Nightspawn (17 page)

‘Ahem,’ he said.

He climbed the bonnet, had a moment of difficulty with the windscreen, and then he was on the roof, where I saw, in awe, his little legs rise, slowly, slowly, a grunt, up; he did a perfect handstand. Coins fell from his pockets, and gave him a silvery round of applause. He clambered down, smoothed his jacket, and swaggered, justly proud, back into the garden.

And I watched the large dent his inverted head had left in the roof of the car, a pool of moonlight, emptying gradually, until, at its lowest tide, the metal suddenly snapped back into its
shape with a deep note of booming black music, filling the night with wonder. I turned, and heard glass crunch under my feet.

When I lifted my eyes I found a figure coming toward me through the purple gloom. I raised my glass in a toast.

‘You,’ I said.

The figure went past me to the window and looked down at the city.

‘Why did you not come for my lesson yesterday?’

‘What?’

I was busy with that bottle again.

‘I said you didn’t come for that bottle yesterday.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The lesson.’

‘Was busy.’

I took the bottle back with me to the chair and sank down into its waiting arms. I asked,

‘Shouldn’t you be in bed, this hour of the night?’

‘What?’

‘Should we go to bed tonight?’

Silence. Thunder rolled in the distance. The pool of moonlight vanished. A finger was drawn down the glass,
ee
ee
ee.
I tried to recall something, a fleeting memory.

‘On such a night as this,’ I murmured.

There was the sound of the silver applause of coins falling, tinkling on the road. A thunderhead with a silver gash in its forehead was rolling in from the mountains. I heard the soft hushing of rain.

‘Always something,’ I said. ‘Something always comes along to ruin it.’

‘In Egypt once I saw a group of pilgrims on their way to Mecca,’ said Melissa, Melissima. ‘It was at the airport. They were bewildered, as though they could not connect the two worlds. They were like refugees. Pilgrims or refugees, there is no difference. You make me think of them.’

‘Why?’

Their plane crashed in the desert before it reached Mecca. I thought of their white robes. And now you make me think of them again.’

Think.
Tink.
Once, in winter, on a deserted beach in a strange part of the country, I found an abandoned baby seal dying in a crevice of the rocks. It had such exquisite moist brown eyes. I wanted to kill it, to put it out of its misery, but I did not know how to go about it, and I went away instead and left it there. Sometimes those eyes stare at me out of the velvet darkness of a dream. Do I digress?’

‘You told me you loved me,’ I said.

‘I never did.’

‘Then you didn’t love me?’

‘I never said that either. That ridiculous machine. He planned it, how could you fail to see that? I shall never forgive you, never.’

She was sitting on the floor, her arms around her knees and her forehead laid against the glass. Lightning flashed on her face.

‘How can I keep you?’ I asked. ‘What have I got to offer you, to make you stay?’

‘You know.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t think I do.’

‘You know. The first day we were together, you spoke of…’

‘What would you do with it, if you found it?’

‘Would that matter to you?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You are such a fool.’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh go away, leave me alone.’

‘Yes.’

I went away, I left her alone. The music had ceased. I searched for Yacinth, but I could not find him. Their plane crashed in the desert. What did I expect from him, anyway? Downstairs, the guests were becoming noisy, recovering from
their fright. You fool. It was only a little thing. Why could she not…?

Suddenly, with a great groan, the whole thing began to uncoil. Pieces of wire hopped into the air like a troupe of undisciplined acrobats. Smoke billowed. A girl screamed, and then a
tremendous
, though undeniably comic, bang came from the machine, and the thing finally exploded with an hilarious, groaning, ungainly slowness.
Ping,
ping,
said the springs, lying down dead on the floor. The last wisps of smoke cleared. I found that I was laughing, while Helena screamed abuse at me from the stage, her fists clenched, feet stamping, her teeth out and eyes ablaze. The immediate area of the disaster was cleared (the artist, Horsfall, who had created the bomb, had been one of the first to flee, tittering as he ran), but beyond that, figures were fleeing, dowagers skidding cumbersomely through the windows into the courtyard (snouts appearing again a moment later), old men dancing with delight, women waving their hands, and a few fat men loping away, pausing every few steps for a glance over their shoulders, fear telling them to flee, curiosity urging, yes, but not yet. Into the centre of the room there tottered a plump woman in pearls and a black dress, wailing, her mouth a round black hole. She halted, her hands in her hair, and her squeals swung into a higher key, then her mouth closed, and she sat down abruptly on the parquet with a soft plop. The thread of her necklace broke, and the little white beads went rolling in all directions. Rescuers rushed forward, drew back before her screams, advanced again and caught her by the arms, legs, tits, head, ribs, and she was hoisted to her feet, roaring in protest. Helena launched herself at me. She had reached a stage of total incoherence by now, just one
unbroken
howl cleaving a passage for her which led to my most pluckable orbs, all four of them. I turned and ran, but not before I glimpsed, in one of those frames of stillness which, running, one can catch so beautifully, Julian, his hands in his trouser
pockets, watching us with amusement, and not a little
sympathy
, yes, sympathy. He had won.

