The oracle thoughtful men consult today in Delphi is themselves. The measurement one takes contemplating the world’s navel is one’s own mortality, one’s fallibility, the dwarf in each of us. It was there that I decided on the place and manner of my telling Stephanou who I was.
On Tuesday night, having returned to Kaléa, I was packing my things when Vasso came to the cottage. “You will not come again,” she said, taking in what I was doing.
“I intend to,” I said, “but I need these things for my work.”
“Everything?”
“There’s not much, really.” I realized how much it must seem. The Greek home is sparsely furnished.
“You will not return,” she said again. “I wonder if Paul shall. You gave him to me and you are taking him away.”
“Vasso, I did not give him to you. He gave himself when he was ready. No more could I take him away if I wanted to.”
She thought about that. I was not sure I had said precisely what I intended.
“Mr. Eakins… John…” It was the first time she had used my Christian name. She came and stood beside me looking down at the bed where I had spread papers, my clothes to be folded. “I am not sorry for the night we were together here. If I had known Paul would want me, I would not have come. You must understand I love Paul, but I am glad I did not know.”
I took her hands in mine for a moment. “Thank you, Vasso. You are very dear to me.”
“Leave something as a token of your return, something you will not want to leave forever,” she said.
I had nothing. There was nothing I owned anywhere which I would not willingly have given. I looked about the room. “You choose, Vasso. Take anything you see and you may keep it for me.”
She smiled as a child might and decided immediately on a small framed print of Byron in his Albanian costume which Dr. Palandios had given me.
“It is yours,” I said. She began to protest. “Listen to me, Vasso. When I return I shall borrow it from you, and then someday when I have made a copy for my book, I will send it back.”
“To Paul and me and to Michael. He will be a scholar like you.”
“To him I shall send the book,” I said.
“You will take care of Paul for me? You will not let him do any madness? The Epirots are wild, you know. Like the Turks.”
It was as though we were going into another land, I thought, and it occurred to me that it had not been until 1913 that the Turks were expelled from Epirus and the province reunited with Greece after centuries of occupation. Its Greekness was still suspect to the southern peasant.
“We shall take care of each other,” I said, quite as though I knew a peril to be waiting us that was not of our making for each other.
18
IT WAS A WEEK later, having gone down to the sea at Nafpaktos, known in Byron’s day as Lepanto, across to Patras and back to Missolonghi, that we reached Prevesa. In those days together we talked of older wars and occupations. He delighted in quoting to me whole passages from Shakespeare’s Caesar and Cleopatra. I would not have said that Paul’s was a Marxist view of history. I ventured to remark on this one night. “I was educated to action, not in dialectics,” he said. And on another occasion: “A Greek makes an unhappy Communist. Even if he is an unhappy Greek. It is not our kind of logic.”
We spent very little of the daytime together except when driving. At the Byron sites, I would leave him in a town square or at a kafenion near the marketplace. The pallor of the prison had long since left his face, and with his smile and the Greeks’ universal disposition to talk, he was engaged from morning to night in conversation. Nor did he have any great trouble in getting from one place to another. If he were gone from where I had left him, I would find him at our lodgings. He would share the day’s discoveries with me, the anecdotes and attitudes. And once I wrote down for him a few lines he had composed. He called it “A Blind Man Comes to the Sea.” I can remember just one line now and I shall translate it badly: “I know the moon in the tide’s turning and the sunrise in the sand’s quick song.”
They were days I think we both cherished. If he suffered any tension in anticipation of Ioannina, he did not show it, and for my part I almost succeeded in suspending belief in the evil he had once done me.
But on the road from Arta to Prevesa things changed between us. I felt my own nerves tensing. What my instinct craved, of course, was to prolong things as they were, to await his revelations to the friend he trusted. My dislike for myself in this role grew apace as the moment for confrontation approached. We had to know each other for what we were before Ioannina, where to share his company would be advertising both of us. We were silent until I parked the car alongside the quay. There was no shade anywhere. Numerous small fishing boats lay idle, rigged but unattended.
“What place is this?” Paul demanded,
“It’s the only decent-looking restaurant in Prevesa,” I said. I had thought I would remember it, but the searing light of day can be as deceptive as night’s shadows. It was not until we had gone inside and I saw the open kitchen doorway and the stove beyond that I was sure it was where we had stayed on the way north. A tour occupied several tables near the windows. I led Paul past them and seated him, his back to the only other table then occupied: men of the town, fishermen, I surmised. They viewed us with an indifferent curiosity.
I left him, going back to wash my hands and to see what fish was available in the kitchen. I left him also for the purpose of observing him, alone there. Ordinarily he would have swung his chair around to where he might soon have involved himself with the local patrons. He made no move at all and when I returned he was in the same position as I had left him.
“Why did you bring me to this place?” he said.
