The coffee came, the small cups and the glasses of water were set daintily on a nail keg. The quick darkness of the valley was coming soon. We sipped the coffee in silence. I offered my host a cigarette.
When he had smoked for a moment he said, “But after the war it was something else. When the Germans were gone we were not all for the Andarte any longer. Sometimes I think we are better at fighting ourselves than we are our enemies. And you know, I sometimes blame the church for it. Maybe I should blame our enemies who have always left us our church. Mind, I am a religious man. They have left us our Greekness, leaving the church.
“Could they have taken it away?”
“They could have tried. But they chose to use it, to content us with it, you know? It depends on the point of view. Even the Communists accept, and I suppose, if it had come to it, the church would have accepted the Communists.”
“It’s the way of survival, isn’t it?” I said.
He nodded. I could scarcely see his face now. “But to some men survival is not enough. It was not the old Greece Paul wanted restored. But it has been restored in spite of him. Again, maybe because of him and his kind. Every village was not as blessed in having an underground schoolteacher during the war, and where was he after the war when teachers were needed the most? He was not teaching. I know that.”
Where was he indeed? I thought.
“I am content now with Kaléa as it is, with the old Greece. My children are grown and gone away. They will not change it. And the old ones are right. I am elected president of the village, but I am paid by Athens, by the tax collectors.”
I tried to think of a way I could non-committally ask my question. I thought of the old men baiting Modenis. “Was it for his political views that Stephanou went to prison?”
“Yes. Even I would say so. He gave testimony at a murder trial. The government had him, you see, and otherwise he would have been tried for treason.”
“But to give testimony is not criminal surely.”
“He implicated himself. He saved somebody else.”
“Who?”
“How should I know? I was no longer myself political. I took the oath of allegiance to the government. So it was told and I can believe it. He was no longer important. None of them were, but he did not know it then.”
“Vasso was waiting for him,” I said. “Has she been waiting all the years he was in prison?”
Kanakis glanced at me from under his drawn brows. “If he believes it, it is so.”
“And the boy, Michael?” I persisted.
“He is his mother’s son,” the man said tersely.
As Kanakis got up and turned on the light his apprentice returned.
“So, my ambassador, my lieutenant, my lazy one, what is happening?”
“There is to be a service at the church at eight o’clock. Father Lappas says you are to come, Mr. President. He will say prayers to St. Panteleimon, the patron of the blind. After the procession Vasso has promised a feast.”
“Vasso has promised a feast,” Kanakis repeated, his voice heavy with irony. Then: “Why not? We shall all get drunk again and pretend he had just won the scholarship.”
“Please, my master, with your permission, I am to run to my brother’s house and ask him to come and to bring his mandolin.”
“Run, boy, run!” Kanakis clapped his hands after him.
I am not myself a religious man, having confused my gods among my other confusions, but I was moved that night by the procession that walked in slow stages from the church through the streets of Kaléa to the house where the blind man was. The priest wore white vestments, gold embroidered, and carried a shepherd’s crook. Two boys with naming torches led the way, another bore a pennant of the Virgin, and an acolyte followed with the censer, then two Greek flags, one flashing new and the other soiled and tattered so that I supposed it to have survived the war and occupation. The men followed, Kanakis and members of the village council first, the others in precedence of age, then the boys—some not yet in their teens—and finally the women, all carrying candles which they strove to keep alight. At every pause while the banner was incensed, the women fell to their knees and bent again and again to the ground in abject petition. They were all, I thought, praying for light, and against the day when blindness might themselves confound. Vasso walked midway among the women. If she prayed, she did not move her lips or sink to her knees. Nor did she carry a candle. Her face, framed in a voluminous shawl, showed nothing except endurance. She had not reached him, entering the house, any more than she had at the car window, I thought.
Before the closed door of Modenis’ cottage the priest made the sign of the cross with his crosier, chanting loudly his prayer to St. Panteleimon, the miraculous healer. He swung the censer round the path, sending up clouds of fragrant smoke.
But the door did not open, and there was no light within. The windows themselves were like empty eye sockets.
“Be of greater faith!” the priest cried out. “Open your hearts!”
The women beat the earth with their foreheads and cried out to God and all the saints. The men grew restive and the priest after many exhortations gave up.
“It is God’s will,” he said, and turned from the house.
Vasso’s voice rose over the murmurous lamentation. “There is food prepared. Father, will you come and bless the feast?”
A moment’s silence hung except for the rustle of clothes and the creaking of joints as the women rose from their knees.
“I am reminded of the biblical parable—the wedding feast to which many were invited and none came,” the priest began ponderously.
No one waited to hear more. The procession dissolved on the instant, men, women and children scrambling through the darkness, their candles going out in the wind.
