- Chapter 8. 1974–2007: After History
- » Explosive Genealogies
“He was one of those who picked up Maratos,” my father said, “and they tried him, sent him to Averof, but his father paid one hundred and thirty gold pounds to commute the sentence to life, and that's how he ended up in Yáros.” This, now, made sense. He was sent to Yáros because he was too young for military service but was a convicted murderer and member of OPLA and the Party. I asked how he left Yáros, only to be told that his class was called to military service. He was transferred to Makrónisos, and from there to Grammos. The part that only those who had signed dēlôseis could be sent to Grammos was left out of this narrative.
I tried to find out anything I could about the Maratos case, to no avail. Several months later, around Christmas 2003, I saw an announcement in the newspaper for a book called Ho Kokkinos Stavros (The Red Cross), written by Georges Maratos. I looked for it, but it did not come out for a few more months. I tried to find Maratos himself in the meantime, although I was not really sure what I could tell him in the event that I found him. As soon as the book came out, I read it in one sitting. My uncle Stéphanos's name was nowhere to be found, but the name of my other uncle, the later chief of police, appeared prominently in the book; it was he who had found the OPLA executioners and had brought young Georges Maratos to the police station, first to identify the body of his father and then to identify the main executioner. At least now I had something to go by. I called my uncle and asked about Stéphanos.
“I am not sure that he was part of that operation,” he said to me. “But be careful. Scripta manet.”
I asked my father about it. He shrugged, saying, “What are you trying to do, now? Leave it alone. The fact is that they are both dead now, just like Bakoyiannis.”
These narrativized connections constitute nodal points around which the memory of corporeal and psychological trauma organizes the articulation of historical experience and thus a conceptual platform for understanding violence against the state. If 17N produced a narrative genealogy of affinities with the revolutionary and emancipatory gestures of contemporary Greek history, this gesture did not go unnoticed by its critics, again with a twist. This twist recognizes the dialectical texture of revolution, the fact that, for every enlightening, emancipatory, and democratic gesture that it makes, there is another one, dark, oppressive, and murderous. The trial of 17N started in spring 2004 and brought to the fore the deep uneasiness in Greece about political violence.
“We didn't need this,” an older friend, Popi, said about 17N. “Imagine, we have been in turmoil all our lives, it's enough.”
“Did people feel safe or unsafe with 17N around?” I asked.
Another friend, Evi, responded to that. “When they were caught, I was talking with a neighbor here. I said that, finally, they had been caught, and she said to me that she never felt unsafe with 17N around. Imagine that!”