I had to decide in that instant how much it was expedient to reveal: I wanted him to tell me the story as he knew it, not adjusting it to fit the pattern already set. But at the same time there were questions I hoped to ask that could not come from a person with no previous knowledge.
“Yes,” I said. “I ought to tell you that while I was in Athens I went to the National Library and read the newspaper accounts at the time.” It might as easily have been the truth.
He sat scowling, his hands wrapped round the cane. For a moment I was afraid he would revert to the sullen silence.
“I was curious,” I said. “I felt … well, let’s leave it at that: I was curious.”
“No. Tell me what you felt,” he demanded.
“I thought if I were to be of any help to you I ought to know the background. I remembered something of the case from the newspapers at home of course….” Christ! I thought, shut up! Stop explaining!
He stomped the cane on the floor and I was silent. Then he smiled. “But you brought me the mandolin.”
“Yes,” I said tentatively.
“To you I am not unclean?”
“If you are not unclean to yourself, Paul, you are not unclean.”
I shall not examine those words now for their soundness or my own in saying them: there was at least the wish behind them for honest measurement. Stephanou seemed to hug them into his breast even as he clutched the knob of the cane against himself. Modenis came in before he spoke again. Paul raised his head and rubbed the back of it as though to ease a stricture there.
“Uncle,” he said, “will you make coffee for my brother and me?”
My brother and me… the words made me a little sick.
To me he said, “We shall talk again at another time.” To Modenis, “You have built me a fence, Uncle. Now I must not go that way.”
“If you do you may break your bones, but it will not be your neck.” The old man could scarcely straighten up after bending to strike the match to the grate.
I said, “Sit down and let me rub your back for you, Modenis. It’s the only thing I was ever good for among the athletes.”
“Pah! You are not a woman.”
“Then we must find a woman, eh, Uncle?”
“Speak for yourself,” Modenis growled. “A woman now would kill me.”
Paul grinned and flung out his hand so that it caught me across the chest. “But what a lovely way to die, Uncle! What a lovely way to die!”
13
TRULY I DO HAVE a diffidence that makes me shy away from overly demonstrative people. I was among a tactile and effusive race, and my whole design, such as it was, depended on Paul Stephanou’s liking of me. Even if he had not been blind, I could not have elicited the truth by the threat of physical action. The very idea is ridiculous. I ought then to have been gratified to have built a relationship in which he called me brother. Instead I was uneasy. Why? I asked myself the question time and again as I walked to the olive groves and back. The answer was simple, really: I doubted his sincerity.
And if he were not sincere in his protestations of affection, what odds? Something which had infuriated me as a boy was my mother’s saying, “So-and-so is taking advantage of you.” I remember shouting at her that I didn’t care. She would have managed nonetheless, and whether it was her intention or not, to spoil the friendship. And in a way she crippled my judgment by trying to strengthen my character.
I laughed aloud at a thought that had never occurred to me quite that way before: she had helped to build me up for the most mammoth advantage-taking since Samson got his hair cut. If Paul Stephanou proposed once more to use me, so be it. And I could hear my mother say to that, “All right, Jabez, just so long as you know.”
Returning to the village the prey of one of those self-denigrating moods which have beset me periodically all my life, I knew where I would have gone at home. I thought of the crumpled little lawyer in Athens and his proposal: “Perhaps tonight you would like to meet someone… a very nice girl?” It was not a very nice girl I wanted. A sadistic whore to prime and drain the lust. I poured myself a half-glass of brandy and drank it. I stripped to the waist and washed in cold water. I put on a clean shirt and the polished shoes Michael had left outside the door. My valet for a drachma a day. I took out the basin of water in which I had washed. It had become a ritual: I looked both ways to be sure the grandmother wouldn’t intercept me. Kanakis had called me a modern man. One of the characteristics then was that I could not submit to the old woman’s intimate services. I tipped the basin into the geranium pots near the walk. So I saw Paul come out of the cottage and along the path, tapping furiously. Modenis followed him, protesting. They had had a quarrel. Good, I thought. One more strike for independence. At the gate Paul turned my way. He was carrying a newspaper.
