The Europe That Was (3 page)

He fired. Pavlo sat down, biting his knuckles, free for ever of military service. Before the smoke of the powder had cleared, Despina had recovered the loaves and sliced out the circles of black and pink.

‘For the children,' she sobbed, as she threw her arms and her long hair about her husband.

DIONYSUS AND THE PARD

His thumb was very obviously missing. You can know a man for weeks—if you are interested in his face—without spotting the absence of a finger, but you must miss the thumb of his right hand, especially when he is raising a glass at reasonably frequent intervals. A hand without a thumb is strangely animal; one looks for the missing talon on the under side of the wrist.

If you saw the back view of Dionysus Angelopoulos in any eastern Mediterranean port, you would at once put him down as an archaeologist or something cast up upon the beach by the Hellenic Travellers' Club. Judging by the tall, spare figure, slightly stooping, dressed in shaggy and loose-fitting Harris tweed, you expected a mild, pleasing and peering countenance with perhaps a moustache or a little Chelseaish beard; but when he turned round he showed an olive face with thin jowls hanging, like those of an underfed bloodhound, on either side of a blue chin, and melancholy brown eyes of the type that men call empty and women liquid when they are hiding nothing but boredom.

It was for the sake of professional prestige that Mr Angelopoulos modelled himself upon what he considered an Englishman ought to look like. He was the Near-Eastern agent for a famous English firm whose name is familiar to few women but to all civilized men. He was responsible for shining palaces above and below ground from Alexandria to Ankara. Wherever there were Greek priests and Turkish coffee one was faced sooner or later by his trade-mark (a little below that of his Staffordshire principals):

THE ALPH
Dionysus Angelopoulos
Sanitary Engineer

He was a man of poetic imagination and had read his ‘Kubla Khan'. He was also a historian.

‘Between myself and the fall of the Roman Empire,' he said when presenting me with his card, ‘there was nothing but indiscipline.'

We had met on board a tiny Greek passenger ship bound from the Piraeus to Beirut: The cramped quarters and the Odyssean good
cheer had swiftly ripened friendship. That is to say, he accepted me as a listener and, when he permitted me to speak, took note of any colloquialisms I might use and added them forthwith to his astonishing vocabulary.

‘It is obvious,' said Mr Angelopoulos, ‘that the ancients tighted themselves with more enthusiasm than we. Frenzy, no? Wine and poetry were the business of Dionysus, no? For Plato it was natural to see godliness in a tighted man. Today we see no godliness. We have changed. It is the fault of the religious. Dear me, what bastards!'

Considering he had just consumed two bottles of admirable claret made by the Jesuits on the slopes of Lebanon, he was unjust to Christianity. But Angelopoulos was a Wesleyan-Methodist. It was a really original point of Anglicism like the Harris tweeds. He had adapted his sect as well as his appearance to the respectable selling of sanitary earthenware.

‘Godliness!' shouted Angelopoulos, raising the bottle with his right hand and placing an imaginary crown upon his head with his left. ‘Do I tell you how my thumb goes to pot?'

‘Not yet. I was going to ask you.'

‘All right. You are my friend. At this table with you I am sitting a living example of Hubris and Nemesis. I am proud I lose my thumb. Do you know La Brebis Egarée?'

‘I've heard of her.'

There were few travellers on the Syrian shore who had not heard of the Lost Sheep—a pale, rolling Frenchwoman whose habit it was, when she felt specially obscene, to declare in the unctuous voice of a priest:

‘Monsieur, je suis une brebis égarée!'

Since, anyway, she looked like a gross white ewe, the nickname stuck. She was not the type to run mythical cargoes to Buenos Aires. She merely knew everybody. Whether you fell in love with a Kurdish princess in Smyrna or a German Jewess in Jerusalem, she could tell you what your chances were and whom you should approach.

‘I tell you, old chappie,' said Angelopoulos, ‘I thought she was no more of this world. I did not know till that evening where she now abided—hung out, I should say, no?

‘The agent Socrates found for her a house in Athens, in the new suburb below Lycabettos. It is the last house in a little street that ends slap up against the cliff. The goings-on cannot be overlooked unless one should hang by his toes from the rocks. Only once was she taken at a loss. A Daphnis and Chloë were in the laurel bushes making love—how do you say that?'

I told him. He thanked me and, pulling from his pocket an expensive note-book bound in limp leather, made a formal entry in Greek and English.

‘They were so happy they went right through the laurels and slid down the rocks into her back garden. A very proper place to find themselves, no?

