by Don DeLillo
She said to me, she whispered with uncanny clarity, “People just want to be held. It’s enough to be held, isn’t it?”
I paused, then used my knees to move her legs apart. I worked in stages, trying to reason it, to maneuver things correctly. We took short breaths, our mouths together, as we urged each other into a rhythm and a need. I worked at her clothes, my mind racing blankly. I felt the warmth in her buttocks and thighs and I moved her toward me. She seemed to be thinking past this moment, finished with it, watching herself in a taxi heading home.
“Janet Ruffing.”
“I don’t do this. I don’t.”
We stood under an iron balcony, in the upper sector of the old town, beneath the rock mass of the north slope of the Acropolis.
10
The Germans are sitting in the sun. The Swedes drift by, heads tilted sunward, an eagerness in their faces that resembles pain. The two women from Holland stand against the wall of the harborfront church, eyes closed, feeling the warmth on their faces and necks. The man we keep seeing, the one in the white linen cap, stands in a patch of sun in the Turkish cemetery, among the pines and eucalyptus, peeling an orange. The Swedes move out of sight, heading toward the aquarium. The English appear, carrying their coats into the empty square, where shadows begin to extend from the Venetian arcade, in the strange silence, the late morning light.
Three days in Rhodes. David decides it is warm enough to swim. We watch him enter, moving slowly forward, shoulders swinging, arms raised to chest level when the water reaches his midsection, the blond body, as he surfaces after the plunge, seeming to leap toward the Turkish hills, seven miles off. We sit on a low wall above the beach. The beach is empty except for boys with a spotted soccer ball. The pages of a paperback book turn in the wind. The man in the white cap comes by, asking us where he can find the museum of fish.
David’s swim leaves a space which we are meant to fill with serious talk. But Lindsay seems content to look out to sea. It is that kind of holiday. The long sightlines, the emptiness, the building wind.
After the second of his long punishing swims he comes up the beach looking four inches shorter, walking deep in sand. When he raises his head we see how happy he is to be breathing heavily and sea-beaten and freezing, his wife and his friend waiting with a hotel towel.
The next day it rains, and the day after, which reduces the mood to a purer state. I begin to see that these days are connected mysteriously to Kathryn. They are Kathryn’s days.
On the afternoon of the third day a storm approaches. It comes from the east and we stand on the breakwater near the old tower to watch the waves hit gleaming on the rocks. An immense graveness fills the air. The seaward stir of clouds and glassy dusk brings on a charged luminescence, a stormlight that does not fall upon objects so much as it emanates from them. The buildings begin to glow, the governor’s palace, the bell-tower, the new market. As the sky goes black the white boats shine, the bronze deer shine, the gold stone of the law courts and bank emits a painted light. Water comes surging over the high wall. There is no light except in objects.
Coming home, flying low over islands crouched in the haze, we began suddenly to talk.
“Why do I miss my countries?” David said. “My countries are either terrorist playpens or they’re viciously anti-American or they’re huge tracts of economic and social and political wreck age.”
“Sometimes all of those,” Lindsay said.
“Why can’t I wait to get back into it? Why am I so eager? A hundred percent inflation, twenty percent unemployment. I love deficit countries. I love going in there, being intimately involved.”
“Too intimately, some might say.”
“You can’t be too intimate with a Syrian, a Lebanese,” he told me.
“When they allow you to monitor their economic policies in return for a loan. When you reschedule a debt and it amounts to an aid program.”
“These things help, they genuinely help stabilize the region. We do things for our countries. Our countries are interesting. I can’t get interested in Spain, for instance.”
“I can’t get interested in Italy.”
“Spain should be interesting. The violence is not sickening like the violence in India. But I can’t get interested.”
“Indian violence is random. Is that what you mean?”
“I don’t know what I mean.”
“I can’t get interested in the Horn of Africa,” I said.
“The Horn of Africa is happening. Rhodesia is happening. But we can’t get interested.”
“What about Afghanistan? Is that one of your countries?”
“It’s a non-presence country. No office but we do business, a little. Iran is different. Collapsed presence, collapsed business. A black hole in other words. But I want everyone to know I retain a measure of affection.”
This was the period after the President ordered a freeze of Iranian assets held in U.S. banks. Desert One was still to come, the commando raid that ended two hundred and fifty miles from Tehran. It was the winter Rowser learned that the Shi’ite underground movement, Dawa, was stockpiling weapons in the Gulf. It was the winter before the car bombings in Nablus and Ramallah, before the military took power in Turkey, tanks in the streets, soldiers painting over wall slogans. It was before Iraqi ground troops moved into Iran at four points along the border, before the oilfields burned and the sirens sounded through Baghdad, through Rashid Street and the passageways of the souks, before the blackouts, the masking of headlights, people hurrying out of teahouses, off the double-decker buses.
All around us the human noise, the heat of a running crowd.