I went to meet him. Modenis stopped at the gate, shouting after the blind one, “You are a stubborn fool!”
“And you are a grandmother!” Paul shouted back. But doing so he lost his sense of direction. He stood in the road, turning slowly, trying, I thought, by the lift of his head, to catch a scent of the wind that might guide him.
“Paul!” I quickened my step.
“Professor, I want you to read something to me. I have caught the old fart deciding for me what I am to read and what I am not allowed to read.”
“Gently does it, Paul,” I said. “He must have good reason.” I took his arm and led him toward my cottage, saluting Modenis as we turned from him. “Come, we’ll have a brandy and no censorship.”
“For a lifetime I have been censored. I will have no more of it.”
God knows I was as anxious to read what Modenis had tried to censor as he was to hear it, but first I settled both of us as comfortably as Vasso’s furnishings permitted. I gave him a good two ounces of brandy, myself rather less.
“This could become a beautiful habit,” he said, and rolled the liquor in his mouth before swallowing it.
The temper tantrum, I suspected, had been a good act.
“Now, what part of the paper am I to read to you?” I picked up the Eleftheria. The headlines concerned the continuing cabinet crisis. There was a picture of the student demonstrations Palandios had predicted.
“There is a reason,” Paul said. “Turn to the social calendar, whatever you call it, the activities of the upper class.”
I knew then what I was looking for before I turned a page. I opened the newspaper to a picture of Margaret Webb and Count Braschi. She wore a wedding gown and veil and seemed to have changed very little. Her husband was her height, not at all good-looking but having a nice smile, I thought. A man of fifty or so. He wore a sash across his morning coat.
I took in the first paragraph at a glance and said, “I should suppose it is the wedding of Alexander Webb’s widow that you are interested in?”
“It is so. My uncle wants me to forget.”
“Don’t you, Paul?”
“Please read. I will forget what I want to forget.”
I drew a deep breath and read in a voice I tried to keep even, unemotional:
“Mrs. Margaret Clitheroe Webb was married in Corfu this afternoon to Count Michael Antony Braschi, Archbishop Alexandrou Sikelianou presiding at the Orthodox service. Lady Mary Ellington, wife of the British consul, was maid of honor. The Honorable Michael Chaconis, Epirot Deputy to the Greek National Assembly, served as best man.
“The Countess Braschi is the widow of the American newspaper correspondent, Alexander Webb, who was murdered in Northern Greece during the Civil War. She has remained in Greece since and has become well known for her charitable and social activities.
“Count Braschi, a former resident of Rome, is an industrialist with extensive interests in Greece. In recent years he has been responsible for numerous reforestation and conservation projects in Epirus and Macedonia.
“The maid of honor and her husband, Sir Thomas, gave a reception afterwards at which the royal family was represented by Lt. General Aristo Kerenyi a
nd Mme. Karenyi. Also present were Princess Ghita and Prince Olaf of Sweden, the Duke and Duchess of Dorset, His Excellency, Timothy Smollens, the American ambassador, and Mrs. Smollens, the Honorable K. Vourtsis, Deputy Minister of Defense, and Mme. Vourtsis, Col. Alexis Frontis, Miss Elena Kondylis and Mr. El. Mylonas, members of the Greek National Theatre.”
I put the paper down carefully lest he hear the rustle of it as my hand trembled. I finished my brandy. Paul gave a disdainful snort and emptied his glass too.
Then he said, “One wonders if she had to wait seventeen years for that.”
“Did you know her?” It was a natural question.
But an unnatural answer: “I have sometimes thought so.”
For the salvation of my soul I could not frame a question to compel him on. Instead I took refuge in the brandy bottle. Paul declined another drink. “Professor, would you do me the kindness to keep the paper for me? I do not trust my uncle. He would throw it away. Perhaps I shall throw it away also… but not yet. Please, read me the names again of the guests.”
