Green Neon

4 A submarine out of water

"How do you know this music?"

Yannis was surprised that Tom not only didn't answer, but also turned pale, his ears were burning.

"Hey, it's not that bad. So what's going on?"

Tom didn't know what to say. Christina's admonitions rang in his ears: "Never talk about what you saw here."

He trusted Yannis, but felt bound by his promise. After all, the military junta not only put Mikis Theodorakis in a concentration camp, but also strictly banned his music. True, it flourished in secret, because it continued to be heard in many Greek homes. The musician was revered by large sections of the population as an icon of the resistance, especially since he had already fought for his political convictions and been imprisoned twenty years earlier.

Nevertheless, the Greeks were careful not to sing his songs in public. As is common in dictatorships around the world, spying was omnipresent and the threat of punishment real.

"I heard a few songs from friends of my hosts and I can't get the music out of my head," Tom replied reluctantly.

Such a formulation would never have occurred to him a few days ago. Tom suddenly understood how terror works. State terror. Of course, two days ago he would have given the names of his hosts, but now he avoided it because he didn't want to endanger Christina and her friends. Not doing something that is taken for granted, changing one's behavior out of fear of the consequences for oneself or friends, treating people with suspicion instead of openly meeting them, that is what state terror is about.

Yannis leaned over to him and spoke even more quietly:

"If we didn't have this music, if we didn't have Mikis, then we would be lost. But the music is there and thay can't stop Mikis even if they kill him. Because of that, they will lose and we will win."

Tom pondered this. In two days he had gotten to know several Greeks, and sooner or later the conversation always turned to politics. So far he had not met a supporter of the military dictatorship - not a single one. Who then supported this regime? How could it stay in power? How did the repression work? Was it really that simple: forbid people to sing what they want and you have all the power? Confusing thoughts.

It dawned on him that the holiday was going to be a little different than he had imagined. Not that he had had any concrete idea about how things would develop. He was curious about the foreign country, the huge city, the Mediterranean. And now he had suddenly ended up in the middle of a life that no longer had much to do with what he had known until two days ago.

After the experiences of yesterday evening, Tom understood that Yannis not only gave him to understand with his statement which side he was on, but also that he trusted him. For his part, Yannis could read from Tom's reactions that he was obviously also dealing with political issues. He liked the Germans. Despite the adverse living conditions, he felt comfortable in Cologne and would certainly have asked Eirene to join him there if his injury hadn't intervened.

He was happy when he met Germans in Athens, and he had spent a day showing tourists around the city more than once. There hadn't been anything like this boy, though. When he heard him humming Theodorakis to himself on the subway, he had developed feelings of fatherhood.

He would have liked to be a father himself, but he couldn't have children with Eirene. At first he was very sad about it, and very briefly the thought of leaving her and starting a family with another woman came to him. Finally he had come to terms with reality and henceforth devoted his fatherly feelings to Nikos, his eldest brother's son.

Nikos was 16 and, like Yannis had, attended the German high school. A good student with weaknesses in science, he was gifted with a talent for languages, so that he not only spoke good German, but also passable English and French.