Greek Fire

by Winston Graham

  Chapter Fourteen

  Soon after seven the next morning Anya was wakened by the telephone at the side of her bed. The blinds were drawn and she stretched out a sleepy arm for the receiver in the sun-shot darkness.

  “Hullo?”

  “Mlle Stonaris?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Gene Vanbrugh.”

  She fumbled the receiver into a better position. “Where are you speaking from?”

  “A call box. I want to know if you’ve decided to come with me.”

  “Come with you?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t expect to hear from me again.”

  “No, I didn’t expect it. Certainly not this early. You have wakened me.”

  “Sorry.”

  She said: “Perhaps it is I who should apologise for last night. I didn’t know that that was going to happen.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t. But it was partly my own fault.”

  “We are not all so ill-mannered.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation at both ends.

  He said: “If you did come today I’d have to ask a favour. For reasons you may be able to guess I’d prefer not to come round to your flat. But I shall be outside the Kotopouli in Ommonia Square at eight.”

  After a moment she said: “ I couldn’t be ready by eight.”

  “Name your time.” There was a new note in his voice.

  She looked at her watch and then at the mouthpiece. “Eight-thirty?”

  “Eight-thirty it is. And thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me,” she said. “ I have always had a sympathy for the stray dog.”

  He was waiting for her at the cinema, standing beside an old Buick, looking casual and unemployed like a car salesman not too interested in his job. She was wearing flat-heeled shoes and almost got to the door of the car before he heard her. Then she was sorry she hadn’t spoken earlier when she saw the suddenly tensed muscles before he turned.

  They looked at each other, and his eyes gave him away before he dropped them.

  “Welcome to the kennels,” he said.

  She got in and he took the driving-seat beside her, and there was silence. His banter had rather quickly run out. They had reached the end of a phase. A new one that they both understood was about to begin. But it was like coming to the banks of a deep-flowing river.

  She put her bag carefully into the pocket of the car. “ What happened after you left last night?”

  “I went home.”

  “You were not stopped?”

  “Did you suppose I would be?”

  “From something that was said after you left—yes.”

  “It occurred to me I might be.”

  “So?”

  “I took the lift to the first floor and looked out of the passage window above the front door. There were two men standing there who looked as if they were waiting for somebody, so I thought I’d let them wait. It’s always easy to get out of a big business block.”

  She said after a moment: “And how did you know I – wouldn’t bring the police with me this morning?”

  “Just a rash belief.”

  “Someone may even have followed me.”

  “Oh, I’m safe enough while I’m with you. George won’t run the risk of having your name mixed up in a police matter, however trivial.”

  She stared out at the city as it slid past, but didn’t comment.

  “I’d given you up,” he said.

  “I didn’t know you ever gave up.”

  “One cuts one’s losses.”

  “And now?”

  “One counts one’s gains.”

  “There is no gain. My coming today is only from a wish to stand aside from last night and say, ‘I was not a party to it’.

  “Commendable sympathy for the stray dog.”

  “But since I am here, perhaps you can explain one or two things for me. I have not led a sheltered life. I am a grown person. I now have a vote. My intelligence is normal. But I live in a fog of ignorance.”

  “I wish I could believe that.”

  “There is no one to compel you to believe it.”

  “What is it you want to know?”

  “First can you tell me a single thing: why it is that a respectable publisher should come to Greece and stay at a third-rate hotel like the Astoria, and then, if he has nothing to hide, that he should move on from one dingy apartment to another so fast that the police cannot catch up with him?”

  “The same respectable publisher came to Athens a couple of years ago and stayed at the Grande Bretagne. From the second day he was a marked man. Obstacles were even put in the way of his meeting some of his old friends. So this time he thought he would be less conspicuous and keep out of the public eye. That’s all.”

  “Because he was up to no good?”

  “It depends whose good you’re thinking of.”

  She made a little gesture. “Just good. The public good if you like.”

  “At any rate, he isn’t here to make trouble that doesn’t already exist.”

  “And what sort of trouble do you suppose already exists?”

  He let out a slow breath. “ We’ve got all day. Maybe during the day I’ll tell you everything I can. But first …”

  “Ah, I thought there would be a first.”

  “… First I wish you’d tell me more about yourself.”

  They had left the town now. She slipped out of her short coat and leaned back in the seat. She had never looked so young to him as she did today in her yellow turtle-necked jumper and wide-belted skirt. A different person from last night; she wore that brittle sophistication with her clothes. Indeed, looking at her, one could see her entirely afresh, cut free from all association, untouched, beautiful as a renaissance angel. (Or maybe, he thought, this new innocence is something I’m creating with my own eyes; the astigmatism of desire.)

  ‘He said: “ I came to Athens with certain purposes in mind. It may seem odd to you, but although I knew a lot about some of your friends I’d never heard of Anya Stonaris. Well, now I have—and getting to know more has already come to mean as much to me as doing what I came to Greece to do. That may not surprise you, but I assure you it surprises me.”