‘The Losted Sheep has a little restaurant upon the roof where the agent Socrates invited me to lunch. He does not pay there, I think. A meal ticket, no? He is a very useful chap. I will give you his card.'

Mr Angelopoulos searched through a portfolio full of badly printed cards, each of which set forth not only the name and address of its owner but his profession and any title to distinction he might have. He handed me:

SOCRATES PANCRATIADES
Agent d'Affaires
Hypothèques, Locations, Immeubles
Vins en gros
Publiciste

whereupon I understood that if I bought wines, a building lot or a political libel from Socrates Pancratiades I should be quoted a reasonable price and Mr Angelopoulos would get one of the infinitesimal commissions by which the Near East lives and is made glad.

‘We were two upon the roof,' went on Mr Angelopoulos, ‘the agent Socrates and I. The view was okay—the Acropolis, the Theseum, and to the south, Hymettus. Rather! God's Truth! We were content. And the Losted Sheep did us proud. The eats were top-notch. And we were served by two little Armenians—big-busted angulars you find seeing them dead upon the walls of an Egyptian tomb. Tartlets or Turtle Doves! O estimable dead!

‘Attend to me, old chappie. It was Athens in the spring and the Losted Sheep's brandy was special reserve from the Achaea vineyard. You have seen the Achaea? Well, it is on the hills behind Patras. And there is the Gulf of Corinth at your feet with blue mountains beyond and the triremes skidding into the water at Naupactus. Splosh! No? And Aphrodite casts a veil about the swift ship. At that distance you cannot see oars and foam, but mist you see.'

‘Triremes?' I asked, being a full bottle behind Mr Angelopoulos.

‘In the eye of the spirit, old chappie. I will give you a card. Then maybe they will let you buy the special reserve and you shall see triremes, remembering where the grapes grow.

‘The agent Socrates was soon tighted. I myself was tighted—but like an English gentleman. Or no. For an English gentleman always wants something. Barbarians! But I love you, my dear.'

‘Hellas,' I said, realizing that this startling declaration was merely an apology, ‘is the mother of all nations.'

‘Incontestably all right!' agreed Mr Angelopoulos. ‘I was content.
So, you see, I was not like an English gentleman. I wanted nothing. I was a god looking down upon Athens from the Losted Sheep's roof.

‘She asked me if I would drink more brandy. I did not want more brandy. Then she asked me if I would make a visit to Fifi. I did not want to see Fifi. But the agent Socrates was asleep and the Armenians were asleep, and the Losted Sheep chattered. She did not understand that it was Athens and sunset and I, Dionysus, have a poet's entrails. I did not want Fifi, but if Fifi were young and would stay naked and quiet upon my knees, she would be better than the talk of the Losted Sheep, no?

‘So I said: ‘If your Fifi is beautiful, I will make her a visit. But if she is not beautiful, I will smell your fat, Brebis, while my priests eat you.' I was a god, you see.

‘The Losted Sheep promised me that Fifi was more beautiful than any tail-piece I ever saw. So I went with her down from the roof and through the rendezvous house into the garden. In the side of Lycabettos was a cave with iron bars across the mouth.

‘There is Fifi,' she said.

‘I look. I see damn-all. A hole in the yellow rock and the shadows of the bushes where the Daphnis and Chloë entertained themselves. I do not know what to think. The Losted Sheep was a naughty one. She was maybe keeping a little savage behind the bars or a dame off her head with the bats. And then Fifi stretched herself and came to see who we were. She was a big leopard. Very beautiful, I bet you! The Losted Sheep had chattered, but she had watched me. She knew I did not want human things to worship me.

‘Herself she would not approach Fifi. The bars were wide, and Fifi could get her paws through and most of her head. But I, Dionysus, had no fear. I spoke to Fifi. I sat on the sill of the cage and tickled her behind the ears. She liked that. She rubbed herself on the bars and purred. Then she was gone. I could only see her eyes in the darkness at the back of the cave.

‘I called to her and she came at me through the air. So long and slender as if a love should fly down from heaven into my embraces. The Losted Sheep shrieked like a losted soul. But I was not afraid. I never thought to be afraid. I was a jolly god. Fifi knew that I would not hurt her. I knew that she would not hurt me. It was mutual confidence as in the sanitary or other business.

‘She landed with all four feet together. I pulled her whiskers. She tapped my face with her paw to tell me she would play. So soft. So strong. I have felt nothing like it in my life. I shall never feel anything like it. They were created cats, you will remember, that man might give himself the pleasure of imagining that he caresses the tiger. To caress the tiger herself, that is for a god.

