The Mystery of Zitrou Street

      The Jungle Comes to Zitrou Street

Flora and Christos, who owned the small apartment building in Zitrou Street, and Kyrios Panayiotis, Flora’s brother, assumed it was a dog. Well, probably a dog, although with Athens going to the dogs, as it were, who could be sure? With the place overrun with refugees and illegal immigrants, anything was possible, of course…

Whoever the culprit, they were deeply affronted and then incensed that they should be singled out for such unwanted attention.

Every night Kyrios Panayiotis checked his five cars before going to bed. They were parked on the street because there was nowhere else to leave them, and he was perpetually agitated by the possibility of fingerprints, cats’ pawprints and other transgressions. Worse scenarios didn’t bear thinking about. He always hosed the vehicles down between midnight and two a.m., before retiring, whether he could detect any visible marks or not. He even hosed down the hulk that was parked permanently under Sergei's and Izzy's ground-floor window. In fact, he often spent longer on that than the other four combined. Not that it made any difference. By morning, the street's population of feline strays had left their version of graffiti all over the paintwork, in the form of dusty or muddy pawprints, while in the course of each day the pigeons added their trademark to whichever cars remained. As if to circumvent this practice, Kyrios Panayiotis would sometimes return from work for lunch, the traditional siesta time, to exchange one car for another, but he was fighting a losing battle, outnumbered by indigent pigeons and alley-cats who had nothing to do but dirty his duco.

And now an invisible enemy had struck, not once, but nightly. Every night after inspecting and hosing down his cars, and reparking them a few times, and standing back to admire the final effect, Kyrios Panayiotis scanned the narrow street. He had a clear view from end to end, and there was never a creature stirring. He would lie in bed, straining his ears, his poodle at the ready. Nobody and nothing could escape Pele’s attention. Such an alert, perceptive, vigilant animal!

But during the couple of hours when Kyrios Panayiotis succumbed to sleep, it happened. There on the marble doorstep every morning the Albanian cleaning lady would find the disgusting visiting card. Always in precisely the same spot. It was the work of a small dog, or perhaps a child, and it was provocative, to say the least.

Flora and Christos and Kyrios Panayiotis held family conferences and sought advice. Various remedies and deterrents were suggested, and one by one they tried them all, to no avail. So it was that the other tenants in Christos’s apartment building came home to find crushed mothballs on the porch. This message apparently made no impression on the nocturnal visitor, and again the cleaning lady found the offensive offering, garnished with crushed mothballs, in precisely the same spot on the porch.

The next innovation was to cover the porch in powdered pepper. The tenants fell about in sneezing fits, but still the fecal fetishist, canine or human, paid its respects. Access to other folk wisdom resulted in the porch being covered in steel wool. This was pushed aside by the mystery trespasser to make a space, and the inevitable remained as proof that folk wisdom is not infallible.

Powders and then gels were tried in the hope that pawprints or footprints would help to identify the culprit, or at least the species. Morning brought the usual unpleasant reminder, but no other trace. The creature revealed no further clue to its identity, just the same pathetic little coil of body waste. Kyrios Panayiotis was beside himself. How dare it/he/she! Such disrespect! It had to be a foreigner, or at least a foreign animal! Little did he realise how close he was to the truth.

In a frenzy of frustration, he had wet concrete laid all around the porch. He might as well not have bothered, for all the difference it made. Every morning the Albanian cleaning lady doused the marble flagstones with ammonia. Every night the unwanted visitor paid a call, leaving the now familiar proof of having trespassed.

The situation had become intolerable. Another family conference was called, only this time it took the form of a council of war. In the midst of these grave proceedings, Sergei, the foreign tenant, knocked at the upstairs door to pay the rent. Flora and Kyrios Panayiotis fell on him excitedly.

“This is the plan,” they said. “We have hired a private detective to spend the night on the roof of the building opposite. Once we identify the culprit, we shall confront its owner with the evidence, and that will be the end of it!” They were as jubilant as children on a spree.

The next day, a subdued Flora passed Sergei in the lobby, and informed him in lowered tones that, according to the private detective, the nocturnal visitor was actually not a dog, but a small monkey.

