Enemy and Brother (13 page)

“And what will that tell you of Lord Byron that you do not already know?”

“If I knew that I should not have to go. Perhaps nothing. I want to see what he saw, to try to imagine what he was thinking about on that particular pilgrimage.”

“To have carved his name, I should say he was thinking about Lord Byron.”

“He did that a great deal of the time,” I said.

“Would you prefer to think about him than about yourself, Professor?”

“No, but it’s easier,” I said with utter frankness.

“Ha! You are an honest man. We look into other lives in the hope of seeing ourselves without looking. But then the only way of understanding what we see is by looking into ourselves. Is it not so?”

“I am afraid it is so,” I said.

“Why are you afraid? Is there something in yourself you do not want to look at?”

I was disconcerted by this bombardment of direct questions. I, who wanted to question him at any peril, was responding as to an inquisitor.

“Yes, there is,” I said with sharpness.

He flashed that smile at me which must have won him every boon he ever sought save freedom. “I am glad,” he said. “What I mean is, it cannot be rubbed out with ointments or covered over by the sweet stink of sanctity. Shakespeare said it, eh? All the perfumes of Arabia…. He said it, not the priests. You know, in prison I read every word, every play, three times over, and some of them many times.”

“In English?”

“In English. It was the only book. Shakespeare and the
Reader’s Digest
.”

“All the perfumes of Arabia,” I murmured.

He thought about that and laughed. “I was wondering about that
Reader’s Digest.
That’s very good.”

It was not quite what I had meant although I did have something of the
double entendre
in mind. I had hoped to bring him back to the original probe, the deed which all the perfumes could not fumigate. But the moment had passed.

“What have you written down there besides the mandolin, Modenis?” I asked, referring to his list.

“Only things the butcher can bring on his next trip.” The old man got up. He was much steadier than when I had coaxed him to my cottage. A great change had come into this house in less than twenty-four hours. “I am going up to Vasso’s. It will no longer be necessary for her to carry our food to us.”

“It is her pleasure,” I said, “but she will welcome you.”

Stephanou ignored our exchange, drumming his fingers impatiently on the table. He turned his head toward the door when Modenis reached it.

“Are you aware of light and dark?” I asked.

He shook his head and plunged the question he had been waiting to ask, “Where were you during the war, Professor?”

“In England. Then in France and Belgium.”

“And afterwards?”

“I went back to school and finished my education.”

“Finished it?”

Damn his impertinent sharpness! “I suppose I should say I began it, but in a way it is right to say that I finished it. I settled into a life from which I have not greatly departed since.”

“Why?”

“I do not understand your question,” I said, although I thought I understood it very well, but I did not propose to give gratuitously without fathoming the source of the inquisition.

“Why did it take you so long to come to Greece?”

Oh, you bastard, I thought. “I have wanted to come for a long time,” I said.

“That is obvious. You do not learn a language—especially a folk language—otherwise. What I meant to ask was what delayed you? Was it the war? Did something happen to you in that experience that made you want to be safe for such a long time?”

“Yes.”

“Are you a coward, do you think?”

It was interesting, the qualification “do you think?” It blunted my rising anger. I answered caustically nonetheless, “I have known greater cowards than myself.”

He sat, his elbows on the table, clicking his thumbnails against his teeth. “Have you gone back to France and Belgium?”

“To the place where I was afraid, is that what you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Not yet.”

“Will you?”

“Possibly.”

“One has to if one is to know,” he said.

“A return to jeopardy?”

“That’s it—to truly exorcise the fear.”

“Paul,” I said, “where is it that you want to go?”

“Into my own heart—where all men face the darkness, Professor. For me it is no longer a matter of geography.”

“Will you go alone?”

He thought about that, and while he thought I squirmed so within myself—for reasons you may fathom: my self-deflating discomfort at intimacy—that I said, “I was thinking of Vasso.”

“Vasso is a woman. She would not understand.”

And still I pursued that cant: “Why will you not accept love without understanding?”

