The Magus, A Revised Version (98 page)

But I had had enough of the farce. I stood up. The headmaster spoke; a pursed mouth in a grave old face.

‘
The headmaster also says,
’
translated Androutsos,
‘
that your insane assault on a colleague at breakfast this morning has done irreparable harm to the respect he has always entertained for the land of Byron and Shakespeare.
’

‘
Jesus.
’
I laughed out loud, then I wagged my finger at Androutsos. The gym master got ready to spring at me.
‘
Now listen. Tell him this. I am going to Athens. I am going to the British Embassy, I am going to the Ministry of Education, I am going to the newspapers, I am going to make such trouble that

I didn
’
t finish. I raked them with a broadside of contempt, and walked out.

I was not allowed to get very far with my packing, back in my room. Not five minutes afterwards there was a knock on the door. I smiled grimly, and opened it violently. But the member of the tribunal I had least expected was standing there: the deputy headmaster.

His name was Mavromichalis. He ran the school administratively, and was the disciplinary dean also; a kind of camp adjutant, a lean, tense, balding man in his late forties, withdrawn even with other Greeks. I had had very little to do
with him. The senior teacher of
demotic, he was, in the historical tradition of his kind, a fanatical lover of
h
is own country. He had run a famous underground news-sheet in Athens during the Occupation; and the classical pseudonym he had used then,
o Bouplix,
the oxgoad, had stuck. Though he always deferred to the headmaster in public, in many ways it was his spirit that most informed the school; he hated the Byzantine accidie that lingers in the Greek soul far more intensely than any foreigner could.

He stood there, closely watching me, and I stood in the door, surprised out of my anger by something in his eyes. He managed to suggest that if matters had allowed he might have been smiling. He spoke quietly.

‘
Je veux vous
parler, Monsieur Urfe.
’

I had another surprise then, because he had never spoken to me before in anything but Greek; I had always assumed that he knew no other language. I let him come in. He glanced quickly down at the suitcases open on my bed, then invited me to sit behind the desk. He took a seat himself by the window and folded his arms: shrewd, incisive eyes. He very deliberately let the silence speak for him. I knew then. For the headmaster, I was simply a bad teacher; for this man, something else besides.

I said coldly,
‘
Eh bien?
’

‘
I regret these circumstances.
’

‘
You didn
’
t come here to tell me that.
’

He stared at me.
‘
Do you think our school is a good school?
’

‘
My dear Mr Mavromichalis, if you imagine
–
‘

He raised his hands sharply but pacifyingly.
‘
I am here simply as a colleague. My question is serious.
’

His French was ponderous, rusty, but far from elementary.

‘
Colleague … or emissary?
’

He lanced a look at me. The boys had a joke about him: how even the cicadas stopped talking when he passed.

‘
Please to answer my question. Is our school good?
’

I shrugged impatiently.
‘
Academically. Yes. Obviously.
’

He watched me a moment more, then came to the point.
‘
For our school
’
s sake, I do not want scandals.
’

I noted the implications of that first person singular.

‘
You should have thought of that before.
’

Another silence. He said,
‘
We have in Greece an old folksong that says, He who steals for bread is innocent, He who steals for gold is guilty.
’
His eyes watched to see if I understood.
‘
If you wish to resign … I can assure you that
Monsieur le Directeur
will accept. The other letter will be forgotten.
’

‘
Which
Monsieur le Directeur?
’

He smiled very faintly, but said nothing; and would, I knew, never say anything. In an odd way, perhaps because I was behind the desk, I felt like the tyrannical interrogator. He was the brave patriot. Finally, he looked out of the window and said, as if irrelevantly,
‘
We have an excellent science laboratory.
’

I knew that;
I
knew the equipment in it had been given by an anonymous donor when the school was re-opened after the war and I knew the staff-room
‘
legend
’
was that the money had been wrung out of some rich collaborationist.

I said,
‘
I see.
’

‘
I have come to invite you to resign.
’

‘
As my predecessors did?
’

He didn
’
t answer. I shook my head.

He tacked nearer the truth.
‘
I do not know what has happened to you. I do not ask you to forgive that. I ask you to forgive this.
’
He gestured: the school.

‘
I hear you think I
’
m a bad teacher anyway.
’

He said,
‘
We will give you a good
recommandation.
’

‘
That
’
s not an answer.
’

He shrugged.
‘
If you insist
…’

‘
Am I so bad as that?
’

‘
We have no place here for any but the best.
’

Under his oxgoad eyes, I looked down. The suitcases waited on the bed. I wanted to get away, to Athens, anywhere, to non-identity and non-involvement. I knew I wasn
’
t a good teacher. But I was too flayed, too stripped elsewhere, to admit it.

