatorship that had just released him from jail. We left with only a small suitcase each: comic book collections were deemed inessential, and on the scale of things, they certainly were.

At those lunches, my grandfather never failed to act the perfect gentleman, and would always offer my mother and sister a rose. He would say with some pride that he himself had planted the rosebush when he first moved in. Some days, he would walk us into the garden so that he could show us the most recent bloom; he’d bend and say, “Smell. This is life.” Here was a man, I later realized, who was in touch with his senses, was always well dressed, always aware of his image, always polishing his voice and his rhetoric, a man who even in exile found ways of loving the places where he found himself.

On the night of the 1967 coup, when most of the politicians were dragged to prison in their underwear, my father included, my grandfather asked the soldiers to do him a favor and give him a moment. If he was going to be arrested, it was going to be in style. As reported to us much later by my father, the old man arrived at the political holding ground (a way-station for the prisons) fully shaved and nicely cologned, and wearing his three-piece suit to boot. Not only that. In full display was the piece de resistance: a rose from his very own rosebush pinned to his lapel.

When he was finally released from prison, my grandfather spent his final days in that Kastri home, under house arrest, before his demise at the age of eighty. Each day, he wore his suit and tie, without fail. He could barely bend down to shine his shoes, but he wanted to look completely unruffled each morning, as if being under house arrest was a temporary condition.

In the spring of 1968, the last spring he would ever enjoy, Kastri dripped with life: the rosebush, the pine trees, the small olive grove. My grandfather wanted to smuggle out a speech to the BBC, which was broadcasting into the country, but he was being watched. He had a recording machine, which the guards had failed to notice, but how was he to use it without being discovered? He decided to play the palaverous cranky old man recalling his past. In front of the soldiers, out in the garden, he would take his walk but now he would talk to himself, sometimes quoting himself from his old speeches, other times coming up with completely new ones. At first they listened in: after all, he was considered a danger. To impress upon them his imbalance, he purposely exaggerated the old flourishes, the intonations, the pauses. Here, in the garden, surrounded by scurrilous but also some respectful soldiers and sergeants who sat beneath the tall pine trees, it didn’t take much to act as if senility had finally come to collect one more soul.

He read the actual speech into a carefully placed microphone in his office. (By then, the soldiers had given up listening in.) As the son of a village priest, he often injected religious anniversaries with political purpose and the Easter of 1968 coincided conveniently with the first anniversary of the coup. His speeches always had a certain biblical style to them, a pithiness and a tendency to aphorism, and it was with these linguistic weapons that he had forged his own unique voice. Greece of Christian Greeks, this speech began, mocking the dictator’s penchant for beginning his own speeches with those very same words. Today, the Greece of Christian Greeks is catholically protestant. Today, though we celebrate the resurrection of Christ, we mourn for the crucifixion of the Greek people.

I recently had occasion to listen to the unedited recording—apparently the BBC filtered out the extraneous sounds when it finally aired the speech. I swear I can hear bits of my own childhood in the background: the sounds of the street, a car in the distance, a lone motorcycle racing up the hills of Kastri, its single lung sputtering with intent. Perhaps it’s only my imagination, but I think I can also distinguish the hoarse cry of the paliatzis, a man who would drive through the neighborhoods on a horse-drawn cart, selling old items collected from abandoned homes.

—Nick Papandreou

Nick Papandreou Threepenny Review, March 2006 I am a writer in a family with an enormous historical archive, a public record that just keeps growing and growing. Sound bites from my father’s and grandfather’s speeches (both prime ministers of Greece) have been quoted and regurgitated to me by the faithful since I was a child, though now I have ended up learning them from the original. This is because I have become the family’s keeper, collecting anecdotes, stories, letters, tapes, pictures, home movies. Anecdote 1: “But old man,” someone said to a villager in Crete during an election campaign, “why vote for Papandreou again? Didn’t you hear him admit that he’s made many mistakes?” The old man smiles. “I’ll vote for him until he stops making them.” Anecdote 2: I am waiting for the bus on a busy street in Athens. A thirty-something working class woman on a moped stops at a red light. When she sees me she does a double take, then removes her helmet. “What can you do, poor soul,” she says, shaking her head in pity. “It’s not your fault all you children are failures. It’s because your father was so great. And there’s nothing you can do about it.” In an Athenian democracy only elected citizens wielded power. In modern Greece power has become an an extended family affair – the children of politicians are democratically voted into power themselves. One person has called it “The Republic of Inheritance” because today the country is run by the offspring of politicians. My older brother did his best to remove the slur of dynastic democracy when the socialist party founded by my father came into his hands just over two years ago. To deter detractors, he brought the matter to a popular vote, open to all Greeks and not just party members. He garnered over a million votes – as solid a blessing as any that he, at least, has full approval to take over where his father left off. I suppose this only reinforces the “Republic of Inheritance,” though George himself campaigns on a theme of meritocracy and equal rights. To make matters worse, things morph into dangerous Gaddafi-like terrain over on this side of the Atlantic — I am the “general secretary” of a shoe-string operation called the Andreas Papandreou Foundation, not to be confused with the near-defunct George Papandreou Foundation (grandfather and older brother’s name) or the more active “Andreas Papandreou Institute for Strategic Studies,” which is the socialist party think tank. My sister Sophia used to live on George Papandreou Street and this geographical conundrum was the reason she received hundreds of other people’s letters who lived up and down the street. Fortunately all four of siblings and my 83 year-old Gloria Steinem-like feminist mother learned early on to take a healthy distance from the cult of personality (key fobs with your father’s image, poems written in his name, people on the street welling up in tears, pictures of yourself on the eight o’clock news, et cetera) and to lead separate lives. I do admit I am sometimes tempted to scrap the high Athenian ideals and yield to elements of the “inheritance.” I dream that if Minnessota born elder brother George comes to power (pollsters predict it could happen in two years), like the hero with the wooden sword I will charge at some controversial problems, perhaps the illegal open air landfill where all of Athens dumps its un-recycled refuse, or the cancerous electric power generating smoke-stacks polluting the town of Megalopolis, or better yet take down the taverns on the beaches of Zakynthos where the endangered Caretta turtles lay their eggs. Why not make that small shift from the Republic of Inheritance to the Country of Nepotism? Using this unethically derived sibling power, why not work towards morally just causes like getting the cops to crack down on the importation of sex slaves from Eastern Europe or proffer citizenships to genocide victims from Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Darfur, and Rwanda… why with brother George in power I’ll get that basketball court next to my apartment re-tarred and the nets fixed. Christ but it’s an odd temptation to have staring at you. The only way to avoid it is to hunker down to the written word, read the Threepenny Review while leaning against a pine tree next to the shores of Spetses, take notes on the texture of the bark and wait for the Hellenic version of The Truman Show to reach its odd conclusion, if ever. (We now have children too…) I recently published a short book on my father’s rhetorical style – his metaphors and similes, the theatrical dialogues he used to liven up his speeches, his use of the first person. I explored the “narrative” he invented to provide his large audience with a coherent political story. This narrative has now become the country’s unofficial history. Snapshot version: Greece- a small country, buffeted by civil war and dictators, initially subservient to the needs of America’s Cold War policy, finally finds its voice, expands the space for democracy, makes lots of noise, finally grows up and joins the ranks of nations. Like so many, I too was swept away by the intensity of his political battle, his jailing, his exile, his charm, the crowds, the speeches, the sheer passion of the thousands who clapped for him. Perhaps I should have been more careful. For too long I was trapped inside pages written by my forefathers. Maybe I still am. However I sit down each day and at least for a few hours I write myself out of their book.