Sonny’s Guerrillas:
A novella by Matthew Asprey
Copyright [c] 2011 Matthew Asprey.
First published June 2011
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This book is for Peter Doyle
I: THE CALL
1.
I was nominated for Best Original Soundtrack at the Zanesville Indie Film Festival. The festival organisers sent me an email about it. I didn’t win but that was fine. I couldn’t have been more surprised. I never thought Sonny Lee’s movie would be shown anywhere. What’s more, I’ve heard that The River and the Dam is now a popular illegal download on the internet. Well, steal the movie for all I care. Sonny never paid me for my music. It took me a long time to pull myself out of the ditch after that debacle.
I first met Sonny in New York in 2006. He and his producer/girlfriend Michelle had heard my tone poem Berowra Waters on WNYU college radio. I suppose Sonny was scouting for a cheap neo–impressionist composer to use for a short film called Commercial Drive he’d shot that summer in British Columbia. I was better than cheap. I was free. Operated at a loss, in fact.
The short film was about Sonny’s parents. A love story. His mother was Greek and his father was Chinese. The actors were good and willing to appear nude but the movie was ruined by didactic contemporary political commentary irrelevant to 1970s Vancouver. It was the fucked–up fag end of the Bush II era. Iraq was blowing up every day. (I never told Sonny that my brother Don was a soldier in the Australian Army stationed in Tallil). Anyway, Sonny was trying to tie everything together – politics, race, history, sex. A grand synthesis. He needed four minutes of music. I liked the guy, so I put aside my dissertation and wrote the score one weekend. I scored for 4 flutes, oboe, 2 bassoons, a bass clarinet, vibes, and a harp. I drafted fellow students from the Brooklyn Academy. They worked for free, although I had to pay that bastard Mario Cantini a hundred bucks out of my own pocket because he is the only competent vibes player around and Mario’s pride won’t let him play without a fee. We recorded the score in Sonny’s living room, a dark cube in a communal house in Flushing, Queens. Every now and then a jackhammer would chip away at the footpath outside. It took about six hours to get clean takes.
Apparently the film was well–received at activist film festivals in the Midwest and on YouTube. I don’t really know. I wasn’t part of the activist scene. I didn’t see Sonny the next few years. I was busy composing, studying, and teaching piano to kids. One night I went to a gig at Zeb’s on W 28th and met a student cinematographer from Columbia. She told me Sonny had been teaching screenwriting in Montreal, he’d directed a few more shorts, he’d been hired to direct a CBC TV pilot in Toronto that went nowhere. In the middle of all that Sonny flew to Phnom Penh to shoot a sweatshop exposé for Peace Activista Online. Somebody had beaten the shit out of him in an alley.
Soon after Wall Street crashed in 2008 I got a call from Athens. Sonny was a week from starting production. On what? The River and the Dam, he said. Ever read the novel by Spyros Heliatas? You haven’t? Well, I’m not surprised because the English translation is forty years out of print. It’s about the Greek Civil War. Some have called it a Hellenic For Whom The Bell Tolls. I got the Greco–Canadian Heritage Foundation to spot me for the film rights – a grand to Heliatas’s widow. Man, the story has everything. In those five hundred eighty–six pages I learned all about the world of my grandparents on the island of Katastari. It will be a historical film and also a political film. An essay film, too. Self–conscious. A bit PoMo. But epic. I’ve conned fifteen thousand dollars out of the Kitchener Consolidated Tiling Company and there is some more money coming from a guy I know in Sofia, Bulgaria. Certainly this will be guerrilla film–making. By commercial standards my script is too long at two hundred and thirty–three pages. Well, I won’t cut it. I can’t even afford to shoot on lowly 16mm, but fuck it. Europe did their Greek Civil War movie (The Battle of Konitsa, 1969) as a sprawling and politically nonsensical multinational co–production with Yul Brynner, Elke Sommer, Adolfo Celi, and poor old Orson in Todd–AO; I will find the crux of the story with high–definition digital videotape. I’ve got a fucking amazing HDV camera. Signed it out of the college supply room at McGill before my dismissal. Yeah, dismissal. Because of a student, a twenty year old Québécoise nympho with librarian glasses and high–heeled leather boots, a drug–fucked rich kid who betrayed me to the faculty. So Michelle has left me. Sure, I fucked up, but it was as if she was waiting for the opportunity to kill it.
I made myself a cup of tea. Sonny kept talking.
With Michelle gone, Sonny said, he was producing The River and the Dam himself in Greece. He was holed up in a backpacker hostel in Athens for twelve euros a night and using the Monastiraki McDonalds as his office. His Greek buddy Risto had put together a camera crew from the Athens Film School. Volunteers. They’d helped themselves to three Arri 150s, a tripod, and a Steadicam from that school’s supply room. Sonny had auditioned forty Greek actresses for the lead roles and found two beautiful English–speaking girls, the Moulos sisters. They’re great, Sonny said, Anastasia Moulos writes the anti–police blog Hell in Hellas, she’s also a notorious Athens graffiti artist, been arrested a dozen times. Eva Moulos is not so political, very quiet actually, but totally gorgeous, she looks like a supermodel although she has a limp. The sex scenes will have to be negotiated with the sisters, Sonny said, we’re having a kind of extended and interesting debate on that, it’s an essential component to Heliatas’s vision of liberation, the girls are not totally convinced, but it’ll happen, the ball is rolling. The island of Katastari has vast olive groves, lemon trees, blue coastal waters populated by loggerhead turtles, Orthodox monasteries, and the ancient Temple of Artemis. And now it’s winter there are no tourists to get in the way. This movie will look lush and big budget. I recently connected with my long lost sixth–cousin Marc through Facebook. He’s agreed to lend me his summer house, it overlooks Mondraki Cove, we’ll live on Katastari for free while we shoot the movie. This is my dream of film–making, buddy. Outside the system, communal, collaborative, free of interference. An artist’s colony. And I need you to write me another beautiful score. We have several musical sequences you’ll need to coordinate. I remember what you’ve done for me in the past. This time I’ve set aside a fee of five grand for you, plus expenses. Within reason.
