by Graham Swift
He never touched the books. Just went up there sometimes to write letters at the desk, which was always kept locked. I remember asking him, and he said, ‘Oh, Greek and Latin. Gods and heroes, all that rot.’ I remember him saying that. ‘All that rot’. So I don’t know why he kept them there, for Mrs Keane to dust. Unless it was just to preserve the sense of a life that might have been. As if, had Uncle Edward, in some fantastic way, suddenly shown up, Grandad would have said, ‘Here you are, old boy. All waiting. Haven’t touched a thing.’
I used to go up there sometimes and pick out a book and look at the name on the flyleaf – Edward Beech, Oxford, 1913, 1914 – and think how it was written by a man not yet twenty, who didn’t know when he wrote his name that he had only a year or two to live. Like Mum, when she left for Greece. And later when Grandad told me a bit more, I figured it all out. Edward, the second son. First Richard, then Edward. They could have afforded, in every sense, to indulge a brilliant scholar-in-the-making. Not knowing that both of them would soon be dead. One in March and one in September, 1915. It would even have looked good to have had some other-worldly and learned element in the family. So: a whole library, bought almost at one go and by the yard by a bountiful if ignorant father (Richard Beech the elder, my great-grandfather, whose strengths were ballistics and business). A whole range of classical texts in the best editions of the day, meant to last a lifetime.
And it was strange to think that if he hadn’t been killed he might have been by then some distinguished Oxford professor, with a bow-tie and half-rimmed gold specs. And Grandad and I might have visited him for tea – can you imagine that, tea in a don’s rooms, overlooking some ivy-encrusted court? – and I would have watched them get jealous and tetchy with each other over me.
So I became this swot. While there was rock-and-roll and Elvis and the Beatles, I became this student of the Ancients. When I wasn’t riding around on Hadrian, imagining I was living in the reign of Queen Anne, I was going back a couple of thousand years more, delving into dead languages and imagining I might one day become, I don’t know, something which made a virtue out of obsolescence – a curator! A brilliant female archaeologist! And all because of her, my mythical Greek mother. Until I was eighteen years old and had a place lined up at University, and I decided to do it by the direct route and go to Greece myself.
You think I’m just another scatty, crack-brained, washed-up Brooklyn housewife who cheats now and then on her husband? But let me tell you, I’ve got culture. I know about Sophocles and Plato and the Persian Wars. I used to show people around the Acropolis. No kidding. And though in the end I never took that place at University, I can still quote you, in the original, the first five lines of the Odyssey. Want to hear? Okay, let’s skip it. And I still think that no one ever got it better, no one said it better. I mean, all that stuff – Odysseus and Penelope, Orpheus and Eurydice – it still gets to you, doesn’t it? It still breaks you up.
Have you ever been to Athens? Have you ever seen the Parthenon? When you first see it, the first thing you feel is that you’re amazed it’s really real. Then after a while you feel sort of sorry for it, stranded up there all alone above the traffic and apartment blocks. Then if you live in Athens for any length of time, you start not to notice it, as if you’re embarrassed by it, as if you’d rather pretend it’s not there.
She was born in Drama. That sounds like a joke, doesn’t it? Like saying: ‘I grew up in Catastrophe’ or ‘I lived in Crisis’. But when you go to Greece all those up-in-the-air Greek words suddenly become literal and actual. Like all those names that shouldn’t belong to real life. You meet a man called Adonis. And his wife Aphrodite. You go to the café Zeus.
And Drama is a town in the far north of Greece, in Macedonia, between two mountains, Mount Pangeon and Mount Falakron. And there never was a town less aptly named. Because all they do around there is watch tobacco growing, then watch it drying, then weigh it and sell it. And smoke it. While they count their money.
But drama is a funny thing, isn’t it? You want it. Everyone wants it. Who doesn’t want a little drama in their lives? Then when you get it, you find it’s just what you can do without.