I fell in step with Vasso. “Let me help.”
“In what way will you help, Mr. Eakins?”
“I will find a way. May I come?”
“Come and welcome! You are not the stranger tonight in Kaléa.”
Men were already drawing wine when we reached the restaurant, jug after jug, and, the jugs full, the water pitchers. In the kitchen the butcher had started to carve the first of three lambs, chunking the meat and piling it high on platters. The women were slicing slabs of bread.
Vasso stood a moment in the kitchen doorway, her arms folded. “I am not needed even here,” she said. “Good!” She swung around to the roomful of milling people. “Where are the musicians? They must eat first.”
But no one waited. People ate as they could reach the food, and drank, the wine running from their now laughing mouths. Vasso wheeled through her guests like a dervish, urging them to eat, to drink. The priest, served by Vasso and by his wife, ate as though he had fasted for forty days.
My friend, Spyro, seeing me, raised a chop in the air. “American friend, eat! Vasso, Mr. Eakins has no food!”
I put out my hand and caught her as she leaped in response to Spyro’s command with a desperate willingness. “Vasso, I can wait.”
Her eyes were wild, beautiful in their restlessness. “Never, never wait. Let me tell you, waiting is to die.”
“Sometimes it is to live,” I said.
The way she looked at me then, her eyes suddenly softening as with tears, sent a shock of pleasure through me as sweet as youth itself. I let her hand go, but she lingered, our eyes not leaving one another’s until the butcher’s wife, bearing a tray and battering her way with her backside, jostled us apart. I moved back to the wall where I could watch and be apart to wonder at the thing which had just happened to me. Vasso brought me food which I ate only because she had brought it. She turned swiftly from me, nor met my eyes, and called out for the musicians to play before they were too drunk. The mandolin player came, his instrument held high above his head for safety, and, finding no place to put it down while he arranged chairs for himself and the other players, thrust it into my hands.
Having long had a camaraderie with a guitar,
I caressed the strings. Spyro and his cronies were on me as instant as genii. They hissed for silence, old Spyro doing a kind of pirouette and snapping his fingers, coaxing me. I could not escape. Nor did I want to, truth be told. I sang in English “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” and the cries of polee orea rang out. There is a melancholy in that old Irish song with which the Greeks immediately identified.
I don’t know what else I sang, two or three songs and the Klephtikos in Greek in which everybody joined. The whole night became a reverie. I remember the old women making a circle sitting on the floor around a space for the dancers, and Vasso’s mother, the toothless one, looking up into my face and laughing, her tongue darting in and out with pleasure. I caught Kanakis watching me. He came to me and asked me for a cigarette. I don’t know what he had in mind, but afterwards I was sure there was some inner symbolism for him in it. He would not let me light it for him, but held it, looking at it for a moment, and then put it in his pocket. He pointed to the priest who was nodding at the table, his hands folded over his belly, his thumbs anchored in his cincture.
“God will wake him when He needs him,” Kanakis said, and moved toward Vasso. Looking at the priest I thought, as though I had been the first to discover a great truth, how men needed gods that they might recognize themselves in the images they worshipped. It seemed a great pity I could not think of a Bacchus among the Christian saints.
Kanakis kissed Vasso on the cheek and, waving to all, went out. I followed him into the street. He lit the cigarette then and we both stood a moment looking toward Modenis’ cottage. There was a light on now and one of the shutters was open. Kanakis took my arm and we walked to the gate. He went to the open window and looked in. I followed, but at a few feet’s distance.
“Paul…”
I could not see the blind man, but Modenis looked round and said to him, “It is George Kanakis.”
“Do you remember the cave where we used to hide, where the children came to you? It was dark there, Paul, until you brought us light. The women keep a candle burning there, for we would not forget.”
For a few seconds there was no response. Then Stephanou demanded, “Who was singing?”
From the way Modenis looked around at him I thought it possible that those were the first words he had spoken in the house.
“Professor Eakins,” Kanakis said. “He is working in the village.”
I moved to where I could see the blind man, but only barely, for he was sitting cross-legged on the ground in a far corner and I wondered if he would grope the floor on all fours for his own beginning again.
“I prophesy another candle in the cave,” Paul said.
“We have need of prophecy as well as light,” Kanakis said. “Goodnight, Paul. Goodnight, Modenis.”
“Kali´níhta,” Modenis said. “Goodnight.”
I followed Kanakis to the street. “What did he mean, another candle in the cave?”
Kanakis shrugged. “Perhaps he too is a little jealous. Goodnight, my friend.”
Of me? I wondered but I would not ask.
We shook hands and parted, I going toward my cottage, he up the street past the restaurant. He did not stop. I watched him out of sight, a man going home alone, and somehow suddenly an old man as I had not thought of him before.