Food and drink were the center of almost every human contact I had in Greece and the region. Eating, talking across rickety wooden tables, marble-top tables, tables with paper covering, wrought-iron tables, tables set together on a pebbled surface by the sea. One of the mysteries of the Aegean is that things seem more significant than they do elsewhere, deeper, more complete in themselves. Those of us pressed together around the joined tables were raised in each other’s estimation to a higher light perhaps, an amplitude that may or may not have been our natural due. The food itself was a serious thing, simple as it often was, eaten with dwarf cutlery from shared plates, an effort of our single will to be where we were, extravagant in our belief in each other’s distinctiveness and worth. We never had to summon a sense of occasion. It was in and around us all the time.
Andreas took me to a taverna in a half-finished street in a remote district. The place specialized in heart, brains, kidneys and intestines. I decided this choice of eating place had not been made casually. The evening was to be a lesson in seriousness, in authentic things, whatever is beyond a pale understanding, whatever persuades the complacent to see what is around them. He would use these parts of the animal’s body to decorate his text. This is the real thing, kokorétsi, the spit-roasted entrails of the beast. These are Greeks, who eat it.
On the other hand maybe it was just another dinner in a smoky room with homemade wine in tin mugs, distinguishable from a hundred other dinners not by the food so much as by the intensity of the conversation. His conversation. His furious, good-humored, incessant and maddening talk.
He was not settled until he put his cigarette and his lighter on the table in front of him. I felt almost threatened by the gesture. Serious. A serious evening.
“Why are we having dinner, Andreas?”
“I want to find out about your Greek. You said you were learning Greek. I want to find out if you are happy here.”
“Not that people need a reason to eat.”
“I am always interested in talking to Americans.”
“Roy Hardeman.”
“Professional duty. I am not so interested. He’s a good manager, very smart, but we only talk about the job. He could be a Frenchman, a German, and I would hardly notice. I don’t think there’s any nationality in companies such as ours. This is sub merged.”
“I can’t imagine
you submerging your nationality.”
“Okay, maybe this is why we are here. To make things clear once again. To show our status.”
“You need someone to rail at. Why not a Frenchman or German?”
“Not so much fun.”
“A waiter said to us on Rhodes the other day, he said, ‘You Americans are fools. You had the Germans down and you let them up. They were down and you did not crush them. Now look. Everywhere.’ “
“But he takes their money. We all take each other’s money. This is the role of the present government. Take the Americans’ money, do what the Americans tell us to do. It is breathtaking, how they submit, how they let American strategic interests take precedence over the lives of Greeks.”
“It’s your government, not ours.”
“I am not so sure. Of course we have experience in these matters. Humiliation is the theme of Greek affairs. Foreign interference is taken for granted. It is assumed we could not survive without it. The occupation, the blockades, the forces landing in Piraeus, the humiliating treaties, the distribution of influence among the powers. What would we talk about if not about this? Where would we find the drama that is so essential to our lives?”
“You realize your irony is fixed in considerable truth. Of course you do. Forgive me.”
“For a long time our politics have been determined by the interests of the great powers. Now it is just the Americans who determine.”
“What is this I’m eating?”
“I will tell you. Brains.”
“Not bad.”
“Do you like it? Good. I come here when I’m tense. When my job is crushing my spirit. Something like this, you know. Misery, depression. I come here and eat brains and kidneys.”
“You realize the trouble with Greece. Greece is strategically located.”
“We have noticed,” he said.
“So it’s only natural the major powers have taken a close interest. What do you expect? My boss once said to me in his nervous raspy way, ‘Power works best when it doesn’t distinguish friends from enemies.’ The man is a living Buddha.”
“I think he must be running American policy. Our future does not belong to us. It is owned by the Americans. The Sixth Fleet, the men who command the bases on our soil, the military officers who fill the U.S. embassy, the political officers who threaten to stop the economic aid, the businessmen who threaten to stop investing, the bankers who lend money to Turkey. Millions for the Turks, all decided in Athens.”
“Not by me, Andreas.”
“Not by you. We are repeatedly sold out, taken lightly, deceived, totally ignored. Always in favor of the Turks. The famous tilt. It happened in Cyprus, it happens every day in NATO.”
“You’re obsessed by the Turks. It’s a spiritual need. Are they even remotely interested in you?”
“They seem to be remotely interested in our islands, our air space.”
“Strategy.”
“American strategy. This is interesting, how the Americans choose strategy over principle every time and yet keep believing in their own innocence. Strategy in Cyprus, strategy in the matter of the dictatorship. The Americans learned to live with the colonels very well. Investments flourished under the dictatorship. The bases stayed open. Small arms shipments continued. Crowd control, you know?”
“They were your colonels, Andreas.”
“Are you sure of that? This is interesting to me, the curious connection between Greek and American intelligence agencies.”
“Why curious?”
“The Greek government doesn’t know what goes on between them.”
“What makes you think the American government knows?
This is the nature of intelligence, isn’t it? The final enemy is government. Only government threatens their existence.”
“The nature of power. The nature of intelligence. You have studied these things. Where, in your apartment in Kolonaki?”
“How do you know I live there?”
“Where else would you live but there?”
“The views are nice.”