So that’s how it started. I rejoiced. Sonny’s commission came as I was facing a hard winter in New York City. I’d submitted my final composition to B.A.M., so there was no more scholarship stipend. It was almost time for me to vacate the college dorms. My income was from three private piano students and a shitty waitering gig at a luncheonette in Cobble Hill. I was surviving on canned beans and stale bread and cheap bottles of beer. I had an on–and–off motherfucking toothache in a back molar but couldn’t afford to see a dentist. What’s more, everybody was saying a recession was coming. So New York was a dead end and I couldn’t go back home to Sydney, either. There was nothing for me there. I was twenty–eight with no plans except to write a lot of music. I packed up my clothes and music books and stored them in a friend’s basement. I went online and bought a one–way air ticket to Athens with my credit card. Sonny had promised to reimburse me when I arrived.
2.
Sonny said he wanted “music in the traditional Greek style”. I’m Australian. I knew almost nothing about Greek music. On the way to JFK I stopped at the Julliard library to photocopy Ellen Frye’s collection of Greek folk songs and the relevant chapters in the Grove Dictionary. I got the gist on the long flight.
Sonny was not at Athens Airport to meet me. I checked my email at an internet terminal. He was sorry, he wrote, he’d had to fly to Sofia at short notice to harass a faltering investor, the father of a buddy from college. I should check into the Hostel Apollo in Plaka and compose twelve minutes of diegetic music. He needed a traditional Greek dance, a piece for a restaurant band, a guitar lament, and a few piano cues that could pass as 1940s avant garde art music. A recording studio was booked six days hence. He didn’t say where. That meant I had to compose two minutes of music per day. Not unusual in the film business. For guidance I had a new two–hundred–and–seventy–one page draft of the script attached to the email. I would have to wait till Sonny returned to Athens to be compensated for my flight, and in the meantime cover my own hostel bill and food expenses and the cost of printing the script at an internet café.
I decided to give Sonny a chance. But screw the grubby hostel. I checked into a room at the Hotel Minos. I would spend each morning at my portable Roland FP–4. I wrote on blank A3 photocopies of twenty–six stave manuscript paper. My balcony looked down on a square bordered on one side by a dilapidated cat–infested villa and on the other by a bank with a faux–marble façade. Inside the square were padlocked motorbikes and polished German cars and an overflowing kiosk selling newspapers, magazines, DVDs, cigarettes, junk food, and condoms. On the footpath African guys flogged fake designer handbags. A gypsy woman smiled with slight insanity at the tourists as she begged for change. Down the hill the shops sold scarves, t–shirts, leather belts and wallets, Peloponnesian vases, classical busts in plaster, and calendars reproducing ancient world porn. One day I saw a grizzled Greek overturn a wheelbarrow of surely unsaleable secondhand books – The Yearbook of Dermatology 1973? – and wait around in patient expectation. The rock of the Acropolis sat high above everything.
Sunlight poured into my hotel room that first morning. I worked on the Greek dance. By early afternoon the room was gloomy and weariness hung on my shoulders like a warm wet blanket. I decided to move my work to the reading room of the Vallianios National Library near Panepistimio. The day was overcast. On the way to the Akropoli metro station I stopped at a little place called Café Switch On. The place was empty. I ordered a chicken sandwich and an espresso. The waitress had a square jaw and black curly hair that she tied back in a short pony tail and smooth olive skin. She wore a thin grey sweater that was tight on her flat chest. Tight jeans. A short lean young woman.
I sat in the corner re–reading photocopied pages from the Grove, yawning, looking at the waitress now and then. I watched her jerk the handle of the espresso machine into its slot with her wiry right wrist. Then the lights in the café cut out. The hum of the refrigerators stopped. The espresso machine, which was just beginning to dribble my cup of coffee into a demitasse, spluttered and died. Very little light came through the windows, so the café was dark as a storeroom. The waitress came over through the shadows.
“Sorry, it’s a blackout,” she said.
That warm wet blanket was heavy on my shoulders. My eyelids were hot and salty. “No coffee?”
“No, not possible.” Her voice was soft, melodious, conciliatory. She put down my chicken sandwich and leaned against the window. I took a bite of the sandwich and said:
“Are you from here?”
She lifted her chin in a little jerk. “Why? Originally I come from Gjakova. You know?”
“Where’s that?”
“Kosovo.”
“When did you come here?”
“I move to Tirana next and come to Athens a few years ago, to study.”
“What do you study?”
“Human resource management.”
“You work here every day?”
“Yes.”
“How old are you?”
“Why? Twenty–nine.”
“What’s your name?”
“Luljeta.”
I told her I was a composer and I was going to Katastari to work on a movie. She’d never been to the island even though it wasn’t far out in the Saronic Gulf and everybody said it was very nice. Because of the curious and even expectant look on her face, I had the feeling that if I invited her she would come with me. But I didn’t say anything. She went off to scrape somebody else’s rubbery chicken scraps into a rubbish bin in the darkness of the kitchen.
I paid the cashier with the correct change, got a hand–written receipt for my expense file, and bought the much–needed coffee at a street stall. I went to the library to go over my morning sketches in ink. I was my own copyist, writing out the individual parts at a broad and well–lit desk. I had moussaka for dinner and then went to hear a chamber concert by young composers at the Athens Music Hall near Megaro Moussikis. Music for two violins, prepared piano, sequencer, and sack of broken glass. Didn’t interest me.
The next day at noon I stopped again at the Café Switch On. Luljeta wasn’t working. I asked the waiter and he said she started at 1pm. I went to compose at the library for a few hours, then made sure I was back in Plaka before 5pm. The doors of the café were already shuttered. I ate pasta alone at a tourist restaurant, got drunk at Brettos with some exchange students from the Netherlands Institute, and wound up in a mutual–masturbatory grapple in an alley with a nineteen–year–old whose name was Gaby or maybe Geddy.