The lights sank with what I would swear was a sucking sound. My hand found a knob, pushed open a door. Lights, lights, bring tapers to this scene, we are not finished yet, I have some revenge, there must be … But soft you now. The lights swooped down from the ceiling and lit up a little tableau for me, quaint as a picture. Look at this descending scale of hilarity. Shelves of books, a chandelier, french windows again. Andreas crouched on his heels in the middle of the floor, one hand behind him pressed to the carpet for support. In front of him, the good Aristotle cowered, knees bent, back arched backwards, an arm lifted across his forehead. And there, last but best, leaning over them with a stick upraised above the Colonel’s unprotected pate, Julian, our genial host, master of assorted jokes and japes, his tongue out and eyes bulging, ready to thrash the living daylights out of his quaking foes. O lord, that I should have had a camera and one of those little bulbs that go pop, to transfix that scene forever. On, on to the finale. There was a roar behind me, and I leapt aside, fearful of a stick descending on my own head, and Erik (remember Erik?) went galloping through the doorway, across the floor, threw the combatants to all sides, then crashed through the windows (closed, by the way) and fell headlong into the courtyard. The last thing I saw of him was his heels disappearing into the darkness. An absurdly melodramatic clap of thunder bawled up in the sky, and when its rumbling had ceased there came to us the prosaic sounds of Erik being extravagantly sick.

And when, toward dawn, I returned to my flat, the place seemed curiously bare. There were my books, all my possessions, all
intact, yet I could not rid myself of the feeling that something was missing. I thought of searching for it, but how could I, not knowing even where to start? The last of the storm was still grumbling in the sky. I went out on the balcony and watched the rain falling on the silent humbled city. Strange lights were burning, each with a moist, white halo. Down in the streets, the beasts were feeding. It was strange. I heard my name called across the roof tops. I thought that I was free again, that I was ready to begin writing, to leave Greece, to return home, even. I was not.

Before I move at last into the real grit and gristle of things, I have a little riddle. Perceive. One word, three syllables. The first is a wager. The second is a fish. The third is one third less than everything, and the whole is my theme. What is it?

Now I may proceed.

For all they tell one, there is really not very much variety in the world. Hills and dales, plains and seas, they are all much like one another; only in what is situated against their backdrops do they differ, and even that difference is not so great as one imagines. I do not speak of that abundance of squirming life which the maniacal scientist, with his pins and poisons, can detect upon two twin stalks of grass. No, I cannot believe in that unreasonable and grotesque underworld. I am talking of scenes and situations, meetings upon mountain paths, the child’s return, again and again, in five different continents, to the same scene of that crime by which he was conceived. On an afternoon full of soft sunlight and the cicada’s song, I climbed another hill toward another white wall, but this time, no music awaited me, none of love’s tuition. And yet …

In the courtyard before the main building, in the centre of that waste of packed brown dust, a single undernourished tree
stood trapped in a metal cage or corset. I pulled the bell beside the massive door and heard it jangle afar, then waited with my hands in my pockets and looked at the tree. I could understand why one would come to rest here. The door groaned as it was drawn slowly open, and a little priest, with a full black beard and bright black eyes to match, ushered me into the hall. In the dimness there, the air was cool, traversed by slanting blades of ruby and blue light from a stained-glass window somewhere above me. There was a wide stairway which curved up to an empty landing. A low chair stood below the banisters. Ikons adorned the walls. The place had that androgynous dull
atmosphere
which marks the total absence of women. I was sent into a long high room, in the centre of which a huge rectangular table squatted. A window looked out through pillars into the unreal brilliance of the sunlight in the courtyard. There was that tree again, looking sad and innocent, as these things will, trying to disclaim the fact that it had scurried around here, cage and all, just to catch again my sentimental gaze.

I turned. Erik stood in the doorway, one hand on the knob, the other lifted hesitantly to his jaw. We said nothing. He tried to smile, but it was a poor effort, and he looked down at his feet. Embarrassment and shame, inexplicable though they were, lay between us. He looked awful, had lost weight, and his shoulders seemed to droop lower than ever, a dirty white shirt hanging from them like something left forgotten overnight on a
clothesline
. His sunken jaws were coloured a bluish grey, and on his nose, which the retreating flesh had left exposed almost to the roots, three large freckles lay in startling isolation. Behind the ugly spectacles, his eyes seemed smaller and redder than I remembered. I must have gasped, for he glanced at me quickly, and grinned, as if to say that this was nothing, that he could and would look worse. I have always felt that the little genes must have thrown up their hands in despair, and abandoned the job, halfway through Erik’s making. He closed the door and came toward me. His walk too had changed, and the springs which had given it that funny bounce seemed now to have gone slack. He shuffled like an old man. He wore a pair of incongruously gay yellow slippers, with Turkish toes that pointed up at him in
something like amused derision. I think I put my fingers to the table to support myself in my shock, as they do in the films. It was some relief to find that Erik was laughing at me silently, walking down the length of one wall and glancing at me now and then from the corner of his eye. But we must have spoken, we must have said something by then.

