Because I was speaking German I used the phrase totaler Krieg famously coined by Josef Goebbels during the Second World War, and some of the Hertha team glanced nervously my way when they heard it, the way Berliners do when they hear that kind of Nazi shit.
‘If I were you, Bastian,’ I added, ‘I would play tonight’s game the same way. It’s the only language these Greek guys understand and respect. You remember the rest of what was written on Goebbels’s banner? Totaler Krieg — kürzester Krieg. Total war — shortest war.’
‘I think maybe you’re right, Scott. We should fucking run over them. Kick the bastards off the pitch.’
I nodded. ‘Before they do the same to you.’
After breakfast I went back to the Grande Bretagne Hotel, in the centre of Athens. At exactly eleven o’clock I was sitting on a large, biscuit-coloured ottoman in the hotel lobby, texting Simon Page about our first game of the new Premier League season, an away match against newly promoted Leicester City, on 16 August. Simon was just about to take an eight o’clock training session at Hangman’s Wood and I was telling him not to make it a hard one as I was concerned that some of our players were still tired after their World Cup duties, not to mention our disastrous and entirely unnecessary tour of Russia.
‘Did you sleep well?’
I glanced up to find Valentina standing in front of me. She was wearing a plain white shirt, tight blue J-Brand jeans, comfortable snakeskin sandals and black acetate Wayfarers. I stood up and we shook hands.
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘Ready?’ she said.
‘Where are we going?’
‘To see someone you know.’
We took a taxi to the National Archaeological Museum, a five-minute drive north from the hotel. The museum was designed like a Greek temple, a little less run-down than the one on top of the Acropolis, but not far off being a ruin; and like many public buildings in Greece — and quite a few private ones — it was covered in graffiti. Beggars drifted around the unkempt park that was laid out in front of the entrance like so many stray cats and dogs and I handed one old man all of the coins that were in my trouser pocket.
‘It’s something I always do back home,’ I said, seeing Valentina’s sceptical look. ‘For luck. You can’t get any if you don’t give any. Football’s cruel, sometimes very cruel. You have to make sure the capricious gods of football are properly appeased. You shouldn’t even be in the game unless you’re an optimist and to be an optimist means you cannot be a cynic. You have to believe in people.’
‘You don’t strike me as the superstitious sort, Scott.’
‘It’s not superstition,’ I said. ‘It’s just pragmatic to take a balanced approach to good luck and to careful preparation. It’s actually the clever thing to do. Luck has a way of favouring the clever.’
‘We’ll see, won’t we?’
‘Oh, I think Hertha will win. In fact, I’m sure of it.’
‘Is that because you’re half German?’
‘No. It’s because I’m clever. And because I believe in totaler Krieg. Football that takes no prisoners.’
Inside the museum were the treasures of ancient Greece, including the famous gold mask of Agamemnon that Bastian Hoehling had mentioned, back in Berlin. It looked like something made by a child out of gold foil from a chocolate bar. But it was another treasure that Valentina had brought me to see. As soon as I saw it I gasped out loud. This was a life-size bronze statue of Zeus that many years before had been recovered from the sea. What struck me most was not the rendering of motion and human anatomy but the head of Zeus, with its shovel beard and cornrow haircut.
‘My God,’ I exclaimed, ‘it’s Bekim.’
‘Yes.’ Valentina laughed delightedly. ‘He could have modelled for this bronze,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t he?’
‘Even the way he stands,’ I said, ‘mid-stride, in the act of throwing a spear or hurling a thunderbolt, that’s exactly the way Bekim always celebrates scoring a goal. Or nearly always.’
‘I thought it would appeal to you.’
‘Does he know?’
‘Does he know?’ Valentina laughed again. ‘Of course he does. It’s his secret. He grew his beard so he would look like this statue; and when he scores he always thinks of Zeus.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not sure he actually thinks he’s a god, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’
I walked around the statue several times, grinning like an idiot as I pictured Bekim adopting this same pose.
And yet, perfect as the statue was, there was something wrong with it, too. The more I looked at it the more it seemed that the outstretched left hand was wrong, that it was attached to an arm several inches too long; later on, I bought a postcard and measured the approximate length of the arm, and realized that the hand would actually have reached down as far as the god’s knee. Had the sculptor got it wrong? Or had the original display angle of the figure required an extended arm to avoid a foreshortened look? It was hard to be sure but to my critical eye, the hand of God appeared to be reaching just a little too far.
She nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier, about being lucky.’
‘Yes? What about it?’
‘I think you’re going to be lucky,’ she said, and taking my hand she squeezed it, meaningfully.
‘When?’
‘Tonight.’
I lifted her hand to my mouth and kissed it. The nails were short, but immaculately varnished, while the skin on the palm of her hand was like soft leather, which struck me as strange. ‘And I thought you were talking about the football.’
‘Who says I’m not?’
I smiled. ‘I suppose that means you’re coming to the game.’
11
The Karaiskakis Stadium, in the old port of Piraeus, looked like a half-sized version of the Emirates, in London, with a capacity of just 33,000. The impression was bolstered by the fact that Emirates Air was an Olympiacos team sponsor and because of their red and white strip, although the shirt was more like Sunderland’s than Arsenal’s. The match was not well attended, but it was enthusiastically supported. The Gate 7 boys, or Legend as they liked to call themselves, made their calculatedly intimidating presence very loudly felt behind the German goal. They had bare chests and big drums and a sort of director of operations who kept his back to the pitch for almost the whole game so that he might properly orchestrate the obscene songs and low, Neanderthal chants. From time to time bright red flares were let off in the stadium but these were ignored by the police and security, who kept a low profile to the point of near invisibility. I was surprised at how unwilling the local police were to interfere in what took place inside the ground; they were forbidden to use the security cameras inside the stadium to identify potential troublemakers, a result of some obscure privacy law.
Valentina and I were seated in a VIP area immediately behind the German dugout. At eighty euros a ticket in a country where the average monthly income was just six hundred and fifty euros you might have expected these mostly middle-aged and elderly supporters to be better behaved. Not a bit of it. I don’t speak any Greek but thanks to Valentina I was soon able to distinguish and understand words that would certainly have had the users of their Anglo-Saxon equivalents quickly removed from almost any ground in England. Words like arápis (nigger), afrikanós migás (coon), maïmoú (monkey), melitzána (eggplant), píthikos (ape).
The man in the seat beside me must have been in his late sixties but every so often he would leave off smoking his Cohiba cigar or eating his cardamom seeds, leap onto the top of wall, bend over the edge of the German dugout and bellow, ‘Germaniká malakas,’ at the unfortunate Bastian Hoehling.