Enemy and Brother (10 page)

“Come up to my cottage with me and have coffee,” I said. “He can manage an hour without you.”

He started to shake his head.

“You will rot in there together!”

“The sooner the better.”

“Modenis, he is still a young man.”

He stood a moment, uncertain, staring back at the closed door. “He will not eat if I am beside him. I have to go to the other room and call out to him that I am there….”

“Then he is proud,” I said. “He is alive.”

Modenis nodded that this might be so. “I will tell him and come.”

“Come without telling him. Either he will stay and wait your return, or he will come out. And that would be good, wouldn’t it?”

“That would be good, but he will not come out.” He glanced up and down the street. “Is it far?”

“Vasso’s cottage,” I said, “I will have the grandmother bring us coffee.”

Modenis straightened his back once more and walked with me as though he were going someplace he wanted to go. His collarless shirt was filthy at the neck, dappled with stains down the front. I could hear the rasp of his breath as he filled his lungs with the clean, soft air. Men coming in from the fields and women on their way to the pump made way for us, murmured greetings that he left unanswered.

I left him inside my cottage while I stepped next door and asked the old woman to make us coffee. When I returned he was standing at my desk, staring at the books on a shelf I had built above it.

“There are some in Greek,” I said. “You are welcome to borrow them.”

His head bobbed slightly, continuingly, in the way of old men who cannot bring their reflexes into immediate control. He pulled the desk chair round and lowered himself into it. I winced as he dropped his body the last few inches.

“When you were a younger man, Modenis, what work did you do?”

“The post office.”

So, I thought, in that too the lawyer, Spiridos, had been correctly informed: Stephanou’s custodian was a retired civil servant.

“And did you ask that Paul be allowed to come to you?”

“I wrote to the Minister of Justice. After many months when I thought my letter had been lost I received an answer telling me that he was going blind. There had been a prison accident. They said he would be released if I could take care of him.”

“Had you visited him in prison?”

“Every year at Eastertime,” the old man said.

“The time of resurrection.”

Modenis nodded, the motion again continuing, pendulum-like, until it ran itself out.

“Did he consider his sentence just?” I asked. It was what I wanted most now to know about Paul Stephanou.

“He never said that it was not.”

The grandmother came with the coffee and cold water fresh from the well. She muttered and clucked over Modenis and plucked at his shirt as though she would take it from his back and wash it.

“Let him be, grandmother,” I said.

We sipped our coffee, saying little. Modenis begged to be excused for the sucking sound he made. As the sunlight faded I turned on the light above my desk and Modenis raised his face to it, blinking his eyes.

“What do you say to him, Modenis? What do you talk about?”

“I say to him—about his youth and how things were as I best remember them. He grinds his teeth and I tell him, ‘You have teeth, my boy. Thank God for that!’ And he makes mock of me: ‘For that I humbly thank you, God. A tooth for an eye! How about it, God? A mouthful of teeth for an hour of daylight? Go to hell, Uncle.’

“I talk about his mother and then it is better. And last night when I told him how she died, he covered his face with his hands.”

“He is alive,” I said, and remembered having said the words before.

We talked on, sharing the little either of us knew of blind men. A half-hour passed, no more. It was early twilight when we heard the commotion, men’s voices, a clatter and clanging. I went to the window. There were several men at Modenis’ gate, unstrapping something from a donkey’s back. The beast was balking and they were shouting at him, making him balk the more.

“Is it there?” Modenis asked.

“Yes. They’re unloading something from a donkey.”

“For God’s sake, help me up!” he cried.

I set my weight and hoisted him to his feet, then returned to the window. The donkey pawed at the dust. The priest was there, waving his arms as he directed the operation. The clank of metal on stone rang clear. Two men hurried across the street carrying a wash tub. I understood then, the metal clank was a can of water. Another of them was lifted from the donkey and the beast then tethered by the gate. He raised his head and whinnied piercingly. Hard on that sound came the shriek of a man that shivered my backbone.

“God’s curse on them, what are they doing to Paul?” Modenis could not get my door open.

I opened it. “I’ll run ahead if you’re all right.”

“What can I do but beat the wind? Go!”

