“It will be different now—I promise you.”
“Will you tell them, please?” She indicated the men. “It is better now than afterwards.”
I got up and went with her to the table and repeated what I had told her of the change in Stephanou.
Kanakis said, “Until the priest can work miracles, he should not expect miracles.”
And the others seemed to come round to the same point of view.
10
THE NEXT DAY WAS Sunday. I suppose this tells more of me than I could set down here in twenty pages of introspection: I went to church. I was the only man outside the sanctuary over the age of sixteen and under sixty-five. I tried for the impossible, to make myself inconspicuous. The coin I slipped into the candle box hit bottom with a resounding clatter. The shawled woman taking a candle at that moment insisted on giving it to me, lighted, and having it, not knowing what to do with it, I watched the others for a moment and then took it to the nearest shrine where, I realized too late, not a candle had been ensconced: it was the newly hung icon of St. Panteleimon. I fled to the shelter of a nearby pillar. The smaller children instantly flocked round and gazed up at me. I winked and grinned at them. When this exhibition lost its fascination they sat down in the middle of the floor and played with one another’s toes. The women bobbed and prayed in one breath and in the next gossiped with their neighbors while the priest performed the Mass behind the grille. Old Spyro, who might have followed me to the church, scattered the children and came to stand beside me.
“In America I went to church every Sunday,” he said. “My wife was very American, may she be with God.”
“I’ve not been to church in a long time,” I said, as though ashamed at being caught there.
“It can’t do any harm,” he said and went himself to light a candle to the Virgin.
When the priest came out from the sanctuary with his basket of bits of bread and handed it to the people crowding round him, I made my way outside, but I noticed as I passed that two more candles had been lighted to St. Panteleimon.
I paused at Modenis’ gate on my way home. The cottage door was open and I chanced a welcome. Modenis and Paul were sitting at the table when I called out to ask if I might come in.
“Come you in,” the old man said. He swept the crumbs from their morning bread to the floor.
Paul lifted his face. It was clean-shaven and the more pallid for it. “Professor?”
“You should go out in the sun and get some color in your face.”
“Is it true you play the mandolin?” Paul asked. And that was to be the pattern of our meetings thereafter: no greeting, just the launching into something held in mind as though one of us had momentarily left the room.
“A little,” I said. “I have a guitar in the States. I didn’t bring it with me.”
“And you sing?”
“Only when I’m drunk. Or more precisely, when my audience is drunk.”
Modenis had a piece of paper and pencil. He was making what seemed to be a list,
“When will you go north?” Paul said.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“But very soon?”
“Why?”
I should not have asked so directly. I could tell he retreated from what he originally had in mind. A little shrug and then he said, “I was wondering if there was time for you to teach me how to play the mandolin.”
“The blind troubadour,” I said.
“Is that ridiculous?”
“No, but I was thinking I could not teach you in your own idiom. I’m not even sure I could teach you in mine.”
“Then it is simple: I must teach myself, but first we must have the mandolin, Uncle.”
“That has already occurred to me,” the old man said.
“I shall be going into Athens one day soon. I’ll try to find one to be bought cheaply if you like.”
“Where will you look?” Stephanou said with an eagerness that reminded me of a child’s wanting to be told a story.
“First, along Ifestou Street,” I said, wanting to give him the image, a share in the quest. “It is a street where one can buy almost anything.”
“You know Athens!” he cried.
“As a tourist who likes to walk,” I said.
“Oh, Uncle, there is a street for every man,” he said, leaning his elbows on the table. If he had not been blind he might still have looked the way he did, closing tight his eyes to conjure memory. “Or was as I still see it. The Germans took everything, they said. But they were wrong. As soon as the Nazis moved out, the traders came back and people brought them things. Everything! Icons, pots, candelabra, old medicine bottles, pottery. A one-legged man could buy a shoe, a bride a mattress. Now there was a sight! I used to walk in Ifestou—because others walked there. And one day we were watching a young girl—no more than seventeen, I think—counting out the dowry money for the mattress….”
One day we were watching…. I remembered the scene instantly. Margaret Webb and I had stopped, struck by the beauty of the child and the intensity of the transaction. “Because others walked there,” he had said. Stephanou had been following her and me those days in Athens before Webb and I went north.
“She did not have enough money for the mattress and when the merchant would not let her have it, she started to weep and to coax him. Louder and louder until she was wailing. Another shopkeeper came, then another, and they scolded the merchant for his hard-heartedness. Suddenly it was a little war, and in the middle of it the girl tilted the mattress against the wall and arched back so that her rags clung to her body like flowing silk, and she lifted the mattress onto her head. She stood a moment, proud and straight. Everybody made room for her. A woman—an Englishwoman—said, ‘One of the caryatids’—you know, the temple maids on the Acropolis? And that was it: three thousand years of Greekness walked down that crooked street with a mattress on her head.”
He had quoted Margaret Webb. I thought both men must hear my heartbeat in the silence when he finished. I should have known from the beginning that for him to have satisfied the jury in his portrayal of me as the frustrated lover he had needed more than random knowledge of the principals.