“It’s the only place I saw to stop for a meal. It’s one o’clock.”
He ate very little. I offered to bone the fish for him but he preferred to pick it up in his fingers. He drank a little wine. The men behind him were talking about the falling price of fish, associating it with the government crisis. The cook came from the kitchen, a tall, gaunt man I thought I remembered as the one receiving us that night. He sat with the fishermen and, catching the gist of their talk, said, “Then dump the fish back into the sea. Put up your nets for a week. You make me sick—complaining when you don’t know your own strength.”
Stephanou bowed his head and smiled. He too had recognized the man. Then he said, “Why are you silent, Professor? We must talk. I do not wish to be more conspicuous here than necessary. I will tell you afterwards.”
I said, “This afternoon I am going to the ruins of the Venetian walls along the edge of the sea. Will you come with me?”
“To what purpose?”
“It will be cool there and you have just said you do not wish to be more conspicuous than necessary.”
I discovered a sadistic pleasure in turning his own words back on him. It too was part of my self-girding.
No one was on the street when we went out. The sun was scorching hot, the car almost unbearable. Stephanou was submissive as I had not known him. We passed a family in a flat wagon drawn by a team of cows. I waved when the children called out. I described them to him. His smile was fleeting. The low swamplands as we approached the sea were covered with a purple bloom. I asked him if he knew what flower it might be. He did not.
The great walls, miles of them I should say, built by the Venetians in the sixteenth century, are crumbling in places, but nonetheless remain an ominous-looking bulwark between land and sea. Here and there to the leeward side, shepherds had built thatched shelters against them. But down to the sea’s edge for miles I could see no one as I led Stephanou through a break in the wall. The breeze was soft and cool. We found a shady place and sat upon the ground. A few yards of scrubby land sloped down to a rocky embankment from beneath which we could hear the wash of the sea.
“It must be beautiful,” he said.
The moment had come.
“You have been in Pr
evesa before and so have I, Paul—in that same restaurant. The ladder stands now at the side of the kitchen door. I don’t suppose they need to hide it behind the stove any more.”
I waited. He sat hunched forward, his mouth a little open. Then, a command: “Say on!”
“I will tell you what happened to me the last time I was in Prevesa,” I started quietly. “It was the loneliest time of my life. No. There were worse ones ahead but I didn’t know it then. I did not know where I was going except that it was north and into territory forbidden the news correspondents by the Athens government. I had an almost religious faith in Alexander Webb, the kind of faith that surpasses reason. My esteem for his wife contributed to that faith. She had been kind and helpful to me, a young ex-soldier very much out of his depth who wanted to see Greece before he went home to Illinois—not Iowa. She recommended some things I had written to her husband. One night and one night only I held her in my arms—dancing in a ballroom full of people in the National Hotel in Athens. Beyond that I don’t think we so much as shook hands….”
His face was taut, the scar tissue about his eyes glistening.
I went on: “Because I trusted Alexander Webb, I also trusted the young Greek who picked us up at Patras and became our guide and translator. He and Webb had many things to say to one another from the outset, things I wanted to understand but couldn’t always. And it was not that they excluded me. My ignorance took care of that. I was a little jealous. Only a little. What appalled me was my own inadequacy. I who thought myself a student of literature, for example, had never heard of the Spanish poet, Lorca. I defended myself by defending what I knew. Silence might have made me more eloquent. As the days of our companionship lengthened and good people along the way, people who were warm to us in spite of their fear—and that kind of fear I had never known—gave us shelter and food their own bellies craved, I began to think of this young Greek as a man of courage. I had never known a Communist to my knowledge, and I found him human.
“I lay in the loft above the restaurant that night thinking of something Webb had said to me before he fell asleep. He said he thought that probably the worst lot of a Communist in a non-Communist society would be his estrangement from the people among whom he lived: love and fear make restless bedfellows. He said he felt sorry for this boy who thought he loved his people. ‘Or else, I feel sorry for his revolution,’ he said, ‘and for those like him who will be stranded when it’s over. It’s possible we shall be in on the end of it, Emory,’ he said, ‘and that will give us both something to write about.’ I asked him if he was afraid. ‘Not yet,’ he said and went to sleep.
“I could not sleep. There was no air in the loft. I thought I was going to suffocate and I could hear the water lapping just across the quay. All else was stillness. I dropped myself down from the loft, checked to make sure the ladder was behind the stove, and went outdoors. But outdoors it was cold and I no longer longed to swim in the water. Webb had talked intimately to me for the first time: it should have bolstered my ego; instead it pointed up in my own mind my utter dependence on him.
“There were no lights in the town, no people awake that I could see anywhere. I began to walk quietly, at first to see if I could walk quietly. I listened in doorways to men coughing, to a child’s crying, language I did understand. A dog growled, then came after me. I tried to freeze the fear out of myself that he not smell it and attack me. I stood where I was, my hand out to him. He stopped growling, sniffed my hand, shied away and went back to where he had come from. I went on with a better feeling for myself than I had had for days. There is nothing like the conquering of one’s own weakness.
