A 27-meter roll of paper written in Athens from 1941 to 1944, an Occupation diary but also a long, romantic, unanswered letter from a thirty-year-old Greek painter to his French beloved who has been silent since the beginning of the war. Days and nights of occupied Athens and nostalgia for the Paris of 1939, when the two of them, fellow students at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, tried with their love to ignore the omen of disaster.

And from there begins an adventure, born during quarantine and lasting four years, an attempt to bring back to life two young people, long dead, and with them all those who lived beside them then—our parents, our grandparents, figures we see in old family photographs and do not recognize, those we did not ask when we should have.

Who was this strange artist, completely unknown in Greek bibliography, who did not even leave his name here, who traveled on the Mataroa and was remembered posthumously by the New York Times? And this girl who was 19 years old in 1939 and whom we left in a village in southern France—did she survive, create, find him again? Can you discover, in the 2020s, a student from the Interwar period?

Many lives intertwine in the pages of this book, quietly walking under the pepper trees of interwar Athens, dancing in the dance halls of Paris a few months before the war broke out, meeting EAM fighters and collaborationist ministers, being photographed with Moralis, conversing with Sikelianos, painting murals at the headquarters of Pfizer decades before vaccines freed us from confinement. 

The Athenian Interwar period, Paris of ’39 and ’45, the Occupation, the Albanian front, San Francisco of the ’50s and New York of the ’60s, coincidences, unexpected encounters, borrowed memories, and an attempt to hold on to time that cannot be held onto at all.