Going Up (41 page)

We returned to the Via Trionfale, where I pinned a quick new tail on the script. There was still enough time left on the Contessa’s lease for me to begin a new novel. Raul Hilberg’s
The Destruction of the European Jews
had been sent to me for review by David Pryce-Jones, who was on the staff of the middle-of-the-road
Time and Tide
. The magazine’s life was abbreviated by more fashionable journalistic traffic coming at it in both directions, but I have been glad to have David’s lively and unflinching friendship ever since.

Hilberg’s book had a programmatic callousness: his scope was limited by the cold determination to look solely at the means and machinery by which the Nazis and their acolytes, whether conscripted or enthusiastic, contrived to kill some four and a half million men and women and a million and a half children while engaged in a many-fronted war against enemies who made no conspicuous effort to deter them. Hilberg’s book, followed by Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, put an end to a decade and a half of – to put it decorously – reticence concerning Hitler’s genocide.

I began
Lindmann
with no precise scheme, but with an urgent verve which had nothing to do with my own petty experiences of English anti-Semitism. My main character was a duplicitous, conscience-stricken impostor. That Lindmann was not the Holocaust survivor he claimed to be gave me licence both to be and not to be the chronicler of events of which I, like my main character, had in truth no first-hand experience. Lindmann was an alter ego whom I could inhabit and satirise at the same time. The characters who surrounded him in his London boarding house were drawn from diverse sources, not least from Hans and Juliana, our neighbours in the Calle Tostón. Juliana had told me little about her father or her life in wartime Germany, but enough to furnish my imagination.

My experiences in TV and, more recently, in conversation with Clive Donner and David Deutsch had been enriching in several respects. They also gave me a sense of how commercial considerations trumped all others. Not least the fun of writing scripts lay in arming actors with words they were happy to say and impressing directors with one’s ingenious speed, but I was truly a writer only when alone with the page which, in my case, rarely stayed blank for long.
Lindmann
was an apology for having played the glad mercenary. The turning point in the plot came when the opportunist Milstein, whom I graced with the thrust of Tom Maschler, appropriated what he thought was Lindmann’s life in order to write a commercial movie about the sinking in the Black Sea of what I called the SS
Broda
. The first
long-playing record we ever owned was of Nathan Milstein playing the Beethoven violin concerto (the second was of Amalia singing
fado
).

The script within the novel tracked the true story of the
Struma
, which had sailed from Constanza, in Bulgaria, in 1943, overloaded with desperate Jewish fugitives. Its passengers were denied visas to land in Turkey because the British refused to allow them to enter Palestine. Perhaps of their own volition, more probably under pressure from London, the Turks required the unseaworthy
Struma
to leave their territorial waters with all its passengers on board. A night or two later, it sank, or was torpedoed, in the Black Sea. There were said to be two survivors, though neither, so far as I knew, had been traced or told his story. In the case of the fictional SS
Broda
, I postulated one survivor, the eponymous Lindmann.

David and Clive were delighted with the work I had done on
Nothing But the Best
and promised to begin the process of casting. It seemed likely that our scoundrel-hero would be Alan Bates, who was about to star in
A Kind of Loving
, directed by John Schlesinger. A screenwriter can always recognise when he has done a good job: he becomes superfluous. The producer and, in particular, the director are likely to assume his work to be theirs. However amiable, they now want the attention of mechanicals and actors to be directed only at them. There might yet be more work for me to do on
Nothing But the Best
; meanwhile we had a period of grace. We also had the slender means to go to Greece and tempting proximity to it.

I
N MARCH 1962 we yielded her keys to the Contessa and drove down the Via Appia and across to Bari, where we stayed the night in a big modern hotel. I woke the next morning with a savage sore throat and a high fever. I took aspirin and whatever else the hotel doctor suggested, but I feared we were stalled in limbo. Bari has its charms, but not many. Beetle took Paul and Sarah out and came back again. I sweated and I slept. The next morning, when I took my temperature it was 101.5. I shook the thermometer down and told Beetle that I was normal. We packed and left. By the time we drove onto the dock at Brindisi, the fever was gone. We drove the Vanguard onto the ferry and set sail for Igoumenitsa on the north-eastern coast of Epirus. The Latin term for the Adriatic figured in the Gender Rhymes, which I learned at the age of eleven, appended to Kennedy’s Latin Primer: ‘Masculine will always be / Things that you can touch and see / Masculine will also be Hadria, the Adriatic Sea’.

