My Brother Michael (12 page)

The old man smiled. ‘Very well then. It is not over. The shame remains.’

‘The shame isn’t yours.’

‘It is that of Greece.’

‘My country’s done a thing or two lately to balance it, Stephanos.’

‘Politics!’ The old man made a gesture highly expressive of what he would wish to see done to all politicians, and Simon laughed. As if at a signal, the old woman got to her feet, pulled back the blue curtain, and brought out a big stone jar. She put glasses on the table and began to pour out the dark sweet wine. Stephanos said: ‘You will drink with us, then?’

‘With the greatest of pleasure,’ said Simon. The old woman handed him a glass, then Stephanos, Niko, and finally me. She didn’t take one herself, but remained standing, watching me with a sort of shy pleasure. I sipped the wine. It was as dark as mavrodaphne and tasted of cherries. I smiled at her over the glass and said tentatively in Greek: ‘It’s very good.’

Her face split into a wide smile. She bobbed her head and repeated delightedly: ‘Very good, very good,’ and Niko turned over on the bed and said in American-accented English: ‘You speak Greek, miss?’

‘No. Only a few words.’

He turned to Simon. ‘How come you speak such good Greek, eh?’

‘My brother Michael taught me when I was younger than you. I went on learning and reading it afterwards. I knew I would come here one day.’

‘Why you not come before?’

‘It costs too much, Niko.’

‘And now you are rich, eh?’

‘I get by.’

‘
Oriste?
’

‘I mean, I have enough.’

‘I see.’ The dark eyes widened in a limpid look. ‘And now you have come. You know about Angelos and your brother. What would you say if I told you something else,
kyrie
?’

‘What?’

‘That Angelos is still alive?’

Simon said slowly. ‘Are you telling me that, Niko?’

‘He has been seen near Delphi, on the mountain.’

‘What? Recently?’ said Simon sharply.

‘Oh yes.’ Niko flashed that beautiful malicious smile up at him. ‘But perhaps it is only a ghost. There are ghosts on Parnassus,
kyrie
, lights that move and voices that carry across the rocks. There are those who see these things. Myself, no. Is it the old gods, not?’

‘Possibly,’ said Simon. ‘Is this the truth, Niko? That Angelos was seen?’

Niko shrugged. ‘How can I tell? It was Janis who saw him, and Janis is—’ he made a significant gesture towards his forehead. ‘Angelos killed his mother when the
andartes
burned his father’s farm, and ever since then Janis has been queer in the head, and has “seen” Angelos – oh, many times. If ghosts are true, then he still walks on Parnassus. But Dimitrios Dragoumis – that is true enough. He has asked many questions about your coming. All the men here in Arachova know that you are coming, and they talk about it
and wonder – but Dragoumis, he has been to Delphi and to Arachova and has asked questions – oh, many questions.’

‘What is he like?’

‘He is a little like his cousin. Not in the face, but in the – what do you say? – the build. But not in the spirit either.’ His look was innocent. ‘It may be that you will meet Dragoumis. But do not be afraid of him. And do not worry yourself about Angelos,
Kyrie
Simon.’

Simon grinned. ‘Do I look as if I was worrying?’

‘No,’ said Niko frankly, ‘but then, he is dead.’

‘And if Janis is right, and he is not dead?’

‘I think,’ said Niko almost insolently, ‘that you are only an Englishman,
Kyrie
Simon. Not?’

‘So what?’

Niko gave a charming little crack of laughter and rolled over on the bed. Stephanos said suddenly and angrily, in Greek: ‘Niko, behave yourself. What does he say,
Kyrie
Simon?’

‘He thinks I couldn’t deal with Angelos,’ said Simon idly. ‘Here, Niko, catch.’ He threw the boy a cigarette. Niko fielded it with a graceful clawed gesture. He was still laughing. Simon turned to Stephanos: ‘Do you think it’s true that Angelos has been seen hereabouts?’

The old shepherd slanted a fierce look at his grandson under his white brows. ‘So he has told you that tale, has he? Some rumour started by an idiot who has seen Angelos at least a dozen times since the end of the war. Aye, and Germans, too, a score of times. Don’t pay any attention to
that
moonshine.’

