by David Malouf
He had a whole life here that I had no part in. There was an old antique dealer in the Plaka who got him hash in return for favours I was never clear about. I would walk up and down the crowded alleyways, peering into shops full of ikons and patched-up pots or crammed with ironmongery of every sort, ploughs, kettles, anvils, old cauldrons and tripods, chains, motorbike engines — till Johnno reappeared, looking sulky but with his tight little wad of “stuff”. He also had a girl in one of the houses at the Pireus, and one day late in my visit he took me down to meet her. We sat about in one of the poky little rooms, laughing, and two of the other girls came in to practise their English, flouncing about in their silk dressing-gowns, giggling, and slipping off whenever there was a call. We had coffee brought in from the cafe opposite by a boy with a shaven head, who came swinging down the street with the five coffees and waterglasses on a silver tray, and while we sipped our coffee, gulped our water, one of the girls tickled him in a corner while the others went off into gales of laughter. He emerged red-faced and angry (he might have been ten or eleven) and clattered about muttering as he gathered up the cups. Johnno went there at the weekend and was away sometimes till Monday night, but the girl never came up to Athens and I saw her only the once. She was a tiny dark girl from one of the islands. Naxos, I think.
Johnno had always liked mysteries. At no time during the past three years had I ever had an address for him — an address, that is, where he was actually living and to be found. In Paris I had written to the Fossé St. Bernard or to the Flore. In Athens he used an address in Monastiraki and I had tracked him down only through the school.
His life here, it seemed to me, was more mysterious than ever. There was an Englishman from the school who came to call for him in his car. Johnno never introduced us, though If requently opened the door to him, and I suspected somehow that he wasn’t from the school at all. If we saw him in one of the city bars, Johnno told me, we must give no sign of recognising him. He wouldn’t want to be seen. And Johnno did translations for a newspaper editor — an American who had a weekly in Saloniki. He would appear sometimes at a neighbouring table, in a cafe we had just happened to stop in, though it was very much out of our way. Johnno would leave me briefly, talk to the man, sitting close across the table, and we would be off. What was he involved in, I wondered. Drug trafficking? Politics? Of the left? Of the right? It seemed typical of our relationship nowadays that I couldn’t tell. It might have been any one of them.
Except for a brief meal in one of the Pireus taverns, which we would eat late in the afternoon, I saw him, for the most part, only at night. I would meet his train at Monastiraki about ten-thirty, after his class. We were free then. To eat at one of the stuffy cavernous restaurants in the Plaka, or at a table on the footpath opposite, talking, reminiscing, bitching, while Johnno consumed tankard after tankard of retsina, till he was so drunk I would have to drag him home and up the narrow stairs to his room. Later, in the early hours towards dawn, I would hear him being violently, wretchedly sick from the lavatory roof. For the first time since I had known him I wondered where he was going, what he was doing with himself. What did he want out of life? What ordinary fate was he in flight from? What would he do next?
“Well,” he enquired of me one day, as if to counter a question I had never put, “what will you do next?”
I answered without thinking: “I’ll go home.”
He regarded me scornfully, then nodded. “I always knew you would.”
He looked hurt, as if I had betrayed him, then shrugged his shoulders and went back to his drink. He found my decision incomprehensible; but didn’t bother to ask why.
I’m not sure I could have told him if he had.
One night late, set off perhaps by the likeness of the little cafe we were drinking in to the Greek Club, and the warmth of the Athenian night to those heavy, subtropical nights in Brisbane when the pavements gave off a heat that rose right up through your shoes, Johnno withdrew a little into some secret place from which he smiled out at me like a mischievous child, then leaning across the marble-topped table began in his old conspiratorial whisper: “Dante, I’m going to tell you something. But it’s a secret. I want you to promise you’ll keep it.”
Worked on by the same uncertain feelings that had inspired Johnno, and glad to see in him some of the old fire, the old mystery, I promised; and he began to tell me.
