Nightspawn (23 page)

Yacinth, my Hyacinth.

Escape, as I choose to call it, was absurdly easy. I walked down the hill, skirted again the place where the soldiers should have been (though they had left) and, with the lucidity and calm which only a maniac can achieve, I found a taxi. Yes, a taxi. The army was everywhere, in tanks, in jeeps, in lorries, on foot, but through it all, the battered yellow cab came nosing, its windows wide, and the car radio blaring martial music,
appropriately
enough, filling the streets with the strains of war. I stepped boldly from the bushes. The driver, a wiry man with a pencil moustache and jet black eyebrows, looked at me dubiously as I climbed in behind him. He was chewing gum, and, as I settled down in the back seat, he turned, laid an elbow on the headrest beside him, and blew a huge pink bubble.

‘The arm,’ he said. ‘Don’t let it bleed over the upholstery.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘English?’

‘No, yes.’

‘That’s a bullet wound?’

‘No, I … a fall.’

‘A fall.’

‘Yes. Will you take me to this address? It’s written here, you see.’

We roared away from the kerb, and headed swiftly north. Apart from the army, there were few vehicles on the road. Those little eyes watched me in the driving mirror. I tried to move out of range, but it was impossible.

‘Great things happening today,’ he said, over his shoulder.

‘Yes.’

‘I knew it was coming.’

‘Ah Jesus,’ I sighed.

Those nerves were creeping forward to investigate the torn
flesh. I was bleeding on the upholstery. The driver turned up the volume of the radio, and tapped out the rhythm on the steering wheel. I knew that none of this was real, but I closed my eyes, and savoured the dream.

‘English. English, you’re here.’

I opened my eyes to find another bubble being blown in my face. The taxi was parked in the dusty courtyard, near the caged tree. The driver grinned.

‘You’re here,’ he said again.

‘Ah.’

‘You want me to get someone?’

‘Iakavos.’

‘Who?’

‘Papa Iakavos.’

The great door was drawn open, and the little priest with the black beard peered out. He came to the window of the cab, looked in at me, and scuttled away. The driver went around and opened my door, threw a look at the pool of blood on the seat, and shook his head. Iakavos appeared, and gaped at me in astonishment and concern. I lifted my hand in a greeting, and smiled.

‘Take me, Papa, for I die.’

I stayed in the monastery for a long time. I lost count of the days, of the weeks, eventually. They gave me Erik’s old room, overlooking the courtyard. His belongings were still there. That was, in a way, comforting. I thought a great deal about him. One day, when I could at last move around, I found, in the wardrobe, his file against humanity. I sat with it on the balcony all day, going through it, as though it were a dossier on his life, trying to discover what had killed him; for Erik, I felt, had died long before Andreas’s bullet reached his heart. I found, on a blank page near the end, these words written:

I could but barely remember having said it. Again and again, I read those words, striving toward some deeper meaning which Erik must have perceived, and at last, after some days, I came to realize that his ruin had come about, not through lack in himself, but through a lack in the world.

Papa Iakavos was a good man. He asked me no questions. Once, in an effort to relieve my torture, I tried to tell him what I had done, what had happened. He sat opposite me in his black robes, smiling and nodding, not understanding one word that I spoke. Perhaps I did not make sense. How could I? There is no sense in any of it.

A doctor was brought to me, a tiny, gentle jew with the round face of a cherub. He ignored the wounded arm which I waved at him, which Iakavos was tending expertly. I realized that this doctor was a psychiatrist. I tried to talk to him, as I had talked to Iakavos, but I could not. I told him lies, clever lies, perhaps, over which he frowned, seemingly baffled. Eventually, he went away, to make arrangements for me to go into a clinic. But he had no sooner left than I packed what things I thought I might need, and walked down the stairs, and through the gate, and escaped, as Erik had once done, so long ago, now.