That evening, after some sober reflection, Sergei added his own theory to the imbroglio. The monkey, he told Izzy, his Australian girlfriend, was a refugee, just as he himself had been. It had been captured in Africa or Java, and sold to the Ambassador of Spain. The Spaniard had brought the little monkey to Athens, where it became an unwilling inmate of the embassy residence, only one block away from Christos’s apartment building. There it had spent its days dreaming of escape, longing to find its way back to Africa, or Java. Then one day, when a servant had left a window open, the little monkey had made a run for it.

Now it – actually, she: Sergei was sure it was a she - was hiding out in a derelict house a few doors up the street, marked for demolition since the recent earthquake. And, since monkeys are fastidious creatures, she did not foul her own abode, but sought a convenient nearby place for necessary purposes. Being too terrified to show herself by day, she waited until no creature stirred in Zitrou Street, and then crept out and quickly attended to her needs. What she lived on was a mystery, but probably she snatched food scraps dropped daily in the street, and found pieces of fruit lying outside the greengrocer’s. She must feel so alone and so confused, Sergei imagined, but he didn’t yet have any idea how to help her. The best thing would be for her to somehow be united with other monkey escapees in the public gardens. He resolved to think of a plan to rescue her, as he could clearly imagine her fear and her despair.

Izzy warmed to Sergei's story, but was inclined to think the monkey's appearance was somehow connected with the earthquake, which seemed to have sent everyone a little queer. Kyrios Panayiotis, for example, had recently taken to sleeping on the back seat of his car-hulk under their bedroom window, and they couldn't decide whether it was because he'd fallen out with his wife (in which case you'd think he'd be more comfortable in the spare bedroom of his own apartment), or because he was afraid to be caught indoors by the next earthquake, or because he was afraid someone would steal one of his other four cars. Perhaps he was lying in wait for a glimpse of the monkey.

These speculations did not exhaust the topic. It could be that he was terribly lonely. His wife was a hard-looking, smart-looking woman, and seemed the type who would care more for her own appearance than other people's feelings, so perhaps pot-bellied, soulful-eyed, dishevelled-looking Kyrios Panayiotis was nothing more to her than that sought-after commodity and valuable asset, the Good Provider.

As for the monkey, almost certainly she'd been frightened out of her wits by the earthquake, and had ended up taking refuge in one of several crumbling nineteenth-century houses a few doors down the street. Zitrou Street would probably appeal to a monkey refugee, because it was too narrow for traffic to flow through, and the buildings were mostly old two-storeyed ones, with walled gardens and the occasional fruit tree, a bakery and a greengrocer's. Certainly Zitrou's Street's permanent residents thought there was no better place to be.

But before Sergei could intervene with a plan to save the monkey, Kyrios Panayiotis proposed a somewhat different strategy. That evening, bristling with purpose, he approached Sergei, and in a quite peremptory fashion said he would trap the monkey by dangling a mango with a large fish-hook concealed inside it out of Sergei’s and Izzy’s bedroom window. Suppressing his sense of outrage on behalf of the persecuted animal, Sergei coldly refused, pointing out that theirs was not the only room on the ground floor facing Zitrou Street.

The following night when Sergei returned home late after his habitual stroll, which helped fill in time until Izzy returned from the newspaper where she worked, he was mildly surprised to find the entrance in darkness. As he stepped across the threshold, something lurking there let out a strangled howl as it leapt at him and enveloped him. There was a moan and a muffled crash, a shriek as the lights came on. Sergei peered through the net that enmeshed him, to make out the rotund object at his feet, which turned out to be Kyrios Panayiotis, bruised and sheepish, lying at the foot of the three stairs just inside the front door. Flora stood farther back, her hands to her cheeks, giggling and blushing.

 “I tell you,” said Sergei, “it wasn’t me!”

Expecting a jocular response, he encountered speculation in their eyes, and then suspicion, as if a new theory had just struck them.

Later the same night, Sergei and Izzy started up in bed as blood-curdling howls rent the somnolence of Zitrou Street. It was Pele, howling as if he’d been stung, which proved close to the case. Kyrios Panayiotis had tethered a protesting Pele at the entrance, where they had heard him fretting and yelping before they went to sleep.

