by Mike Bond
“God, what a feeling,” she sighed.
“You mean gods?”
“You are a Jesuit. A Jesuit Jew.” She kissed his neck, shoulder, the hard flesh of his stomach, along one thigh, avoiding the knee, then down the other, her hands enfolding him, her fingers lightly urging him up, her lips then moist and full around him, down and up, down and up while her tongue wrapped him in warm liquid folds and her hair moved softly over his thighs. He slipped one hand into the wet softness of her groin and let the other wander across her breasts beneath the up-rolled cashmere. She withdrew so just her lips were touching him, drinking him in, her tongue fluttering gently.
She kissed his chest. “I never liked the thought of it, swallowing it. But now I wanted to.”
He snuggled her into his arms, not sure where his body ended and hers began. I must not love.
THE MOON WAS SINKING in the west when they closed the gate behind them. The streets were silent but for here and there a couple hand in hand, a patter of rats in alleys, a donkey snuffing at them through a fence. The room was clammy and constricted after the freedom of the Acropolis, making love less exotic within the walls, two green and two peach, that enclosed them.
When she slept he rose and prowled the roof. A cat yowled in the street, then another. As a boy I would hold two ants close in my fingertips until they tore at each other, and so began a war between two anthills, countless ant bodies littering the sandy soil. He gazed across the rooftops to the columnar magnificence of the Parthenon, blown up by men of war and rebuilt by men of peace. In which category am I?
Exhaustion washed over him. He imagined her as he had left her, on her right side, hands clasped beneath her chin, hair in abandon on the pillow, the covers lifting gently with her breathing.
Three weeks. Perhaps she knows someone at Le Monde. If Paul comes to Paris…Then we'll go straight to New York, Kohler Import-Export. But if Paul's dead under the Himalayan snow? Or in some sordid hovel? Then I'm deceased, adrift in a measureless universe. Phu Dorje, his family, Kim, the monkey man – their deaths'll all be blamed on me. Alex's and Goteen's too, Eliott's, the Tibetan in the Kali Gandaki – where does it stop?
His gaze returned to the Parthenon's Olympian luminosity. This is the full measure of my fate, my failure. An outlaw, internationally hunted, an excommunicate beyond appeal, I'm everywhere at risk. How much of this would she believe?
AT DAWN they hunted the chilled, smoky streets for Turkish coffee and rolls, returned to bed and made love quickly, slept and made love again, floating exhausted in each other, and slept again.
Church bells woke them. She watched him dress the knee. “Still bad, isn't it?”
He shook his head, then nodded. “Yes.”
“A friend of mine in Brussels has a place near here,” she said, slipping into French jeans and a silk blouse. “In Crete, on a primitive beach.” She stretched to snap her jeans. “Let's go there for a few days, sit in the sun, till it's better?”
He finished the bandage, stood to test the leg. She watched from the mirror, head tilted as she brushed her hair. “I have to go,” he said.
She swung her hair back. “So go.”
“Yet I don't want to – already getting pulled back.”
“To what?” She tossed the brush into her handbag, bent and pulled a maroon silk scarf from her suitcase, knotted it round her neck.
“Back into life. Being with you I forget what's happened, start to live in the moment.”
She raised one foot behind her to hook a high heel strap round her ankle. “You were in Vietnam – some horror you can't forget?” She crossed to him. “It's okay to fear – takes time to forget.”
He kissed the tip of her nose. Just flesh, we are – pores and bones and death. Her eyes seemed distant though not harsh, as if she pondered some weight unknown to him; her body moved lean and lithe against his. So beautiful, so fallible, so short-lived, so caring – this is what I've forsaken. “It's more than a personal horror, goes beyond forgetting, makes a parody of life.”
“So it's a good story?” she grinned. “Come, tell me!” She sat on the bed, pulled him down beside her. “You've been holding out on me, Sam Cohen!” She licked her tongue into his mouth. “You tell me. Right now!”
Such lassitude – a warning? Claire's face superimposed by Kim's. “God tries,” Kim said. “I'll try,” he answered.
“Fine!” She sat up. “If it's a good one we'll split the proceeds and spend months making mad mucking love en Maroc!”
He tried not to smile. “It's a sick story, Claire. After I tell you, if you believe me, you'll never feel the same.”
“Was my life so great as it was? Tell me!”
“Nor was mine. But I'm not giving you anything better.”
WHEN HE WAS DONE she sat still, head down, hands clasped between her knees. He felt like a seashell unearthed in the desert, as if the dry dust of Athens could blow him away. Her breathless charm was gone, her eager asperity, her Vassar cynicism. As if we've been married years and just admitted to each other that all our years were charade. He limped onto the balcony, squinted into the glare. When he came in she had taken her handbag from the chair. “Going for a walk,” she said.
“You don't believe me.”
“Perhaps I do.” Her voice was ancient, as if from a tomb. “What reason would you have..?”
