Enemy and Brother (7 page)

“Michael, it burns!” Kanakis called out.

The boy dropped the book, dipped his ladle and basted the lamb.

The woman, taking the last of the loaves from the oven, lifted her foot and closed the oven door with her toe. I glimpsed a graceful leg and a fine ankle.

She sprinkled the loaves with flour and then came to us, wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. She paused, seeing me, a stranger, and then came on, the dark eyes shifting questioningly from me to Kanakis. She was a handsome woman, but not as young as I’d thought judging from the ankle.

“Who is it?” she said to him almost as though I were not present. She is expecting someone else, I thought, or word from someone. Kanakis quickly explained my presence and more convincingly than I should have done under the circumstances. He introduced her simply as Vasso.

“Are you alone?” she asked me.

“Yes.”

“Last summer there were archeologists. They gave employment to some of our people.”

A true matriarch, I thought. “I’m sorry, but I have nothing like that to offer.”

“With God’s help we live,” she said. “Come. You will eat first and I will see what can be arranged.”

Kanakis shook hands with me and went outdoors. Vasso took me to the stove and lifted the lids of one pot, then another, that simmered there, a chunk of lamb previously spitted now steeped in its own juices, flat green beans in basil and oil, spaghetti….

“Some of everything,” I said. “I am very hungry.”

At the dining room door she bade me choose my table and then brought a simple setting and fresh bread. She drew wine in an earthenware jug from one of the kegs and brought it.

“You are a professor also?” she said, Kanakis having listed that among my credentials.

“Yes.”

“My son goes twenty kilometers to the gymnasium. Someday he will go to the university in Athens if God is awake.”

“Do you have other children, Mrs. …? I did not get your other name,” I said apologetically.

“Vasso. I am called Vasso. It is enough. Michael is my only child and I have no husband.” She flung the words at me, not with hostility but as though in a summary that should forestall my asking further questions. I think it amused her to see that I was somewhat flustered. All of which gave me something to ponder while I sipped the good light wine and ate my bread. She wore a red skirt and white shirtwaist, not the widow’s black.

The old men from the
kafenion
had drifted down the street and taken up chairs outside the restaurant. They twisted around to peer in at me owlishly now and then, while Kanakis stood talking with them, and if they seemed to catch my eyes, they nodded and saluted me.

Kanakis came in presently and said, “You are invited to have coffee with us, Mr. Eakins,” and, at the kitchen door, “Five coffees, Vasso!”

I shall give the names of some of these old gentlemen afterwards. It was some time before I knew them myself, but three of them had been in America and had returned to the village of their birth. They questioned me on my business—where I taught, whether I got paid for writing a book, and how much. One of them complimented me on my Greek, but the eager confirmation of the others made me doubt its excellence. Then each of them told me of his business in America.

“They do us a great honor, coming home to die,” Kanakis said. I was not at all sure it was not sarcasm.

“We come home to live,” he was corrected.

“To live is to plough the soil, reap the grain, it is to make strong sons.”

“We have done all that, Kanakis.”

“And left them in America. You are not Greeks, you are displaced Americans.”

“We pay Greek taxes, Kanakis.”

“Because you can’t run fast enough when the collector comes.”

“And why do you not run, you are so swift? You stay to collect from the collector.”

“I am a paid public official.”

“And we are the public!” One of the old men thumped his fist on the table, shimmering the water in the glasses. “I learned that in America.
We
are the public.”

This while Vasso’s son had gone and come, bringing back with him a woman in black of an age to be his grandmother. Whatever was said in the kitchen as the old one went out again she bowed and nodded to me, the boy at her heels. The village president left us and the old men had fallen to talking about the government subsidies to farmers. They opposed it, to a man, lest it change the country in their lifetime. The sun was setting when the boy came back and asked if I was ready.

The square had come to life when Michael and I walked back to where I had left the car: wagons and donkeys, men and women returning from the fields. Women carried water in cannisters on their heads, moving with solemn and sure grace over the cobbles in their bare feet. The humped hills to the west were rimmed in gold and the shadows fell through the valley like the descent of enormous bats.

