Enemy and Brother (8 page)

I thought of the night in a Greek prison when I had myself cursed as bitterly. I said, “Homer was blind, and so was the English poet, Milton.”

Modenis opened his eyes, then nodded his head a little.

Vasso came and set a cup of coffee before him. “Godspeed, Uncle of Paul,” she said.

“I will tell him that you said it, Vasso.”

Old Spyro clapped me on the back. “Tonight, John Eakins, you will learn what a Greek homecoming is like. We will all get drunk and we will laugh and cry, and nobody will talk of politics.”

“Ha!” another man cried.

“He cannot be a Communist any more. And if he is, who will argue with him? I swear by the sweet Virgin Mother I will not say a word.”

“Nor I, nor I,” the others chorused.

I heard the words and did not hear them. I looked at Vasso, the color high in her cheeks, the dark eyes darting from one face to the other and then to me as if to plead the welcome. I could see in her the girl she would have been when Stephanou had left her—for war and revolution. But, oh, dear God, what would she see in him who was coming home—the dead man looking for a grave?

Vasso brought us coffee which the old boys sipped noisily as though to dissipate Modenis’ brooding silence.

The butcher drove up in his Chevrolet. Modenis put on his hat and raised himself from the chair. No one dared to help him, but each man grunted sympathetically. I stood up and moved the chair out of his way.

He extended his hand to me. “I am sorry I was lacking in hospitality.”

“Godspeed,” I said, although the word was bitter in my mouth.

I walked far that day, crossing through the olive groves and climbing to the rocky cliffs above the Bay of Corinth. I was trying to walk off a sudden anger, or at least to understand it. I supposed it lay in the resuscitation of that dread feeling of being used, and of having got myself into a position where I could not avoid it: I was to be part of the welcome—I’d seen it in Vasso’s face—as though she had said, “I am glad you are here, someone of his caliber. You will be useful in his rehabilitation.”

Or was it jealousy that ailed me? Of all the god-damned nonsense! I was jealous of his coming home to Vasso even as I had once been jealous of the relationship between him and Webb as we had gone north together. I thought then of the son who bore Vasso’s maiden name, Panyotis, and felt a satisfaction in the breach I presumed it manifested in her fidelity. Then how I castigated myself for that bit of nastiness! I was incapable of measuring honest sentiment to the depth of a handshake, I thought. I had never loved a woman I had touched or touched a woman whom I had loved. Pitiable if not funny. I had pitied myself too much and had rarely if ever been able to laugh at my own expense. For a flickering instant as I looked down on the dark, night-blue water, I asked myself at what Paul Stephanou was laughing that night when we had looked for Webb, both of us frantic—or so I had thought him as well as myself—for the safety of the man, only to discover him tossing on a sea of bliss.

Christ in heaven! Was that not funny? I could no more laugh now, explaining the joke on myself to myself, than I was able at the time to see it that way. But the loathing I had felt at that instant for Webb and for the laughing Greek had, over the years, shifted its focus… I had come to loathe myself for the victim that moment had made of me.

“The wretch, concentred all in self….” I said the words aloud even as they surfaced unbidden in my mind.

I moved away from the precipice and turned my back on the sea, my mind clinging, much after its usual fashion, to the contemplation of some poet whose words I had plucked with apt timeliness from my subconscious as from a jewel box. Thus did I substitute ornament for truth. There was something in the exchange of correspondence between Scott and Byron I ought to explore, I told myself, a key perhaps to the puritanism behind the sham of the libertine.

It was late afternoon when I returned to a much-changed village. Word had spread of Modenis’ mission, and by now the name of Paul Stephanou was on everybody’s lips. Women were home early from the fields, picking flowers from their gardens, or braiding their hair as they gossiped at the windows. Girls, most of them too young to remember him, were out in fresh frocks. When one of them said something, they would rush together to join in paroxysms of glee. They reminded me of nothing so much as undergraduates on a football Saturday. One had to suppose from this activity that there was a legend to the man returning home.