It was late autumn. The air was crisp. One afternoon I went to the National Archaeological Museum because Sonny wanted me to take a digital photo of a jockey boy recovered from the sea around Katastari. According to the script it was going to be used in the opening montage. I walked up to the Acropolis a couple of times. I passed the Café Switch On three days in a row but Luljeta wasn’t working there.
I liked being in Athens. The score was my first paid commission and I needed the money badly. But for now I had to live on my credit card.
3.
On the eve of the scheduled scoring session I still hadn’t heard from Sonny and I was sure the session wouldn’t happen. I hadn’t contracted musicians. Still, I kept filling the manuscript pages with ink. I’d written several themes based on Greek modes. For the diegetic cues I limited myself to bouzouki, oboe, classical guitar, double bass, and percussion (vibes and snare).
Sonny turned up at the Hotel Minos at sunset. He was skinnier than I remembered. He’d grown a faint goatee. His t–shirt was crumpled. His excitement manifested itself in trembling hands, tapping toes, stuttered words, stories that didn’t conclude or else referred to unknown events and people and places, the Slovenian had reneged on his handshake and Steinman had rejected the eighth application and Mike is still in Thessaloniki.
“Who’s Mike?” I said.
“Mike?” Sonny laughed. “Mike is my cinematographer and general Mr Fix–It. He’s an American dude who lives in Greece. Mike and I have to go to Katastari tomorrow and start shooting with the Moulos sisters, I’m already behind schedule,” he said. “My buddy Risto, one of my co–producers and also a fine chef, will sneak you into a little recording studio at the film school tomorrow afternoon. Risto knows student musicians. You come to Katastari as soon as you’ve done the recording and we’ll film the scenes featuring your music. But tonight we’re here in Athens. Great to see you!”
Sonny tried to give me a hug.
“This is impossible,” I said. “I haven’t specified what ensemble I’ve written for. If the musicians must be amateurs then I’ll have to audition them. Is there no budget for this?”
“Not yet,” said Sonny, “but there will be. For now Risto knows local cats who’ll donate their time.”
“And what about my plane fare and hotel bill? I’m living on my credit card.”
He nodded. “My production company is in the middle of a major financial reorganisation. I need a few days to clear it up. You have no idea how much work I’ve taken on since Michelle split and quit as my producer.”
I had no choice but to wait it out.
“Dude, if I’m paying for this fancy private room you’ll have to let us crash here tonight,” Sonny said. He dumped his backpack on my floor next to my digital piano in its hard case. Two Czech girls of about twenty came in and dumped their bags, too. They were named Franka and Marketa. The girls worked as nannies in London for a Chinese family related to Sonny. They had come to Athens by ten quid plane tickets with Sonny’s promise of a month’s free accommodation on picturesque Katastari. The girls were in charge of costumes for the movie. Sonny had given them a scrapbook of photos from the 1940s and they’d spent the day shopping for old dresses in thrift shops, buying calico, muslin, and cotton.
Blonde Franka had a light step and no trace of fatigue. Marketa was broad–shouldered and was trying to comb out the knots in her brown hair with her fingers. Her eyes were barely open. She told me she had not slept in thirty–six hours. She’d worked all yesterday then gone straight to Gatwick Airport. She was sniffling. She had a cold. She was very hungry, too, but Sonny was determined to lead us to the Acropolis before dinner. He wanted to show us where he would film the final shot of his movie. I had already seen the Parthenon, was worried by Sonny’s casual attitude to my scoring session and my expenses, and was in a low mood all the way to the summit.
Yet at sunset the Acropolis was different than it had been during the afternoon. A cold wind was strafing the city. Sonny made a widescreen frame with his fingers and demonstrated a long tracking shot across the columns of the Parthenon. “I want a big orchestral score,” he said to me. “Majestic. Strings and shit. What do you think?”
“I think it’ll be great, Sonny. But if you want to do it right it’ll cost money. There’s studio rental, hiring the players, mixing. And I need to be paid. I can’t afford to do this project as a favour. Are you sure you’ll be able to get the money together?”
Sonny said it was no problem. The bastard wasn’t even nervous.
We were four figures at the summit. We stood fast against the wind, looking down into the Theatre of Dionysus. We moved over to the Erechtheum where the ranked Caryatids stood in eternal, classical stillness. A noble oboe, a Mixolydian mode. We gazed out at the city sprawling in sunset–bathed white between the shoulders of the mountains. Perhaps that solitary oboe swept up by strings and a tumbling wave of arpeggiating harps, with low cellos and muted French horns, profound and strange chords. Mount Lycavetus, the highest peak in the city, stood across the way to the northeast. Far to the south through the fog lay the port of Piraeus. Solitary trumpets for the fishing boats, a fluttery flute ensemble shifting in quartal harmony as the water slapped against the prows, the clanking of iron freighters, and beyond that the glories of Poseidon’s sea.
Marketa and Franka declared the shot brilliant, fantastic, masterpiece theatre, Sonny. Now give us fucking food and wine.
As we walked down to Plaka Sonny took out his digital still camera and showed us pictures of his activities with his friends in Bulgaria – drinking wine at the Vitosha ski resort outside Sofia, red–eyed at a topless bar in Varna, sailing a cabin cruiser in the Black Sea. Sonny didn’t say if any of this schmoozing had succeeded in guaranteeing an investment in the movie, but he looked like he’d had a fine and expensive time.
Outside a tourist restaurant in Plaka we were seized by a tout with a wet bottom lip. Sonny said he had made reservations at Vyzantino, we were meeting a new investor there for dinner, but the Czech girls insisted. They liked the sound of the restaurant’s bouzouki and guitar duo. We were seated at an outdoor table directly in the draught coming down the paved street. The waiter brought us laminated menus and complimentary glasses of rough red wine. I ordered ouzo – I hoped the anise would numb my toothache. Sonny left us to fetch the investor from the Katastari Heritage Foundation.
