I asked Svolos what sort of following he thought E.A.M. could now command if it were free to function politically. It seemed to be generally admitted that at the time of the civil war it had been backed by about 80 percent of the Greeks. He replied that the Socialists had now split off from E.A.M., but that the Socialists and the Communists between them could still, he thought, command a following of 75 percent of the people. And he pointed out that when these Left elements asked the British to allow the Greeks to form what was described as “a representative government,” they had proposed a combination which did not at all reflect these proportions but gave undue importance to the Right—the formula being one third Royalist, one third democratic and center, and only one third Socialists and Communists.
I asked him why he had split with the Communists. Because their methods were so unscrupulous, he said. Nobody else could get on with people who made a practice of double-dealing; nor could they accomplish their own aims in that way. He himself had always been a Socialist—he had been removed by Metaxas from his university chair; and now, dissociating himself from E.A.M., he had organized last April a new Socialist Party by the fusion of three other parties. Georgalas, he told me, belonged to a small Socialist group that was still a part of E.A.M. and that he believed to consist of camouflaged Communists. During my interview with Georgalas, I had had a very definite impression that I was talking to a convinced fellow-traveller, and I was interested by Svolos’ confirmation. Later I tried to put my finger on the indications which had made me feel this. It seemed to me that I was able to identify them in a peculiar extreme cheerfulness and certainty with which he had talked about everything. The middle-class C.P. member or sympathizer is transported into a kind of substratosphere where, like the aviator who goes too high, he falls victim to a treacherous euphoria. There is no question in his mind that he has picked the winning side and is about to cash in on the stakes, and he does not need to argue about it any more than a Rosicrucian is obliged to defend his esoteric doctrine. Georgalas, no doubt by temperament a sanguine and self-confident man, had, I felt, succumbed a little to that mood of Communist blitheness which is not entirely reassuring. He had talked to me at length and with feeling about the soul-destroying pedantry with which the ancient Greek authors were taught: “Why we love Homer and Sophocles,” he said, “they would never find out from their teachers! A little niece of mine was terribly proud because she knew about a verb form which only occurs about once in the whole of Greek literature and which, as I told her, I had taught Greek for years without ever knowing about. But that was what our education aimed at!” I demurred that this might not be entirely the fault of the reactionary powers who presided over education in Greece, that, even in democratic America, Shakespeare was often taught just like that—that this was a tendency of the academic profession at all times and everywhere. But he smilingly shook his head, brushed my interruption off, and went on; and it seemed to me that, in his Marxist optimism, he was sure that these stupidities would disappear so soon as the Communists should come to power.
With Svolos it was quite different. You could talk to him as to anyone else. He lived in the same world as I did, where there were difficulties, doubts, confused issues, conflicts between expediency and principle. He reminded me a little of Silone, in Rome, who was engaged in a similar task: the attempt to build up, out of the Socialist tradition and the survivors from the old Socialist groups, a movement that would be strong enough to resist the Russians and avert the kind of paralyzing dictatorship which Russian Communism has always brought with it. Such people are anxious and intent; they are never unnaturally cheerful. The only time, during a long stay in Rome, when I ever saw Silone look happy was at the time of the Socialist Congress last July, when I met him on the street, beaming, and he told me that he believed that the pro-Stalinist Socialists were certain to be outvoted on the issue of a merger with the Communists.
· · ·
I had made, on a trip to Delphi, the acquaintance of a young Greek woman, who was acting as interpreter for U.N.R.R.A., and I saw something of her and her family. They belonged to the well-to-do Greek bourgeoisie—that is, they had once been well-to-do, for few people in Greece have much money or can buy much with what they have. The V.s lived in a well-furnished apartment on the Odos Vasilissis Sophias, among the palaces, the fine houses, and the embassies of the fashionable quarter of Athens; but three generations and two branches of the family were obliged to share half a dozen rooms, so that their life was rather hampered and constricted. There were Eleni and her husband, their two children, her mother-in-law, her brother-in-law, and his wife. And they got water only, I think, twice a week and had to save it in buckets and heat it themselves.
Yet this was, for them, a period of relative security. Eleni’s husband had worked against the Germans and had had to escape to Egypt, and Eleni had had to spend a couple of years alone with the children in Athens. Their persistence through it all in the habits and the attitudes of comfortable people made rather an odd impression—especially when one remembered how completely they had been cut off from the rest of their kind in Europe. It was as if they had preserved in a vacuum an abstraction of the bourgeoisie, an essence which had never been troubled by the social upheavals going on in the world or by the ordeals of their native country. Their culture was at least as much French as Greek. Eleni’s husband had studied law in Paris, and Eleni spoke French with her children. Her mother and her stepfather, whom I met there one day, spoke French, they told me, even between themselves. But the effect was not to place the V.s in a larger international world: it was rather to make the French language seem like something nonconductive and insipid, a medium of intercourse that did not imply any real relation either with actual, present-day Athens or with present-day, distant Paris.