“The bidet of America, we call this place. Do you want to hear the history of foreign interference in this century alone?”
“No.”
“Good. I don’t have time to recite it.”
In the end he did recite it. He recited everything, interrupting his meal several times to light cigarettes, order more wine. I enjoyed myself even in the sweep of judgment and enormous accusation. He had made an occupation of these matters, he had taken pains, and I think he was eager to vent his scholarship. Diligence, comprehensiveness. He was a student of Greek things. It occurred to me that all Greeks were, both in and out of politics and war. Being small and exposed, being strategic. They had a sense of the frailty of their own works, the identifying energies and signs, and they instructed each other as a form of mutual reassurance.
“Does your boss tell you that power must be blind in both eyes? You don’t see us. This is the final humiliation. The occupiers fail to see the people they control.”
“Come on, Andreas.”
“Bloody hell, nothing happens without the approval of the Americans. And they don’t even know there is a grievance. They don’t know we are tired of the situation, the relationship.”
“You’ve had five or six years of calm. Is this too long for Greeks?”
“Look how deep we are involved in the comedy. To make concessions to Turks for the sake of harmony in NATO. All arranged by Americans. Americans have played the game badly in Greece.”
“And your mistakes. All your mistakes are discussed in terms of acts of nature. The catastrophe in Asia Minor. The disastrous events in Cyprus. This is the language of earthquakes and Hoods. But Greeks caused these things to happen.”
“Cyprus is problematical. I will say this only because there is no documentary evidence. But one day the facts of U.S. involvement will emerge. I am certain.”
“What am I eating?”
“This is the stomach, the stomach lining.”
“Interesting.”
“I don’t know if I would call it interesting. It’s a sheep’s stomach, you know. Usually I come here alone. It has a certain meaning for me. Brains, intestines. I don’t know if you can understand. Did you ever see a Greek when he dances alone? This is private, a private moment. I’m a little crazy, I think. I need a moment of eating sheep’s brains now and then.”
The owner stood over us, totaling the bill in machine-gun Greek. We went somewhere for dessert, somewhere else for drinks. At two in the morning we walked the streets looking for a cab. Andreas told me about events leading up to this and that and the other calamity. Whenever he had a point to make he stopped walking and seized my wrist. This happened four or five times on a single windy street. Talk came out of him like the product of some irreversible technology. We’d stand briefly in the dark, then start up again, heading toward a boulevard somewhere. He was full of night vigor, a common property of Athenians. Ten paces he’d stop again. Nuclear stockpiles, secret protocols. His politics were a form of wakefulness, the alerting force in a life that might otherwise pass him by.
“What do you want me to do, Andreas?”
“I want you to argue,” he said. “It may be an hour before a taxi comes.”
From the small balcony off my bedroom I looked into a room across the courtyard, a little below me. A bright day, shutters open, the room being aired. Self-possessed, a woman’s room, a woman’s shoes on the floor. I was in shadows, the room in clear light, utterly still, a cool space of objects and tones. What a mystery her absence was, full of unformed questions. There was something final in the scene, a deep calm, as though things had been arranged to be gazed on. Shouldn’t a scene like this be marked by expectation? The woman will enter? She will enter drying her hair in a towel, bringing into the room so many things at once, so much affective motion, a lifetime’s shattering of com posed space, that it is possible to believe you know everything about her, just in that bundlin
g of head and arms, that careless entrance, barefoot, in a loose robe. Alluring. This is what I missed. When the light changed, later, I would look again.
My landlord, Hadjidakis, was standing in the lobby. He was a short heavy man who enjoyed speaking English. Almost everything he said in English struck him as funny, almost every sentence ended in a laugh. He seemed happily disconcerted, making these strange sounds. After we’d greeted each other he told me he’d just seen a group of riot policemen assembled near the center of town. Nothing seemed to be going on. They were simply there, about forty of them, in their white visored helmets, black uniforms, carrying riot shields, guns and clubs. As he told the story Hadjidakis kept laughing. All the facts in the story were separated by the sound of his laughter. It was an odd juxtaposition, of course, the riot police and the laughter. The story in English had an eerie dimension it wouldn’t have had in Greek. And the sight of those shields and clubs had made an impact on him.
“It gave me an emotion,” he said, and we both laughed.
When I came down the next day with a suitcase, the concierge stood in the dimness, his right hand twisted in the air, the gesture of destinations.
China, I told him, Kina, not knowing the word for Kuwait.
I rode out to the airport with Charles Maitland, who was going to Beirut to see about a job as security officer with the British embassy there.
“I was saying to Ann. They keep changing the names.”
“What names?”
“The names we grew up with. The countries, the images. Persia for one. We grew up with Persia. What a vast picture that name evoked. A vast carpet of sand, a thousand turquoise mosques. A vastness, a cruel glory extending back centuries. All the names. A dozen or more and now Rhodesia of course. Rhodesia said something. For better or worse it was a name that said something. What do they offer in its place? Linguistic arrogance, I suggested to her. She called me a comedian. She has no personal memory of Persia as a name. But then she’s younger, isn’t she?”
