As he went on, oozing sympathy and then lacing it with his own righteousness, I wanted nothing so much as to be alone, to be rid of the sweating little lawyer. “I have lost my appetite for lunch,” I said.
“I understand. Also, I have an appointment with a man who is so poor he would have thought it my reason for not coming.” He went on unctuously, “I can afford to help him because of you, my friend.”
I put my hand to my wallet pocket. “What else did you learn about Stephanou?”
“A year ago another prisoner who was cleaning the latrine threw lye in his face. That is all I learned. I did not think you would want to know more yourself.”
“That is all,” I repeated. “How did you know he was political?”
“Because it cost me a thousand drachmas.”
I gave him a crisp new note. Sixty dollars in lawyer’s fee. I added a hundred drachmas. “You had better take a taxi. We have come some distance, and I wish to go on alone.”
“I am sorry,” he said, opening the car door.
“So am I. You can forget now that we ever met.”
“It is a shame, but you are right.” He started to get out and then looked round at me brightly. “Perhaps tonight you would like to meet someone—non-political? A very nice girl?”
I was startled, not so much by the proposal or his unabashed directness as by the sort of spinning search it started in my subconscious. I scowled at him, trying in my mind to catch the association before it was lost entirely.
“Please, it was offered in friendship,” he said. “You are a young man.”
I took the hand he offered, as viable as a wet sponge. “Thank you, but not tonight.”
I had the association the instant before he slammed the car door: Webb and the woman on the night he had been murdered, the unnamed, unquestioned woman.
I thrust the car into motion and through the rearview mirror I saw the lawyer shake out his coat and put it on again. My mind began to swarm with the evil images that had pursued me and compounded themselves since that night. I saw again the flashing candlelit nakedness of the woman, then the grinning face of Stephanou, his eyes shining with malicious glee. And I thought of the women I had taken since, or so had striven to construe the act. Even now I felt the crawl of lust starting out of the association. I drove faster and faster, sighting the sea, fighting the images. I could not put down the memory of a whore to whom I had gone, a woman who truly loved her business because she hated men. The struggle was exquisite but the triumph hers, always. And spent, I would have died each time. Yet I went again and again. It was six or seven years since I had been with her, but still I wakened in the night thinking of her and seeing always in the darkness afterwards the laughing eyes of Stephanou.
But a blind man’s eyes don’t laugh. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. And welcome. That much honor was in me: I would not have wished him blind.
I left the car at the road by the sea and walked to where I could see the water only, and the ships, and the nets of the fishermen spread in the sun. I came on an old woman, stooped and shrouded in black, probing the mesh for snags. I watched her sure and facile fingers plying a craft by ancient rote. I almost spoke, wanting to see her face. Then I ran, fearing that, seeing it, I might discover her to be blind.
5
ACCORDING TO THE MAP, a thread of a road led to Kaléa, a village of unspecified population deep in the hills between The Sacred Way and the Bay of Corinth. I set out to find it early the next morning, loading the car with luggage, papers and books, the whole of my possessions in Greece.
Less than a mile from the main highway the road all but disappeared into a bed of stones that shivered the Vauxhall in its every joint. I braked suddenly and killed the motor. The silence all around was awesome, the desolation of the hills stark. I stepped out of the car for a moment. The only movement anywhere was the swooping flight of hawks overhead and the gentle bowing of poppies in the field. I waited, listening until I might hear some sound other than the wind’s moan and the hawks’ shrill cries. It came in the bleating of sheep. I went on, confident that where there were sheep there were also shepherds though I might see neither.
I drove until I reached a shrine at a sharp turning of the road and again stopped. Before the icon of the Virgin a few shafts of grain had been placed in an old wine bottle. The candle had gone out. I relighted it, observing the little offerings within the shelter: a thimble, a watch chain, a tarnished tie-clip, a gold ring.
I heard voices some distance off and I saw a wisp of smoke trailing up to the sky. A school or church bell rang, the sound sporadically muted by the shifting wind. Afternoon was well advanced. I crossed the road and looked down into the valley. Harvesters were working their way slowly up the hill. It was a scene which could have changed very little from the days men first discovered that the fruit of the fields could be husked and ground, leavened and baked in loaves. A woman in peasant black was scything in long, slow strokes, her back the crescent shape of her scythe. Other women were binding the grain in sheaves while a man gathered the sheaves and fastened them, grain downward, on either side of a donkey. They paused in their work, all but the woman with the scythe, and, shading their eyes, looked up to where I stood.
“Your health!” I called out, and waved.
They waved back except for the woman with the scythe, who did not break the rhythm of her work. I remembered the old one mending nets by the sea who did not lift her head to me, and I was uneasy lest there be an omen in it.
The hillsides were dotted with white-washed huts, more numerous as they converged to form the village below. I drove down the precipitous road which leveled off at a shaded square in the middle of which was a fountain where women were drawing water. I parked in the shade and walked toward the nearest kafenion, aware of the women’s glances and the children gathering on tiptoe to peer into the car after I had left it. There was only one other car in sight, an ancient Chevrolet which I subsequently learned belonged to the butcher. The first shop I came to was that of a blacksmith. Beyond the dark recess I could see a boy fanning coals in the backyard. The blacksmith himself was mending a saddle, hugging the daylight near the entry. He nodded and I stopped. I inquired if there was an inn in the village. He put down his tools and came out into the street with me.