I began to study ancient Greek – starting with
luo, lueis, luei
, I let go, you let go, he lets go – when I was ten years old. Not one of my teachers at any stage recommended going to modern Greece. As Byron put it, ‘Fair Greece! Sad relic of departed worth / Immortal, though no more, though fallen, great!’ The only period worthy of prolonged academic attention was
the fifth century BC, in which the Attic language and the Athenian empire had the double flowering that would be matched by that of England under Elizabeth I.

The eclipse of Athens in the Peloponnesian War was famously said to have ‘taken the spring out of the year’. In fact, the city recovered much of its prosperity, if never the communal vanity that made the theatre, comic and tragic, both a civic embellishment and the crucible in which ideas and vanities were dissected in imagery and dialogue. In the post-classical Greek-speaking world, expanded by Alexander the Great’s bloody crusade, there were many clever Greeks and more clever Greeklings. Writers who lacked Hellenic blood could become, as the Syrian Lucian proved in the second century AD, at once insolent and brilliant in their second tongue.

Like the English language, first mangled and then renovated by fast-talking immigrants into the US, Greek had an elasticity often made snappier by non-native speakers. Traditional classicists pursed their lips at such iconoclasts. Lucian was notorious for deriding the great statue of Zeus that Phidias enthroned in his temple at Olympia (it was said that if Zeus were to stand up, he would take the roof off the building). Lucian’s contemporary, Dio Chrysostom – the man with the golden mouth – said, piously, that a single glimpse of the statue would make a man forget all his earthly troubles. Lucian, the emblematic jobbing journalist, had to think of something less deferential to say. He compared Phidias’s sublime image to that of a listless old man in whom no one any longer had serious faith. In this, he was the predecessor of Stephen de Houghton, whose blasphemous squib procured the decline and rise of Mark Boxer.

Byron visited Epirus when it was a Turkish province. As he rode into Joannina, he saw a human arm and hand hanging from a gibbet; all that remained of a Greek patriot called Evtinnio, who had been tortured for three months, before being hanged, drawn and quartered at the orders of the Turkish governor Ali Pasha, who asked Byron to dinner and admired
his ‘fine white hands’ and small ears. ‘I’m very partial to Englishmen,’ Ali told him. ‘I particularly love English sailors.’ Byron, like many British travellers, was appalled and beguiled by ruthless tyrants, even though he was willing to risk his life to unseat the Turks who had out-Xerxesed Xerxes.

We took the steep, zigzag road up to Dodona, greenest, most ancient and most remote of Greek oracles. Shepherds huddled under shaggy fleeces – some dyed saffron, some blanched – knees to chin to keep the warmth in. Long white crooks posted question marks in the cold air. Dodona’s ancient priests were said never to wash their feet. Greek versifying may well have begun with oracular pronouncements; not, however, with those at Dodona. The rustling leaves of its sacred oak tree, duly interpreted by those chthonic priests, yielded divine responses to pilgrims’ questions. One inquiry that survives, inscribed on a lead tablet, asked whether a man’s current wife would give him children; another whether it was a good idea to keep sheep. Dodona was still a numinous site, but it offered no rustling hint as to which of the isles of Greece we should visit.

We drove south, via the paramount oracular site, at rug-draped Delphi, to Athens. We walked down Stadiou Street and tried to decipher what was on at the cinema on the façade of which was advertised, in capital letters, NTONALNT PTAK. The image of Donald Duck, on a billboard lower down, supplied a crib.

A travel agent called Thalia Taga had been recommended, in a recent
Sunday Times
article by Dilys Powell, the film critic and Hellenophile. Playing the petty impostor, I allowed Thalia to believe that Dilys was known to me personally. As it turned out, eighteen months later I was Ms Powell’s junior colleague on the
Sunday Times
, when I became a fortnightly fiction reviewer under the distant aegis of Dilys’s husband, Leonard Russell, and the immediate tutelage of Jack Lambert, whose handwriting and editorial tact equalled Guy Ramsey’s.