Inside the restaurant the two moustachioed musicians started up with ‘Never on Sunday’. Franka went inside and requested they play the theme from Zorba the Greek. They obliged. Franka danced alone as if in a trance. Marketa rubbed her gunky eyes and said to me:
“Why you so grumpy? This will be good movie.”
“Sonny owes me money.”
“Fuck, you’re like a Jew,” Marketa said to me. “Chill out, man.”
“I am a Jew, Marketa.”
“I was right, yes?” She laughed. “Shit, Australian Jew. You people fucking go everywhere.”
Some of the other tourists, retired Americans with fanny packs, got up and danced with Franka. When the song ended she came back to the table. “In Prague there is Greek restaurant,” Franka said. “We dance ‘Zorba’ all the time.”
I drank my ouzo. “Sonny said you live in London now.”
“I own flat in Prague,” Franka said. “I get rent. But I not go back to live.”
“I thought Prague was the happening city,” I said. “The new bohemia in the old Bohemia. I was thinking of visiting after we’ve done this film.”
“No, London is better life for me,” said Franka. “Make more money. And many parties.”
“So many parties,” Marketa agreed. She drained her complimentary glass of red wine and then my untouched glass and then signalled the waiter for ouzo. “One time I get so drunk at London pub I fall asleep on toilet. I wake up on couch at house of strange man in Sark.” Marketa half–opened her sticky eyelids. “Hey, you know Sark? Very pretty. You should go.”
Franka giggled. “This girl is crazy! She drink like a fucking fish.”
Marketa shrugged and drank her ouzo. Her eyes seemed to be gluing shut. By this time she had not slept for thirty–eight hours. She slapped my shoulder and mumbled an invitation to her forthcoming twenty–fifth birthday party at a thirteenth century castle in Slovakia.
Sonny returned to our table with his ‘investor’, a blue–eyed thirtyish man named Costas, a full–time real estate agent in Athens who was also a representative of the Katastari Heritage Foundation. He’d grown up on the island. Coming up the narrow street with Sonny, Costas moved with a plodding reluctance, a bored undertaking of his duty to listen to every crackpot proposal. Then he saw Marketa and Franka, an unexpected windfall.
The Czech girls ordered plates of fried octopus. I browsed the prices on the menu. Because this meal would be on Sonny, I ordered barbouni (red mullet) with a side of squid. Sonny didn’t blink. If the production company’s financial “reorganisation” was worrying him, he hid it well. He outdid us all in extravagance by ordering lobster and a litre of good barrel wine.
Costas didn’t want a meal. He said he’d just finished lunch. He beckoned the waiter and ordered a bottle of Mythos beer.
“I hope you love Katastari,” he said to the Czech girls. “I think you will. We have caretta caretta turtles in Mondraki Cove. You can snorkel with them.”
“My film will bring a lot of attention to the island’s history,” said Sonny.
Costas shrugged and drank his beer. “The role of our Foundation is to preserve the dignity of the island and promote it as a tourist destination. Not really to fund movies. I googled Spyros Heliatas. He was a communist.”
“No, a democratic socialist,” said Sonny. “A brave man, a political prisoner for eleven months in nineteen–sixty–nine and –seventy during the dictatorship of the colonels. Later he was a judge and member of your nation’s parliament. He’s sadly forgotten in Greece. Why don’t they teach The River and the Dam in your schools alongside the works of Kazantzakis?”
Costas looked at me. “Are you an actor in this movie?”
“I write music,” I said.
Sonny steered the conversation back where he wanted it. “Heliatas isn’t doctrinaire,” he said. “He’s ambivalent about the moral choices in war. The problem of violence. Poverty and oppression. This is the hard world of my grandparents brought to life. They left Katastari in 1952.”
Two black guys approached our table selling roses. Costas waved them away. “Look at these monkeys,” he said. “We should give them a banana.”
“You should see in my country,” said Marketa. “Everywhere bloody Gypsies and blacks.”
For a moment the hope seemed to drain from Sonny’s eyes. An indignant snarl turned his lips. “What do you think of me, Marketa?” he said. “Half–Greek, half–Chinese. A half caste?”
“You American as apple pie, Sonny.”
“I’m Canadian.”
“These people live off the government and poison the economy,” Costas said. “Everywhere you look some black or Albanian on welfare.”
Sonny shook his head. “Easy scapegoats for the tabloid press.”
Marketa chuckled. “You don’t know.”
“I don’t think I can help you with your film,” Costas said with finality. He turned to Franka and Marketa, considered for a moment, and chose Marketa. “I’m going to a party in Kolonaki.” She yawned and said she would go with him. Costas opened his wallet and paid the bill for the whole table. Sonny didn’t protest. He didn’t thank Costas, either.
“What an asshole,” Sonny said as Costa and Marketa walked off together.
Franka lit a cigarette. “She’s always with some new guy. Don’t be jealous, Sonny.”
Sonny laughed. “Jealous? No way.”
Franka ate Marketa’s plate of octopus. We didn’t see Marketa again. Plaka was quiet. We went to Brettos and got drunk on Bloody Marys. Franka wandered into conversation with the Greek guys in the bar. Sonny admitted to me that the Czech nannies might indeed be racist fascist scum but he didn’t have anyone else to do costumes at such short notice. And did he really need an all–leftist crew, anyway? The radical blacklist–breaker Spartacus was shot in fascist Spain, with Franco’s army doubling for the Romans, wasn’t it? Maybe it would contribute to the dynamism of the movie. Dialectically, he meant.
“It depends on whether you think these girls will be smuggling in fascist sentiments through their costume design,” I said.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Sonny said. He seemed to think I was serious. Then he laughed. He bounced back from the dismal dinner and showed me his storyboards. I discussed my grand plans for the movie’s score. Sonny had a way of charming you to your doom. He looked you in the eye – we’re gonna make a movie!
Franka slept on the spare bed in my room at the Hotel Minos. Sonny slept on the carpet. At nine in the morning Marketa knocked on the door and woke us up. She was hung–over, sniffling and blotchy, stinking of booze and fucking, smug with sexual hubris. While I was in the shower the three of them snuck out and caught the metro to Piraeus, where they would catch a ferry to Katastari. Sonny did not leave any cash for my passage to the island or the hotel bill. My credit card was almost dead.