‘
You
’
re asking too much.
’
He waited in silence, implacably.
‘
I
’
ll keep quiet in Athens on one condition. That he meets me there.
’

‘
Pas possible.
’

Silence. I wondered how his monomaniacal sense of duty towards the school lived with whatever allegiance he owed Conchis. A hornet hovered threateningly in
the window, then caroomed away;
as my anger retreated before my desire to have it all over and done with.

I said.
‘
Why you?
’

He smiled then, a thin, small smile.
‘
Avant la guerre.
’

I knew he had not been teaching at the school; it must have been at Bourani. I looked down at the desk.
‘
I want to leave at once. Today.
’

‘
That is understood. But no more scandals?
’
He meant, after that at breakfast.

‘
I
’
ll see. If…
‘
I gestured in my turn.
‘
Only because of this.
’

‘
Bien.
’
He said it almost warmly, and came round the desk to take my hand; and even shook my shoulder, as Conchis had sometimes done, as if to assure me that he took my word.

Then, briskly and sparsely, he went.

And so I was expelled. As soon as he had gone, I felt angry again, angry that once again I had not used the cat. I did not mind leaving the school; to have dragged through another year, pretending Bourani did not exist, brewing sourly in the past … it was unthinkable. But leaving the island, the light, the sea. I stared out over the olive-groves. It was suddenly a loss like that of a limb. It was not the meanness of making a scandal, it was the futility. Whatever happened, I was banned from ever living again on Phraxos.

After a while I forced myself to go on packing. The bursar sent a clerk up with my pay cheque and the address of the travel agency I should go to in Athens about my journey home. Just after noon I walked out of the school gate for the last time.

I went straight to Patarescu
’
s house. A peasant-woman came to the
door; the doctor had gone to Rh
odes for a month. Then I went to the house on the hill. I knocked on the gate. No one answered; it was locked. Then I went back down through the village to the old harbour, to the taverna where I had met old Barba Dimitraki. Georgiou, as I hoped, knew of a room for me in a cottage near by. I sent a boy back to the school with a fish-trolley to get my bags; then ate some bread and olives.

At two, in the fierce afternoon sun, I started to toil up between the hedges of prickly pear towards the
central ridge. I was carrying a
hurricane lamp, a crowbar and a hacksaw. No scandal was one thing; but no investigation was another.

I came to Bourani about half past three. The gap beside and the top of
the gate had been wired, while a new notice covered the
Salle d
’
attente
sign. It said in Greek,
Private property, entrance strictly forbidden.
It was
still easy enough to climb over. But I had no sooner got inside than I heard a voice coming up through the trees from Moutsa. Hiding the tools and lamp behind a bush, I climbed back.

I went cautiously down the path, tense as a stalking cat, until I could see the beach. A ca
ï
que was moored at the far end. There were five or six people
–
not islanders, people in gay swimming-costumes. As I watched, two of the men picked up a girl, who screamed, and carried her down the shingle and dumped her into the sea. There was the blare of a battery wireless. I walked a few yards inside the fringe of trees, half expecting at any moment to recognize them. But the girl was small and dark, very Greek; two plump women; a man of thirty and two older men. I had never seen any of them before.

There was a sound behind me. A barefooted fisherman in ragged grey trousers, the owner of the ca
ï
que, came from the chapel. I asked him who the people were. They were from Athens, a Mr Sotiriades and his family, they came every summer to the island.

Did many Athenian people come to the bay in August? Many, very many, he said. He pointed along the beach: In two weeks, ten, fifteen
ca
ï
que
s, more people than sea.

Bourani was pregnable: and I had my final reason to leave the island.

The house was shuttered and closed, just as I had last seen it. I made my way round over the gulley to the Earth. I admired once again the cunning way its trapdoor was concealed, then raised it. The dark shaft stared up. I climbed down with the lamp and lit it; climbed back and got the tools. I had to saw halfway through the hasp of the
padlock on the first side-room; then, under pressure from the crowbar, it snapped. I picked up the lamp, shot back the bolt, pulled open the massive door, and went in.

I found myself in the north-west corner of a rectangular chamber. Facing me I could see two embrasures that had evidently been filled in, though little ventilator grilles showed they had some access to the air. Along the north wall opposite, a long built-in wardrobe. By the east wall, two beds, a double and a single. Tables and chairs. Three armchairs. The floor had some kind of rough folkweavc carpeting on top of felt, and three of the walls had been whitewashed, so that the place, though windowless, was less gloomy than the central room. On the west wall, above the bed, was a huge mural of Tyrolean peasants dancing;
Lederhosen
and a girl whose flying skirt showed her legs above her flower-clocked stockings. The colours were still good; or re-touched.

There were a dozen or so changes of costume for Lily in the wardrobe, and at least eight of them were duplicated for her sister; several I had not seen. In a set of drawers there were period gloves, handbags, stockings, hats; even an antiquated linen swimming-costume with a lunatic ribboned Tarn o
’
Shanter cap to match.