‘I stroked her stomach. She purred. I stabbed into the fur my nails,
up and down her backbone.'—Mr Angelopoulos held out his thumbless claw, crooking and contracting the fingers.—‘She was in ecstasy. There was a communion between me and Fifi. All she felt, I felt. It tickled me delicately from the point of my fingers to my kidneys. I knew when she had had enough, when her pleasure could not more be endured. It was the same for me. If she had touched me again with her paw, I should have bitten her.

‘And so we parted. I wept. I knew I should never feel such godly pleasure again. And there was the Losted Sheep shrieking and moaning. I put out my hands to her to stroke her as I had stroked Fifi. She ran. And so I woke the agent Socrates and we went away.'

Mr Angelopoulos was silent, brooding over the splendour of his past divinity.

‘But your thumb?' I asked.

‘My thumb—yes, my dear, I had forgotten. Hubris and Nemesis, of which is sitting with you the sad example. A week later I was in Constantinople. I had businesses near the port and I was coming home at night from Galata to Pera. There are streets with steps, no? Little stairs with stinks. There was a street with cats on all the steps. I stopped to talk to them—I, Dionysus, the catman who is chums with leopards. But I forgot that I was sober. I was a man and no more a god. I was a danger to all beasts. There was a pail of ordures and a grey kitten eating fish-heads from it. I stroked him and he bit me in the thumb. How should he know I did not want the fish-heads? If I had been tighted and a god, he would have known I needed no fish-heads.

‘And so you see, old chappie, my thumb was tinctured red and then blue, and then it was green and white like marble. Thus I hospitalized myself, and they cut it off. Nemesis, old chappie, or the godly tit for tat as we say in English.'

LOW WATER

Gino's was an island. Its inhabitants had a single culture; it was surrounded by a sea as acquiescent as they. In summer the happy Mediterranean disturbed Gino's not at all; in winter harsh little waves, last remnants of storm beyond the narrow bay, spat fiercely at the weed-draped jetty and gurgled away in dark impotence beneath the flooring. The piles which supported Gino's were rotten; the planks which joined the café to the mainland stayed in place by sheer inertia. Every year the many slopes of the tiled roof, the angles of the wooden walls, became crazier by another inch. When anything fell off, Gino, eventually, put it back again. Neither screw nor nail would grip in the soft timber. A hole under the eaves which had mildly annoyed his clients for two seasons he stopped with a broken frying pan, leaning a balk of driftwood against the wall to hold the patch in place.

The culture of Gino's island was listless and Levantine. His nationality was Turkish; his father had been Maltese as much as anything, and his mother half Greek and half Italian. The ancestry of his girls resembled his own in so far as they were of mixed blood and obscure descent. The island industry was the provision of routine entertainment for summer visitors. Somebody had to undertake the job. It called neither for shame nor self-congratulation; it merely fulfilled a social need like unloading coal or selling hashish or cleaning sewers or becoming a policeman, and demanded—at any rate from Gino—no undignified activity of the body.

Gino was very long and very thin. His interior was full of national and foreign parasites, for he had been poor and a traveller. To him his island was home at long last, and upon it was no more need for energy or emotion. His only token of feeling was an undulation of the spine, which might have expressed satisfaction, at the same hour every morning when he rose from breakfast, took rod and line and started to fish from the stage outside the kitchen door. He fished from eleven to six, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing, hunched over the Mediterranean which sparkled and laughed at the foot of his steps and spread out beneath his island into a still lake of deep greens and browns sown with traps and nets of his own devising.

He caught fish. He caught fish continuously. They came, it was said in the town, all the way across the Mediterranean for him to
catch; and indeed Gino's island was about as far east as they could swim. It seemed to be a fish terminus and round point; after a quick nip from Gino's garbage or the soft ooze beneath his island there was nothing for it but to turn back to Greece and Gibraltar and the rich North African banks.

Gino himself looked like an old grey mullet set up by a bad taxidermist who had put back the skin over insufficient stuffing. His head was hairless and his dull eyes were too large. His fishlike mind knew none of the enthusiasms of humanity except the cooking of his catch. For this he was famous. Whether he fried to biscuit hardness in deep oil or adventured in the casseroles and herbs and wine of French cuisine or served his fish boiled and cold and decorated, they were products of high human art. His other cooking was vile. Indeed all of Gino that was not fish was distasteful.