4.
Risto Georgiou was one of Sonny’s many co–producers. He was a fat, shaggy–haired, stubbly, pasty–faced guy of about forty. When he turned up outside the film school with a lone seventeen–year–old guitar player, I nearly broke down.
“My score also requires a bouzouki player, an oboist, a bassist, a percussionist!” I said. “This won’t fucking work!”
Risto laughed. “No problem, man.”
The guy had energy. He preferred to yell rather than speak. He laughed with a roar. We went to a café. I showed the guitarist my score. He and Risto pulled out their phones and within an hour I had the musicians I needed, competent students from the conservatory, volunteers, not one of them older than twenty–two. Risto took us to a small rehearsal room at the film school. Nobody asked us why we were there. A student sound engineer came in to set up microphones and man a mixing consol while I rehearsed the ensemble. They nailed it right away. We recorded the cues in single takes. The engineer made a live mix to two–track, a typical European technique, and then copied the 24–bit sound files to an external hard drive. I packed the hard drive into my backpack and headed for the door. It was quarter to five. Risto was in the corridor, yelling into his phone and cleaning his fingernails with a pocket knife. He interrupted his conversation to call to me:
“It’s done?”
“Done.”
“Do you want to go out for beer?”
“I can’t.”
“Later we’re going to a house party in Exarchia. Sexy girls, man. I’m cooking kleftiko for everyone.”
“I have to meet somebody.”
“Okay, we go to Katastari tomorrow. Meet me in Piraeus at 9am.”
I rushed to Café Switch On. The sky had turned black, rain was starting to fall, and Luljeta was padlocking the roller doors. I said:
“Will you have dinner with me?”
She zipped her raincoat over her thin grey sweater and gave me her little chin–jerk of curiosity. “Oh, you. Why?”
“I’m leaving Athens tomorrow.”
She looked me over. “No, I don’t think dinner. But we can have a drink.”
We sat in a corner booth in a nearly–empty bar in Monastiraki. The bartender was smoking in front of the NO SMOKING sign. There was loud, pounding dance music, so Luljeta and I had to lean our heads close together to talk. Curly black hair slipped from her ponytail and brushed her cheek.
“When you came in on Monday with those questions I thought you were from immigration.” She laughed. “I nearly showed you my passport.”
She sipped an orange juice through a straw. She displayed no urgency, no rush to be back at the flat she shared with a Croatian woman named Kiki. I felt her knee bump into my thigh.
“I’ve been to your café a couple of times this week,” I said.
“Actually I had to study every day for my exam.”
“Are you going to stay in Greece?” I said.
“I don’t want to go back to Tirana.”
“What about your family?”
“My brother was killed by crossfire in Kosovo in ‘ninety–nine,” she said. “My parents are old and will stay in Tirana.”
I drank a glass of vodka with lime soda. A television high in the corner of the bar was showing a world news channel. The sound was off. It was a report of a suicide bombing at a mosque in Musayyib, south of Baghdad. Twelve dead. A skinny drunk kid, maybe seventeen, stumbled past our table and gazed up at the TV screen. He started to leap on the spot in a futile attempt to switch the channel. After seven jumps he sat down on the floor and keeled onto his left side.
“He must be a bad basketball player,” Luljeta said.
People came in and out of the bar. I ordered another vodka.
“I leave for Katastari tomorrow,” I said. “Do you want to come with me and check it out? It’ll be fun. The director has borrowed a house on the beach.”
“I can’t. I have an exam.”
“Come after the exam.”
“I have to work. I need to pay my rent. I need to pay for my study.”
I leaned in to kiss her. For half an hour we touched each other in the dark corner of the bar. I slid my hands inside her grey sweater, hooked my fingers beneath the underwire of her small brassiere, rubbed her small nipples. After a while I asked her to come back to my hotel room. She wasn’t sure. Then she said yes, but I should come to her share flat on Stadiou. We caught the metro to Omonoia. At a kiosk I bought a packet of condoms. She asked the vendor for a disposable razor.
Luljeta lived on the third floor of a decrepit building next to an auto garage. She unlocked the door. The flat was dark. In her bedroom there was a small cot, barely big enough for one person, under a single bulb. Pairs of cotton panties hung on a clothes string by the window. She didn’t put the panties away. Before anything happened, she said, she wanted to take a shower. I was left by myself. On the bookshelf were books in English and Greek and several spiral–bound journals. There was also a badly–lit picture of her stiff–backed parents. There was an old framed picture of a serious–looking young man I guessed was her dead brother.
I stared a long time at another photo. A long time. I’d just spent the autumn composing, teaching, waitering, wandering around Brooklyn, knowing it was time to leave New York, my head full of yearning for some abstract woman and some place to live. Anyway, the picture was of Luljeta. Her hair was shorter. She was standing in a yard of snow beside a crumbling stone farmhouse. There was a brown horse. You could almost smell the smoke of a hearth and the pine needles. She wore a buttoned pea coat. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks red. She looked like the happiest person in the world.
I lay back on the cot. Luljeta took so long in the bathroom that I fell asleep waiting for her. She came back into the room naked and wrapped in a towel, dabbing her shin with a tissue. She had cut her leg while shaving. She unwrapped the towel and used it to rub her hair dry. I sat up on the cot and touched her between her legs. Her pussy was smooth, newly shaved. I rubbed her clitoris until the groove of her pussy was slippery. She dropped the towel on the floor, looked at me, and said:
“I have only one lover before you.”
We turned off the light and made love a couple of times, her wide mouth locked on mine, her lean smooth body bucking beneath me, the cut on her shin smearing the white sheets with blood. We slept in a close embrace on the tiny cot. At dawn we made love again. Luljeta got up to go to the university for her exam. I went back to the Hotel Minos, checked out, and caught the metro to Piraeus to meet Risto.