Children were dispatched to the shrine where the road turned down to Kaléa. Outside the church a close-shaven young man was rehearsing a boys’ chorus in folk songs. I wandered among the men gathered at the
kafenia.
The talk was politics no less than usual, but the consensus, if I judged it right, was that since Paul was coming home all must be well with the government in Athens: political leniency was the sure sign of stability.

I approached Constable Rigi and remarked on the excitement. He shrugged and said, “People remember what they want to remember. To me it is no great honor to have been in prison. But if I said that now….” He made the gesture of cutting his own throat.

I watched and listened with a kind of horror, not because of my own feeling about Stephanou—who here would believe me if I told of his false testimony? Constable Rigi!—but because I kept remembering the lawyer Helmi’s description of him. I wanted to prepare the people, particularly Vasso. I watched her come from the house to the restaurant, her arm across Michael’s shoulders. She sped him on to join in the children’s vigil.

She smiled as I came up. “You will like the Greeks tonight, Professor Eakins.”

“I do not have to wait for tonight. Have you seen him, Vasso, since he went away?”

She shook her head.

“There are few afflictions worse than blindness,” I said.

“He will have a hundred pairs of eyes.”

I said no more. Going into the cottage, I looked up the correspondence between Byron and Sir Walter Scott.

He came as the first shadows fell upon the valley. I knew it from the ringing of the church bell, then from the sound of the grandmother as she ran past my window. I looked up in time to see her cross herself again and again as she ran. I closed my books and went out. Everyone was gathering in front of the restaurant, the boys’ chorus, the giggling girls. The priest came out from his house, striding in black magnificence, his wife scurrying after him.

The car came down the hill, the dust in its wake veiling the children who ran after it, the flowers still in their arms. That it had not stopped for their gifts was to me the first omen.

As the car drew to a halt, the singing master signalled and began himself to sing, but the boys, far more interested in the passenger than in their director, sang in neither tune nor time. And one long moan went up from the women who had glimpsed the men in the back seat. The butcher’s wife handed her husband a towel in which he wiped his face. Vasso, waiting with towels for the others, could not get the back door open and no one helped her until I pushed through the crowd and, reaching through the front window, unlocked it from the inside and opened it. Paul Stephanou sat like a stone man, his face grey, save for the pinched red lids that concealed the sightless eyes. His closely cropped hair was white and his lips tight, the color and shape of a slashing scar. I would not ever, ever have known him.

Beside him old Modenis sat staring ahead, his fierce dark eyes blinking. He was like a poised eagle.

Vasso held the wet towel close to Paul’s hands and said his name. He pushed her hand from him and said harshly, “Butcher, drive on!”

The priest came up, trying to move Vasso away and himself take over, but she elbowed him back and slammed shut the door of the car. I thought she was going to faint, such was the pallor of her face. I offered my hand and she caught it and held it fiercely as the car moved slowly, jerkily, from the curb. The white towels lay at her feet.

The chorus faded out altogether with the sound of the car’s motor and mercifully did not start up again. Only the moans of disappointment. What in hell had they expected? The return of a laughing boy?

I said one word to Vasso, “Courage!”

Her lips were parted. She nodded a little without looking at me and then, letting go my hand, followed after the car. She walked in the slow march of a ritual to where Modenis had gotten from the car in front of his cottage. He put the small, cheap suitcase on the ground and gave his hand to the blind man who then got out of the car, cane in hand, and permitted his uncle to guide him into the house. Vasso picked up the suitcase and followed them.

The butcher circled back and parked the car, immediately becoming the center of a men’s jabbering council. The children pelted one another with the flowers, the girls went home to put away their pretty dresses and some of the boys from the chorus staggered mockingly into the street, groping the air in a sort of grotesque game of blind-man’s buff.

I walked to the opposite end of the village to the shop where I had myself been given my first welcome to Kaléa just two days before.