He employed six performers. Each year they were sent to him by an agency in Alexandria. One of the batch had to be able to dance efficiently; two must be endurable however sordid their acts; the remaining three had just to get on and off the stage without incident and were usually over forty. He paid wages and commission to the upper three and commission only to the lower three, and put them all up in rooms like sunlit bathing hutches on the floor above the café. Gentlemen were strictly forbidden both by Gino and the police to visit this second floor; but the holiday season was short and the police were very poorly paid. As for Gino, he had signed a Notice To Customers and thereafter was indifferent to what went on upstairs unless the noise was too great. Then, in a barely audible voice, he pointed out that the house was very old and might fall down. If anyone were injured, he said, there would be a scandal.

That year there were scandals enough. They were the fault of Tatiana. She was an Egyptian with a Russian mother; and in her character a faint and purely traditional Russianness had remained proof against the lethargy of Egypt. Tatiana was the star performer and neither better nor worse than dancers whom the Alexandria agency had sent to Gino in other years. Her morals, which mattered to nobody, were above the usual standard. Her behaviour, for so conventional an island, was indiscreet. She gave parties to her favourites. She considered the whole upper storey as her own and dashed in and out of bedrooms at awkward moments. Her colleagues, who themselves observed the decent melancholy proper to Gino's, accepted Tatiana's instability as a new fashion from worldly Egypt and a useful topic of conversation.

The other two paid performers were Miriam and Elena the Greek. Miriam, being half Sudanese, was too black for popularity; Gino's clients preferred to cherish the illusion that they were being entertained by pure Europeans. Elena the Greek was born at Marseilles of
port parentage into which, somewhere, had entered a strain of Chinese blood; she was called the Greek because that was the language she spoke most fluently. The three girls who worked for commission alone had the names and nationalities that the agency had given them. They were old, pink animals who answered to these names. How or in what memory each addressed herself could not be known. They lived in a dead present untroubled by remembered suffering. They had no clear thought left to them and little revealing speech.

Gino's season was short and it was not much of a season. The little town was Turkish; the islands which closed the western horizon were Italian; the inhabitants of both were largely Greek. It belonged nowhere and had nothing to offer the moneyed tourist. Yet the two hotels and the red and white villas set irregularly among dusty country lanes suited the pockets of small businessmen with the faiths and customs of Europe and were reasonably full of their families attracted by the hard and waveless beach. The fathers and elder sons, dignified and respectable by day, considered it proper to relax at night. Gino's represented for them the smart cabarets of French
plages
and Florida beaches familiarised by the cinema.

Upstairs and downstairs Tatiana disordered the island. She was always surrounded by two or three young admirers who were fascinated into outrageous behaviour though not into any lavish spending. She had a dashing habit of throwing her cocktails overboard ‘to feed the fishes'. This might have been good for trade if she and her parties had not thrown the glasses and crockery as well. To Gino Tatiana was a liability, a shock, a devastation. She kept the older, slow consuming, steadily paying clients away. The noise and scandal raised the weekly subvention paid to the police. The glasses, if they could not be netted, were replaceable only at fantastic prices.

Gino increased the bills by erratic and exaggerated items which led to endless arguments with the clients and, after all, had to be reduced. He left his basic charges unaltered. They were reasonable—little more than those of the hotels although there were a band and three waiters and the performers to be paid, and a cook who attended to Gino's stove when Gino himself was reluctantly gazing at the dance floor. He felt that he ought to gaze—so far, that is, as
ought
had any meaning for him—but he said no word, he took no action. He had no interest in women, individually or collectively. They were like the bottles of Egyptian whisky. There was a demand for the stuff and he supplied it.

His fitful attempts to keep up with rising costs and wages were always a year behind. He had made his calculations when he bought and fitted out the island, and felt that the one effort should be sufficient for his life; it had to be done but thereafter there should be no necessity for thought. Beneath the floor the bountiful sea worked for
him in darkness. Above was modest catering for eternal desires of men. Neither one nor the other could fail.

The season was disastrous. At the beginning of September there was nothing in the bank and the night's takings were paid out every morning. The wages of Tatiana, Miriam and Elena fell into arrears. As yet they did not complain. It was not the first time in their experience that the boss had been in difficulties.