I went there, in a slow, hot, dusty train out of Salonika. And I went to Thassos too (a ferry from Kavalla), where Uncle Spiro had had his villa, and where I imagined him, I don’t know, sitting on a balcony, reading Wordsworth and Keats, because he was a professor of English at Salonika (with a little library of English books like Uncle Edward had a library of Greek ones – I guess those two would have liked each other), and where she and he weathered out the war. But I never found the villa. Maybe it was gone anyway, or I was looking in the wrong place. And I went to Olympus. Which was easiest. Because I could pretend I was just an ordinary tourist, on an ordinary tourist coach, paying my respects to the home of the gods. And how was I to know exactly where? In all those mountains. I listened to the guide, babbling on about what I knew already, and I never thought that soon I would be doing a job just like hers.
I didn’t find Mum. But I found out about being lonely and feeling a stranger and getting stared at. Especially about getting stared at. I know that Grandad hadn’t wanted me to go. Though he’d never said. I could have spent one last, long, idle summer with him at Hyfield. I could have teased him by getting coolly and carelessly involved (I’m eighteen now, I’ve left school) with one of his junior execs at BMC, or – hell, why not? – with one of the married ones. Ha! Who am I kidding?
But I’d wanted to see the world. And there I was, on a Sunday afternoon in Drama, at what seemed the very edge of it. Lying on a lumpy bed in a bare hotel room overlooking a square that radiated heat and inertia, and thinking that perhaps it was just as well that Uncle Edward never got to go to Greece. Because Homer doesn’t tell you about miles and miles of flat tobacco fields. Or about the sad stumps of crumbling minarets. Or that Greek men wear flat caps and have gold teeth and stubbly chins. Or they have sun-glasses and little thin moustaches. And when they are just talking normally it sounds as if they are having a fight. And the women are mostly fat and swathed in black.
I thought I would ask questions. Get to know people who’d known her. Say: I am the daughter of Anna Vouatsis. Me with my dark eyes and smattering of Greek, and a little notebook in which Grandad had written down all he could remember of what Mum had told him of before she met Harry. I thought I’d feel instant attachment to this land that was half my own. But in Drama, where on Sunday evenings the whole town suddenly swarms into the streets and starts walking up and down, just walking manically up and down and greeting one another like long-lost friends, as if to prove things are not so inert after all, I lay in that hotel room with the shutters closed, with my Blue Guide and my copy of the Odyssey, with an empty stomach and – pardon me, Doctor K – my hand between my legs. And on Thassos, when I’d given up on the villa, and when I went down in the heat of the afternoon to a little empty beach (afraid of lust-crazed youths behind every rock) and swam, it was the first time in that trip that I felt a thrill of true, truant pleasure. I might even have said aloud, with my head poking out of the water – blue sea! The sun beating off hot rocks! Think of me, Doctor K, think of my young body in that blue, clear water! – ‘I’m sorry, Mum. But I came here. I’m here.’
I met him at Thermopylae. How about that? Where Leonidas held the pass, keeping the world safe for democracy. But he wasn’t called Leonidas. Just Joe. And Thermopylae now is a pull-in with some road-houses where the Athens–Salonika buses take a half-hour break. On one side of the road are steep rocks and on the other is a marsh and an ugly monument to the battle.
He picked me out straight away from that busload of yawning, stretching passengers. And I had him down as English before he even spoke, because only Englishmen abroad have that faint look about them of the boy scout. Even when they’re driving a white Mercedes.
You know what my first thought is? To pretend I’m Greek! Defending the pass. Ha! But that lasts about two seconds. Because he
says, ‘You’re not going all the way to Athens in that thing, are you?’ And it’s true, it was some bus. My suitcase was strapped to the roof with about a ton of other misshapen luggage, and we had a hard job persuading the driver to fetch it down.
‘I’m air-conditioned,’ he says. Then he laughs, the laugh of a man who wears laughter like a second skin. ‘I mean, so is my car.’
He orders two beers and souvlákia – in a terrible accent – and says, What was I doing in Greece? And I say, Oh, just travelling, a tourist. You looked Greek, he says. And I say, Oh, so how did you know I wasn’t? And he says, You looked lost too. And I thought, Well, okay, so that’s a well-tried line: the little lost girl. So I look at him meekly and girlishly and say, ‘And what are you doing in Greece?’