“Because in this case, that love would be pity. Look you: I have not seen Vasso in almost twenty years. Now I shall never see her except as she was then—nineteen years old and my promised bride.”

“Carrying a mattress on her head down Ifestou Street in Athens,” I said with something close to malice which was really directed at myself.

His face puckered up like that of a child about to cry—or a very old man protesting medicine. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!” he cried and pounded his fists on the table.

“I am sorry, Stephanou. It was not my intention to upset you.”

“I don’t want to talk any more,” he said.

“I understand. Come and see me when you do.”

He said nothing, sitting erect and unsmiling, much like the stone image in the car on the day of his return to Kaléa. I left him without further word.

Modenis brought their food, and to my knowledge Stephanou did not leave the cottage either that day or the next. Early Tuesday morning I drove back to Athens.

A seemingly small observation I should mention—to say it disturbed me at the time is too strong: I walked through the village late Monday afternoon to have coffee with Kaléa’s president. Without deliberateness but with much the same motivation as I had gone to church, I chose him as my liaison among the people. He was the most sensible of men, and, having admitted to me his compromise with the status quo in Greece, he represented the Greek analogy to myself. On the way to his shop I paused in the square where the women had spread the grain in long trays to sweeten in the sun. They were sifting it through their fingers, picking out the bad kernels. I heard one of the old ones say, “Blind men’s eyes,” and she spat three times as she cast the blackened seed away. The others laughed and, it seemed to me, set more assiduously to work to discover themselves the blighted amongst the grains and cast them out.

W
HEN I REACHED THE
main road and turned toward Thebes I was following Byron’s way for the first time. To be sure I had not yet been to Delphi, and when the time came I would go down from there to the sea whereas Byron had come up from it. I would see more of the ancient places in their ruins today than he would have seen, living before the era of Schliemann and Evans, of massive excavations and daring restorations.

But what changed in a hundred or two hundred years, in a thousand or two? Byron also had paused at The Triple Way to wonder whether, as legend had it, this was where Oedipus killed the man he did not know to be his father. The silence could have been no more awesome in the times of either traveler than it is today. I glanced at the shrine to the Virgin. It was new, the icon mounted in a red brick shelter—an anachronism, the brick, I thought. But Byron might have found an icon there despite the Turkish occupation. I again remembered my conversation with the president of Kaléa: they left us our Greekness, leaving our church.

I thought later, driving down toward the richer lowlands of Boeotia where great fields of cotton were under cultivation here and there by a machine, but mostly by women with hoes, I thought that across these plains had come the invaders of Greece from history’s earliest reckoning—Achaean, Dorian, the Persians, the Romans, the Franks, Turks and the Germans. Nothing in the experience of nations gainsaid its happening again. Man changed his weapons, not his nature. He knows that he must die and yet he kills; to me this seems the paradox of all paradoxes. Byron it troubled not at all: he thought war to be among the most ennobling of experiences. Of course, he had in mind a war of national liberation.

“You must remember that clubfoot,” Dr. Palandios said when, late that morning, I visited him at the university. We were speaking of Byron’s aggressiveness. “And another handicap—to my plebian mind, that is—his aristocracy. And then he was a short man. I’m sure you’ve thought about the little men of history—Caesar, Napoleon—Stalin, Hitler, the Italian buffoon and Churchill, oh yes. Empire! No man ever put down its burden more reluctantly. Beware of men with short legs, I say. They have long arms.”

I grinned. “What about De Gaulle?”

He came and stood beside me at the window where I was looking down at the students. He was himself no higher than my shoulder. “Now, isn’t that curious?” he said. “I’ve always thought of De Gaulle as a man on stilts.”

We watched the students for a moment, talking in high animation, gesturing violently. “Are they always so wrought up?” I asked.

“Not quite. There’s a government crisis brewing. They’ll be in the streets soon, demonstrating for the Prime Minister. He’s testing his strength over a purge in the army. Leftists in the army—I find it hard to credence…. Oh, I have something for you, Eakins.”

He handed me a letter addressed to me in his care. I did not recognize the handwriting. Feminine, but not overweeningly so. The postmark was Crete.