‘Erik. How are you? You look terrible.’

‘Fine, I am fine.’

‘They said that this was a hospital, that you were in hospital.’

‘It is, a kind of hospital.’

‘But why are you here?’

He lifted an imaginary glass to his lips, emptied it, and smiled his crooked smile. I noticed for the first time that one of his side front teeth was missing. That black rectangular gap among the yellow restored to him for a moment his strained, funny
ferocity
. He said,

‘I fell through a window at that party. Were you there?’

‘Yes. You jumped through a window.’

He shrugged.

‘I do not remember. Kyd brought me here, unconscious, and now they will not let me free. Will you help me?’

‘Maybe you should stay here for a while. Have you been drinking all that much?’

‘More than that, my friend. Have you not noticed how like a bottle I am beginning to look?’

‘Aye, very like a bottle.’

I smiled, and shook my head, and pulled out a chair from the table, but as I made to sit down, he cried, with false heartiness,

‘Come up to my room, come.’

In the hall, we met another priest, a great brown brute of a man with a thick coat of fur on the backs of his hands. Erik said,

‘Papa, this is my friend, Ben White. Papa Iakavos.’

The priest inclined his square head toward me, and let fall through his large white teeth a stream of Greek which was unintelligible to me. I smiled, and nodded, and he left us. We went up the stairs, and Erik said,

‘Iakavos is a good man, you’ll like him.’

‘Eh?’ He did not pause, but looked down at me with a trace
of appeal in his eyes.

‘I thought you might come and stay here for a while? I am told that Mrs Kyd and you …’

‘Now how do you know about that?’

‘I told you before, I know everything.’

A flash of the old Erik. We went on up the steps. It was a slow ascension. There was a long strip of gauze plastered to the back of his neck, in the centre of which lay an awful, dark little spot of blood. I said,

‘I see that window left its mark on you.’

‘Marks,’ he laughed. ‘Marks.’

He turned and peeled back his lip to show me that gap in his teeth.

‘I noticed that,’ I said. ‘Adds a certain something to your face.’

He nodded soberly. Some distressing notion seemed to have struck him. At the top of the stairs, a white stone corridor swallowed us, and halfway down it, Erik pushed open one of the anonymous narrow doors which were so flat and characterless that they seemed to have been painted on the wall. His room was a stark cell, with an iron bed, one chair, a tiny desk. Not a speck of dust disturbed the paranoiac neatness. In such a stifling bareness, the open window drew us to it immediately. Below was the courtyard, with two black priests pacing the dust; there was the high wall, and an open arch framing a view of pines and the sunlit city.

‘They say that wall is four feet thick,’ Erik mused.

‘To keep out the Turks.’

He laughed softly.

‘And the Germans too, perhaps, yes? An irony.’

I pulled up the chair, and Erik sat on the bed. He arranged his hands on his knees with care, watching them as though he were nervous of leaving them to their own devices.

‘What was going on that night?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘At the party, when you jumped through that window? Don’t you remember?’

‘No.’

‘I opened this door, and found Julian ready to beat the shit out
of Andreas and your friend the Colonel with a big stick. What was the argument?’

‘I do not know. What did Andreas say?’

‘I didn’t ask him,’ I said.

‘Aristotle is threatening this man Kyd with … I don’t know, something to do with his business interests here in Greece. I don’t know.’

‘I saw him the other day.’

‘Who?’

‘Aristotle. He telephoned me, and told me to come and see him. When I went, he said nothing, but I got the impression that he was passing on a warning. He told me to get out of Greece. I don’t suppose he knows anything, does he?’

‘He knows everything, except that most important little thing.’

I gaped at him.

‘Jesus. How did he find out?’

Erik grinned.

‘I told him. Oh don’t shout at me. Do you never think? Do you never sit down and consider? Why are we still free, after the blunders we made? Someone has to … protect us.’

‘And what does he get in return for his protection?’

‘What do you think he gets in return?’

‘He said he’d kill you, that day on the island.’

‘Did he?’

He put his hands over his face, and gave a great sigh of
weariness
. I said,

‘Erik, Erik, what are you doing here in this awful place?’