II: KATASTARI
5.
Risto and I got off the ferry at Sykamio, Katastari’s port village. The brutally blue sea was calm. There were half a dozen fishing boats and one or two yachts drifting off the port. Beyond them you could see the ghostly shapes of distant islands. From the edge of the wharf I saw a school of tiny fish dart through the limpid water. The sun was high and bone–warming. Already I was thinking of how to translate the setting into orchestral colours.
Few people sat at the outdoor tables of the cafés and restaurants on Sykamio’s waterfront strip. Risto said many of the restaurants were closed and half the holiday villas on the island were empty. It seemed nothing much was happening in Katastari in the off–season, only an academic ‘creativity conference’ at the Hotel Elektra. Risto and I went to hire motor scooters. I tried to pay for a week in advance but my credit card was refused, maxed out. I paid for three days in cash and was left with about twenty euros in my pocket. Risto said he had to buy fish at the Sykamio market and have a drink with the fishmonger. He walked off. I lashed my backpack and piano to the back of my scooter with rope and headed up the west coast of Katastari. I followed the signs to Mondraki Cove. Even though the sun was bright I froze as I sliced head–on through the wind. I didn’t see a single car on the road.
I found the house, blinding white with blue trimmings, on a hill about five hundred metres from the cove. A warm breeze tickled the lemon tree near the front door. Cicadas were buzzing. The gravel driveway was full of parked motor scooters. I heard voices and walked around to the backyard. Sonny was chatting to the two Greek actresses, the Moulos sisters, on the grass lawn sloping behind the house. A little further downhill was the start of the thick forest that ran down to the cove. Eva Moulos was tall and thin, maybe twenty–one years old. Sonny was right – she might have been on the catwalk in Milan or Paris except her right hip rolled up and down as she strolled across the grass. Her long black hair fanned in the wind. Anastasia Moulos was two years older and six inches shorter, slightly fat with big breasts and hips. She had high cheekbones and flawless pale skin. Like her sister, she had velvety black long hair. She came across the grass and said:
“You’re the music guy from New York? Do you know the Scrambling Fucksters?”
“Who?”
“They’re anarchist remixers in Queens. That’s in New York, right?”
“I’ve never heard of them.”
Sonny laughed and said to Anastasia, “No chance, this guy is strictly classical.”
Eva smiled at me politely but didn’t introduce herself. She sat down on a rock with a thick branch. She unclasped a knife and began to carve something.
Sonny took me up to the house’s sun terrace and started pointing. “We’ll be shooting down in Mondraki Cove and in the woods along the coast. This is where the guerrilla warfare happened in ‘forty–six. My sixth–cousin has lent me his tin dinghy for the skin–diving scenes.” Sonny turned away from the coast and pointed inland across a valley of olive groves. There was a farmhouse two kilometres away which would serve as the headquarters of the fascist commander. On the northern peak of the island was the ancient Temple of Artemis, where contemporary characters, also to be played by the Moulos sisters, would discuss Heliatas’s novel in light of contemporary Greek politics. “But the most important location,” said Sonny, “is the jail where Heliatas was held and tortured. It’s a padlocked concrete bunker on the other side of the island. Hasn’t been used in years. I’m working on getting access. I want to perform a monologue inside Heliatas’s cell.”
We went into the house. I dumped my backpack and piano on the kitchen floor. The director of photography, Mike, was fiddling with a Canon XH–A1, the HDV camera Sonny had stolen from McGill University. Mike was about twenty–five, a very quiet guy from San Francisco, short, skinny, and too–closely shaven (he had a purple rash under his jaw). He wore tinted prescription glasses. The glasses might have dated back to his early teenage years because they seemed to bite into the bridge of his nose. I heard Risto call him the Frisco Kid and it really annoyed him. Now he was too engrossed in the workings of the camera to really notice I’d arrived.
“This camera is almost as good as thirty–five mill,” Sonny said. “It’s used a lot these days in low budget feature production.”
Mike did not look up from the camera. “Sonny, stop comparing HDV with thirty–five millimetre. It’s a totally different look.”
Sonny smiled. “It’ll do fine. Film is dead. And nobody will tell the difference.”
I was skeptical. With that logic Sonny would push me towards using synthesizers. I told him I was going to compose for an entirely acoustic, tonally–diverse orchestra to compliment these wide spare hills and olive groves and the immensity of the Saronic Gulf. There were no synthesisers in 1946. It would be more expensive, but I wouldn’t do it any other way.
“We’ll record the score in New York next year,” he said. “You can round up some of your buddies from B.A.M..”
“You want your majestic score, you need to spend some money. I’m not recording this in your living room in Flushing.”
Sonny agreed. Why disagree now when it would only lead to an argument? He would save disagreement for later, when I had fewer options. “Anyway, I don’t live in Flushing now, man.” He reached into the refrigerator for two bottles of beer. “I have no fixed address. This film has stripped me of everything.”
Sonny handed me a bottle and took me on a tour of our production headquarters. The house dated from the seventies, was decorated with coffee–brown rugs and modular white plastics, more modernist Milanese than Aegean, although the exterior conformed to the island style with its whitewashed walls and sea–blue doors and window frames. There was a two–car garage holding Sonny’s sixth–cousin’s blue BMW, strictly off limits to us. Sonny used one of the four bedrooms as an editing suite and divided the others between the cast and crew. Sleeping in that small house were Marketa and Franka, Mike, Risto, three camera assistants from the Athens Film School who didn’t speak much English (Gino, Panos, and George), the Moulos sisters, a fortysomething actor named Dennis and his six–year–old son Bill, and myself. Sonny had supplied inflatable mattresses and sleeping bags and pillows. There was plenty of pot and beer. It was like a commune and already a mess.
The week’s shooting schedule was posted on the kitchen wall. On several mornings Mike and his crew were booked to shoot footage of the Katastari hills and churches at sunrise, but most days the crew had the mornings free as the actors rehearsed scenes to be shot from one till six.
