Book I, Vertical Time Summary

Athos takes Jakob, now thirteen, to Athens to search for information about Bella and Aunt Ida's fate. Greece is in ruins from the war and communists and British are fighting. They stay with Athos' old colleague Kostas Mitsialis and his wife Daphne, the adults talking politics and Kostas describing the various occupations. Jakob pictures events from his childhood similar to some of the Greek anecdotes about British and Australian soldiers singing, Germans marching, stealing, and taunting, and Greeks blackmarketting or collapsing from hunger. Kostas tells Jakob about the beloved poet Palamas and Sikelianos, who preaches freedom at Palamas' funeral. Athenians are on the roof, greeting one another the night before the Germans withdraw. They hear news of one thousand vanished villages. There are too many dead to bury. The Americans bring food, which the communists steal as...