Thalia Taga sent out for coffee for us and sweets for the children. She
was advising us to go to Skiathos, when the telephone rang. The man at the other end was an ex-Minister of Marine, Artemis Denaxas. He owned most of a remote Cycladic island called Ios. Like Ali Pasha, Denaxas had a soft spot for the English. He wanted us to discover Ios before the French and the Germans. It was, Thalia promised, ‘a sign’. If we sailed to Ios, Denaxas would come soon and, meanwhile, she would ensure that he sent word that we were to be well received. As guileless as Croesus, when he took Delphi’s word for it that, by crossing the Ilissus, he would ‘destroy a great empire’ and never considered the grammatical duplicity which allowed that it might be his own, we relied on the benign patronage of the unseen Denaxas.

Viewed at a distance, Greece had seemed to be a small, jagged adjunct to the Balkans. Once there, it stretched in all directions. Lacking more specific or alluring advice, we honoured Thalia’s oracle. On the following day, we went down to Piraeus, garaged the Vanguard and, with most of our belongings, boarded an obsolete English Channel ferry, built on the Clyde, now renamed the
Despina
. A fourteen-hour trip would deposit us, between three and four in the morning, at Ios. Before we had left the placid waters of Piraeus, the shrilling of the hooter cued old ladies in black to be neatly sick into grey cardboard boxes.

As we sailed under the lee of Poseidon’s temple at Sounion, where Byron felt entitled to carve his name, in big letters, two bearded priests, in their tall black hats, were standing by the rail in soft conspiracy with two army officers. Five years later, the army – backed by the church – would send young King Paul and his hated German mother Frederika, into exile and impose an officious tyranny on the country. We were uneasily asleep in our tight, brown, airless
prote thesis
cabin when the cry came, ‘Ios, Ios!’

We took our possessions up on deck and stared into the lapping darkness.
Despina
’s lights glistened on toothy rocks. A red-eyed beacon blinked on a metal tripod.
Despina
turned and slid into the black goal of Ios bay. Below us, the breathing glow of cigarettes spotted the purple night. Invisible
oarsmen were pulling out to meet the
vapore
as her anchor was unravelled into the Guinness-dark sea. The oarsmen scrambled up the rope ladder and grabbed our things, like helpful pirates. We were the only foreigners to disembark. Beetle carried Sarah down to the bobbing boat; and I carried Paul. Hands reached up and took us and our things into the boat. On shore, no one had heard of us. We put up in the only hotel in the harbour, the
xenodocheio Denaxas
, which was named in honour of ‘
ho plousios
’, the rich man, perhaps because he or one his ancestors had fathered the hostelry’s founder.

The next morning, Beetle’s birthday, we looked up through the clear air at the starch-white village, high-shelved cubes topped by the church tower, 150 metres up the zigzag path with its up-and-down traffic of doleful, neatrumped donkeys. There were no wheeled vehicles, no paved roads. Beetle was tired and wanted somewhere, anywhere, to unpack, get food for the children, set up Sarah’s portable cot and be immune to the inquisitive stares of the islanders. More than anything, I wanted to resume work on
Lindmann
.

At breakfast (coffee, bread, vitam and honey), we were approached by a French-speaking Romanian who promised to find us a house. If it was a trap, I was glad to fall into it. He led us to a three-roomed
spiti
– the modern Greek for house comes from the Latin word
hospitium
– in the
campo
, the wide valley behind a long sandy beach adjacent to the harbour. There may have been other houses available. Some may even have had a bed more comfortable than a cotton palliasse, stuffed with straw, laid on five pliable planks on a rusty metal frame. Niko’s cottage had a kitchen, with table and chairs, and a single deck chair. There was a terrace in front of the
spiti
, with a concrete table under the metal frame for the summer’s vine. Too dispirited to care to traipse any further in the heat, we settled, as we often do, for the first plausible thing we came to. The rent was £2 a week. Judging from the Romanian’s expression when we agreed to it, we were being overcharged.