He construed the silence to his present need. “So! If poets make pictures, I am qualified to practice, eh?”
“Eminently,” I said.
Modenis sighed. “Why do you need a mandolin?”
“I shall find one,” I said, “and if there is anything else I can do for you, please tell me.”
“Why do you go to Athens?” Paul demanded.
“Actually I’m going to Sunium,” I said, “where Byron went and carved his name upon a rock.” I could not tell him I was going in order to escape briefly the intensity of involvement I felt in Kaléa—to try for perspective.
“And what will that tell you of Lord Byron that you do not already know?”
“If I knew that I should not have to go. Perhaps nothing. I want to see what he saw, to try to imagine what he was thinking about on that particular pilgrimage.”
“To have carved his name, I should say he was thinking about Lord Byron.”
“He did that a great deal of the time,” I said.
“Would you prefer to think about him than about yourself, Professor?”
“No, but it’s easier,” I said with utter frankness.
“Ha! You are an honest man. We look into other lives in the hope of seeing ourselves without looking. But then the only way of understanding what we see is by looking into ourselves. Is it not so?”
“I am afraid it is so,” I said.
“Why are you afraid? Is there something in yourself you do not want to look at?”
I was disconcerted by this bombardment of direct questions. I, who wanted to question him at any peril, was responding as to an inquisitor.
“Yes, there is,” I said with sharpness.
He flashed that smile at me which must have won him every boon he ever sought save freedom. “I am glad,” he s
aid. “What I mean is, it cannot be rubbed out with ointments or covered over by the sweet stink of sanctity. Shakespeare said it, eh? All the perfumes of Arabia…. He said it, not the priests. You know, in prison I read every word, every play, three times over, and some of them many times.”
“In English?”
“In English. It was the only book. Shakespeare and the Reader’s Digest.”
“All the perfumes of Arabia,” I murmured.
He thought about that and laughed. “I was wondering about that Reader’s Digest. That’s very good.”
It was not quite what I had meant although I did have something of the double entendre in mind. I had hoped to bring him back to the original probe, the deed which all the perfumes could not fumigate. But the moment had passed.
“What have you written down there besides the mandolin, Modenis?” I asked, referring to his list.
“Only things the butcher can bring on his next trip.” The old man got up. He was much steadier than when I had coaxed him to my cottage. A great change had come into this house in less than twenty-four hours. “I am going up to Vasso’s. It will no longer be necessary for her to carry our food to us.”
“It is her pleasure,” I said, “but she will welcome you.”
Stephanou ignored our exchange, drumming his fingers impatiently on the table. He turned his head toward the door when Modenis reached it.
“Are you aware of light and dark?” I asked.
He shook his head and plunged the question he had been waiting to ask, “Where were you during the war, Professor?”
“In England. Then in France and Belgium.”
“And afterwards?”
“I went back to school and finished my education.”
“Finished it?”
Damn his impertinent sharpness! “I suppose I should say I began it, but in a way it is right to say that I finished it. I settled into a life from which I have not greatly departed since.”
“Why?”
“I do not understand your question,” I said, although I thought I understood it very well, but I did not propose to give gratuitously without fathoming the source of the inquisition.
“Why did it take you so long to come to Greece?”
Oh, you bastard, I thought. “I have wanted to come for a long time,” I said.
“That is obvious. You do not learn a language—especially a folk language—otherwise. What I meant to ask was what delayed you? Was it the war? Did something happen to you in that experience that made you want to be safe for such a long time?”
“Yes.”
“Are you a coward, do you think?”
It was interesting, the qualification “do you think?” It blunted my rising anger. I answered caustically nonetheless, “I have known greater cowards than myself.”
He sat, his elbows on the table, clicking his thumbnails against his teeth. “Have you gone back to France and Belgium?”
“To the place where I was afraid, is that what you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Not yet.”
“Will you?”
“Possibly.”
“One has to if one is to know,” he said.
“A return to jeopardy?”
“That’s it—to truly exorcise the fear.”
“Paul,” I said, “where is it that you want to go?”
“Into my own heart—where all men face the darkness, Professor. For me it is no longer a matter of geography.”
“Will you go alone?”
He thought about that, and while he thought I squirmed so within myself—for reasons you may fathom: my self-deflating discomfort at intimacy—that I said, “I was thinking of Vasso.”
“Vasso is a woman. She would not understand.”
And still I pursued that cant: “Why will you not accept love without understanding?”
“Because in this case, that love would be pity. Look you: I have not seen Vasso in almost twenty years. Now I shall never see her except as she was then—nineteen years old and my promised bride.”
“Carrying a mattress on her head down Ifestou Street in Athens,” I said with something close to malice which was really directed at myself.
His face puckered up like that of a child about to cry—or a very old man protesting medicine. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!” he cried and pounded his fists on the table.
“I am sorry, Stephanou. It was not my intention to upset you.”
“I don’t want to talk any more,” he said.
“I understand. Come and see me when you do.”
He said nothing, sitting erect and unsmiling, much like the stone image in the car on the day of his return to Kaléa. I left him without further word.