On the occasion of one of my calls, I found Eleni’s mother-in-law reading an old back number of Les Œuvres Libres, and she explained that they had not been able, in Greece, to get any new French books since before the war. I walked up to the large, glass-doored bookcase and looked in at the paperbacks, which seemed to exhale a peculiar staleness. They were the biographies, the novels, and the poetry, including much that was second-rate, of the early 1900s and the twenties. I had already been conscious in Italy of the extent to which the war and Mussolini had kept the Italians cut off from the main currents of contemporary thought; but there the crop of brilliant white and colored covers with titles in vivid type that had come out last spring, like flowers, in the shop windows and the sidewalk newsstands—the translations of contemporary books, the new editions of French and Italian classics, the first Italian printings of outlawed Italian authors, and the innumerable new reviews—had been rapidly making up for this. In Greece there was no similar revival. To go into Kauffman’s, the headquarters for foreign books, was almost like exploring an attic; and in Eleutheroudakis’, the Athenian Brentano’s, you were shocked to see how rare and how precious modern books on technical subjects, such as medicine and engineering, had become. A look into the V.s’ bookcase was a contact, from which one drew back, with a cultural day-before-yesterday that was somehow still a part of the present world. And near the bookcase hung a small oil painting which seemed to me in key with the books, for it depicted not a person or a landscape but what appeared to be a room in a museum—perhaps one of the great chambers of the Vatican—with indistinct paintings on the walls and something in a case, that one could not see. It was, I thought, characteristic of the household. Eleni’s husband knew an extraordinary amount about an extraordinary variety of things—the history and culture of Greece, and European philosophy and music, as well as his profession of law—and wrote more or less on all these subjects; but his opinions (I do not say it invidiously of so agreeable and learned a man) made sometimes as dry eating as must have been the legendary steaks supposed to have been cut by the Russians from the mammoth found frozen in Siberia. He was a Royalist, and, as with all such people whose position had been thus reduced, I could not bu
t feel that his politics were founded—however subtly he might justify them—on an identification with his remnants of property and with the social prestige he enjoyed of the cultural interests and intellectual standards which were unquestionably what he most valued. Nor do I mean to sneer at this. How many similar people in the United States, deprived of social standing and financial independence—which is what the Greek bourgeoisie seem menaced with as no group in America is—could be sure of being able to uphold or defend the things they have been taught to admire?
Eleni, who was younger than her husband, did not, I thought, though loyal to Church and King, quite follow all the bourgeois prejudices, for she told us that some friend of hers was taking her to meet the Soviet Ambassador. She had the special sort of elegance and fineness that is not monied or aristocratic in the usual European sense but a part of some old kind of nobility, at once primitive and civilized, that still thrives in the Greek islands. I used to go swimming with them in the afternoons, and it depressed me to contrast with the beach reserved for the military Americans the “plage” at Gliphada, which had once, I was told, been the gayest and smartest of Athens. We U.N.R.R.A. men and soldiers on leave and engineers and war correspondents had a fine row of clean little houses that seemed to have been newly built, with various kinds of service, such as a woman who splashed you with water to wash the sand off your feet, and a bar where they opened your PX beer and supplied you with glasses to drink it. But at Gliphada the old casino had been completely dismantled by the Germans, and there was nothing but a sordid little place where you had to take turns in the bathhouses, rather sickening with the smell of the muddy sand with which the floors were caked and of the fish which was always being fried right next to the wet bathing suits. Eleni, against this background, in a faded pink bathing costume that brought out the tan of her arms and legs and showed her slender and sinuous body, all the more attracted one’s attention by her naturalness and poise and grace; and two glimpses of her still stay in my mind as if I had brought them home engraved on Minoan seals: one of her figure going quickly up the stairs, obliquely so that I saw her in profile, pressing firmly but lightly on each of the steps with her rather long feet, showing none of the self-consciousness or vanity of a pretty woman at the beach; and the other of her standing in the water and playing with her little girl, smiling so that she made her eyes slits as she splashed with her palm tipped back at the wrist, at every splash thrusting her face forward and hissing, as if she had been some elemental creature—some siren that resembled a water snake. When I asked her what she was supposed to be, she answered that it wasn’t anything.
· · ·
The V.s invited me to dinner one evening to celebrate Eleni’s birthday. It was then that I met her mother and her stepfather, and I was amazed at her mother’s youth, as I had been when I discovered that Eleni had children of ten and thirteen. Eleni had been married at sixteen, and her mother when she was not much older. The stepfather was a cosmopolitan man who apologized with dignity for the Greeks: they had recently been led to misbehave themselves by certain lawless and alien elements, and it was regrettable that this should have given the world a poor opinion of them. We went for dinner to one of the very best night clubs: a place such as, for gaiety and glamour, I had not seen, since the war, in Europe. It was also the first full-length meal under completely clean and attractive conditions that I had had since I had been in Greece, and evidently also a treat for the V. s. You got just the same dishes as elsewhere: sliced tomatoes, rice pilaff, and fish, but you got enough instead of too little. The place was full of well-groomed British officers with Athenian “society” girls, some of them very pretty with their blond hair in two rolls over their temples, so that their faces looked like valentines. Eleni and her mother enjoyed themselves recognizing people and gossiping about them. Some of these Greek girls were engaged to Englishmen.