The city seemed disturbingly normal. I had expected … I do not know what I had expected; martial law, perhaps, and manacled political prisoners being herded through the streets. A few more soldiers than usual were in evidence, and that was all. The evening papers were shouting about a dangerous madman on the loose in the city, and for a long time, before I found the nerve to buy one, I thought they were talking about me; they were not. I sat in a café, in the warm sun, and searched the pages for some mention of Hyacinth’s death. There was none, not a word. Perhaps it never happened.

I went to my bank, stood at the counter, and spoke my name clearly and loudly, expecting the combined might of the police, army and secret service, led by Helena screaming for blood, to
come bearing down on me. Nothing happened. The clerk was polite. He closed my account, and paid me my cash. Some royalties had come in; I was richer than I had expected. I took the train to the Piraeus, and bought a boat ticket. I sailed to the island. No one was interested in me. It was, I can admit now, it was disappointing. What a strange cold creature I am.

I wish that I had some last scene with the boy to recount, as a way of saying goodbye to him, some last moment of tenderness; but I have not. I can only speak of a day long ago in spring, some time after the party. I was travelling in a bus through the city, going … where? I cannot remember. It was one of those days when the world seems to be offering some consolation for all the times it has disappointed. Each new scene, as I came upon it, presented to me a further step in what would surely be the unlocking of a great secret. Sunlight, glancing from a high window, found a bit of broken white glass in the gutter, and set it ablaze. Trees fell away and showed me a young girl, her hair flying, riding a red bicycle against a sea of blue sky and light. An old man, on a park bench, gazed at a bird, and the bird gazed at him, turning its head this way and that. Above ugly black roofs, like rotten teeth, where, before, there had been only sky, the pillars of the Parthenon, golden, perfect, rose into view. And then, when the bus was parked for a short stop at traffic lights, I looked through the window, across the road, and saw, under a tree, Helena and Yacinth standing, their faces turned away from me, as they looked intently down the street. Her hand rested lightly, forgotten, on the boy’s shoulder; his hands were clasped before him. Light, breaking through the tree, fell into his hair, creating a burning aureole around his head. He seemed hardly human, but, rather, a manifestation of time itself, of continuity, of history; he seemed a promise to hold up in the face of death. I thought, not daring to take my eyes from him, that if I could see what it was that he saw down at the end of that street, where he looked so intently, I would discover the
secret, so long hidden from me, the secret of, yes, the secret of art.

It does not matter that I have probably missed the one chance in my life to know real love, the real anguish, torment and joy of love; it does not even matter that he is dead. I am not being cruel or vicious; I cannot explain, only I say it again, it does not matter that he is dead.

So. There are those who can perceive a heartrending beauty in the truth of the Pythagorean theorem; I am not even sure of its truth. I can offer nothing better than flawed and imperfect jewels. I never could offer anything other than an apprehension of the shadows that surround a beam of sunlight, the whisper of unheard music, the smiles of Botticelli’s maidens. Art is, after all, only mimicry.

Some things remain, scraps and bits. I did not stay for long on the island. It had changed. I had lost it somewhere, somehow, in the coils of the year that had passed. Apostolas, Erik’s man, came to see me one night. He was a great hulking inarticulate boy with burns on his hands from hot cordite. I asked him if he was still practising with his dynamite in the hills. He shook his head. He was worried, and asked for my help; he thought that the police were watching him. Imagine, he asked me for help. I told him that I could do nothing for him. He went away. Next day, the police arrested him. By then, it seemed superfluous to add that as another crime to my list. I could not have helped him. I could not help myself.

I returned to the city. I took my old hotel room again, just to tempt the fates, to tempt Papa Dop’s police, that is. They
steadfastly
refused to be tempted. I went to see Iakavos. He seemed not to remember me at first, but then, when I mentioned Erik, he smiled, and put his arm around my shoulder. He was a mine of information, if one could have deciphered more of his strange language. One surprise which he gave me was the fact that old Rabin had been arrested. He had, it seemed, been Mr Big in the
counter-revolution which we had been helping. Helping, ha. I found that hard to believe. But then, why not? Rabin had his secrets.

