The Balkan Trilogy (130 page)

With nothing else to do in a city where life was ebbing to a stop, the three sat on and watched the sun move off the square. It was late in the afternoon when the hearse and carriage drew up before the hotel.

‘They’ve done him proud,’ Guy said.

Four black horses, with silver trappings and tails to the ground, drew a black hearse of ornamental wood and
engraved glass, surmounted by woeful black cherubs who held aloft black candles and black ostrich plumes. These splendours pleased the mourners but they did not please the hotel management. As soon as sighted, a porter came pelting down the steps to order them round to the back entrance.

While Alan and the Pringles stood in the kitchen doorway Dobson arrived in a taxi and joined them. The undertakers had taken the flimsy coffin up to the bathroom and the living listened to the arguments and the scraping of wood as it was manoeuvred down the grey and grimy cement stairway.

Dobson, sniffing the smell of cooking-fat, rubbed his head-fluff ruefully and said: ‘This is really too bad!’

‘It could be worse,’ Guy said. ‘Chekov died in an hotel and they smuggled him out in a laundry basket.’

The coffin edged round into view and reached the hall where the bearers, placing it on the ground, lifted the lid so all might see that Yakimov and his possessions were intact.

‘We forgot to close his eyes,’ Harriet said in distress and, looking into them for the last time, saw they had lost their lustre. Despite his greed, his ingratitude, his long history of unpaid debts, he had a blameless look and she found herself moved by his corpse, wrapped there in the Czar’s old coat, as she had never been moved by him in life. He had died demurring, but it had been a gentle demur and the gaze that met hers was mild, a little bewildered but resigned to the mischance that had finished him off. Her own eyes filled with tears. She turned away to hide them; the coffin lid was replaced, the carnations placed upon it, and the cortège set out.

Dobson had asked the English
popa
Father Harvey to conduct the service: ‘After all,’ he said, ‘Yaki must have been Orthodox.’

‘But Russian Orthodox, surely?’ said Alan.

‘His mother was Irish,’ Harriet said. ‘So he may have been a Catholic.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Dobson. ‘Harvey’s a dear fellow and won’t hold it against him.’

They drove at a solemn pace past the Zappion and the Temple of Zeus and came to a district that no one except Alan had visited before. Above the cemetery wall, tall cypresses rose into the evening blue of the sky. Father Harvey had already arrived. In his
popa
’s robes, with his blond beard, his blond hair knotted behind the veil that fell from his
popa
’s hat, he led the funeral procession through the gate into the graveyard quiet.

There had been no one to buy a plot for Yakimov. The Legation was paying for the funeral, but the coffin would have only temporary lodging in the ground. Alan mentioned that he had had to identify the remains of a friend who had died while on holiday in Athens.

‘What was there to identify?’ Dobson asked.

‘Precious little. Bodies disintegrate quickly in the dry summer heat; soon there’s nothing but dust and a few powdery bones and bits of cloth. They put it all into a box and place it in the ossuary. I prefer that. I don’t want to lie mouldering for years. And think of the saving of space!’

‘There’ll be no one to identify Yakimov,’ Harriet said.

Alan sadly agreed.

There would be no one left who had known him in life or remembered that the scraps of cloth lying among his long, fragile bones, had been a sable-lined greatcoat, once worn by the doomed, unhappy Czar of all the Russias.

Passing among the trees and shrubs, they came on small communities of graves that seemed like gatherings of friends, silent a moment till the intruders went by. When the ceremony was over, Harriet fell behind the party of mourners and, walking soundlessly on the grass verges, lingered to look at the statues and photographs of the dead. She did not want to leave this sequestered safety, where the ochre-golden light of the late sun rayed through the cypresses and gilded the leaves.

The richness of the enclosing greenery secluded her and gave her a sense of safety. When the men’s voices passed out of hearing, a velvet quiet came down so she could imagine
herself dead and immaterial in a region where the alarms of the present could affect her no more than those of the past. She wandered away from the direction of the gate, unwilling to leave.

Guy called her. She came to a stop beside a stone boy seated on a chair. Guy called again, breaking the air’s intimate peace, and she felt her awareness contract and concentrate upon the destructive and futile hazards outside.