In that last summer before he left, as a final gesture of defiance, he had gone out each night for a week and set fire to a church: four Methodist, one Congregational, one Anglican, and one of some other nondescript nonconformist creed he had never been sure of. The Catholics had escaped because the bastards always built in stone! No doubt I’d remember the fuss there’d been. A firebug! A maniac! Well, it was him. He sat there large and solemn. Bubbling. What did I think of it?
As always with one of Johnno’s stories I didn’t know what to think. Yes, there had been a firebug. I remembered that well enough. Yes, it would be easy enough to take a can of petrol, crawl under the stumps or through the absurd little gothic window of one of those weatherboard churches in the outer suburbs, which were not much more than one-roomed sheds really, and set it alight. Especially in early summer when dry grass could catch and be ablaze in seconds. Even a bit of broken glass would do that, if the angle was right and the sun high enough. Stony ground, parched half-acre of something like straw with a single hoop-pine or bunya ragged in the wind. I even believed he was capable of it. But whether he had actually done it — that was another matter.
“You don’t believe me,” he said bitterly.
I shrugged my shoulders. “If you say so, yes, I believe you.” It didn’t sound convincing.
“Well you can check the bloody papers,” he said, “The Courier-Mail, you’ll believe that I suppose. It was in the last weeks of December. I did my last one just before Christmas, at The Gap. I would have done nine altogether to make a cross, but the rain set in and I had to leave one whole arm off. It’s all there in the papers in black and white. I don’t give a fuck whether you believe it or not.”
He looked sulky. Somehow the excitement of it had made him blaze up for a moment like the old Johnno, something impish leaping clear of the heavy body that I had finished off with my failure to respond. I felt mean. As if I had cheated him of some larger dimension of his own improbable existence. Johnno’s story was less a confession, I thought, than a rehearsal. I had just rejected one of his finest scenarios.
We did finally make the climb to Kaysariani, on almost my last day in Athens before the long haul across Europe to another London winter.
On the bus out through the hot flat suburbs Johnno was still heavy and bad tempered from last night’s drinking. He huddled sulkily in a corner, pulling away savagely when a small child in a woman’s arms leaned out and tugged playfully at his hair. But once we were on the slopes of Hymettos, with the last garish villa behind us and the road winding up ahead among dark straight cypress, he relaxed a little and began to point out to me the domes of the churches below, and further off, the pinkish roofs of the Pireus where we went sometimes in the evening to eat souvlakia and drink sweet Samos wine in the smoky taverns. The hillside was a blaze of air, with rows of square metal bee-boxes arranged one above the other in a dazzling terrace and women in black moving slowly across the slope gathering baskets of the wild herbs whose fragrance was everywhere, oregano, rosemary, sage. Far away just under the peak, in a grove darker and thicker than the rest, were the gold crosses of the monastery When we reached it at last, and stepped through the wall into the chapel forecourt, it was like plunging into a well, it was so cool, so still, the silence was so deep. The darkness of cypress enclosed the place completely. You had to look far up to see the blue of the open sky. Little streams trickled away between green slabs underfoot and seeped between the moss-covered stones of the wall. We drank from a ram’s head that uttered a jet of clear, ice-cold water that must have come from the very depths of the mountain.
&nbs
p; “There’s a spring,” I remembered, “a fountain of Diana or Venus — I read about it in the guide.” And I began to take from my duffel the Blue Guide that, to Johnno’s disgust, I carried everywhere, like a bloody German!
We examined the frescos in the dome of the chapel, and Johnno declared them rubbishy, poor late-eighteenth-century work, restored, from the look of it, by foot painters. His big loose laugh offended the young monk who had unlocked it for us and I gave him twenty drachmas out of embarrassment. I suggested we look for the spring, which was the source of all those little rivulets whose bubbling filled the court with a sound that I had taken at first for silence. Johnno shrugged his shoulders, and followed me, muttering, up the steep slope beyond the monastery that led, according to my guidebook, directly to the spring. For twenty minutes or more we searched the hillside in the prickly noon heat. Bees droned, grazing on the herbs, and Johnno drove them off with his hat. There were tall dry thistlesticks that caught our trousers, loose stones that slipped underfoot, and everywhere the sound of water, trickling, gurgling, at times it was almost thunderous. But no sign of a spring. Johnno snatched the guidebook from my hand and turned it to left and right, trying to make sense of the map.
