“Nicholas, I have much to attend to. I must ask you to leave me in peace for an hour or so.”
I stood up. “No work?”
“You wish to work?”
“No.”
“Then we will meet for ouzo.”
I thought that perhaps he wanted me to go out of doors, that Julie would be waiting there. So I went down. In the music room I saw that the other photo of Lily had also disappeared.
I strolled idly all round the domaine, in the windless air; I waited in all the likely places; I kept on turning, looking backwards, sideways, listening. But the landscape seemed dead. Nothing and no one appeared. The theatre was empty; and, like all empty theatres, it became in the end frightening.
* * *
We silently toasted each other, across the lamp-lit table with the ouzo and the olives, under the colonnade. Apparently we were to have dinner there that night, for the other table, laid for two, had been placed at the western end of the colonnade, looking out over the trees. I stood beside Conchis at the front steps. A breath of dead air washed over us.
“I hoped you would tell me more about previous years here.”
He smiled. “In the middle of a performance?”
“I thought this was a sort of interval.”
“There are no intervals here, Nicholas.” He took my arm. “After dinner I am going to tell you the story of the execution. And now I am going to tell you what happened when I returned to France. After Seidevarre. If you are interested?”
“Of course.”
He gestured with his glass. “Let us stroll as far as the seat. It will be cooler.” We went down the steps and across the gravel into the trees. As we walked, he talked. “It took me many months to learn how much I had changed. As one learns of a distant earthquake by the imperceptible shakings of a needle on a seismograph. I gradually came to understand that I was really by nature a very different person from what I had previously imagined. I had, you remember, many new notes on bird sounds to collate and work through. But I found that I had no real interest in the subject after all. That in fact I preferred the mystery of birds’ voices to any scientific explanation of them. Something analogous happened in every department of my life. When I looked back I saw that there had always been a discord in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued the latter, worshipped the latter, as a doctor, and as a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and classify it and vivisect it out of existence, was like trying to remove all the air from atmosphere. In the creating of the vacuum it was the experimenter who died, because he was inside the vacuum. All this change in me came just when I unexpectedly found myself presented with the money and the leisure to do what I wanted in life. At that time I interpreted that last question of de Deukans as a warning. I was to look for the water, not the wave. So.”
We came to the seat overlooking the dark sea.
“And you came to Greece?”
“I did not come to Greece to… look for water. I came because my mother was dying of cancer. Like myself, she had always resisted any idea of coming here. Or rather, I learnt my unwillingness to face Greece from her. But when she knew she was dying she suddenly wanted to see it one last time. So we took a boat from Marseilles. This was in 1928. I shall never forget seeing her come on deck one morning. In brilliant sunshine. And finding herself in the Gulf of Corinth, which we had entered during the night. She stood gripping the rail. Facing the mountains of Achaia with the tears streaming down her face. Lacerated with joy. I could not feel it then. But later I did. By the end of the holiday I knew that I too had gained a homeland. Perhaps I should say a motherland. My mother died four months after we returned to Paris.”
“And you came here.”
“I came here. I told you why. But it also reminded me very much of Norway. Like Henrik Nygaard, like de Deukans, in their different ways, I have always craved for territory. I use the word in the technical ornithological sense. A fixed domaine on which no other of my species may trespass.” He stared to sea. “I gave up all ideas of practicing medicine. In spite of what I have just said about the wave and the water, in those years in France I am afraid I lived a selfish life. That is, I offered myself every pleasure. I traveled a great deal. I lost some money dabbling in the theatre, but I made much more dabbling on the Bourse. I gained a great many amusing friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. I suppose I was fortunate. It took me only five years to discover what some rich people never discover—that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it.”
“When did you start your theatre here?”
“Friends used to come. They were bored. Very often they bored me, because an amusing person in Paris can become insufferable on an Aegean island. We had a little fixed theatre, a stage. Where the Priapus is now. We began to write our own plays.” He turned. “Et voilà.”
The new-risen moon was amber, hazed, and made the sea glisten turgidly. A few crickets cheeped, but we sat before a dropsied, listless silence. Far away to the west over the black mountains of the mainland I saw the nervous, thunderless flicker of summer lightning.
I sprang my question on him, out of the silence, in his own style.
“Is your dislike of me a part of your part?”
He was undisconcerted. “Liking is not important. Between men.”
I felt the ouzo in me. “Even so, you don’t like me.”
His dark eyes turned on mine. “I am to answer?” I nodded. “No. But I like very few people. And no longer any of your sex and age. Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society. It is one I have long banished from my life. You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.”
From the house the bell rang, and we walked back slowly through the trees. Maria’s shadow moved under the arches, round the white-and-silver table. It was like a stage setting, and I had the sharp realization that this was presumably the last dinner Conchis and I should have together. I wanted desperately to have Julie at my side, to have that situation solved; but I found myself wishing that the masque, despite all its asperities and shocks and uglinesses, could have also continued.