  She said: “Isn’t it quite usual for a stray dog to start looking for a new mistress?”

  After a minute he laughed and said: “Yes, I was wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “Just now I thought you looked young and innocent.”

  “I think it is you who are young and innocent.”

  “Give me time.”

  He had to brake as two mule carts laden with vegetables came out of a field in front of them.

  Anya said: “And what do you know about my friends?”

  “Oh.… I know that General Telechos owes the bank of Greece a million drachmae and I know why the bank hasn’t yet put the screw on him. Maurice Taksim’s wife is divorcing him and he is fixing up a crooked deal in oil. Jon Manos has a big reputation in law—of the wrong sort—and is trying to needle Stavrides out of second place in EMO. I know about George Lascou, his finances and his plans, but nothing about you.… Turn right here?”

  “Yes. We follow the sea and fork off at Eleusis.”

  The sun had not quite soaked up the night mists, but the water of the gulf was a rich cobalt with coppery rocks at its brim. In the distance and behind rose the ghosts of the Peloponnesian mountains.

  She said: “ My father and mother came from Smyrna. Is that what you want to know?”

  “It’s a beginning.”

  “But already you know so much. You know that I am—what is it?—innocent-looking but hard-boiled. What more is there necessary to understand about any woman?”

  He said: “ Isn’t it the Greeks of Smyrna who consider their blood purer than the Greeks of the mother country?”

  “… My father’s family had been there for over four hundred years, if
that is what you mean.”

  “When did he come to Greece?”

  “In 1922.”

  “The exchange of populations?”

  “Yes.”

  He waited. “ Go on.”

  “Oh, you will know the background.”

  “I can hear it again.”

  “My father and mother were of that number of hundreds of thousands forcibly transferred after the defeat of Greece by Turkey. My father had not then finished his training as a doctor, but with what he was able to save from the catastrophe he finished his studies here, and in 1929 he married my mother. I was born three years later. My father was foolish enough to practise for many years among the refugees and dispossessed, his countrymen; and so we too were quite poor. When the Germans came he continued his work in Athens. Twice he was in prison for short periods for helping the Resistance, but the Germans soon let him go because they had need of doctors. Then when the Germans left, the Communists occupied our part of the city.”

  He waited. “Is that the end?”

  “Yes, so far as they were concerned, it is. Because my father had influence in all his district ELAS told him he must publicly join the party. When he said he had no party, but only disease to fight, they shot him and stigmatised him as a collaborator. My mother they took away a month later as a hostage and I never saw her again. She is buried in the north. A priest hid me at that time, in the altar of his church—you know in Greece there are doors to the altar—and he kept me there and fed me for three weeks.”

  “… I’m very sorry.”

  “It is stale history now. All it has left me with is a dislike of the smell of incense.”

  They passed Eleusis and took the main road to the north, crossing the great plain with its ancient distorted olive trees and red-brown earth.

  He said: “I was in Greece all that time, and in Athens too.”

  “What time? During the occupation?”

  “Yes. The war against the Germans became my war very early.”

  “Because of Greece?”

  “In the main, yes. I was here when the Germans came but got out in time. Then I came back and stayed around.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I just stayed around. And noted how the various resistance groups were trending.”

  “ELAS?”

  “Well, there were dozens of different groups to begin with. But after a time ELAS became much the biggest and it was soon pretty clear that they were more interested in making an eventual Communist state in Greece than in wasting their ammunition on the Germans. At least it was. clear to a few people but not to those outside.… Perhaps you know all this as well as I do?”

  “I was ten or eleven at the time. It is not always easy to remember.”

  “ELAS tactics were unvarying. By 1943 they were far the best equipped force in the field. They were the only one with any outside propaganda system, the only one with a proper organisation, because it had been in existence before the war. In addition to doing a little sparring with the Germans to satisfy the British and the Americans, they took on one by one the other resistance movements and wiped them out. It was the same technique as they applied to your father. Each resistance group, each leader of a resistance group was given the alternative—be absorbed by us, toe the party line, or else. The ‘else’ was to be denounced as collaborating with the Germans and then liquidated. I can give you the names of eight or ten such groups—with their leaders—who went that way. Not three or four killed but hundreds massacred. Some of them were my oldest friends. Only Zervas with EDES survived because he was too big and tough to be destroyed.”

  “You were in Athens at the end?”

  “Yes, and I didn’t like that either.”

  She shrugged. “ Perhaps my father was lucky to be shot by a firing squad. At least he was luckier than my mother and some of the others.”

  For a while they had met on neutral ground. He had tried deliberately to slacken the tautness between them and had succeded better than he’d hoped. They reached Levadia soon after eleven and here swung off the main road on to the loose and uneven surface of the mountain road. A few clouds had blown up, but through them the snow-headed peaks watched them as they passed.

  “That’s Parnassus,” Anya said.

  Gene stared ahead.

  “I used not to think it existed in fact. I thought it was part of a legend, like Zeus and Aphrodite.”

  “Nobody knows now what is legend and what is history,” she said. “Perhaps there is not all that difference.”