I played Sonny the master takes of the Athens recording sessions. He gave me a hug. Exactly what he wanted. A little part of his dream film had become manifest. I was his new favourite person. He was a bit behind schedule with the shoot, he told me, but next week I would be needed on the island to coordinate the scenes featuring this diegetic music. Actors would mime to the tracks. After that I was free to stay on to compose my score on the island as part of the collective, this filmmaking kibbutz. Sonny was hardly sleeping in order to edit by night on his laptop, and scenes would be ready for scoring almost as soon as they were shot. But if I went back to New York he could just as easily upload HD quality rough cuts to a password–protected Vimeo account.
“It’s impossible for me to leave Greece until you reimburse my expenses. My credit card is maxed out.”
“Oh, sure,” Sonny said. He acted as if this was the first time he’d heard of the problem. “Give me a couple of days to sort that out.”
Sonny invited Mike and Anastasia and me to Sykamio for lunch. He had a meeting with Lieutenant Apostolou, who officiated at the police station. We rode our motor scooters down the coast. Anastasia sped far ahead of us. We parked the scooters and followed Sonny into the police station. It was between a scuba dive centre and a seafood restaurant on the Sykamio waterfront.
The station was little more than a small office. It seemed more like a travel agency. The lieutenant was alone. He had lank grey hair and a black moustache. Very dark wrinkled skin. He wore a crisp white shirt and blue tie but I instantly pictured him, for some reason, in a safari suit. He didn’t really look like a cop. He was handsome, tall, with a military man’s posture. He stood up from his desk and shook our hands. To Anastasia he bowed and said:
“Oh, I can see already you will be a star.”
“I don’t want to be a star,” she said.
He laughed and said something in Greek. He did not know that Anastasia was the author of the Hell in Hellas blog and had several times cracked the mainstream Athens press with her revelations of police brutality. She studied the police station, perhaps hunting for material for future blog posts. There was a single empty holding cell opposite the lieutenant’s desk.
“We have a peaceful island,” Lieutenant Apostolou said. “My job is easy. How can I help you?”
We need, Sonny said, to have access to the old Katastari jail for a few hours to shoot a scene for our film of Heliatas’s The River and the Dam. Lieutenant Apostolou was delighted. We would have every assistance, every resource for our little student film. We must, of course, submit the script for his perusal. This was mere routine, a simple matter of vetting, because he must protect the reputation and integrity of this great island, he must make sure it is an accurate representation of the glorious history of this great island of Katastari. And what if the history is not glorious, said Sonny, what if many brave patriots were betrayed by the people of Katastari in the Civil War? Is this a science fiction film, Lieutenant Apostolou inquired, or are you thinking of another island? In the Civil War our hills were full of murderous agents from Moscow. Well, said Sonny, it’s much more complicated than that.
There was a long argument in which Lieutenant Apostolou defended the island, repeatedly slamming his fist on his right knee, you are not speaking of the Katastari we know and hold dear in our hearts. Anastasia stepped in and began talking about massacres, imperialism, the CIA, American guns and American bullets. Sonny reminded the lieutenant that in 1969 Spyros Heliatas had been tortured in the Katastari jail. Katastari was a hell on earth for Heliatas.
While this carried on I snuck outside with Mike. I bought a peach from a fruit stall on the deck of a small boat docked at the waterfront. Mike bought a bag of pistachio nuts. We sat down at an outdoor café table and ordered Greek coffee. The waiter brought two demitasses and two small glasses of water. Mike and I each dropped a sugar cube into our demitasse and let the coffee settle for a few minutes. I ate my peach. Mike broke open some pistachio shells and ate the nuts. The lenses of his tiny tinted glasses were smeared with oil. I couldn’t imagine how he could see a thing while riding his scooter or looking through a viewfinder.
“Sonny doesn’t really need to shoot at the jail,” Mike said. “It’s a concrete box. Nothing distinctive about it. We could shoot the scene against any old wall.”
“Authenticity,” I said.
“The message is the important thing,” said Mike. “Telling the truth about the past. I know all about the tortures. My girlfriend is Greek. She directed Eptaetía, the documentary about the junta. Did you see it?”
“No.”
“It’s something Greeks don’t want to hear about these days.”
“Why isn’t your girlfriend helping on Sonny’s movie?”
“She doesn’t really get along with Sonny, and also she’s busy in Athens shooting investigative pieces for IndiNews. She’s a better cinematographer than me. We studied together at U.S.C. in L.A.. She was the star student. She brought me to Athens.”
Two Irish backpackers, stocky and sunburned girls in their early twenties, sat down at the next table. They ordered bottles of Mythos. Mike pointed to the video camera on their table.
“Is it a HC-52?” he said.
One of the Irish girls drained her beer bottle and glanced at the camera. “I really wouldn’t know.”
Mike leaned closer to look. “Ah. No. It’s a HC-18.”
“Is that good?”
“Doubleplusungood.”
I drank my sweet coffee down to the grounds and then drank water. While Mike taught the girls how to get the most out of the HC–18 I bought a cheap pair of sunglasses from a passing African vendor and read the International Herald Tribune.
Finally Sonny and Anastasia came out of the police station. They did not have authorisation to shoot on the grounds of the old jail. The authorities were promoting historical falsities. But we would find a way to shoot there.
6.
I tried to get as much of an advanced start on the scoring as possible. The first afternoon I set up my piano at a grubby plastic table on the sun terrace. I had a view directly down the slope to the cove’s pebbly beach where Marketa and Franka were dressing the Moulos sisters in peasant dresses. Mike was strapping on a Steadicam. Sonny was waving his script around, yelling a bit, rehearsing Dennis. A breeze kept me cool in the sun. I re–skimmed Sonny’s script and did some preliminary work. I composed a theme based on a folksong from the Frye collection. I sketched a main title. When I’d gone as far as I could without a cue sheet I took out a paperback copy of a book called Kosovo: War and Revenge. I’d found it in the English language section of a Piraeus bookshop before boarding the ferry to Katastari. Occasionally the boy Bill would come out on the terrace and chase lizards across the baking concrete. He was a self–sufficient kid with long black hair.