“You are German?” he asked with no great show of hospitality. He was my height, but a bigger man and much older. His face was heavily lined. He was a man who laughed easily, but not with strangers, I thought.
“American,” I said.
He scowled, looking toward the car. I led the way back across the street. The children retreated. The blacksmith stooped to examine the inside of the Vauxhall. The back seat was piled with books which Dr. Palandios had insisted I borrow. My own were boxed and on the floor with my luggage.
“Do you dig?” he asked with appropriate gestures.
“I write,” I said, “and I am a teacher.”
“Ah! A professor! Our professor lives in the next village,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
“I am. And I want a place to live.”
“In Kaléa?” he asked, puzzled as well he might have been. I did not suppose he could have heard of Lord Byron, any more than was Byron likely to have heard of Kaléa.
I nodded, indicating beyond the village. “How far is it to the sea?”
“Twenty kilometers. But there is no road.”
“I am writing about your War of Independence,” I said, which was remotely true.
“Ah-ha.” He took me by the arm to turn me in another direction. “That way is Distoman. Do you know what happened there?” And I now understood the reluctant hospitality which would have been extended to me if I were a German.
“Three hundred hostages were shot there,” I said, “a male from each family.”
His eyes bore home the point. “A child two years old, an ancient of eighty-seven. He could not walk. They carried him. But when he got there he stood up straight. Proud.” He spat in the s
treet, his own show of lingering defiance.
I then explained: “It is the war against the Turks in 1821 that I am going to write about.”
“That one!” he said contemptuously. He took my arm again and led me down the street. He asked my name and, when I told him, repeated it, giving it a slightly guttural sound, close to “Achens,” and so it would be pronounced from then on in Kaléa. “Your father was a Greek?”
Seeing no harm in the pretension, I did not deny it.
“What does he do in America?”
“He is dead,” I said.
“May he be with God.” He stopped and offered his hand.
“I am George Kanakis, and I am president of Kaléa. I am also the blacksmith and I repair the roads.”
“You must be a very busy blacksmith,” I said.
He shrugged, then a moment later, realizing what I had meant, he gave a great “Ha!” and pressed my arm. “In America the roads are better?” He led the way past the post office, pointing to me and calling out to the person inside, “American!” and past the bus station which was closed, explaining to me that the bus came early in the morning and mid-afternoon, past the kafenion where I had intended to make inquiries. Several older men half-rose from their chairs at our approach. My guide propelled me on, saying, “Later, later,” to the habitués. To me he confided, “Old men, only the old ones go there.”
The butcher, a few doors down, came out from his shop to meet us, leaving his one customer to examine a few straggles of ripe meat hanging on hooks behind the block. He shook hands and in so doing turned me to the Chevrolet. It was for hire, he explained, wiping the dust from the fender with his apron which already looked as though he had rubbed down a raw carcass with it. He told me that he drove to Athens twice a week. He had a son in Detroit, America, who worked for General Motors, and three daughters at home, beautiful girls, but what could he do? All the young men left the village as soon as they got shoes on their feet.
“He wants us to kill the shoemaker,” Kanakis said, and eased me on. Out of the butcher’s hearing he elaborated: “He has buried three wives and is now on a fourth. Why should he complain of three daughters?”
I could smell the fresh-baked bread and roasting meat some distance before we reached the restaurant and realized that I had had no food since breakfast.
“Vasso cooks for many people,” the president of Kaléa explained. “Everybody does not have a stove. Why should they, when we have Vasso?”
There was no one at the tables outside and the dining room was bare except for tables and chairs, two huge wine kegs and the pastel-tinted photographs of the King and Queen which hung over the kitchen door. But the kitchen was something else: a great table was stacked with fresh bread. There were baskets of tomatoes and carrots and large flat beans. Mesh bags of garlic and onions hung from a beam along with strings of herbs, the smell of which added pungency to the room. Outside the open back door a lamb was roasting on a spit turned by a boy who was paying far more attention to the book in his other hand.
“Michael, it burns!” Kanakis called out.
The boy dropped the book, dipped his ladle and basted the lamb.
The woman, taking the last of the loaves from the oven, lifted her foot and closed the oven door with her toe. I glimpsed a graceful leg and a fine ankle.
She sprinkled the loaves with flour and then came to us, wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. She paused, seeing me, a stranger, and then came on, the dark eyes shifting questioningly from me to Kanakis. She was a handsome woman, but not as young as I’d thought judging from the ankle.
“Who is it?” she said to him almost as though I were not present. She is expecting someone else, I thought, or word from someone. Kanakis quickly explained my presence and more convincingly than I should have done under the circumstances. He introduced her simply as Vasso.
“Are you alone?” she asked me.
“Yes.”