His head jerked up, and he stared at me in genuine surprise. I waved my hands at our surroundings, lost for words. He moved his feet, and made a sucking sound through that gap in his teeth. I was curious to know what had happened to him in the last year, what awful events had brought him to this state where he was nearly broken; but yet, paradoxically, it was an effort for me to inquire.

‘I am happy here, ‘he said, that word not fitting too well in his damaged mouth. ‘When you stop drinking, you become aware of things once more. I find something, a flower, and I am like a … a young girl, pressing it to my cheek. Oh yes, you would be
sickened with me now. I have projects. My file, let me show you my file.’

He went to the desk and drew from it a tattered cardboard folder bulging with papers, and laid it on my knees.

‘A file against humanity,’ he said. ‘I have so much time now, I read newspapers, all I can find. I am astonished by the things which are reported. All my life I have dealt with the big issues, and never cared to look at the trivial things. Now … Look here, look. Mother murders … couple torture … children killed by ….’

He was like a child himself, but this toy was spattered with blood and bits of bone, and reeked of the world’s carnage. He pounced upon a choice morsel, a clipping from a German newspaper, and began to translate it for me with frightening gusto. A fine spray of spit descended on my wrist. I put my hands over my ears, and cried,

‘Stop, Erik. Stop.’

He fell immediately silent, and went back to sit on the bed in that lost, piteous attitude. I laid down that bag of blood on the floor beside me, and, as gently as I could, I asked,

‘What are you hiding from, Erik?’

He did not answer. We looked through the window. The distant mountains trembled. The day was dying. We sat for a long time without speaking. Then Erik said,

‘I want …’

His voice faded off into the enormity of an inexpressible longing, and I did not discover what it was that he wanted. I was never to discover it. Strangely, that unfinished statement obsesses me yet. I probe again and again into his file against humanity, which I still have, but it gives me back only death and devilry.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Will you get me out of here, get me out for just one night?’

‘You want to drink?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d be a fool to help you to do that.’

‘Be a fool. I must have one night of freedom, Ben. Do that for me.’

‘Erik.’

‘Jesus Christ, do you want me to beg, on my knees? I will, if that will move you.’

‘All right. What do you want me to do?’

I was to walk ahead of him and make sure that the way was clear; he did not need me to enable him to escape, but I think he needed me to keep his courage intact. I should not have done it. God knows, I should not have done it. 

We caught the city in a moment of magnificence, as the violet light of evening crept down from the crown of Mount Hymettus and set a soft, trembling fire among the pure white buildings, the ancient streets. The shoeshine boys were busy, preparing their clients for the night’s strolling, and young girls flitted in waves of excitement across the squares, their eyes flashing, faces flushed with the nameless possibilities surely to be met under the stars. Erik, high on freedom and the evening air, smiled on it all with a sad, gentle smile, on all that he would lose, was already losing. And Athens, like the exquisite whore that she is, laid herself before him with that look, all violet, gold and white, saying, farewell.

We went drinking. I could not keep him from it. I did not try. He was so happy, so deliriously, relievedly, carelessly happy, that I had not the courage to hold him back from all those bottles, in the amber and clear depths of which the last possibilities of his life lay. We moved from bar to bar, at first purposefully, with great big grins on our faces. I had never felt so at ease in his company. We stopped somewhere in the Plaka to consume a fearful mess of eggplant and crushed meat, which Erik said would see us right through the night’s drinking. He was pleased with that phrase. See us right, he kept repeating, chuckling,
shaking his head.

From the Plaka, we crawled down to Syntagma Square, descended steps in a crevice behind a hoarding, and in the low Aladdin’s cave which we found there, we came at last to rest. It was an odd dive. The woman behind the bar turned out to be a man, or, to put it another way, the man behind the bar was turned out to be a woman. Its name was Fatima, and it stood with one stout, faintly furred arm laid upon the gleaming counter, turning its powdered head this way and that, like some great friendly awkward bird, flinging lewd remarks at the habitués, and squawking at new arrivals. As to the customers, it would take a textbook to cover the variety. I wondered how they could talk and talk and talk, exhaustively, sincerely, about nothing, for such long unbroken periods. The lights were dim, so dim that they hardly deserved their name. I remember mirrors, countless mirrors, and a million tiny crystals of glass which bent and twisted the glow from the bulbs, and laid down a ceaseless undertone of tinkling music beneath the
high-pitched
chatter. It was a pretty place. I liked it, god forgive me. Erik and I sat face to face across a little table, grinning at each other and chewing the rims of our glasses in that fatuous, inane attitude which marks the emergence from the far side of total drunkenness into a state where trivia impinge on the brain like explosions of supernatural grace. I must have been very far gone, for at one point, late in the evening, I found that, unnoticed by me, we had been joined by a third party: Colonel Sesosteris sat motionless between us, a billious Buddha, staring at his hands, which lay lightly folded in the centre of the table, as though he were wondering to whom they might belong.