* * *
Almost as soon as we had started eating I heard the footsteps of two or three people on the gravel round by Maria’s cottage. I glanced back from my soup, but the table had been, no doubt deliberately, placed where it was impossible to see.
“Tonight I wish to illustrate my story,” said Conchis.
“I thought you’d done that already. And only too vividly.”
“These are real documents.”
He indicated that I should go on eating, he would say nothing more. I heard footsteps on the terrace outside his bedroom, above our heads. There was a tiny squeal, the scrape of metal. I tried to get a conversation going while we ate the kid Maria had cooked for us, but he did not bother to keep up the host-guest fiction anymore. He did not want to talk, and that was that.
At last Maria brought the coffee, which she placed on the table by the front steps. Conchis stood up, excused himself for a moment, and disappeared upstairs. I looked back from the edge of the colonnade towards the cottage; nothing unusual. I strolled a few steps out on the gravel and peered up, but once again there was nothing to be seen. Conchis returned very shortly with a large cardboard file, and gestured to me to bring the chairs to the front steps. We sat, facing the sea, the table between us, evidently waiting. I was silent, on my guard.
Then I heard footsteps again on the gravel and my heart leapt because I thought it was Julie, that we had been waiting for her. But it was a man, the black-dressed Negro, carrying a long bundle. He crossed to in front of us and then, at the edge of the gravel, he set the bundle on its tripod end and I realized what it was—a small cinema screen. There was a ratchetin
g noise and he unfurled the white square; adjusted it. Someone called in a low voice from above.
“Entaxi.” All right. A Greek voice I didn’t recognize.
I turned to Conchis. “Isn’t Lily going to see this?”
“No. I would be ashamed to present this to her.”
“Ashamed?”
“Because these events could have taken place only in a world where man considered himself superior to woman. In what the Americans call a ‘man’s world.’ That is, a world governed by brute force, humorless arrogance, illusory prestige and primeval stupidity.” He stared at the screen. “Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling that we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women—and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.”
He stopped and turned down the lamp to the faintest glimmer. His mask face looked as grim as I could remember having seen it. Then he said, “I will begin.”
53
Eleutheria
“When the Italians invaded Greece in 1940, I had already decided that I would not run away from Europe. I cannot tell you why. Perhaps it was curiosity, perhaps it was guilt, perhaps it was indifference. And here, on a remote corner of a remote island, it did not require great courage. The Germans took over from the Italians on April 6th, 1941. By April 27th they were in Athens. In June they started the invasion of Crete and for a time we were in the thick of the war. Transport airplanes passed over all day long, German landing craft filled the harbors. But after that peace soon alighted back on the island. It had no strategic value, either to the Axis or to the Resistance. The garrison here was very small. Forty Austrians—the Nazis gave the Austrians and the Italians all the easy Occupation posts—commanded by a lieutenant who had been wounded during the invasion of France.
“Already, during the invasion of Crete, I had been ordered out of Bourani. A permanent lookout section was posted here, and the maintenance of this observation point was the real reason we had a garrison at all. Fortunately I had a house in the village. The Germans were not unpleasant. They carried all my portable possessions over there for me. And even paid me a small billeting rent for Bourani. Then just when things were settling down, it happened that the proedros, the mayor of the village that year, had a fatal thrombosis. Two days later I was summoned to meet the newly arrived commandant of the island. He and his men were installed in your school, which had been closed since Christmas. I was expecting to meet some promoted quartermaster type of officer. Instead I found myself with a very handsome young man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, who said, in excellent French, that he understood I could speak the language fluently. He was extremely polite, more than a little apologetic, and inasmuch as one can in such circumstances we took to each other. He soon came to the point. He wanted me to be the new mayor of the village. I refused at once: I wanted no involvement in the war. He then sent out for two or three of the leading villagers. When they came he left me alone with them, and I discovered that it was they who had proposed my name. Of course the fact was that none of them wanted the job, the odium of collaboration, and I was the ideal bouc émissaire. They put the matter to me in highly moral and complimentary terms, and I still refused. Then they were frank—promised their tacit support… in short, in the end I said, very well, I will do it.
“My new but dubious glory meant that I came into frequent contact with Lieutenant Kiuber. Five or six weeks after our first meeting he said one evening that he would like me to call him Anton when we were alone. That will tell you that we often were alone and that we had confirmed our liking of each other. Our first link was through music. He had a fine tenor voice. Like many really gifted amateurs, he sang Schubert and Wolf better—in some way more feelingly—than any but the very greatest professional lieder singers. That is, to my ear. On his very first visit to my house he saw my harpsichord. And rather maliciously I played him the Goldberg Variations. If one wishes to reduce a sensitive German to tears there is no surer lachrymatory. I must not suggest that Anton was a hard subject to conquer. He was more than disposed to be ashamed of his role and to find a convenient anti-Nazi figure to worship. The next time I visited the school he begged me to accompany him at the school piano, which he had had moved to his quarters. Then it was my turn to be sentimentally impressed. Not to tears, of course. But he sang very well. And I have always had a softness for Schubert.