“Oh fuck it!” he said at last, flinging the book back to me, “who wants to see it anyway. Let’s go down. Do you mind?”
We made our way back down the steep slope, half-crawling, half-sliding, and were about to go back through the gap in the monastery wall when a young woman appeared, fanning herself, the hair sticking sweatily to her brow, with another girl behind her, and then two old women in black.
“You found the spring?” the first girl asked in Greek.
No, we hadn’t.
The girl, still blocking our path, turned and shouted down to the older women. They shouted back and forth. Then the girl consulted with the other young woman and they began to climb back through the wall while we slid and scrambled behind.
“You are English?” the girl said, when we were all down. “My cousin and I have learned English very well. My cousin is at work in the Congo for an English company. We would like you,” she indicated benches, “to have lunch with us.”
The old ladies, who had already settled, lifted their heads in the odd Greek way of agreement, and smiled. They undid bundles which contained rolls with sausage and fetta cheese, tomatoes, olives, cucumber.
“Please,” the girl urged, “you are very welcome. A picnic, you see.”
We sat and ate on the stone platform under the wall, in the shade of the cypress, while water trickled noisily all about us. We conversed. About the difficulties of English, especially the tenses: present, past, future; past perfect, continuous past, conditional past; conditional, subjunctive — all so difficult because there are no rules! and the young woman from the Congo, who was too deeply aware of the difference between Greek and English habits to be entirely happy about her young cousin’s exuberance, told us tersely that she was company secretary to an import-export firm and was in Athens on three months leave. It was cool. The old ladies munched noisily on the tough bread, and the woman from the Congo tore off bite-sized pieces and was still nibbling away long after the rest of us were done. At times when there was nothing to say we smiled.
“Well,” the younger one said after a particularly long silence, “it’s almost twelve.” And she repeated it in Greek to her mother and aunt. Who suddenly went very still.
The girl explained lightly. It was the foolish man in Italy, who had promised the world would end today, with a flood, right now, at twelve o’clock. Hadn’t we read it in the papers? He and his foolish people had gone up to a high hill and were waiting there, to be safe. The girl’s eyes met mine and she blushed. Well, it was very foolish. Educated people did not believe such things. Of course it was in Italy.
The two old ladies, sitting very still, looked dead ahead. Water gurgled comfortingly. Away in the distance — why hadn’t I noticed it before? — was the sound of traffic, and a plane turned to make its run in to the airport. The girl glanced casually at her watch.
“There!” she announced triumphantly. “After twelve o’clock!” She laughed. “Silly! I knew it wouldn’t happen.”
The two old ladies smiled, shifted on their haunches, smoothed their skirts, laughing.
“Didn’t it?”
Johnno had been unusually quiet. Now that he spoke the girl had to turn half about to enquire, puzzled:
“Please?”
“How do you know it didn’t? It could have.” He gave a sudden violent chortle that startled the old ladies out of their happy calm. “Maybe it did and we didn’t notice.”
The girl looked distraught. What was he talking about? She couldn’t follow. It was the tenses.
“I’m sorry, I have failed to understand,” she admitted, deeply disappointed.
Johnno gave another of his harsh belly-laughs and I explained hastily: “A joke. My friend was making a joke.”
She smiled weakly and I got up, thanking her, and all of them, the sour cousin, the two old ladies, while Johnno kept mumbling: “How would we know the difference? It’d all go on just the same. How would we know?” I pushed him off down the steps towards the forecourt and on out of sight.
But the notion pleased him. He kept up all day the pretence that it had happened after all.
“How do you feel, Dante? Can you feel the difference?” He poked himself in the tyre of fat around his ribs. “I feel exactly the same. It’s marvellous. Should we eat do you think? Look at that old lady eating baklava, she hasn’t even realised. Look at the way she’s licking the back of her fingers. It all looks exactly the same. Exactly! Not a scrap of difference. Maybe it happened ages ago. Ages! How would we know? How would we ever know?” He stopped and shook his head, amazed, in front of an old man selling lottery tickets, with row upon row of papers stuck into slots at the top of a pole like a Sioux war lance. It kept him light and happy till well after dinner.