Fortified by the brandy I read again the last paragraph. Then I said, “I have met one of them, by the way—the actress, Elena Kondylis. She will be playing in the festival at Dodoni in August.”
“Where did you meet her?”
I told him about the dinner party at Dr. Palandios’. I thought of going on to repeat the discussion of Webb’s murder, but I wasn’t ready yet. Nor was he—and the line seemed too direct. If I had been going to tell him of it I should have done so when I accounted my knowledge of the case as having come from looking up the old newspaper files.
“And will you attend the festival?” he said.
“It is possible.”
He flashed a smile at me. “Perhaps you will meet the Count and Countess!”
“That too is possible,” I said.
He sat a moment, blinking furiously, his mind, I suspected, racing. He reached for his cane. “I would ask you, Professor, to tear out that page and let me have the rest of the paper for my uncle. It will give him pleasure to read it to me.”
He got up and waited until I put the paper in his hand. “It will not be necessary for you to go with me.”
I let him go alone, but followed several yards behind. He made it faultlessly and, at Modenis’ gate, turned and called back, “You see, it was not necessary, Professor, but I thank you.”
I went on to the shop that served as bus station and news stand, telephone office and agricultural agency headquarters. I bought that day’s Eleftheria myself. I proposed to know from then on what Paul was being read.
The old men rose to meet me when I was halfway to Vasso’s that night, Spyro all but hopping to be the first to tell me that something had happened.
“He walked in like you—coming up the road with his stick!”
“Who?”
“Paul, Paul!” He urged me forward the quicker to show me what was going on. The others crowded behind me at the open door. Inside the restaurant Stephanou and Modenis were sitting at a table which Vasso had covered with a white cloth. Kanakis was there also, but not yet seated. The butcher was drawing wine.
“It’s a miracle, don’t you see? He talks and laughs.”
For a moment, God forgive me, I feared that he had regained his sight.
“Go in,” Spyro said. “He’s waiting for you. You should have seen how he came like a soldier marching, and old Modenis hobbling behind him.”
I went in as Vasso came from the kitchen, a great bowl of salad in her hands. Her eyes flashed as she saw me. “Our Paul has come home! You were right, Mr. Eakins.”
Stephanou lifted his head, his face open with laughter. “The professor is always right.”
“Except when he is wrong,” I said.
“Come and sit beside me, my brother.”
Other men of the village were there as was their custom, sitting off to the side at games of backgammon, munching nuts, sipping coffee. There was not the usual chatter among them that night, however. They spoke softly, the better to listen when the blind man spoke.
And speak he did, the speech stopped within him for years released full flood. “My uncle tells me…” he would start, and repeat a bit of village gossip. Then he would enlarge upon it in the manner of the true raconteur, making good-natured caricature of the principals as though he had known them without interruption from his childhood. Indeed, I thought, he has known them for centuries. And sometimes a story that had started as a bit of bantering nonsense he elaborated into allegory:
“The grandmother Panyotis had a wart beneath her thumb, I understand, which on some days looked like an olive, on others like a cherry, and on yet other days like someone whose name I won’t mention here….”
A cackle of laughter came from the kitchen doorway. The old woman covered her mouth and drew back from sight.
“The hairy doctor came from Lavidia—it’s still the hairy doctor, isn’t it, Uncle? I remember his beard crawling up my neck whenever he looked down my throat. His glasses he wore like a hummingbird perched on the tip of his nose, and his breath was as sweet as charity. But the wart, the wart. The doctor consulted and thought he could snip it, but someone suggested the wart was alive and the priest when called in amen’d it. He rubbed oils and ablutions, said prayers to St. Michael, St. George and, for all I know, to the dragon. The wart stuck to the widow Panyotis. A priest may not win but he never loses. Some men live with lumps all their lives, he exhorted, and to some they may even resemble their wives. He accounted the blisters and boils man was heir to, to say nothing of taxes and gravediggers’ fees. A mere wart, it seemed, was a blessing from God. Content with contenting, he went home to bed.