“I should have thought Mrs. Storme would be much taken with you,” Palandios said. He stood on tiptoe to better see what was going on below, but one eye was on my letter.

“I can’t say I was taken by Storme,” I said.

He did not get the pun, which was just as well. “He is a dry old stick, isn’t he?”

“If only he would smile now and then.”

“Oh, my dear Eakins, it’s much better that he doesn’t. I’ve seen him try.”

I pocketed the letter. Palandios did not conceal his shocked disappointment. “I’ll open it at lunch,” I said. “Where shall we go?”

There was a slight bulkiness to the letter suggesting the enclosure of a newspaper clipping. I thought it possible, in the wake of Elsa Storme’s and my conversation, that it might refer to Margaret Webb. By now I had gone over in my mind the advisability of confiding to Dr. Palandios my true identity for I greatly trusted him, but decided that such knowledge might prove an embarrassment to him if nothing worse. I was also lingeringly aware that up to this point I was not committed to any revelation whatsoever. Leaving the building, we edged our way through the students, Dr. Palandios, rather wickedly I thought, raising his fist to encourage their demonstration.

As with the choice of restaurant I left the selection of our luncheon entirely up to Palandios, rightly suspecting it would involve him in a trip to the kitchen. The moment he left the table, his arm linked in that of the
maître d’hôtel
, I opened the letter from Elsa Storme. Not one but two clippings were enclosed, both from the Athens English-language newspaper. One was the announcement of the impending marriage in Corfu of Margaret Clitheroe Webb—I skipped the biography for the time being—to Michael Antony Braschi, an industrialist of Rome. The couple planned to live in Greece.

The other clipping concerned the Festival of Classic Tragedies to be performed in Dodoni, Epirus, that August. My correspondent had underlined the name Elena Kondylis among the performing artists. She was the actress I had met at the Palandios dinner party. I read the letter quickly and was prepared on Palandios’ return to show him the clipping about the festival and to say that Elsa planned to attend it.

“Shepherded or unshepherded?” He waited shamelessly to make sure I got
his
pun and then answered himself. “Ridiculous question. She is, of course, hopeful that he will be able to accompany her….”

“Her very words,” I said and put the letter away.

“Elsa is worth cultivating, let me say, should you have any doubts about it. She is in her way every bit as nineteenth century as her husband. Let me see now to whom among our acquaintances back there she is comparable….” He coaxed me with his fingertips to come up with a name, presumably out of the Byron legend.

“Lady Melbourne?” I suggested.

“She’ll do,” he said without enthusiasm.

“He confided or at least hinted his every wickedness to her,” I elaborated by way of justifying my choice.

“The more I read of that correspondence, the more I’m convinced Byron was merely physicking himself. He was a great one for purges of all sorts.”

“We’ve got away from Elsa,” I said.

“Yes. Well. She carries on a voluminous correspondence with all sorts of important people and provokes—though I wouldn’t say for a moment she does it deliberately—the gossip in all of us. I find myself scribbling outrageous chitchat to her. My wife would be furious.”

“Would she?” I murmured. I could not imagine Madame Palandios being discomfited by anything so trivial, but it amused me to suppose that the old boy himself might need to think so.

The salad came, greens, cheese, olives, anchovies, peppers…. Palandios tossed it vigorously. “Salad and a fish, and the good wine of Samos. Will you be satisfied?”

“Eminently,” I said. I glanced at the festival clipping where it lay between us on the table. “Is Miss Kondylis a good actress?”

Palandios covered his mouth with his napkin and laughed. “My boy,” he said, “you are mystical. It was indeed on the subject of Miss Kondylis that I gossiped. Remember Constantin Helmi, the lawyer?”

I nodded. What I remembered particularly was his conversance with the Webb case.

“He is a very wealthy man,” Palandios said, “and a patron of classical theater.”

“So he also will be at Dodoni?”

“It is a very romantic setting.”

“Where in Greece is not?” I said.

He shrugged. “Possibly Knossos—if you are Elsa Storme. What more did she say?”