At sunset everybody was back at the house, drinking beer and waiting for Risto’s feast. I locked my piano in its hard case, put my manuscripts in my backpack, and joined the crew for dinner. Risto had bought four red snapper at the fish market at Sykamio and cooked a soup with rice and oily lemon sauce.
“So delicious,” said Eva.
“Psarosoupa,” Risto said, looking at her for a long time. He drank retsina wine from a beer tankard. “I make it from an ancient family recipe.” Then they spoke in Greek.
Sonny had the idea that each evening after we cleared the dining table he would screen another DVD from his collection. He was putting us on a curriculum of political filmmaking, he said. Against the white wall of the living room he projected Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, Costa–Gavras’s Z, and Jean Eustache’s long and wearying Mother and the Whore. Then one night we watched The Battle of Konitsa with a mocking live commentary track by Sonny. This was inaccurate, this was American propaganda, this was Eurokitsch. I said I thought it was a pretty good Yul Brynner movie with a colourful score by Hugo Friedhofer. Sonny asked me if I was joking. Anastasia said it was a war movie for stupid boys. Everybody else was asleep or had wandered off. Sonny also planned on screening West African films made by an infamous guerrilla collective in the 1970s, but the crew was spending every afternoon sewing dresses or lifting boom mikes and camera equipment, and after the first couple of nights we all left Sonny to his films.
We carried chairs down the hill to the pebbly beach, made a bonfire with driftwood, drank beer and smoked pot into the early hours. I borrowed somebody’s acoustic guitar and played Beatles songs. Everybody sang along. I had found the lingua franca. I tried to teach Bill to play some basic guitar chords, but his nail–bitten fingers were too small and weak. He was a nice kid. He said his mother lived in Thessaloniki. Gino and Panos and George kicked a soccer ball and threw a frisbee to Marketa and Franka and goaded each other into dives from the rocks into the churning young winter sea. One night Risto got drunk and sprinted naked across the beach. He tripped over and stumbled back to the campfire a sandy hairy mess. He pointed at Mike and said “Is that a toilet?” and then tried to sit on Mike’s lap. Mike pushed him off and ran back to the house. I watched everybody laugh. It was like being back in high school.
Drunk one night on the beach I began talking to Anastasia Moulos. She quit talking about Afghanistan and the destruction of the Brazilian rainforests and told me about her time hitchhiking through Bulgaria and couch surfing in Hungary. She wanted to travel to America.
“When I come to New York I sleep on your couch, okay?”
“I don’t have a couch any more,” I said. “I think New York is a dead end for me.”
“You go back to Sydney?”
“No way.”
“Why don’t you stay here? We’re doing something important.”
“My life’s dream is not to be a soldier in Sonny’s guerrilla army. I came here for a job, not as a volunteer.”
“You’re a cynic,” she said. “This movie is not about making money.”
“It is for me. And don’t be so sanctimonious. You’re only in the movie because you want to be famous.”
“That’s bullshit, man, that’s just what Eva says when she’s being a bitch, I’m committed,” she said. “That fucking bitch should shut her mouth.”
Later Anastasia asked me to play ‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey’ on the guitar. She sang it. After that we went walking in the forest by the beach. The Hotel Hercules sat on the edge of a cliff north of Mondraki Cove. The place was closed up for the season. We found an unlocked changing hut beside the hotel’s swimming pool. The moonlight came through the bamboo slats above our heads. I kissed Anastasia on the mouth. I unbuttoned her shirt, kissed her big belly and breasts, pulled down her tight jeans, and rubbed her pussy through her cotton panties until they were hot and wet. When I tried to tug off the panties she said she couldn’t. She kissed me slowly and said we would just have some fun. She kept her vagina for her boyfriend only, not that they believed in strict monogamy or anything, it was all about negotiation, but anyway everything else was cool. She told me what she wanted me to do. I reached around her waist to hold the middle finger of my left hand an inch inside her hot tight arsehole. With my right hand I slowly rubbed her clitoris. She let herself go limp against my chest, murmuring in Greek. After about ten minutes of this she came with a wild gasp.
Then she sat on the wooden bench of the hut, unzipped my jeans, and began to fondle and kiss my cock. I’d been drinking a lot and it took me a while to get hard, but the slippery hot wetness of her tongue felt wonderful. When I was erect she held my cock in her right hand, gripped it hard and possessively, and started to suck me. There was almost complete silence, nothing to hear but the waves slapping the rocks below the cliff and the sucking sounds. It was cold, my fingers were almost numb, and when she dipped lower to kiss my balls it felt like icicles were forming along my cock. When she sucked me again her mouth was like a furnace. After it was over we walked back towards the beach party. She told me that what had happened was a one–off.
Marketa and Gino became a more committed couple. We all heard the jerks and groans on Marketa’s small cot in the early hours of the morning. Franka was having trouble deciding between Panos and George, so she tried both. Panos lost out. He disappeared one morning and never returned. When Sonny found out he threw an empty beer bottle against the kitchen wall. But what did he expect? He was paying his crew with ‘experience’. And he begged a few more days to reimburse me for my expenses. He said he was due US$20,000 from Sofia on the 12th of December. For now I had ten euros in my wallet.
“I won’t participate in the filming unless you give me some cash now,” I said.
“There aren’t any expenses on the island!” Sonny said. “Bed and board are taken care of. This is an artist’s colony, man, it’s paradise. Don’t be so mercenary. Enjoy the experience.”
“I can’t afford to fly out of Greece, but I can take the ferry back to Piraeus any time. I’ll take my external hard drive with me, too.”
He looked at me a long time, deciding whether to call my bluff. If I’d left the island Sonny would have found a way to continue. He was a resourceful guy. But he was sold on my music. At first he tried to pay me in kind with a box of twenty Criterion Collection DVDs. I pointed to the stamps and barcodes of McGill University Library on the plastic sleeves. He said fuck and pulled out his wallet. He handed me fifty euros.
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