He took the key from the dresser top. “Can I go with you?”
GAILY DRESSED strangers jostled them in open markets. She followed him into the cool albumen of a church. Kneeling figures mumbled before altars; a skinny man lit a votive candle, his careworn face lambent.
“All of this,” she said as they emerged. “Transitory. Dreamlike.”
“It's worse than a dream. We don't wake.” It's that strange passive leadership of hers, he thought, that has me going where I never intended, as if it were my choice. “I want to go my own way. It was a mistake to tell you.”
“So what do you plan to do?” she yelled in the bustling street. “Be a lone ranger – a solitary hero? In the real world heroes get eaten alive! Don't you know that? What tapestry are you riding through, my solitary knight? Or shall you forget it, pretend it never happened?”
“I have to meet my friend in Paris. Then we'll see.”
“And like you said – what if he's dead?”
He shrugged. “We'll see.”
“See what?”
“How to reveal it and when.” He avoided her eyes. “My concern's revenge not publicity. I don't care any more about the future – there isn't any.”
“So where does that get you? Besides dead?” She shook his arm, forced his face down into hers. “You're going away from me – I won't let you!”
“You can't stop me.”
“Oh yes I can! Don't you dare tell me what I can't do.”
“And you're still trapped.” He dropped his hand from hers. “I'm gonna sit in Syntagma, think for a while, plan, be back about two.”
She pulled back. “Ciao, then,” she turned and shouldered through the crowd.
FEELING DULL AND shallow he limped to Syntagma. Shadows lay corpselike on the square. He ordered a raki and sipped it venomously. Finally he rose, threw some coins on the table. Don't take it out on her. She'll help if I let her. Couldn't be a safer place than Crete. Lie low in the labyrinth.
He returned to the hotel. The room retained her fragrance but her things were gone. On the bed lay the embroidered shirt. He hobbled quickly down to the lobby where the clerk told him she'd just reserved a seat on the Olympic flight leaving in forty minutes for Paris and New York.
It took ten minutes to find a cab in Syntagma Square. In a side street off the square a fat truck blocked the way. Cars behind them cut off their retreat. The cabbie jumped out and pounded on the truck's horn, invading the street with raucous echoes. An unshaven man with a dirty undershirt riding up his belly yelled and shook his fist out a doorway. Horns wailed behind them. Finally the unshaven man climbed into the truck and drove it gr
atingly away. Cohen sat back in exasperation. Traffic gathered ahead behind black-belching buses; the taxi cut nervously from one lane to another, making little gain.
Near the airport exit the traffic slowed, then halted. The cabbie stood on the front bumper, shading his eyes. “Disti'chima!” he called, banging his fists together. He motioned Cohen up.
Through the crepe-paper rippling of exhausts ahead he could discern the silver oblong of a tanker truck, on its side. Behind them, a siren howled.
“Airport – how many kilometers?”
The cabbie raised four fingers.
“Forget it,” Cohen sighed. He sat back in the cab. And forget her. Now there's all the time in the world for a cautious trip through Yugoslavia. Wait there two weeks, then quick to Paris. No money, but I'll make it. Some day find her in Brussels. He shook his head. Don't lie to yourself.
He picked at the seat's worn vinyl. “Even in accidents,” Hem had said, grasping his horses’ reins by the cyclone fence in Pokhara, “there is purpose.” Suddenly he hungered for Hem's one-eyed face, for his calm acquiescence in a deeper life. Deeper than what? Than ordinary turmoil? How can I be sure what's ordinary, what's deeper, being only myself?
Cars ahead began to budge. The taxi started with a hoarse crepitation. How long was it since the woman's voice on the telephone had said, “In forty minutes, sir”?
They cleared the overturned truck on the right. Half-crushed beneath the truck's chrome torso was a taxi. Its passenger lay in a pool of blood and oil on the pavement. A policeman was covering his face with a piece of cotton, not before Cohen glimpsed the vacant, white-eyed stare of a lean, nearly familiar face, almost recognized the rictus beneath a trim, thin moustache.
I recognize the dead: they're my people. I never knew that one, but I see my death in him, everyone's. Caught in the labyrinth. Without exits.
The taxi halted nose down in a shrill of tires before the Olympic terminal. “Two hundreds drachma,” the cabbie said.
He fumbled in his pockets. His few dollars were tucked away in the room, under the mattress, with the bag of hash. All he had was a hundred drachmas. The driver took them and reached back for more. “Wait!” Cohen pointed downward. “Stay here.”
“One more hundreds drachma!” The cabbie wiggled his fingers. A plane rumbled in the distance. A woman dragged a suitcase loudly across the sidewalk. Within the terminal a loudspeaker bellowed.
“I come back,” Cohen said. The cabbie shook his head. Cohen yanked out his passport, handed it to the cabbie. “You stay!” He pointed down. The cabbie nodded.