“The widow, like the nation in this parable, bit off the wart that tortured her, swallowed and digested it, healed the wound with her own tongue, and went on working. Hail, Mother Hellas!”
I have tried to convey the pattern of his tale. In Greek it was more poetic, more idiomatic.
The old lady appeared in the doorway, but reluctantly, her head half-turned and gesturing with her hands that it was all nonsense. Vasso stood, her arms folded, her eyes warm on all present. I became aware then that other people had come, men and women, among them the gleaners I remembered plucking the bad seed from the good and calling them blind men’s eyes. They all wanted to hear more. Paul had filled his mouth with chicken. His face was flushed, his eyelids blinking. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and started again. The stories went on, half-humor, half-sadness, turning always on a nationalistic theme. As I remembered my own grandmother saying once—my father’s mother who had come from Ireland—he could melt the heart of a wheelbarrow. Whenever he paused to eat of the abundance Vasso set before him, the murmur ran round the room of the Paul they all remembered, the scholar, the hero, the martyr.
He washed down the food with a great draft of wine. I was reminded of one of Franz Hals’ laughing boys, possibly the mad one.
He began to beat a rhythm with his hands on the table, vigorous, martial.
“The Klephtikos, the Klephtikos!” several voices urged.
Someone started to sing, Paul joined and soon everyone was singing. The butcher reached across the table and plucked the handkerchief from the pocket of my shirt, saying please and thank you at the same time. He shook it out and moved to the middle of the room, the villagers falling away to make space for him. He waved the handkerchief over his shoulder and others followed him into the dance. He had the grace so many fat men do on the dance floor and, having drawn a circle of dancers in, he detached himself from them and improvised a series of lunges, sword feints, the dance of the Klephts, the mountain warriors. The room shook with his leaps. I leaned over to Stephanou and shouted, “Falstaff!”
He nodded, grinning, and kept on pounding the rhythm, the silver and glassware tingling.
Falstaff tried to pass the handkerchief on, the sweat streaming down his face, but someone shouted, “Hassapikos (the dance of the Butchers)!” and he was pus
hed to the center again.
He accepted the challenge as though his honor was at stake, pausing only long enough to mop his face in my handkerchief. It is a dance with much pounding of feet. The men circled him, hands on each other’s shoulders, bent their knees, straightened and stretched, pounding their feet in the rhythm, and repeated the motion. Watching, one felt the room to be undulating as on the waves of the sea. Inside the circle the butcher danced, the same forms but counter-clockwise. On and on it went, with such tantalizing pace, the accented beat, the sway and retreat of the dancers who gradually accelerated until it seemed a test of balance and motion. The butcher at last flicked the handkerchief. I thought it a white flag, and Constable Rigi, the officer with the bored expression, took it up.
He was anything but bored now. He took off his uniform jacket as he danced and flung it aside. The dance changed—I think to the Kalamantianos, for the women formed a circle within the men’s, and inside the policeman spiraled and leaped like a dervish, while the slow, swaying grace prevailed among the group.
“The boy scout,” Modenis said of Rigi, and made the gesture of spitting. He was no lover of the constabulary.
The dancing went on, others coming, and there was a moment when I thought Paul about to join it. I’m sure he could have, his arms linked to those of the others. But instead he simply pushed his chair back from the table and beat the rhythms with his cane on the floor.
When at last the circles broke, Vasso offered wine. Many politely chose water. Old Spyro came up and snatched his cap from his head. He pointedly dropped a couple of drachmas in it and held it out to me. I dropped in a twenty drachma piece. Kanakis matched it and round the room Spyro skipped from one to another he knew to have change in their pockets. Everyone with a thirst drank wine and toasted a true homecoming.
Suddenly then, while the wine was passing, Vasso stood apart in an uncrowded place. She raised her hands over her head and began to snap her fingers rhythmically. She wore the flared red skirt and a full-sleeved cotton blouse that showed her fine neck and breastbone and the soft swell of flesh where her bosom began. The first words she sang made the women cry, “Ah!” and “Neh, neh!” Yes! Yes!
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