“Last summer there were archeologists. They gave employment to some of our people.”
A true matriarch, I thought. “I’m sorry, but I have nothing like that to offer.”
“With God’s help we live,” she said. “Come. You will eat first and I will see what can be arranged.”
Kanakis shook hands with me and went outdoors. Vasso took me to the stove and lifted the lids of one pot, then another, that simmered there, a chunk of lamb previously spitted now steeped in its own juices, flat green beans in basil and oil, spaghetti….
“Some of everything,” I said. “I am very hungry.”
At the dining room door she bade me choose my table and then brought a simple setting and fresh bread. She drew wine in an earthenware jug from one of the kegs and brought it.
“You are a professor also?” she said, Kanakis having listed that among my credentials.
“Yes.”
“My son goes twenty kilometers to the gymnasium. Someday he will go to the university in Athens if God is awake.”
“Do you have other children, Mrs. …? I did not get your other name,” I said apologetically.
“Vasso. I am called Vasso. It is enough. Michael is my only child and I have no husband.” She flung the words at me, not with hostility but as though in a summary that should forestall my asking further questions. I think it amused her to see that I was somewhat flustered. All of which gave me something to ponder while I sipped the good light wine and ate my bread. She wore a red skirt and white shirtwaist, not the widow’s black.
The old men from the kafenion had drifted down the street and taken up chairs outside the restaurant. They twisted around to peer in at me owlishly now and then, while Kanakis stood talking with them, and if they seemed to catch my eyes, they nodded and saluted me.
Kanakis came in presently and said, “You are invited to have coffee with us, Mr. Eakins,” and, at the kitchen door, “Five coffees, Vasso!”
I shall give the names of some of these old gentlemen afterwards. It was some time before I knew them myself, but three of them had been in America and had returned to the village of their birth. They questioned me on my business—where I taught, whether I got paid for writing a book, and how much. One of them complimented me on my Greek, but the eager confirmation of the others made me doubt its excellence. Then each of them told me of his business in America.
“They do us a great honor, coming home to die,” Kanakis said. I was not at all sure it was not sarcasm.
“We come home to live,” he was corrected.
“To live is to plough the soil, reap the grain, it is to make strong sons.”
“We have done all that, Kanakis.”
“And left them in America. You are not Greeks, you are displaced Americans.”
“We pay Greek taxes, Kanakis.”
“Because you can’t run fast enough when the collector comes.”
“And why do you not run, you are so swift? You stay to collect from the collector.”
“I am a paid public official.”
“And we are the public!” One of the old men thumped his fist on the table, shimmering the water in the glasses. “I learned that in America. We are the public.”
This while Vasso’s son had gone and come, bringing back with him a woman in black of an age to be his grandmother. Whatever was said in the kitchen as the old one went out again she bowed and nodded to me, the boy at her heels. The village president left us and the old men had fallen to talking about the government subsidies to farmers. They opposed it, to a man, lest it change the country in their lifetime. The sun was setting when the boy came back and asked if I was ready.
The square had come to life when Michael and I walked back to where I had left the car: wagons and donkeys, men and women returning from the fields. Women carried water in cannisters on their heads, moving with solemn and sure grace over the cobbles in their bare feet. The humped hills to the west were rimmed in gold and the shadows fell through the valley like the descent of enormous bats.
Vasso
’s son walked in silence.
“What are you reading, Michael?” I asked.
“A book, sir.”
“What is it about?”
“People.”
“That’s the best subject,” I said, and abandoned the attempt at conversation. He was small for his age and he bore little resemblance to his mother. Both his head and face were round, the features small. I was to remember later thinking that he looked like the child of an old man.
At the seaward edge of the village, he directed me to stop the car. The old woman was waiting outside a freshly whitewashed cottage. As I reached its door she scurried in ahead of me and pulled an electric-light cord. The bulb gave a dismal light but to her it was a triumph. She grinned and waited for my approval.
“Kala,” I said, but I was grateful I had remembered to purchase a strong bulb in Athens.
There was but the one room, large and as sparsely furnished as the requirements I had specified. The shutters were open and the room smelled fresh. The old woman pointed to the icon, a long-faced Virgin, and blessed herself as she watched me.
“Kala,” I said again.
She brought me a small dish of preserved cherries with a silver spoon and a glass of water, and watched solemnly while I ate them.
Michael had vanished. It was the old woman who insisted on helping me bring in my things, choosing to carry the heaviest of them. Gallantry on my part would only have embarrassed her. I unpacked my books.
“Grandmother,” I said, “how many grandchildren do you have?”
She laughed. “Eleven. Seven boys.”
“May they all prosper with God’s help,” I said.
“I have three sons, two of them in Athens and one in Istanbul.”
“And daughters?”
“Only one, thank God, my Vasso.”
“She will provide for herself,” I said.
“Ah.” She wagged her head.
“She is beautiful,” I said.
She glanced at me furtively, but her eyes were tender and, in that deeply lined face, the cheeks shrunken beneath their high bone structure, I could see the daughter’s mother.
Enemy and Brother Page 5