You see: older men. Schoolgirl parties. Fathers of friends. Uncle Frank even. Looking up at them all eyelashes and sweet admiration. Not even knowing I might be making them sweat. So when I meet a man, one to one, on neutral territory, in Thermopylae of all places, what do I do but slip into the same old role? Wanting there to be this safe buffer of an imaginary generation between us, wanting to be like a child, and wanting him to erase that touch of the boy scout. Which unnerves him. Because he’s only twenty-five, for a start – he gets that in early. Twenty-five but a company executive. And the more he tries to play his side of it, the more he betrays that he’s just a kid really, though a kid who’s landed on his feet. Here he is in Greece for a whole year, working for a tour company that’s just started to take off, swanning around in a hired Mercedes, doing deals and making contacts. And out of nervousness or naivety or just sheer high spirits he starts to talk to me as if I’m some client he has to impress. He says, This is the age of fun, the age of leisure, the age of the holiday – there never was a time to be alive like the 1960s.
And I’m thinking: Okay, so there’s no threat here. And Jesus, I am the older one. My head full of Homer and Sophocles and scholarship and sage thoughts. Sophia! Sophia! You know what my name means?
So what am I doing talking to a shrink?
And I fell for him. I fell for him like I would go on falling for him, till I was pregnant. Like a mother falls for a little boy she does and doesn’t want to grow up. I’d got it wrong, you see. The wrong way round. What I needed was a younger man.
We drove past signs to Chalcis and Thebes. He kept looking at me, turning his head quickly from the road as we drove. I kept my eyes ahead, but I could tell that with each glance he was a little less certain, the laughter in his face melting away. That his plan, whatever his plan had been – an old, hackneyed plan – was being modified, changed. He hadn’t reckoned on this. He was going to have to take me seriously. And I was thinking, I shall have to tell him lots of things, the whole story of my life perhaps. Oh, and another thing I shall have to tell him: that I’m still a virgin.
I’d never felt so beautiful.
The sun was sinking. You know about the light in Greece? How it goes purple and violet and rose. Greek light. I thought: I hadn’t come to Greece to find my mother. I’d come to find myself, to find my own life. And here I was, in the land of gods and heroes.
And I’d never thought the world could be so lovely. White houses stepping down to the sea on all those little islands. Painted eyes on painted boats. Olive trees turning silver in the breeze. And the lemon trees on Poros and the pines throbbing with cicadas and their own hot scent. I never thought the blue Aegean could be so blue-blue-blue. Or the days so dazzling. Or the nights so voluptuous and starlit. Or the heat so flagrant, so that you felt all the time you were really naked, just the thin sleeve of your clothes between you and the world, and you could walk down even a raucous Athens street, as brazen, as confident and erotic (oh yes, Doctor K, no longer a virgin) as those statues of striding, beaming youths in the museums.
I used to feel almost sorry sometimes for those parties I led round the Acropolis. Round Delphi and Corinth. And Mycenae and Epidauros. Because they weren’t in love too? How did I know? They were on holiday, weren’t they, having the time of their lives? But they could look so lost and sheepish, stumbling around those ruins, as if, without their guide, they wouldn’t have known what to do. Or as if it didn’t matter what the guide said or whether or not it was true, so long as she just kept talking. I used to pick out the ones who fancied me. Middle-aged husbands with straw hats and peeling noses. Not listening and not looking at what they were meant to be looking at. Nothing like knowing one man is crazy over you for spotting the others.
But when I’d finished, there would always be the ritual, the duty of the cameras. Always leave plenty of time, pause at the best places, for photographs. I used to think, Why is it so desperate, so sad, so urgent – everyone taking the same pictures? And I’d come to this conclusion: They are trying to possess something that doesn’t belong to them.
I used to tell Joe sometimes – as if I were responsible: But they don’t seem to enjoy themselves. And he’d say, ‘Don’t patronize the paying customer. Who knows what they feel? Maybe they’ve never had a holiday abroad before. Never seen the world. Eyes down all their lives. You put them suddenly in the sunshine, show them the sights. They’re a little shy, a little dazzled. Like I was, goddess …’
That’s what he used to call me. Goddess. We used to make love right there in the office on Nikodhimou. The blinds drawn and the evening noise in the street. His head in my thighs.