“The trouble was that in my exhilaration I lost myself wandering in the twisted streets of the old town. The rest you know: I saw you though I did not know it was you and followed, hoping that whoever it was would lead me out of the maze. It took as much courage to stand my ground when you turned back as it took for you to confront me, more perhaps, since I was not prepared to kill.”
I waited.
“Nor was I,” he said finally. “Not Emory.”
“Not by false testimony, convicting him of a murder he did not commit?”
He cried out, “I do not believe you are that man!” Then with resignation, “But you are. I know you are. You defended what you knew.” He thought about those words, repeating them. “That was it. It is the truth you have told me.”
“If it weren’t I would not be here.”
“That is so… and all these years you have been in America?”
“Yes.”
“Not in prison.”
“No.”
“Then you were believed in the end—as I was not.”
“I told the truth. You did not.”
“The truth was never less relevant,” he said and covered his face with his hands, but in the instant before he concealed them I saw the tears ooze from beneath the shriveled eyelids.
“Now I must know it all, Paul. We are neither of us what we were then. I am John Eakins to everyone I know except you as of now, and I have been since the day I returned to America. It was not your friends who rescued me from the Ioannina jail. I was removed, I should suppose, at the instigation of the Greek government with the consent and cooperation of my own country after the sham trial to which you were a party.”
He took his hands away and, getting a handkerchief from his pocket, he wiped his eyes and blew his nose. “You were not an agent of your government?”
“I was not.”
He sat silent for a long time, then said, “I think Webb believed as I did. Otherwise he would not have abandoned you to die.”
“To die?”
“It is so. The gun I sold to you was given me by Captain Demetrios in the presence of Markos, and I was instructed to leave you at the crossroads—dead.”
I remembered then his coming for me to take me down after Markos had sent for him, his harshness, and what I took to be a sullen anger.
“Why did you not do it if you believe me to be a spy?”
He shook his head. “It was not you…” he murmured and left the rest unsaid.
“What, then?” I persisted. “Webb was already dead—of a bullet wound from the same gun. If he abandoned me to die, was it to save himself?”
“I would not believe that of him,” Stephanou said.
Nor would I.
“Did you kill him, Paul?”
“No. It was as I told it at the trial. When you and I went down together that morning, I did not know that Webb was dead.”
“Where did you think he was?”
“I did not know. I was afraid he might be waiting for us.”
“Afraid?”
“It is so. I was afraid—for myself. You see, my loyalty was to one man, our General. And he had not allowed me to be present when he spoke with Webb. Yet I was the only Greek with fluent English. It meant, I thought, that he no longer trusted me. And why assign a man you do not trust to kill—unless you expect him to be killed also?”
“You were not present at the Markos-Webb interview?”
“I was never called.”
“Then how did they communicate?”
“In French, I believe, with Captain Demetrios as translator.”
It was not easy for me to adjust to this information after all the years of “felt” truth.
“His name did not even come up at the trial,” I said.
He ignored the remark and went on: “I will tell you everything I know of what happened that night, but I should like to know, Professor, how you became… you.”
I told him of my removal from the prison and interview with the representative of the United States State Department much as I set it down at the beginning of this account.
“Isn’t it extraordinary,” he said with a kind of wryness, “how different our careers have been?”
I let it pass.
“I want to ask you something,” he said then, “you who sit here with me now: have all these days we spent
together, and before—my wedding, bringing me the mandolin, the errand on Varvaressos—have they all been for you a mockery?”
“Only if they are now so proven,” I said.
19
“I HAD FOUGHT IN the north, you must remember. I was with the army that pushed the Fascists off our soil, and I was in the great retreat when the Nazis took over. I remind you of this only so you will understand I knew the country, the terrain, and sometimes the people. You will remember how after we got the horses that last night out, I made contact one place after another to find out finally where Markos was encamped.
“You remember Captain Demetrios as the man with Markos when we reached the camp?”
I remembered him as the only one showing us the slightest cordiality. I said this now to Stephanou.
“It is so. Did Webb speak to you about him?”
“No.”
“One of the things I have asked myself many times since—would Demetrios have been there if he had known Webb was coming with me? Or was he there because he knew it? Do you understand?”
“I understand what you are saying—but how would he have known that if Markos did not?”
“I was told by the men afterwards in their quarters that he had come across the Albanian border two days before. He was our liaison among our friends to the north. I had heard of him but I had not met him before. During the war he had been interned by the Germans. He was a cultured man, one of the few, shall I say, aristocrats in the movement. Demetrios was his party name. He was said to come from a prominent family. But those things were often exaggerated. It improved the morale of our bourgeois converts.
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