I ran up the hill but at the gate Kanakis and the priest barred my way. Four men had carried Stephanou from the house into the yard and were stripping off his clothes, he screaming curses at them, spitting, gnashing his teeth like an animal at bay. They hoisted him onto his feet, naked before the tub now filled with water. He careened drunkenly. They steadied him, propped him upright, then gingerly skipped back. Suddenly he was still, in command of his balance, standing in white nakedness like Christ at the pillar.

“Paul!” Modenis’ voice rang out. “Do not be afraid! I’m coming!”

The men—I knew some of them by name; I’d drunk wine with them in the
taverna
, sung with them—moved in and began to slosh the water over Stephanou. He stood rigid and submissive, his legs spread, his arms stretched overhead—as in surrender—or as about to dance.

Modenis reached my side.

“Stay, Modenis,” the village president said. “It must be done. Father Lappas says it is the only way.”

Modenis, only beginning to understand, screwed up his eyes, the better to see what was happening. One of the men had taken a sponge and, soaping it, rubbed down the body of the rigid Stephanou. Modenis looked slowly around him, down the otherwise deserted street, at the shuttered houses fronting it. Not a woman nor a child was out-of-doors. He looked back at his nephew, whose care he could not manage without the man’s consent. He lifted a crooked finger.

“I remember,” he started to say as to himself, and then called out, “Do you remember, Paul? Alexis used to bathe you at the pump when you were a little boy?”

“Aye, Modenis, aye,” Alexis shouted, and wrung out the sponge, “but in those days he was a grasshopper!” He pulled the blind man’s hand down and thrust the sponge into it.

Stephanou took it, held it for a moment—I thought he might fling it from him—but he washed himself between the legs. I put my arm across Modenis’ shoulders, for he had closed his eyes. I did not watch. Nor did any man, but the blind man could not know it.

“I will go now for the censer,” the priest said when the sloshing of water over the naked body began again.

Modenis’ eyes snapped open. “What’s that he said?”

The priest had gone, lifting his cassock above the dust as he hurried down the street.

“They should do the same for him,” Modenis said, indicating the ablution and the priest.

Alexis worked alone now, rubbing the blind man down with a towel. Stephanou held out his hand and took the towel. He finished the drying of his own body. One man gave him a shirt which he put on, another shorts, another a pair of trousers in which he dressed himself. Someone took away the tub and tipped it at the edge of the parched garden. Stephanou sat upon the ground and put on his canvas shoes as they were put in his hands. The men had begun to talk among themselves of other things, of the darkness that was almost on them, the women waiting.

The priest returned, a long-legged acolyte hurrying after him, trying to button his cassock with one hand while he managed the smoking censer with the other.

“We shall give thanks to God,” the priest said at the gate. I wondered at his need for ceremonial. Why not just a prayer when Stephanou had already shown such hostile withdrawal? Then it occurred to me, the priest, a simple man, was using what tools he could command to reach the blind man’s senses: the incense carried the odor of the church, the fragrance of religious consolation.

“It is a mistake, Father,” Modenis said. “I tell you, it is a mistake.”

The priest moved imperiously into the courtyard and stood before the blind man where he still sat upon the ground but with his cane now in his hands and he leaning forward, his forehead pressed against it. One could sense the quest then going on inside him—or at least I presumed to think I could—the holding of the cane that way, both hands clasped around it and his head bowed into its support: the core of stable peace within himself that would give him anchor, perspective in what must seem to him an amorphous world. This man was not merely prisoner of his blindness: for sixteen years, most of his adult life, he had been bound in by walls, protected, if you like, particularly after the blindness came. His every movement outside familiar corridors must need to breach the unexpected, time and again he must absorb the shock of the uncounted step at the bottom of the stairs.

“I have brought you an icon, Paul,” the priest said. “I had it sent from Athens, St. Panteleimon, the patron of the blind.”

The blind man lifted his head. “Who are you?” His voice had acquired a deep resonance.

“Father Lappas. I will bless it and bless the house.”

“No, Father Lappas,” Stephanou said. “Take it to the church.”

“If that is your wish,” the priest said. “We shall place it just inside the door where you can reach it easily.”