Simon laughed. ‘Or to the lights and voices on Parnassus?’

Stephanos said: ‘If a man goes up into Parnassus after sunset, why should he not see strange things? The gods still walk there, and a man who would not go carefully in the country of the gods is a fool.’ Another of those glowering looks at his grandson. ‘You, Niko, have learned a lot of folly in Athens. And that is a terrible shirt.’

Niko sat up straight. ‘It is not!’ he protested, stung. ‘It is American!’

Stephanos snorted and Simon grinned. ‘Aid to Greece?’

The old man gave a gruff bark of laughter. ‘He is not a bad boy,
kyrie
, even if Athens has spoiled him. But now he comes home to work, and I will make a man of him. Give
Kyrie
Simon some more wine.’ This to his wife, who hurried to refill Simon’s glass.

‘Thank you.’ Simon added, in a different tone: ‘Is it true that this man Dragoumis has been asking questions about me?’

‘Quite true. After it was known that you were coming, he asked many questions – when you came, for how long, what you meant to do, and all that.’ He smiled sourly. ‘I don’t speak much to that one, me.’

‘But why? Why should he be interested? Do you suppose he had anything to do with Michael’s death?’

‘He had nothing to do with it. That much we found out after the war, before he came back here. Otherwise he would not,’ said Stephanos simply, ‘have dared come back. No, he knew nothing about it. Once before,
a year – more – eighteen months ago – he spoke to me and asked me what had happened, and where it was that Michael was killed. He showed a decent shame and he spoke well of Michael; but I do not talk of my sons to every man. I refused to speak of it. And no one else knew the whole truth except the priest at Delphi who is since dead, and my own brother Alkis who was killed in the war.’

‘And now me.’

‘And now you. I will take you there tomorrow and show you the place. It is your right.’

He looked up under the white brows at Simon for another considering moment. Then he said slowly, irrelevantly: ‘I think,
Kyrie
Simon, that you are very like Michael. And Niko – Niko is even more of a fool than I thought …’

S
IMON
didn’t speak on the way back to Delphi, so I sat quietly beside him, wondering what had been said in that sombre and somehow very foreign-seeming interview. Nothing that Stephanos – exotically Homeric – had said could have been ordinary, while about Niko’s racy intelligent beauty there was something essentially Greek – a quicksilver quality that is as evident today under the cheaply Americanised trappings of his kind as it was in the black and red of the classical vase-paintings.

When at length, as we neared Delphi, trees crowded in above the road blocking out the starlight, Simon slowed the car, drove into a wide bay, and stopped. He switched the engine off. Immediately the sound of running water filled the air. He turned out the lights,
and the dark trees crowded closer. I could smell the pines, cool and pungent. They loomed thick in the starlight, rank on rank of scented stone-pines crowding up towards the cleft where the water sprang. Beyond the trees reared the immense darkness of rock, the Shining Ones no longer shining, but pinnacles and towers of imminent blackness.

Simon took out cigarettes and offered one to me. ‘How much of that did you understand?’

‘Nothing whatever, except that you were talking about Michael and the ELAS leader Angelos.’ I smiled. ‘I see now why you didn’t mind my sitting in on your private affairs.’

He said abruptly: ‘They’ve taken a very queer turn.’

I waited.

‘I’d like to tell you, if I may.’

‘Of course.’

So we sat there in the car and smoked, while he told me, fully and accurately, what had passed in the shepherd’s cottage. So vivid were my own visual impressions of the recent scene that I was able without difficulty to impose my picture, so to speak, over his, and see where movement and gesture had fitted in with the words.

When he had finished I didn’t speak, for the sufficient reason that I could find nothing to say. The instinct that had halted me at the foot of the alley steps had been a true one: these waters were too deep for me. If I had felt myself inadequate before – I, who had been afraid of a mild skirmish over a hired car – what was I to feel now? Who was I to offer comfort or
even comment on a brother’s murder? The murder might be fourteen years old, but there’s a kind of shock in the very word, let alone the knowledge of the deed, however many years lie between it and the discovery. I didn’t know Simon well enough to say the right thing, so I said nothing.