Vasso’s son walked in silence.

“What are you reading, Michael?” I asked.

“A book, sir.”

“What is it about?”

“People.”

“That’s the best subject,” I said, and abandoned the attempt at conversation. He was small for his age and he bore little resemblance to his mother. Both his head and face were round, the features small. I was to remember later thinking that he looked like the child of an old man.

At the seaward edge of the village, he directed me to stop the car. The old woman was waiting outside a freshly whitewashed cottage. As I reached its door she scurried in ahead of me and pulled an electric-light cord. The bulb gave a dismal light but to her it was a triumph. She grinned and waited for my approval.

“
Kala
,” I said, but I was grateful I had remembered to purchase a strong bulb in Athens.

There was but the one room, large and as sparsely furnished as the requirements I had specified. The shutters were open and the room smelled fresh. The old woman pointed to the icon, a long-faced Virgin, and blessed herself as she watched me.

“
Kala
,” I said again.

She brought me a small dish of preserved cherries with a silver spoon and a glass of water, and watched solemnly while I ate them.

Michael had vanished. It was the old woman who insisted on helping me bring in my things, choosing to carry the heaviest of them. Gallantry on my part would only have embarrassed her. I unpacked my books.

“Grandmother,” I said, “how many grandchildren do you have?”

She laughed. “Eleven. Seven boys.”

“May they all prosper with God’s help,” I said.

“I have three sons, two of them in Athens and one in Istanbul.”

“And daughters?”

“Only one, thank God, my Vasso.”

“She will provide for herself,” I said.

“Ah.” She wagged her head.

“She is beautiful,” I said.

She glanced at me furtively, but her eyes were tender and, in that deeply lined face, the cheeks shrunken beneath their high bone structure, I could see the daughter’s mother.

I added, “As you were once yourself, grandmother.”

She caught my hand in hers and lifted it briefly to her lips. Then she fled into the twilight.

I felt my hand where the dry lips had brushed it, the touch of them as light as that of a moth’s wing, and I stood, aware that tears had come to my eyes. Why I wanted to weep I did not know except that I had meant what I said and she believed me.

Later, lying in the darkness and staring through the window at the myriad stars, I thought about the blind man coming. I wished in my heart that he too would come a stranger to Kaléa. But I knew, more deeply than the wish to gainsay it, that he was coming home.

I
HAD ARRIVED IN
Kaléa on a Thursday. The next day I walked several miles toward the sea to the point where I could look down on the miles of olive groves which lay, wind-rippled in the sun, like a monstrous green serpent easing up from the sea. I walked back through the bristling gorse from which the sheep cropped a stubborn nourishment. I spoke with a shepherd who had never been out of the hills, and I watched the threshing of grain on a sun-bleached floor, men and women flailing with sticks and then sifting the grain from the chaff. They invited me to share a meal of bread and cheese, and afterwards I divided the two oranges I had in my knapsack.

That night I sat with the old men outside the
kafenion
and shook hands with people who came, hearing I was there. The priest invited me to his house and promised me the loan of a book on the Siege of Missolonghi, the town where Byron died. He was a little pompous and spoke as though he had been present at the Siege. An old man with a stick, hobbled with arthritis, passed back and forth in front of us, glowering at me with open hostility.

Old Spyro, who had proclaimed himself my friend because we both had once lived in Boston, called out to the lame one, “Modenis, come meet my American comrade.”

“Your comrade,” he muttered and went on.

The old ones around me nudged one another and chuckled over a joke I did not understand.

“Who is he?” I asked.

I didn’t understand the word. Spyro explained: “A mountain fighter, but old, old. He is suspicious of everybody, not just you.”

“Why?”

Spyro, a wizened little man given to twisting and turning in his chair like a bird on a perch, wove his arm through the back rungs. “If
he
comes you will find out,” he said. “If he does not come, so much the better.”

“Aye, aye,” the others agreed.

I was sure they were talking about Paul Stephanou, but I did not question further.