I wondered if he was deliberately misunderstanding. But he went on, beckoning the others closer. “Come, we shall pray together and I will anoint the blind man’s eyes with healing oil.”

The men shuffled forward a little. Modenis pushed hard through them. I followed him.

“No,” Paul said. “Pray where you like, but not over me.” With the tip of his cane he measured a half-circle in the dust before him. “No oils or ointments. I have been once blinded. It is enough. You will not seal the darkness in. And take away the incense pot. It stinks like a bishop.”

“Do not blaspheme!” the priest warned.

“It is the least of my sins. Go! All of you. Modenis, why don’t you speak?”

“What shall I say, my Paul?”

“Tell them to get out!”

“We are your friends, Paul,” the priest said. “I wish only to bring you consolation.”

“I have been consoled by priests before, and I will not submit!” He rose from the ground and steadied himself with the cane.

“You will submit, my son. God’s will can break you if you do not bend. We are His children and must abide in darkness or in day.”

The priest’s words awed me: they had the chill ring of a medievalist’s anathema! I saw men cross themselves as they moved back to let him pass and then followed silently after him. Women had gathered at the gate. They too crossed themselves as the priest and his acolyte passed. Only Kanakis lingered.

“The women have asked to clean your house for you. Modenis. It was their wish to worship the icon after its blessing.”

“Thank them kindly for me,” Modenis said. “But it is best that we go in.”

So much accomplished and then undone, I thought, with the wafting of a little incense. “Modenis,” I said, “come and sit with me for a little while, you and Paul. It is not far. The road is smooth and the air is sweet.”

Modenis looked hard at me. I nodded encouragement.

“Paul,” he said, “I wish you to meet a friend, Professor Eakins.”

“John Eakins,” I said, repeating Modenis’ pronunciation. “I’m spending the summer in Kaléa.”

“An American?” Paul asked.

“Yes.”

“He is writing a life of Lord Byron. I told you but you did not listen.”

“I listened,” Paul said.

“Then give him your hand. He is a friend.”

Slowly the blind man shifted his cane and put out his right hand. And so, after seventeen years, I shook hands again with Paul Stephanou.

With one hand on Modenis’ shoulder and probing the ground before him with the cane, he moved alongside me at a cripple’s pace toward Vasso’s cottage. He said nothing for some moments, concentrating on the road beneath him. Then he stopped and breathed deeply. “It is night now and we are going toward the sea.”

“We are,” I said.

He moved on, starting Modenis with him, shuffling his own feet in the dust. I closed my eyes. For all that it was too dark now to see the ground, there was a vast difference to the utter darkness behind closed eyelids. It was not only that I could not see in those few seconds of experiment, but that I seemed unable to breathe either. When I opened my eyes I saw that I had fallen behind my companions. I remembered, in a sort of accelerated flashback, stumbling after Stephanou down the path from the
Andarte
camp to the Ioannina crossroads. Was my recollection wrong that he had shouted to me, “You’re as slow as a blind beggar! Come on, you!” Something very like it.

Stephanou played his cane along the row of stones that hedged the way from the street to the cottage where I lived.

“This is Vasso’s house,” he said, stopping.

“I have rented it for the summer.”

“Is she so poor?”

“She is kind,” I said.

“To you also?” His short laugh was harsh.

I turned to the old woman who hovered as usual to answer my slightest need and said, “We shall want another chair, grandmother.”

She wagged her head. “Michael has gone for one.”

By the time we were inside, Michael came, the chair balanced over his head, the arms resting on his shoulders. He had brought it from the restaurant. I took it from him.

“Who has come?” Stephanou wanted to know. He had stationed himself at my desk, half-sitting on it after testing its stability.

“It is Michael, Vasso’s son,” Modenis said.

Stephanou put his cane on the desk. “Come here, boy.”

Michael obeyed. Stephanou gripped the boy’s shoulders, felt the arms for muscle, his waist for girth. Then, with great delicacy, he played the tips of his fingers over the boy’s head, his ears, chin, and then with both thumbs, as might a sculptor, he explored the bone structure of the face. The boy quivered beneath his touch.