He said it would be easy. I knew about all that stuff, didn’t I? And I spoke some Greek. And he’d fix up my papers, no problem. Guide and courier. So I wrote to Grandad and said I wouldn’t be coming home, after all, in September, in fact I wouldn’t even be going to university (I’d write separately). The fact was I’d met this man, and he could get me a job. The fact was I was happy. And I think it was that word, heavily underlined, that made him write back, without a hint of reproach, whatever he really felt, and say I must do what I thought was best, I was eighteen now. But I would remember to write to him, wouldn’t I?
So I stayed the whole winter. I stayed till Joe’s year was up. I wrote Grandad letters. We had the apartment on Ippodamou Street and the place on Poros Mr Zoumboulakis lent us for weekends. They say Poros is all ruined now. In the winter there were still plenty of tour parties wanting to do Athens and trips out. Sounion. Marathon. ‘Had the Athenians not won at Marathon, the whole history of our civilization might have been different.’ (Got that, everyone?) In between, on the coach rides, little snippets of mythology. The deeds of Theseus. How the Aegean got its name.
Do you know what winter is like in Greece? They try to pretend it’s not really happening, that there isn’t really such a thing as winter. The wind blows and it rains and everyone shivers for a while. Then the sky clears and goes still and blue. Out come the café tables again. People sit and chatter, their breath steaming. On the trees that line the streets there are little bright balls like miniature suns. Oranges.
I won’t forget that April morning when I looked out of the window on Ippodamou Street and saw the tank in the square below. It was like when I first saw the Parthenon, all floodlit, that night we drove into Athens. I thought: This isn’t really real, this isn’t a real tank. It looked like some clumsy, extinct monster that has somehow turned up in the wrong place and was trying to get out.
The streets were all empty.
You know, Joe went back there in ’74. To ‘clear some things up’. That was the summer Argosy Tours folded. But I didn’t think he had anything more to do with them. And I don’t know how he knew. I mean, about Cyprus and everything. He said it was strange, the whole country was mobilizing, and yet the tourists were still carrying on as normal, buying postcards and getting their sun-tans. He said that almost straight away they started pulling down all those phoenix-and-soldier signs that were the emblem of the Junta. He said he never thought you could feel, see a thrill run through a whole people like that. I had this picture of a breeze running through a field. He was gone three weeks. When he got back he looked so ti
red. The tired old new world. That’s when I fucked Nick the plumber. We all want Greece in our hearts, don’t we? Blue air and marble Apollos.
Harry
To be happy in Nuremberg! To fall in love in Nuremberg! In that city of guilt and grief and retribution, to think of only one face, one pair of eyes, one body.
Sometimes I wonder, if it had been somewhere else, if it would have happened so quickly, so precipitately. As if there you could do these things, dispense with niceties and preliminaries. Like the German girls, whose English was basic: ‘Kommon, shveetart, less go ficken.’ If we would have walked as we walked that afternoon across the Hauptmarkt, trembling just a little (though the autumn air was mild), with nothing between us save a few words, a few cups of so-called coffee and a mutual rush of desire. (We stopped outside the Frauenkirche: she lifted her head and took those deep, concentrated breaths.) If she would have led me so directly and so artlessly to where she stayed, Küfergasse, number twenty-eight, and I would have heard so soon, like the unfamiliar sound of happiness, like the sound of the future being unveiled without any pious ceremony, the slither of a dress being lifted over newly bought American nylons.
A virgin, for all that. A towel to protect her landlady’s sheets. Why then? Why me? As if she were shutting other, bigger doors than the door of that little dingy room in Nuremberg, behind her.
There was a look you could see in those days in people’s faces. Maybe you could see it especially in Nuremberg. As if their minds had gone on hurriedly ahead, grown up too fast, and their bodies had been left behind. They were waiting for their bodies to catch up with their minds. Or for their minds to go back to their innocent, forgotten bodies.