  “Have you ever been to the summit?”

  “No. August is the time.”

  “It doesn’t look difficult. How high?”

  “Oh—three thousand metres perhaps. The snow’s treacherous of course.”

  “Next time we come, let’s arrange to go.”

  “Are you very sure of yourself? Or very unsure? Deep down. I’d like to know.”

  “Physically I’m sure,” he said. “ The way a rat’s sure. Once you’ve lived in holes, you come to know your own muscles, your own teeth, your own sense of smell. Being wanted by a few tired policemen doesn’t worry me. But about you I was never more unsure in my life. Anything you detect to the contrary is purely coincidental.”

  “It’s bad to be on the run,” she said, after the minute she had taken to digest what he said. “Even from a few—tired policemen. Bad for something inside oneself. It is like driving on one’s brakes too much. I know—though I had it for only a few weeks.”

  They began to climb by hairpin bends. At one point three ragged children stood by the way offering to sell them bunches of anemones. When Gene did not stop they leapt across the rough moorland like goats and were waiting patiently at the next corner above. When he still went on they got to the third corner before the car, and here Anya made him stop and buy the flowers. Afterwards they went on again between walls of rock and skirting dark and tangled forests. Arakhova was reached clinging uncertainly to the side of the gorge. Then the mountains drew right in upon the pass, they skirted the face of the precipice and began to fall gently into Delphi, which came in view with the clustered tiles and huddled streets of the modern village standing athwart the road and the white skeletal remains of the sacred shrines climbing in tiers to the foot of the great Phocian wall.

  Gene found Michael Miehaelis’s house just short of the village, and the poet, white moustache gleaming like a scar on his old brown face, limped down the steps to meet them.

  They had lunch out of doors on the terrace behind the house, while eagles swooped and circled overhead. Everything here was dwarfed by the great precipice behind them, which both protected and threatened from three sides. But on the fourth the ground fell away in an avalanche of forest and olive groves stretching five miles and dropping two thousand feet to the shining rim of the sea.

  Over luncheon Michaelis was talkative, Gene as conversational as was necessary, Anya silent. But it was not a bored or a disdainful silence. For all her assumptions of arrogance Gene saw perfectly well that she would look with the same contempt upon herself as upon anyone else who pretended to knowledge they didn’t have. The old man wore an embroidered smock like an artist’s coat, with buttons to the neck and a white linen collar. On his head was a little black cap shaped like a beret and worn on the slant. He had no family and his wife had been dead some years, but the three small children of his housekeeper kept popping on and off the verandah like puppies for tit-bits that he took from his own plate to give them.

  He said: “I never go down into Athens. The skies of the mind so quickly become overcast. Here in Delphi I think perhaps we can still see.…

  “Of course I am not a poet. I write songs. They are songs which I hope people sing, and some day may even dance to. Because they deal with elemental things it does not make them great; only truth is great—and for that one digs for ever in one‘s own soul. Perhaps enlightenment comes in death—the supreme moment of all-knowing—or is there just a blank end and candles burni
ng and the thud of a spade? More grapes, Aristide! Man’s mind works always to conceive a unity, and enlightenment would complete it, but that alas does not prove the epiphenomenalists wrong.…

  “How beautiful you are, Miss Stonaris. Beauty I think is so much more than skin deep: on that most poets are wrong, deriving from a puritan tradition which fortunately never rooted deep in Greece; beauty’s an outward expression of an inner grace. I think of Apuleius’s description of Isis: ‘her nod governs the shining heights of Heaven, the wholesome sea-breezes, the lamentable silences of the world below.’ It is pleasant to be an old man because one can express oneself without fear of misunderstanding.…

  “Yes, from 600 B.C. and before, the pilgrims used to come here, by sea chiefly, disembarking down there in Itea and making the long climb up to the Oracle. The people of Delphi had a bad reputation in those days—they lived off the pilgrims and often robbed them. They murdered Aesop, you know.”

  “I didn’t know,” said Gene. “More names.”

  “Well, yes, we are full of them. Croesus sent money for rebuilding the temple when it was destroyed by an earthquake. Nero robbed it. Domitian restored it. Plutarch was a priest here. So it goes on.”

  “So it no longer goes on.”

  “No.… Nowadays our temporary Hitlers call and stare but learn nothing from their visits.”

  After lunch Gene had a few minutes’ business talk with Michaelis and then they took their leave and walked up to explore the ruins.

  “Well?” Gene said.

  She stopped to finger a stone out of the side of her shoe. “I think he understands women.”

  They were climbing towards the temple of Apollo, and for a few steps they went on in silence. He said: “If I can believe my own eyes, you were as impressed by him as I was.”

  “Well, so if I was impressed by him? What then?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  She said: “Perhaps I would rather marry Michaelis than any man I have ever met. Does that satisfy you?”

  “At sixty-nine?”

  She shrugged. “It would solve some problems. Life would be less complex.”

  “If one could live and think like Michaelis, life might be less complex any way up.”