Modenis brought their food, and to my knowledge Stephanou did not leave the cottage either that day or the next. Early Tuesday morning I drove back to Athens.
A seemingly small observation I should mention—to say it disturbed me at the time is too strong: I walked through the village late Monday afternoon to have coffee with Kaléa’s president. Without deliberateness but with much the same motivation as I had gone to church, I chose him as my liaison among the people. He was the most sensible of men, and, having admitted to me his compromise with the status quo in Greece, he represented the Greek analogy to myself. On the way to his shop I paused in the square where the women had spread the grain in long trays to sweeten in the sun. They were sifting it through their fingers, picking out the bad kernels. I heard one of the old ones say, “Blind men’s eyes,” and she spat three times as she cast the blackened seed away. The others laughed and, it seemed to me, set more assiduously to work to discover themselves the blighted amongst the grains and cast them out.
11
WHEN I REACHED THE main road and turned toward Thebes I was following Byron’s way for the first time. To be sure I had not yet been to Delphi, and when the time came I would go down from there to the sea whereas Byron had come up from it. I would see more of the ancient places in their ruins today than he would have seen, living before the era of Schliemann and Evans, of massive excavations and daring restorations.
But what changed in a hundred or two hundred years, in a thousand or two? Byron also had paused at The Triple Way to wonder whether, as legend had it, this was where Oedipus killed the man he did not know to be his father. The silence could have been no more awesome in the times of either traveler than it is today. I glanced at the shrine to the Virgin. It was new, the icon mounted in a red brick shelter—an anachronism, the brick, I thought. But Byron might have found an icon there despite the Turkish occupation. I again remembered my conversation with the president of Kaléa: they left us our Greekness, leaving our church.
I thought later, driving down toward the richer lowlands of Boeotia where great fields of cotton were under cultivation here and there by a machine, but mostly by women with hoes, I thought that across these plains had come the invaders of Greece from history’s earliest reckoning—Achaean, Dorian, the Persians, the Romans, the Franks, Turks and the Germans. Nothing in the experience of nations gainsaid its happening again. Man changed his weapons, not his nature. He knows that he must die and yet he kills; to me this seems the paradox of all paradoxes. Byron it troubled not at all: he thought war to be among the most ennobling of experiences. Of course, he had in mind a war of national liberation.
“You must remember that clubfoot,” Dr. Palandios said when, late that morning, I visited him at the university. We were speaking of Byron’s aggressiveness. “And another handicap—to my plebian mind, that is—his aristocracy. And then he was a short man. I’m sure you’ve thought about the little men of history—Caesar, Napoleon—Stalin, Hitler, the Italian buffoon and Churchill, oh yes. Empire! No man ever put down its burden more reluctantly. Beware of men with short legs, I say. They have long arms.”
I grinned. “What about De Gaulle?”
He came and stood beside me at the window where I was looking down at the students. He was himself no higher t
han my shoulder. “Now, isn’t that curious?” he said. “I’ve always thought of De Gaulle as a man on stilts.”
We watched the students for a moment, talking in high animation, gesturing violently. “Are they always so wrought up?” I asked.
“Not quite. There’s a government crisis brewing. They’ll be in the streets soon, demonstrating for the Prime Minister. He’s testing his strength over a purge in the army. Leftists in the army—I find it hard to credence…. Oh, I have something for you, Eakins.”
He handed me a letter addressed to me in his care. I did not recognize the handwriting. Feminine, but not overweeningly so. The postmark was Crete.
“I should have thought Mrs. Storme would be much taken with you,” Palandios said. He stood on tiptoe to better see what was going on below, but one eye was on my letter.
“I can’t say I was taken by Storme,” I said.
He did not get the pun, which was just as well. “He is a dry old stick, isn’t he?”
“If only he would smile now and then.”
“Oh, my dear Eakins, it’s much better that he doesn’t. I’ve seen him try.”
I pocketed the letter. Palandios did not conceal his shocked disappointment. “I’ll open it at lunch,” I said. “Where shall we go?”
There was a slight bulkiness to the letter suggesting the enclosure of a newspaper clipping. I thought it possible, in the wake of Elsa Storme’s and my conversation, that it might refer to Margaret Webb. By now I had gone over in my mind the advisability of confiding to Dr. Palandios my true identity for I greatly trusted him, but decided that such knowledge might prove an embarrassment to him if nothing worse. I was also lingeringly aware that up to this point I was not committed to any revelation whatsoever. Leaving the building, we edged our way through the students, Dr. Palandios, rather wickedly I thought, raising his fist to encourage their demonstration.
As with the choice of restaurant I left the selection of our luncheon entirely up to Palandios, rightly suspecting it would involve him in a trip to the kitchen. The moment he left the table, his arm linked in that of the maître d’hôtel, I opened the letter from Elsa Storme. Not one but two clippings were enclosed, both from the Athens English-language newspaper. One was the announcement of the impending marriage in Corfu of Margaret Clitheroe Webb—I skipped the biography for the time being—to Michael Antony Braschi, an industrialist of Rome. The couple planned to live in Greece.
Enemy and Brother Page 10