There was with us a youngish journalist who wrote for a Royalist paper: he was a tall man of the world, very lively and rather dapper, with mustaches in the style of George II—as Eleni said to me later, “always perfectly delighted with himself.” He was an old friend of Eleni’s husband, who loved to talk politics with him. I had the impression that the combinations and projects which these two were always discussing were among the least realistic of the many schools of café-table politics with which Athens so abounds; but it had to be admitted this evening that their hopes, from an unexpected quarter, were getting the most heartening encouragement. The journalist had just heard over the radio the news of Bevin’s speech on British foreign policy, and he relayed it to us with unrestrained glee and much gloating over the chagrin of the Left: “He said that the Labour Government would continue to follow the policy that England had already supported, that they could see no good reason for a change in Greece before the Greek elections took place, and that they would make every effort in the meantime to see that law and order were preserved—that they would send a police mission.” He described to us at length a visit to England, from which he had just returned. He had been gratified unspeakably, at a party, to see a fashionable English lady recognize, by a glance at his insignia, an officer of the Greek Air Force. And he went on to tell us a story about another party, at which he had had “un succès foudroyant avec trois compliments—trois seulement, mais très méditerranéens.” The first compliment I cannot remember, but the second had been detonated at the time when they were playing a game of “What famous person would you most like to be?” The lady whom he hoped to impress had, in his turn, put this question to him, and he had answered, “La ville de Hiroshima.” “ ‘Pourquoi?’ J’ai répondu, ‘Je voudrais être la ville de Hiroshima, si vous étiez la bombe atomique pour me tomber dessus!’ ” Later she had returned and said, smiling, “Dîtes-moi, qu’est-ce que vous voudriez être encore?” “Cette fois je lui ai répondu—toujours très méditerranéen, ‘Je voudrais être une cigarette.’ ‘Pourquoi?’ ‘Pour brûler entre vos lèvres!’ Le prochain après midi, à cinq heures, elle m’a téléphoné,” etc.
The floor show seemed to me absolutely marvellous. I had forgotten how good such things could be, had hardly realized they were still going on. There were a girl who did an Oriental tumbling dance; a girl who sang in Greek and English; a couple who did a folk dance from one of the islands, fresh and animated and gone in a flash; and the great feature: a famous woman dancer who was also a romantic legend. I learned about her from Eleni and her mother. The Germans had had her on the carpet, the elder but far-from-old lady explained to me, for her well-known association with the English. But she had stood up to them with perfect sang-froid: “Que j’ai eu un amant anglais—même deux, trois, quatre,” she was supposed to have replied, “qu’est-ce que ça fait?” She had had German lovers, too, Eleni thought; she had run through all the nationalities and always remained herself—and Eleni added with admiration: “Elle ment avec une facilité inouïe.” I saw that the myth of this performer, the great dancer who is also a great courtesan, had come to mean a good deal in Athens, which had been so much without the luxuries and so much at the mercy of the war. She was the devotee of art and love who had endured through all the hardship and conflict, and she was almost a sacred figure.
And she was extremely good: very beautiful, quick, sure, and dashing, and able to get into everything she did a personality of enchanting insolence. Before one knew it, she would have leapt on a chair, and would be bending down and kissing one of the diners, and then would hit him over the head with her tambourine. I had avoided such black-market places: one night at one of the too well-supplied restaurants in Rome, where we had been dining at outdoor tables, a small mob had gathered behind us and begun reaching in for the food, and we had seen them dispelled with brutality—an old woman knocked down in the street—by the strong-arm men from the restaurant. But I succumbed to the brilliance of this night club, and, since I had been there without my long-distance glasses and we had been sitting in a corner a long way to the rear of the show, I decided to go again
and see it better. I got up another party the next night with a man I knew in U.N.R.R.A. and two of the U.N.R.R.A. girls, and this time we had an excellent table in the middle and on the edge of the floor. The girls, who had been there often, said we were right in the spot to be kissed. This time some of the acts, seen distinctly, turned out rather disappointing; but the fascinating dancer was wonderful. Her first appearance was a ballroom number, which had its climax in a piece of business—an ecstatic start and smile as her partner, kneeling, kissed her midriff—that, for daring, style, naturalness, and timing, took your breath away. When she came out for the second time, she seemed to be some sort of priestess or idol—possibly Javanese; and, exhilarated as I was by the excellent white wine—well cooled and non-resinated—I was preparing to fall under her spell when she abruptly disappeared from the stage. The music went on playing, but she did not come back. “Did you see what happened then?” the U.N.R.R.A. man asked the girls. “Yes: the thing that held her dress behind broke.” “Somebody’s catching hell back there!” he said.
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 31