Toward midnight I saw Vasso turn out the restaurant lights and walk up the street to the cottage next to the one she had rented to me and where she now lived with her mother and the boy. When I passed it later it was in darkness, but I heard the murmur of the women’s voices and I thought I heard the name Modenis. I wondered if the cottage where I lived had been prepared for Stephanou. No one had mentioned his name, but from somewhere I had got the impression that Vasso also was waiting for his return. Perhaps it was the searching look she had given me when we met—as though I might have been the herald of his coming. In Kaléa it was possible to imagine many things.

I went to the restaurant for breakfast in the morning so that Vasso would at the same time prepare a lunch which I could take with me. It was early, but no sooner had I sat down at a table outdoors than the garrulous old ones appeared and gathered around me. There was something different, not in their attitude toward me especially, but among themselves, as though they had something they wanted to tell that had not been told before. I can say this now, looking back: it was not quite so defined then, and I was probably first aware of the change in atmosphere when Constable Rigi, one of the village’s two policemen, came and stood nearby, his arms folded, his legs spread. His perpetual expression was that of a man suppressing a yawn, but his proximity that morning disquieted even those who had sat in camaraderie with him the night before.

I was about to offer coffee around when Spyro nudged the man next to him. They all turned to look in the same direction.

“Modenis,” Spyro said.

He came, rod-backed and steady-paced, dressed in a dark suit, shirt and tie, a straw hat on his head and his shoes so shined that they caught the glitter of sunlight. He was as old as most of the men around me, but by his gait and mien I sensed an iron will bearing him on this appointed journey. I was reminded of an old soldier about to take a last salute. When he was abreast of us I realized that Constable Rigi had moved off down the street. Modenis stood a moment glowering after him and then snorted. Disgust or contempt, I could not tell. I studied his face, searching it for a resemblance to the young Stephanou I remembered, for I knew even before Spyro said:

“
Kalí méra
, Modenis. So the hero comes home at last.”

A lump rose in my throat.

Modenis turned on us, his dark brows fierce. “Americans, you shut up!” he shouted.

Spyro appealed to his cronies. “What did I say?”

“He is a blind boy and a patriot,” Modenis said. “While you were making Yankee dollars he was fighting Fascists.”

“And for that they put him into prison?”

“Yes! For that they put him into prison!”

“Come, Modenis,” Spyro said, “have coffee with us. Your taxi driver must first butcher a lamb. You do not need to fight his battles, old friend. A blind man has no enemies.”

While two of the men scraped their chairs back from the table, Modenis came a step closer, leaning heavily on his cane. His eyes were on me. “Who are you and what is your business?”

“My name is John Eakins,” I said, getting up.

“Modenis, Modenis, what’s the matter with you? The man is a friend. He is a professor, a writer. We are not savages in Kaléa.”

“What do you write?” Modenis demanded.

“The life of a poet,” I said.

“A poet,” he repeated, the fierce brows slowly relaxing. He sat down, a gnarled, shaking hand steadying itself on the table to support his weight while the other groped for the back of the chair. He had to drop his crippled body into it like an abandoned puppet. He drew a deep breath and looked at me. “A poet?” he said again as though he might not have heard correctly.

I nodded.

“Sit down,” he ordered me. To Spyro: “I will have coffee. And tell Vasso I want to speak to her.” He took off his hat and laid it on the table. His head was as bald as the rock of starvation.

One of the men went to the doorway and clapped his hands.

Modenis touched his chin where he had nicked himself shaving. “A Greek poet?” he asked.

“An Englishman, Lord Byron.”

The old man nodded. “My sister’s son who is coming home today… he has been away for a long time….” His voice trailed off and his eyes strayed around the faces of the cronies, solemn and watchful, men with no cares left in the world save their own comforts. Then he wagged a finger at me. “Do not believe what these old gossips tell you!”

“Is your nephew a poet?”

“Once he was. Now—who knows? except that he is blind. God wither their souls in hell!” He crashed his hands down on the table and bent his head as low as his wracked body would allow, his eyes closed, his jaws clenched.