Guy came through the trees, reproving her: ‘Darling, do come along. Dobson has to get back to the Legation. There’s a lot to be done there.’

On the return journey, Harriet asked what they were doing up at the Legation.

‘Oh!’ Dobson gave a gasp of amusement at the ridiculous ploys of life. ‘We’re burning papers. We’re sorting out the accumulation of centuries. All the important, top-secret documents written by all the important top-secret characters in history are being dumped on a bonfire in the Legation garden.’

Alan was returning with him to help in this task so the Pringles, dropped in the centre of Athens, found themselves alone.

Guy was certain that Ben Phipps would be waiting for them at the Corinthian, but there was no sign of him.

‘Let’s try Zonar’s.’

They walked quickly in the outlandish hope that Tandy might, after all, be there. But he was not there. And Ben Phipps was not there. The table was unoccupied. Disconcerted, disconsolate, they stood and looked at it. What they missed most was Tandy’s welcome. He had liked them; but he had liked everyone, in a general way, as some people like dogs, and might have excused himself by saying: ‘They are company.’ He had been in Athens only ten days and in that time had become a habit. Now he had gone, it was as though a familiar tree had been cut down, a landmark lost.

They felt no impulse to sit down without him. While they stood on the corner of University Street, some English soldiers came and began to set up a machine-gun.

‘What on earth’s happening?’ Guy asked.

‘Martial law,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’d go in if I were you. There’s a report that the fifth column mean to bump off all the British.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

The sergeant laughed: ‘Tell you the truth, I don’t, neither.’

The Greeks seated in the café chairs watched apathetic, as the gun was placed in position, resigned to anything that might happen in a city passing out of control.

Standing there with nothing to do, nowhere to go, Harriet could see from his ruminative expression that Guy was trying to think of some duty or obligation that might protect him from the desolation in the air. Fearful of being left alone, she caught his arm and said: ‘Please don’t leave me.’

‘I ought to go to the School,’ he said. ‘I’ve left some books there; and the students might come to say good-bye.’

‘All right. We’ll go together.’

The sun had dropped behind the houses and long, azure shadows lay over the roads. With time to waste, the Pringles strolled back to Stadium Street where other machine-guns stood on corners. Soldiers were patrolling the pavements with rifles at the ready. Most of the shops had shut and some were boarded and battened as a precaution against riots or street-fighting. Yet, apart from the guns, the soldiers and the boarded shops, there was no visible derangement of life. There was no violence; there were no demonstrations; simply, the everyday world was running down.

A sense of dream pervaded the town. Even at this time, human beings were entering the world, or leaving it. Yakimov had died and had to be buried, but his death had been an event in another dimension of time. Now, it was amazing to see the tram-cars running. When one of them clanked past, people stared, bewildered by men who had still the heart to go on working. The rest of them seemed to be without occupation, employment or interest. They had nothing to do. There was nothing to be done. They had wandered out of doors and now stood about, blank and silent in the nullity of grief.

Before they reached Omonia Square, Harriet was stopped by the sight of a shoe standing in an empty window: a single shoe of emerald silk with a high, brilliant-studded heel. Peering into the gloom of the shop, she saw there was nothing else. Cupboards stood open; drawers had been pulled out; paper and cardboard boxes had been kicked into corners. The only thing that remained was the shoe with its glittering heel.

In the square they saw Vourakis again, still carrying his shopping-basket, though there was nothing left to buy. A few shops had remained open but the owners gazed out vacantly, knowing the routine of buying and selling had come to an end like everything else.

Vourakis was tired. His eyelids were red and his dark, narrow face had sunk in as though in the last few hours old age had overtaken him. He had spoken to Guy only once or twice but caught his arm and held to him, saying: ‘You should go, you know. You should save yourselves while there is time.’

‘They can’t find a ship for us,’ Guy said.

Vourakis shook his head in compassion. ‘Let us sit down a while,’ he said, and led them to a café that smelt strongly of aniseed. The only thing kept there was ouzo and while they drank a couple of glasses, Vourakis told them stories of heroism and defiance that he had heard from the wounded who were now coming in in thousands from the field hospitals. Even now, he said, when all was lost, there were Greeks resisting and determined to resist to the death.

