PREVIEW:

1. How to Disappear Completely

The last time I had a fever was in the spring of 2013. Back then I was living in Thessaloniki in northern Greece, where I paid a hundred and seventeen euros a month for a room with a mandala on the wall and a double mattress on the floor. The fever came like a traitor. For months I’d been existing on greasy cheese pasties, smoking weed and slipping into a state I would later identify as depressive. In my delirium, all I ate were the bananas that a local communist boyfriend of sorts had brought me. The fever was cold in the morning and boiling at night. When my temperature rose, the mandala gained psychedelic properties and the mattress no longer made sense. The feeling was so alien and extreme that I thought I was dying.

It always embarrasses me a little to think of those months in Greece. They remind me of how I failed at the elementary business of being twenty-two and living a subsidised and carefree existence in a foreign country. With hindsight, my sole obligation was to create memories of youthful enjoyment that would sustain me in the subsequent greyness of life. It was such a resounding failure that I’d have to alleviate it in later years, regularly returning to Greece under various humane and professional pretexts. My visits would usually begin with lofty intentions, like filming a documentary or destroying a relationship with a future in the name of hedonism. But in the end, the existential threat of the mandala and mattress would always appear; like an accusation it floated over the coves of Ikaria and glasses of raki in Cretan tavernas. It would remind me that things are always but a step away from collapse, and there’s nothing to do but try and run the other way.

The first phrases I learned in Greek were thelo na eimai mazi sou, ‘I want to be with you’, to xapi tis epomenis imeres, ‘the morning-after pill’, and oriste ta resta sas, ‘here’s your change’. On the tenth day of the fever the communist boyfriend took me on his motorbike to Ippokrateio, the nearest municipal hospital to my mattress. It might have been the fever, but I remember the place being full of Orthodox friars wandering along courtyards and corridors amid clouds of flies and trailed by their numerous progeny. I can see myself waiting in a crowded room, then going into a consulting room with a choreography of three or four doctors: one smoking by the window, another feeling my throat, a third cracking jokes about my chances of success in adult cinema. I had the same name as a porn actress in Greece; I soon learned to smile knowingly every time I revealed my surname. They charged me five euros for the visit and prescribed me an antibiotic, which I paid full price for at the pharmacy.

Yiannis Boutaris, then mayor of Thessaloniki, often said that Greece was the last Soviet-type society. The phrase was initially intended to be provocative, but by the end of his mandate it was a cliché lazily rolled out to foreign journalists. Boutaris was a wine-making entrepreneur who entered politics in his late sixties and gave off a refreshing air of constantly making a comeback. A divorced, reformed alcoholic with a tattoo of a lizard on the back of his right hand. He talked about restoring the memory of the Jews deported during the Nazi occupation and dared to criticise the unions, the only effective power in the city. He ran as an independent in 2010 and won by just 419 votes. He was said to have been granted the mayorship by the Jewish voters, of whom there were no more than a thousand but who were grateful for a public representative confirming their existence.

I met him in 2019, years after the fever, while visiting on one of my attempts to reconquer the city under a professional pretext. It was a snowy morning in January, and he had a few weeks left as mayor. I turned up to the interview unshowered and wearing the previous day’s clothes, all nervous and hungover.

When I was twenty-two, Boutaris had seemed legendary and unapproachable. Now I was almost thirty and sitting across from him in an office covered with stickers bearing anti-fascist slogans, like a teenager’s bedroom. He was wearing his trademark outfit: red braces over a white office shirt. Next to him was his press manager, primed to jump in at the mayor’s first outburst. Disenchanted, bored with the conversation from the get-go, Boutaris sat there chain-smoking cigarettes in total defiance of the municipal ban. It had been a tedious, interminable Friday. A snowstorm had brought the public transport network—consisting of a couple of bus routes—to a standstill, and the mayor had been fielding insults on Twitter all day. He said the Soviet mentality thing right at the beginning of the interview. The doctors from Ippokrateio burst in like a hologram, performing a Russian ballet, smoking in the window and ensuring me a promising future in the world of porn, while friars wandered the corridors and patients crowded into the waiting room.

Like a tour guide rattling through the last visit of the day, the mayor continued with a long diatribe about the city’s 2,500-year history. Famous visitors included Paul the Apostle, North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, and a false Jewish messiah named Sabbatai Zevi, who garnered a group of fanatical devotees in the seventeenth century. The city had a rich history that was perfectly exploitable as tourist bait, but he had decided to turn his back on it, the same way he’d turned his back on his administration. In his eight-year mandate, progress had been minimal. Boutaris’ most conspicuous project—building a museum to honour the memory of the murdered Jews of Thessaloniki—had dissolved into semantic and ontological discussions at the city hall.

Was it not unfair, as the opposition argued, to focus on a single exterminated community when so many others had suffered during the occupation? Where would the money come from to maintain a museum, aside from the contributions of Israel and Germany? What is to be exhibited there, in a museum dedicated to a non-existent community?

All these questions seemed irrelevant on that snowy January morning, when an already retired Boutaris wanted to believe that the project would go ahead.

“In the end it will be called the Museum of the Holocaust and Human Rights of Thessaloniki. The name is problematic because Israelis don’t have much respect for human rights.”

“We’d better not talk about that,” the head of press smoothly intervened.

I’ve never been a good interviewer; when faced with the slightest reluctance, I tend to avoid discomfort and trust that I’ll be able to fill in the gaps with intuition and wit. A silence followed, bringing an end to the discussion about his pet project. As I was on my way out, he asked for the first time where I planned to publish the interview.

“It doesn’t matter. Nobody gives a shit about anything we talked about,” he said, answering his own question, and lit up another cigarette.