“One of the first things I wanted to know was why Anton, with his excellent French, was not in occupied France. But ‘certain compatriots’ considered him not sufficiently ‘German’ in his attitude to the French. No doubt he had spoken once too often in the mess in defense of Gallic culture. And that was why he had been relegated to this backwater. I forgot to say he had been shot in the kneecap during the 1940 invasion and had a limp, unfitting him for active military duties. He was German, not Austrian. His family was rich, and he had spent a year before the war studying at the Sorbonne. Finally be had decided that he would become an architect. But of course his training was interrupted by the war.”
He stopped and turned up the lamp; then opening the file, unfolded a large plan. Two or three sketches—perspectives and elevations, all glass and glittering concrete.
“He was very rude about this house. And he promised he would come back after the war and build me something new. After the best Bauhaus principles.”
All the notes were written in French; not a word of German anywhere. The plan was signed. Anton Kiuber, le sept juin, ran 4 de la Grande Folie.
I noticed one of the sketches was of a theatre, a small amphitheatre. An exotic sickle-shaped apron stage, a canopied proscenium.
“And your theatre.”
“Yes. He was going to come and design for me.”
He let me look a few moments longer, then he turned down the lamp again.
“For a year during the Occupation everything was tolerable. We were very short of food, but Anton—and his men—shut their eyes to countless irregularities. The idea that the Occupation was all a matter of jackbooted storm troopers and sullen natives is absurd. Most of the Austrian soldiers were over forty and fathers themselves—easy meat for the village children. One summer dawn, in 1942, an Allied plane came and torpedoed a German supply landing craft that had anchored in the old harbor on its way to Crete. It sank. Hundreds of crates of food came bobbing to the surface. By then the islanders had had a year of nothing but fish and hard bread. The sight of all this meat, milk and rice and other luxuries was too much. They swarmed out in anything that would float. Somebody told me what was happening and I hurried down to the harbor. The garrison had a machine gun on the point, it had fired furiously at the Allied plane, and I had terrible visions of a revengeful massacre. But when I got there I saw islanders busily hauling in crates not a hundred yards from where the machine gun was. Outside the post stood Anton and the duty section. Not a shot was fired.
“Later that morning Anton summoned me. Of course, I thanked him profusely. He said that he was going to report that several of the crew of the landing craft had been saved by the prompt action of the villagers who had rowed to their help. He must now have a few crates handed back to show as salvage. I was to see to that. The rest would be considered ‘sunk and destroyed.’ What little hostility remained against him and his men among the villagers disappeared. I remembered one evening, it must have been about a month after that, a group of Austrian soldiers, a little drunk, began to sing down by the harbor. And then suddenly the islanders began to sing as well. In turn. First the Austrians, t
hen the islanders. German and Greek. A Tyrolean carol. Then a kalamatiano. It was very strange. In the end they were all singing each other’s songs.
“But that was the zenith of our small golden age. Somewhere among the Austrian soldiers there must have been a spy. About a week after the singing, a section of German troops was added to Anton’s garrison to ‘stiffen morale.’ He came to me one day like an angry child and said, I have been told I am in danger of becoming a discredit to the Wehrmacht, and I must mend my ways. His troops were forbidden to give food to the islanders, and we saw them far less frequently in the village. In November of that year the Gorgopotamos exploit created a new strain. Fortunately I had been given more credit than I deserved by the villagers for the easiness of the régime, and they accepted the stricter situation as well as could be expected.”
Conchis stopped speaking, then clapped his hands twice.
“I should like you to see Anton.”
“I think I’ve seen him already.”
Up on the terrace a petrol engine suddenly sputtered into life. A generator.
“No. Anton is dead. You have seen an actor who looks like him. But this is the real Anton. During the war I had a small ciné-camera and two reels of film. Which I kept until 1944, when I could get them developed. The quality is very poor.”
I heard the faint whir of a projector. A beam of light came from above, was adjusted, centered on the screen. A blur, hasty focusing.
I saw a handsome young man of about my own age. He was not the one I had seen the week before, though in one feature, the heavy dark eyebrows, they were very similar. But this was unmistakably a wartime officer. He didn’t look particularly soft; but more like a Battle of Britain pilot; stylishly insouciant. He was walking down a path beside a high wall, the wall of Hermes Ambelas’s house, perhaps. Smiling. He struck a sort of heroic tenor attitude, laughed self-consciously; and abruptly the ten-second sequence was over. In the next he was drinking coffee, playing with a cat at his feet; looked sideways up at the camera, a serious, shy look, as if someone had told him not to smile. The film was very fuzzy, jerky, amateurish. Another sequence. A file of men marching round the island harbor; apparently shot from above, out of some upper-story window.
The Magus Page 42