In my bed I lay in the darkness and listened with a throbbing alertness to every sound, the leavetakings, the waking of children as the older ones came home, the mournful crooning of the lately joyous turned melancholic with too much wine, the tinkling of sheep bells, the harsh braying of a donkey. I heard the opening and the closing of the door to the next cottage. I saw the light go on, its reflection faintly spangling my own wall through the shutters. Soon the light went out, and there was stillness everywhere.
The agony of wanting was such that I could have cried out with it. I even thought I might have done so, when I heard my door opening. I saw her figure but briefly before the door closed, and I leaped up to catch her quickly into my arms. We did not speak. Afterwards she wept and then laughed silently at her own weeping and begged me to forgive the tears.
“I am blessed by them,” I said, “and by your coming.”
Here I must fall back again on my poets and say with that greatest and most ancient of the Greeks, she left me with the coming of rosy-fingered dawn.
8
BUT THE LIGHT OF day is something quite different from rosy-fingered dawn.
Spyro and his friends were waiting at the café when I went up in the late morning, a shaggy trio of old crows who missed very little when they were sober, which was almost always, but they had not been sober the night before. They sat blinking their bloodshot eyes, their beads idle in their fingers, for once having nothing to say. I clapped Spyro gently on the shoulder, eliciting a groan. I went inside. The floor had been swept, the debris cleared. Only the swarming flies found traces of the feast. In the kitchen Vasso was scraping the bones of last night’s lamb and chopping the meat into tiny pieces.
“Kali´méra,” I said. It is a word the sound of which I love. But there are many such Greek words.
“Kali´spéra,” Vasso corrected me. “Good evening.” She did not look up from her work, but jerked her head toward the dining room. “I have eggs and a piece of ham for you,” she said.
“Thank you, Vasso,” I said weightily, trying to combine my many gratitudes in one telling.
There was, I thought, amusement in her eyes as she glanced at me and shrugged a little. I was chagrined at my own ponderousness.
“Tell me what I can do to help you,” I blurted out.
And at this she laughed aloud. Finally she said, “Please, Mr. Eakins, go and sit with the old ones and I will bring your breakfast.”
I was hurt and confused, and I sat at a table inside the restaurant alone. When she had brought the food, water and Nescafé, she stood, her arms folded, looking down at me. “Can you bring him back to life?”
“Possibly I can,” I said.
She looked at me, searching my eyes, unsure we had understood each other.
“It is possible that I can,” I said, rephrasing the words so that there could be no misunderstanding. It would have to be done by someone, somehow, before I could pursue my own mission in Kaléa. “But it will not happen immediately.”
“It will happen,” she said and put out her hand as though she would touch me. The softness I had found in her the night before had returned, the flood of it shimmering in her eyes. Through a curtain of tears I could be seen as the image of Paul Stephanou.
“Leave me,” I said, near to choking with resentment, humiliation. “For God’s sake go back to your kitchen and let me have my breakfast in peace.”
But I could not eat. I put the ham between two slices of bread, wrapped it in paper and put it in my pocket. I even tested the bolt on the door of my cottage when I returned and mocked myself as I did it: the Puritan forging his own chains.
Days passed and no one saw Paul Stephanou except Modenis. Vasso’s grandmother and Michael brought water to their door each morning before Michael left for school, and each night. Vasso brought them food which Modenis took at the door. Toward sunset every day the old man himself carried out the slops past his patch of garden and emptied them over the edge of a gulley. He would scratch a few shovelfuls of loose earth and pitch it after the muck. Sometimes, going out, he would leave the door open. And sometimes, then, small boys, who had taken to surreptitiously watching the house, would creep into the yard, trying to see within. Whether or not Stephanou knew they were there, his shadow could be seen briefly before the door slammed violently shut.
I waited at the walk one evening for Modenis to come back, slop bucket in one hand, his cane in the other. I said his name softly, and beckoned to him to come to me.
He put down the bucket and came, his head thrust out of the hunched shoulders as he peered through the twilight to see who it was. It took him a few seconds to remember me. “Ah, yes, the professor, the American,” he sa
id finally. His beacon of a nose stood out in the unshaven face. I thought of the proud, immaculate old man who had gone to fetch Stephanou.
“Come up to my cottage with me and have coffee,” I said. “He can manage an hour without you.”
He started to shake his head.
“You will rot in there together!”
“The sooner the better.”
“Modenis, he is still a young man.”
He stood a moment, uncertain, staring back at the closed door. “He will not eat if I am beside him. I have to go to the other room and call out to him that I am there….”
“Then he is proud,” I said. “He is alive.”
Modenis nodded that this might be so. “I will tell him and come.”
Enemy and Brother Page 7