My arm healed, and I could use it again, but something vital must have been severed in it, for I could but barely move the fingers. I taught myself to type with my left hand only. The departure of dexterity seemed a fitting symbol.

I found, in an old newspaper, a photograph of Erik being carried on a stretcher from the hotel where Andreas had shot him. The picture fascinated me, I cannot say why. It had been taken at the usual crooked angle, and the stretcher, which one of the white-coated orderlies seemed about to drop, stretched from the top left corner of the snap to the bottom right. The thing had the proportions of a carefully posed painting. But as for Erik himself (a twisted face with something dark streaming from the mouth) I could not feel anything. It was not really him, but someone else, a one dimensional creature in an unreal agony. I tore it up, and threw it away. I wish I had not done that.

I went up to the house on the hill, one day, but the place was locked and barred. I rang the bell, but nothing came back to me, only silence. Everything was silent. I scratched, with the toe of my sandal, a message in the dust outside the gate. And then I went away.

One last report, the one which seems to me to sum it all up, in some way which I cannot identify. Here it is, for what it is worth.

One night, very late, well after midnight, there was a knock upon the door of my hotel room. This is it, I thought, with relief, almost. Outside, in the corridor, stood a little man whom I
vaguely recognized, but could not place.

‘White?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Come with me. Colonel Sesosteris wants to see you.’

The long limousine, which I recognized, stood outside in the street. Purring, it carried me and the silent driver across the city, to Aristotle’s house. A light burned in an upper window.

‘Listen,’ I said, laying my hand on the driver’s arm. ‘What’s this about?’

He shrugged, and said nothing, and led me into the house. The place was cold, and smelled like a hospital. I went up the stairs, and along a hall. The driver opened a door, and stood back, motioning me inside.

A weak bulb burned over the bed, and through the downward sifting of its light, the scene slowly advanced. In one corner of the room a table stood, draped with a napkin, and bearing instruments of burnished steel. There was a bowl of needles, a syringe and a wicked pair of scissors. The stiff white linen of the napkin fell from the corners of the table in fluted folds, and the folds created shadows. Shadow ascending, and substance falling, produced, together, a false sense of movement at the edge of my vision. Beside the table there was a chair, with slender legs, delicately curved, terminating in carved and polished claws which gripped the vague design of the carpet with inexplicable fierceness. Upon the chair a woman sat, dressed in white, with a white cap precariously perched on her hair. She was reading a novel, and nibbling, with the intensity of the plot, the nail of her little finger. The bed was huge, ornate, and low, and across the headboard a band of nymphs and satyrs pranced, flesh-pink, and forest-green, and the
glittering
silver of a stream, which knew no flow or flood, appeared through painted leaves. The old man lay motionless under the counterpane, his head turned sideward upon the pillow, his eyes closed. Two thoughts came strangely to me; I remembered such another bed, in another world, and I remembered the taxi driver who had carried me to Papa Iakavos. I advanced into the room. The nurse lifted her head.

‘Sh.’

She folded back an ear of the page, closed the book, and, taking my arm, she marched me firmly from the room. The hall was silent and empty. Two mirrors, one of them cracked, faced each other from opposing alcoves, bearing away a bowl of blown roses through an infinity of images. I stared at what seemed to be the solid version of the flowers, while the nurse, with her hands folded under her breasts, spoke to me.

‘Are you Mr White?’

‘Yes.’

‘He has been calling for you.’

‘Why?’

‘He wants to explain something, I don’t know what. He is very weak, you must understand, and his voice is not strong.’

A question, unspoken, hovered between us. She had a strong kind face, ands her eyebrows needed to be plucked. I said,

‘I didn’t know him very well.’

‘No?’

‘He knew a friend of mine, who’s dead now.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you?’

The nurse put her hands behind her back, and considered her black shoes.

‘I think I do,’ she said.

‘Then I wish you’d explain it to me.’

She smiled. We walked some steps down the corridor. I asked,

‘Is he dying?’

Her mouth tightened, and she said,

‘You must ask the doctor that, in the morning.’