I walked back to the hotel where we had dumped our possessions. Donkeys
stood, like vacant taxis, under a rusting placard which announced, in festering white capitals, that Ios was the site of HOMER’S TUMB (scholarship somewhat confirms the claim). As I came out with our heavy blue suitcases, one of the donkeymen limped over and took them from me. Before I could argue or ask the price, he was roping them onto Phryne, one of his two neat, blue-beaded donkeys. Yorgios Galatsios appointed himself our island cicerone and was not to be denied. He already knew where we intended to live. When we got there and I asked him how much he wanted for his welcome attention, he said, ‘
Oti thelete seis
’, whatever you want; a form of demanding generosity to which I became accustomed. The speed with which it was pouched suggested that five drachmae was too much; if so, it was not a great deal. The last thing I wanted was what the Greeks call
fassaries
, complications; they are a national sport, not infrequently a bloody one.

The islanders had their quarrels (loud voices cataracted down the jagged hill from the village), but their paucity and their isolation insured civility. If anything was lost, or dropped, it was always returned almost before anyone had time to look for it. The illusion that we were living in an idyll was sustained, by contrast, when we listened to the news broadcast, in very slow Special English, from the American airbase at Akrotiri in Cyprus. The announcer’s educational tone was at cruel odds with the stories that he measured out of assassinations, bombings and massacres. The last phase of the war in Algeria was reaching its bloody climax in the savage activities of the French ultras’ OAS (
Organisation de l’armée secrète
). Its self-righteous thugs committed conspicuous atrocities, such as murdering victims, French ‘traitors’ and Algerian wounded, as they lay in hospital beds.

Niko’s cottage sat below a round, terraced hillock where, three decades later, the ancient city of Ios would be excavated. There was no electricity and no plumbing; the roof consisted of strips of bamboo, laced tightly together and laid across wooden beams, with a foot of rammed earth on top; our toilet was an earth-closet across a field. That one deckchair, reminiscent of
Wittgenstein’s in his rooms in Whewell’s Court, was our only luxury, apart from the German radio, which we had detached before abandoning the car. One night, there was a thunder storm. The piercing rain drilled straight through the roof and into the middle of our three rooms, where Paul and Sarah slept. In the morning, the earth floor was badged with black puddles. Only the corners in which the children were sleeping remained dry. Local gods, whimsy might claim, are kinder than the almighty.

We drew water from the well next to the terrace. Simplicity was not as simple as all that: it required an acquired knack, a timely twitch of the rope, to tilt the tin bucket so that it took on its first gulp of water and then sank down to be filled. We had to be careful always to replace the plank lid on the well. I worked at
Lindmann
in the mornings, sitting under the empty grape vine. If the sun was very bright, I opened and dangled our big black British umbrella from the trellis. The work went well. Our landlord, Nikos, would come by and watch me typing. He had never seen a typewriter before. Paul and Sarah improvised toys from the roots and stones on the island’s floor. The beach was littered with fist-sized lumps of pumice, small change from the great explosion of the volcanic island of Santorini three or more millennia before. During our afternoons on the sand, we looked up from castling at the Kolynos-white church of Aghia Eirene, Saint Irene.

The islanders were poor; yet you never passed one without him giving you something, if only the flower from behind his ear. Panaiotis, the father of our landlord Nikos, came by each morning with a can of sheep’s milk. It had fresh hairs floating in it. Properly strained, it made delicious rice pudding. One day we met a handsome man holding a very young calf around his neck, a modern
Moschophoros
. He and his partner (perhaps his lover) were the island butchers. He promised to keep some
sêkoti
(liver)
ya ta pethia
, for the children. I hoped, like any squeamish humbug, that it would not be that of the calf he was carrying. Meanwhile, he offered a slab of cheddar cheese, the product of a dairy that
ho plousios
Denaxas had funded.

We did most of our shopping on the harbour. The kiosk in the centre of the quay sold ION chocolate and small plastic toys. Paul collected beer bottle tops. It was easy to be happy. A smiling, smelly lady ran the Shell concession, supplying fuel for the local
caiques
and the few yachts that put into Ios, and also sold more or less crisp Papadopoulos cream sandwich biscuits. Their name did not yet carry sinister overtones. The sea was full of fish, but Captain Adonis, who sat with his seldom empty glass on the quayside, was as deeply suspicious of Poseidon as any of his ancient ancestors. However calm the water, he could find good reason not to put to sea. The village postmaster, Michalis, who wore two pairs of glasses as improvised bifocals, doubled, in the late afternoon, as a more regularly daring fisherman.