Now the monkey had struck with a vengeance, defecating defiantly on its chosen spot on the porch, and giving Pele a nasty nip on the neck before running away.

Kyrios Panayiotis was seething. This meant full-scale war. First his porch (in a manner of speaking), and now his pooch. It was too much. By the end of the following day he had erected such a formidable barricade around the front porch that some of the timider tenants feared to enter. There were strange smells and chicken wire, barbed wire and nets, alarms and, most probably, concealed booby traps.

That night, even the monkey’s suspicions must have been aroused, since she transferred her activities to the dentist’s porch across the street. Flora and Kyrios Panayiotis were ecstatic. Christos seemed to have long since lost interest.

There was no further mention of the monkey, until one evening the dentist came rushing into the building, blood trickling onto his white collar from his neck. He was yelping in pained surprise, and simultaneously cursing. It seemed that he had somehow managed to capture the monkey, which had become bolder in her sallies, or perhaps developed more pressing needs. Just as he had been about to anaesthetise her with an injection, she had turned and nipped him on the neck, then fled. And there on Flora's and Christos’s porch was a fresh symbol of defiance.

Now the tactics changed again. A thin blue gel was applied to the white marble porch each night, making it a perilous operation for residents to enter and exit. No explanation was offered as to its name or composition. Several evenings passed with the predictable retaliation, and then the monkey seemed to disappear. Nobody said anything. Night and morning, the porch remained bare and clean. If Flora or Kyrios Panayiotis had cause for jubilation, they didn’t show it.

Some months later, Sergei and Izzy were visiting Santorini. Something in a corner of the museum caught Izzy's eye. It was a fresco of some little blue monkeys.

“Look, Sergei,” said Izzy. “She might have been a Minoan monkey. Perhaps she escaped from a wall-painting, not from the Spanish embassy. And now she’s back, with the other blue monkeys, safe again. Maybe the blue gel helped her make the transformation. Do you remember? It was the same blue.”

“Maybe,” said Sergei, entering into Izzy's fiction. Surrealism appealed to him, although art had never been anywhere near as surreal as life, in his experience. "But I think it is something to do with earthquake. Big earthquake destroyed Minoan city where blue monkeys live. Maybe they are her ancestors, and she has phobia from them.  So she panics when big quake comes, like everyone, and runs away when all the people run out in the street. She gets confused, and runs some more, and finds herself on Flora's porch… But still I wonder how she is, and where. And I wish we could know this story, why she came to Zitrou Street…”

Izzy shied away from contemplating the fate of a small, frightened, homeless monkey in a hostile environment, among people who could seemingly turn into territorial maniacs at the drop of -- well, something messier than a hat, admittedly, but hardly life-threatening. She still felt shaken when she thought of the way their hitherto benevolent landlords had reacted. "Seismic country, seismic people," she had told herself, trying to shrug it off, but disquieting implications kept sneaking back like the much-maligned monkey. She kept them at bay by reminding herself how easy it would be for people in Sergei's and her position to succumb to paranoia.

They were both foreigners, here on sufferance, their situation precarious at best.  But this was the only place that had so far accepted them both. Although "acceptance" was not exactly the right word, either. They were quasi-legal residents on a temporary basis. She realised that, by current world standards, this represented a generous degree of accommodation. It was probably the best they could hope for, in fact. She would probably not be allowed into Sergei's country, nor he into hers. It was not a good time for migration. It seemed no country on earth wanted more immigrants. Even little monkeys could be demonised for arriving uninvited and unwittingly breaching local etiquette.

Realising that Sergei was still waiting for her response to his comments, she said brightly: "I've changed my mind about the recent earthquake theory. I think she has to be Minoan. I wonder if anyone noticed she went missing from the fresco for a couple of months?"

Sergei stood behind Izzy, looking at their reflection in the glass of a museum case.

"No, Izzy," he said, his tone sober. "No use to pretend. Monkey is like us, and we are like monkey. Her turn today, our turn tomorrow. We want people to tolerate us, but they don't really want us here. Next earthquake is very big. I feel it coming."