He himself made no comment, beyond telling me the story of the interview in that give-nothing-away voice of his that I was beginning to know. I did wonder fleetingly if he would say anything more about Michael’s letter, or about the ‘find’ which he, Simon, had said he knew of … But he said nothing. He threw his finished cigarette over the side of the car into the dust, and it appeared that he threw the story with it, because he said, with a complete change of tone and subject:

‘Shall we walk up through the ruins? You haven’t seen them yet, and starlight’s not a bad start. Unless of course you’d rather wait and see them for the first time alone?’

‘No. I’d like to go.’

We went up the steep path through the pines. Now that my eyes were used to the darkness it was just possible to see the way. We crossed the narrow rush of water and were on a track soft with pine-needles.

After a while we came out from under the trees into an open space where fallen blocks made treacherous walking, and dimly in the starlight I could see the shape of ruined walls.

‘The Roman marketplace,’ said Simon. ‘Those were shops and so on over there. By Delphi’s standards this is modern stuff, so we bypass it quickly … Here
we are. This is the gate of the temple precinct. The step’s steep, but there’s a wide smooth way up through the building to the temple itself. Can you see?’

‘Fairly well. It’s rather … stupendous by starlight, isn’t it?’

Dimly I could make out the paved road that zigzagged up between the ruined walls of treasuries and shrines. The precinct seemed in this light enormous. Everywhere ahead of us, along the hillside, below among the pines that edged the road, above as far as the eye could reach in the starlight, loomed the broken walls, the spectral pillars, the steps and pedestals and altars of the ancient sanctuary. We walked slowly up that Sacred Way. I could make out the little Doric building that once housed the Athenian treasure, the grim stone where the Sybil sat to foretell the Trojan War, the slender pillars of the Portico of the Athenians, the shape of a great altar … then we had reached the temple itself, a naked and broken floor, half up the mountainside, held there in space by its massive retaining walls, and bordered with six great columns that even in the darkness stood emphatic against the star-crowded sky.

I took a little breath.

Beside me, Simon quoted softly: ‘“The gods still walk there, and a man who would not go carefully in the country of the gods is a fool.”’

‘They
are
still here,’ I said. ‘Is it silly of me? But they are.’

‘Three thousand years,’ he said. ‘Wars, treachery, earthquake, slavery, oblivion. And men still recognise
them here. No, it’s not silly of you. It happens to everyone with intelligence and imagination. This is Delphi … and, well, we’re not the first to hear the chariot wheels. Not by a long way.’

‘It’s the only place in Greece I’ve really heard them. I’ve tried to imagine things – oh, you know how one does. But no, nothing, really, even on Delos. There are ghosts at Mycaenae, but it’s not the same …’

‘Poor human ghosts,’ he said. ‘But here … I suppose that if a place was, like Delphi, a centre of worship for – how many? – about two thousand years, something remains. Something inheres in stone, I’ll swear, and here it’s in the very air. The effect’s helped by the landscape: I suppose it must be one of the most significant in the world. And of course this is just the setting for the holy place. Come up into the temple.’

A ramp led up to the temple floor, which was paved with great stone blocks, some broken and dangerous. We picked our way carefully across this until we stood at the edge of the floor, between the columns. Below us was the sheer drop of the retaining wall; below that the steep mountainside and the ghosts of the scattered shrines. The far valley was an immensity of darkness, filled with the small movements of the night wind, and the sound of pine and olive.

Simon’s cigarette beside me glowed and faded. I saw that he had turned his back on the spaces of the starlit valley. He was leaning against a column, gazing up the hill behind the temple. I could see nothing there, but the thick shadows of trees, and against them more pale shapes of stone.

‘What’s up there?’

‘That’s where they found the Charioteer.’

The word brought me back to the present with the tingle of a small electric shock. I had forgotten, in the overpowering discovery of Delphi, that Simon would have other preoccupations.

I hesitated: it was he, after all, who had sheered away from the story on to the neutral ground of Delphi. I said a little awkwardly: ‘Do you suppose Stephanos was right? Does it make any kind of sense to you?’

‘None at all,’ he said cheerfully. His shoulder came away from the pillar. ‘Why don’t you come up to the studio now, and meet Nigel, and have some coffee or a drink?’