Which we did eat after all, at a little pavement cafe in the Plaka, while cats prowled the stones beyond an iron railing — the last remains (unnecessary to visit, according to my Blue Guide) of Hadrian’s library. Sic transit gloria mundi …
XIII
✧✧✧
Back in Brisbane just after Christmas, I discovered that I had made a terrible mistake.
There was this girl I had met in England who was more than half the reason for my return, but suddenly everything that had seemed possible while we were still footloose in another country, with all the ease and openness that comes from having only such possessions as will fill a rucksack and a couple of light cases, now disappeared under difficult considerations like where we might live (she came from Grafton and was excessively devoted to her parents), the sort of “home” we might settle for, and whether the wedding, since there must after all be a wedding, should take place here or there, in church or out of it. Nothing seemed to me to be open or free any more. It was to be decisions at every point, a whole set of little locks into a life I had never cared for, and doubted, even now, if I could accept.
We saw one another at weekends (I went down on the overnight train), and in between had expensive long-distance quarrels on the telephone. I spent my time mooning about the house waiting for her to call or waiting impatiently till I could call her. We broke off, made up again, broke. The thing was hopeless but wouldn’t end. My parents, who thought I had come back to get a job and settle, were bitterly disappointed. From their point of view I was exactly where I had been four years ago, and there were times when I felt so too. Brisbane, where I sometimes thought of myself as having “grown up”, was a place where I seemed never to have changed. Just turning a corner sometimes on a familiar view, or a familiar sign: Fullars Dry Cleaning, Red Comb House Ind. Coop., made me step back years and become the fourteen-year-old, or worse still, the twenty-year-old I once was, helpless before emotions I thought I had outgrown but had merely repressed. All my assurance, all my sophistication about foreign places and
performances and food, like the growing heaviness round the shoulders, was a disguise that might fool others but could never fool me. Elsewhere I might pass for a serious adult. Here, I knew, I would always be an ageing child. I might grow old in Brisbane but I would never grow up.
And there were other ghosts as well. Even more disturbing. The ghosts of schoolboys still visible behind the solid, dull presence of friends I ran into in Queen Street or met at Hamilton when I went to watch my nephews tussle on a rugby field (fierce, dodgy seven-year-olds), and found half the fathers in the crowd were my contemporaries: lawyers, stockbrokers with seats on the Exchange, architects, accountants, successful real-estate agents, all thickening out of whatever grace I had remembered in them but retaining, for all their ponderous self-assurance, some hint of boyishness that seemed like a national trait, though all their fire had been delegated to those small muddy figures on the oval, breaking out of the mob with a ball or dodging skilfully downfield towards the touchline. I went and had drinks with one of them (we had nothing to say to one another) while half a football team tumbled about in the back of a station-wagon, and visited others at home. They seemed oddly apologetic at being caught out like this, running to fat from too little exercise and too much beer, inclined to boast about how quickly they had made it, uneasily proprietorial as they allowed the children to show off a little and their wives to be admired. I recognised the elements of success. Scrubbed colonial furniture, the pennants for swimming and football in the children’s rumpus room, a Blackman lithograph. I could appreciate also the technical expertise, a hard competence at whatever it was they did that had taken them easily to the top.
But it depressed and saddened me, and was half the reason, perhaps, for my difficulties with the Grafton girl. I grew increasingly restless and ill at ease. Just to be out of the house a little I took to reading again at the Public Library, and was on my way there one steamy, drizzly afternoon when I was astonished to see making towards me along Queen Street two more ghosts — the most unexpected of all: Johnno, huge, spade-bearded, wearing an olive-green safari jacket, shorts, desert boots; and dancing along a few steps behind him a spring-haired figure, skinny as a rake, whom I recognised immediately as the Mango.