These stories of gallantry in the midst of defeat filled Guy and Harriet with profound sadness; and they felt the same sadness about them everywhere in the hushed city.

Vourakis suddenly remembered that his wife was waiting for him: ‘If you cannot escape,’ he said, ‘come to us,’ and he parted from them as though they had been lifetime friends.

When they went on towards Omonia Square, an ashen twilight lay on the streets. As the evening deepened, the atmosphere seemed to shift from despair to dread. There had been no announcement. Vourakis had said that telephone communication with the front had broken down. So far as anyone
in Athens could know, there had been no change of any kind, yet as though the enemy were expected that night, there was a sense of incipient panic, impossible to explain, or explain away.

The School building had been shut for Easter week. Guy expected to find it empty but the front door lay open and inside half a dozen male students were moving furniture, despite the protests of the porter, George. Flushed by their activity, they gathered round Guy shouting: ‘Sir, sir, we thought you had gone, sir.’

‘I haven’t gone yet,’ Guy said, putting on an appearance of severity.

‘Sir, sir, you should be gone, sir. The Germans will be here tomorrow. They might even come sooner, sir.’

‘We’ll go when we can. We can’t go before. Meanwhile, what are you up to?’

The boys explained that they intended taking the School furniture into their homes to prevent its seizure by the enemy. ‘It will be safe. It will be yours, sir, when you come back. We’ll return it all to you.’

Three more students appeared at the top of the stairs carrying a filing-cabinet between them. Those at the bottom, shrill with excitement, began shouting up instructions and a small, dark youth with wide eyes and tough black hair, came panting to Guy, his teeth a-flash, crying: ‘To me, this very day, an admiring fellow said: “Kosta, you are to make suggestions
born
.”’

Guy insisted that operations should cease for that evening. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘you can take what you like, but just at the moment I want to sort out my belongings.’

The departing students shook him by the hand, exclaiming regretfully because he must go, but for the young there was piquancy in change, and they went off laughing. It was the only Greek laughter the Pringles heard that day.

George, the porter, his grey hair curling about his dark, ravaged cheeks, gripped Guy’s hand and stared into his face with tear-filled eyes. Guy was deeply moved until he discovered that this emotion had nothing to do with his own departure.

George had replaced a younger man who would now be returning from the war. ‘What is to become of me?’ he wanted to know. ‘He will turn me into the street.’ George had his wife, daughter and daughter’s two children in the basement with him. The School was their home; they had nowhere else to go.
Kyrios Diefthyntis
must write a letter to say that George was the rightful possessor of the basement room.

Guy was disconcerted by this appeal because the old porter knew his appointment had been temporary. ‘What of the young man who has been fighting so bravely at the front?’ he said.

The porter answered: ‘I, too, fought bravely long ago.’

Guy suggested that the problem be referred to Lord Pinkrose, and the old man gave a howl. Everyone knew that the Lord Pinkrose, a mysterious and unapproachable aristocrat, never came near the School. No,
Kyrios Diefthyntis
, with his tender heart, must be the one to act.

In distress Guy looked to Harriet for aid but she refused to be involved. Guy wanted only to give, leaving to others the much less pleasant task of refusing. In this present quandary, she decided, he must do the refusing himself.

She said she would wait for him in the sanded courtyard. When she left the building, she saw Greek soldiers walking along the side road and went to the wall to watch them. They were coming from the station. She had some thought of welcoming them back, but saw at once that they were not looking for welcome. Like the British soldiers she had seen on the first lorries into Athens, these men, shadowy in the twilight, were haggard with defeat. Some were the ‘walking wounded’, expected to find their own way to hospital; others had their feet wrapped up in rags; all, whether wounded or not, had the livid faces of sick men. They gave an impression of weightlessness. Their flesh had shrunk from want of food, but that had happened to everyone in Greece. With these men, it was as though their bones had become hollow like the bones of birds. Their uniforms, that shredded like worn-out paper, were dented by their gaunt, bone-sharp shoulders and arms.