On the next payless Saturday morning there was a row. Wages and commission were now three weeks overdue and obviously lost for ever. Even the three working crones, holding around their shapeless bodies wraps of pink and pale blue chiffon, stared at Gino with sad eyes in which was understanding of their fate. Tatiana, trim and terrifying in a beach suit, screamed at him in good Egyptian Greek. He was impassive. He bent his shoulders humbly over the till, as if it were the sea, and opened it and showed that there was nothing in it. Tatiana raged around the unswept room, buzzing like an angry insect of undoubted grace and comparative cleanliness between four greasy, wine-splashed walls, foul ashtrays, spilt food, tables stinking of sweat and debris. She hurled a bottle into the sea and was led upstairs weeping by Miriam and Elena. The other three returned to bed and their daydreams of the impossible. Gino went out to fish.

The sun shone. The paintless wooden balconies of the upper storey gave back the light of the day and the stored light of a hundred years, sparkling with the fawn and white of timber on the southern edge of a forest. Tatiana, Miriam and Elena lay in the shade of the eaves, cursing Gino. When they were silent they could hear the plop of his tackle re-entering the water, or the reverberation of a sea bream smacking its arched body against the planks of the back-door jetty.

Night brought the end. There was no band. There were no waiters. There was no assistant cook. All had gone to the hotels to make what they could in the last week before the season finished. A few habitual customers drifted in across the creaking bridge of planks. They listened to abuse of Gino and agreed. They helped themselves and the girls to drinks and paid what they liked or nothing at all. Gino did not appear.

In an hour the café had emptied. There was no gaiety, no romance; the island and its inhabitants appeared exactly what they were. The girls, like the clients, had looked to the night and music, even at Gino's, to create an endurable illusion. Now there were only themselves and the sea and the slap of moths and beetles, before unnoticed, against the glaring lights. They sat still, scattered about the room at the tables where they had been left, without energy or desire to move together.

Gino came in from the kitchen bearing a huge casserole of fish. The scent, rich and appetising, overwhelmed the staleness of the room. He
put the dish on a table with six flat cakes of bread, beckoned to the girls and went out.

They moved to the food slowly, and as if ashamed by their failure to retain a single customer. Then with a brisk exclamation Tatiana threw away the filthy table cloth. The others, catching her mood of self-respect, swiftly washed knives and forks, glass and plates left untouched since the previous night. They chose clean chairs and sat down at the bare table, three a side, as in some institution for homeless females deserted by all but themselves. They began to laugh and chatter. Gino's fish was in no way institutional. It warmed and delighted.

They went to bed early, breathing for an extra four hours, instead of smoke, the cool air currents of the bay, and awakened to a vague feeling of holiday rather than disaster. Miriam made coffee and they breakfasted on the balcony. Then, as the heat of sand and dusty tracks consumed the morning, they saw their position in all its hopelessness.

It was Gino's responsibility to return them to Alexandria, and it was certain that he could not do it. They all spoke loudly of their contracts and of the Law that would, if necessary, compel him to sell his island to pay their fares. They gesticulated at a just and imaginary judge, but in their hearts they knew that they were terrified by the Law, upon whose edge they lived, and had no intention of calling to their aid the unknowable, uncontrollable gods of policemen.

They were too far east for chivalry. Tatiana and Miriam ran over the characters and probable bank balances of their devoted followers in the hope of finding one who might be gallant. Any, they decided, would provide food and especially bed for the few more days that he would remain at the seaside; not one would commit the generous folly of advancing the fare to Alexandria or even—in view of their known economic distress—of allowing it to be earned. There were no capitalists among the fathers and sons who took their holiday by that horned beach. Money counted, even when Tatiana was feeding the fishes and creating an illusion of imperial excess.

Either Miriam or Tatiana might perhaps make enough for herself to go, but not enough to release a companion as well. Though they had not hitherto been conscious of much liking for each other and though the three wage earners despised the three commissionaires, as Tatiana christened them, the solidarity of their profession—they called it the theatrical profession—prevented them from leaving behind any of their number to end, with certainty, in some horrible village brothel.

Tatiana could raise—probably—from an old friend in Alexandria the money for her fare. Miriam had a contract half promised for the winter and thought, not very hopefully, that the agency might lend her what she needed. Elena the Greek, who could dance just well
enough for a joint such as Gino's but looked, without make-up on a blazing morning, like a slender Chinese grandmother, had no hope at all. The three commissionaires listened with dazed attention to the discussion among their betters. They would not have been surprised if Tatiana had produced thousands of piastres from a hat or if she had told them to go and prostitute themselves upon the beach. Whatever she decided they would perform.

Tatiana and Miriam decided nothing. They dived, exasperated, from the balcony into the caressing sea, two worn but serviceable arrows of black and white startling Gino and wrecking his fishing for that morning.