A
MAN CONSPICUOUS BY
his absence from Stephanou’s homecoming was George Kanakis, the village president. I sought him out in his shop. He was at the forge, turning the blade of a plow that had been cruelly bent as by a rock. I watched him try to hammer it into shape while he looked at the fading coals and cursed the boy who had deserted the bellows. I volunteered to try my hand at them. I was more a menace than a help, sending up a cascade of sparks with my first attempt.

“It can wait,” Kanakis said, and laid aside the plow.

“I can learn.”

“Why? It is an ancient trade and you are a modern man. What is happening with the return of the hero?” I could not tell: sarcasm or acclaim?

“He is old,” I said. “He would not speak.”

“Not to Vasso?”

“To no one except the butcher, telling him to drive on.”

Kanakis led the way to the front of the shop and offered me one of the two chairs there. At the door he clapped his hands, a signal to the
kafenion
-keeper two doors away. “You will have a coffee with me,” he said.

“I would be honored. What was he like before he went away?”

“Before he went away. I remember Paul when he was a boy and I was already a man.” He threw up his hands. “I remember when he was born. His mother died, may she be with God. His father was killed in a street demonstration in Athens. He too was a radical, a self-educated man. Modenis, his uncle, brought Paul up like his own son, sent him to school. He was a fine student, very good in languages at the gymnasium. Then before the war he won a scholarship to the university in Athens. Modenis gave a party that night—oh, I tell you, it was beautiful.” He tilted back in his chair, remembering, his toughened face soft with the visions he saw. “Everybody got drunk. A scholar from Kaléa. It was like having a doctor from the village, you know? It was like all of us together were part of him. And we were. We all gave something so that he should live well in Athens, like the son of a merchant or a lawyer. But the war came, and Paul fought in the north with our ragged and heroic army and then afterwards when everything was lost, he came back and the terrible time of the German came on us. He could have gone to Egypt with the government… the flight into Egypt….” Kanakis smiled at the bitter image. “But he chose to stay. He taught school at night—in the cave where a candle burns to this day. Our children were like moles, but they learned to use words, to read and write their own language. He was like a young priest. And later, when he roused us all by his passion—he would tell us in the church while the priest—it was the old priest, not the one here now—watched from the belfry lest the Germans come. He would tell us of our ancient heroes, of our rising amongst the graves defiled by the Turk, and then afterwards our young men and some not so young—I was among them—would follow him in the night and we learned something else—how to kill, how to blast with dynamite; I who turn my back like a woman when the butcher sticks a pig. In this village we were not afraid of the
Andarte.
In those days we were the
Andarte
.”

The coffee came, the small cups and the glasses of water were set daintily on a nail keg. The quick darkness of the valley was coming soon. We sipped the coffee in silence. I offered my host a cigarette.

When he had smoked for a moment he said, “But after the war it was something else. When the Germans were gone we were not all for the
Andarte
any longer. Sometimes I think we are better at fighting ourselves than we are our enemies. And you know, I sometimes blame the church for it. Maybe I should blame our enemies who have always left us our church. Mind, I am a religious man. They have left us our Greekness, leaving the church.

“Could they have taken it away?”

“They could have tried. But they chose to use it, to content us with it, you know? It depends on the point of view. Even the Communists accept, and I suppose, if it had come to it, the church would have accepted the Communists.”

“It’s the way of survival, isn’t it?” I said.

He nodded. I could scarcely see his face now. “But to some men survival is not enough. It was not the old Greece Paul wanted restored. But it has been restored in spite of him. Again, maybe because of him and his kind. Every village was not as blessed in having an underground schoolteacher during the war, and where was he after the war when teachers were needed the most? He was not teaching. I know that.”

Where was he indeed? I thought.

“I am content now with Kaléa as it is, with the old Greece. My children are grown and gone away. They will not change it. And the old ones are right. I am elected president of the village, but I am paid by Athens, by the tax collectors.”

I tried to think of a way I could non-committally ask my question. I thought of the old men baiting Modenis. “Was it for his political views that Stephanou went to prison?”

“Yes. Even I would say so. He gave testimony at a murder trial. The government had him, you see, and otherwise he would have been tried for treason.”