He limped hurriedly through milling crowds, stumbled over a poodle on a chain, its owner snapping at him. The Olympic flight had left seven minutes earlier. He wandered dizzily, seeking her in the throng, without hope. When he returned to the sidewalk the taxi was gone.
9
HE HITCHED A RIDE in a garbage truck toward Athens, its unshaven and obese driver gesticulating largely and breathing onions across the seat as his truck jounced and clattered through the a streets, melon and squash rinds rumbling disconsolately in the back.
Cohen nodded uncomprehendingly. He was left at a traffic circle and retrieved by a gray Mercedes, whose silver-haired, gray-pinstriped owner spoke English easily. “Odos Apollonos? It is quaint, the Plaka. I will drop you.” The car shifted easily. “Have you been in before, Greece?”
“Once.”
“Most of us live in our own little corners, never seeing the world. Travel's exciting, opens the eyes.”
SUNLIGHT had retreated above the storefronts; Odos Apollonos was rank with cooking smells. The landlady came ranting at him, her pink fists raised, “Out! Out!”
Nodding, he edged by her, limped up the stairs and unlocked the door. Claire sat reading by the window.
“I thought you'd gone.”
“I came back.” She closed the book. “Though I can't really say why.”
“I thought you'd gone,” he repeated. He entered the bathroom, slipping. “Why's the floor wet?” He sat on the bed opposite her.
“When I came back the shower was running. I was happy you were there so I undressed and got in the shower but it was the plumber who had come to fix it; he was so shocked he fell and sprained his ankle. Now he's going to sue the landlady and she's thrown us out.” She began to giggle, biting a finger.
“So why'd you come back?”
“I said I don't know. Do you always need a reason?”
“I went to the airport to stop you. I've never done that before.”
“What,” she laughed, “go to the airport?”
“Come off it! I've never gone after someone, if she left, tried to keep her.”
“Oh, Sam,” she got up and held him. “You must've had a ragged life.”
He stood and took his hashish and money from under the mattress. “I lost my passport.”
“Sam! Where?”
“Cabbie stole it. Did you see the accident?”
“I saw the mess, coming back. It must've happened behind me. Sam – what are you going to do?”
“I just remembered who he was.”
“Who?”
“The dead guy beside the cab. He was on our plane. Got on before you, in Teheran.” He sat, his knee throbbing. “So why was he following you?”
She knelt before him. “I don't know. Let's go quickly! Go to Crete, out of the way – it's dangerous here. Now you don't have your passport! How can you escape?”
“Why's it dangerous here?”
“Can't you tell? Maybe I'm getting shaky – picking up on you – but I'm afraid, afraid for you. You said you've got time – why starve in Yugoslavia? No one'll follow us to Crete – we'll have time to find you new papers, figure out something – then fly to Paris, just before Easter. Please?”
FROM THE WET STERN RAIL of the steamer they watched the darkening bones of Greece sink into the sea. Shivering, she leaned against him, shoulder to shoulder. “It's so awful.”
He cupped her chin in his palm. “Your face's cold. We should go in.”
“You stay out – you're enjoying it.” She turned into the oncoming wind. “I'm a little sick.”
“Seasick?”
“Crossed the line, maybe. So much has happened today.” She vanished through the bulkhead door.
HE PACED the slippery decks, ducking beneath gently swaying lifeboats. In the lee of the fantail he smoked a bit, eyes on the phosphorescent wake, mind on the dead man. He wasn't following me – obviously. An accident? A toothbrush salesman, functionary…Arab, Jewish, Greek? Could've been anyone. What brought him across Persia's eroded expanse to death in Athens?
The death of this man with the rimless spectacles and black moustache seems strangely preordained. The labyrinth of fate's otherwise too complex. And I'm no doubt fated to seek a certain exit, and death's fated to be waiting. He drew a finger line along the wet rail. My own death, swifting toward me, equally preordained. Like most men, I don't mind death as long as it stays away.
The ship's engines pulsed through the rail into his elbows. Above him Orion extended over half the sky, gathering stars, worlds, void into his arms. How many winter nights have I watched your hunt across the darkness, while coyotes yapped on the Big Hole benches and owls talked in the lodgepoles? The wide Montana starry sky came back to him; he lowered his head onto his folded arms.
The wind changed and cut into his ribs. Fate is too complex for any understanding. Before all this, in Nepal, I felt that understanding was not important, that since it was doomed to failure no time should be wasted on it. Was that not wisdom? Now I'm forced to some attempt – an attempt doomed to failure. Weary and unsleepy, leg aching, he limped the tilting deck. Twenty days more. She'll be warm, blankets up around her chin. For a while perhaps my enemies will look elsewhere.
THEY DOCKED in Heraklion at first light. “I'll rent the car,” she said in a harbor café reeking of ouzo and soggy cigarettes. “And I'll go to the bank – let's meet here at ten?”
Sun g
leamed on the pebbled beach westward of town. Seagulls and sandpipers kept pace along the water edge. A man with furled trousers led a donkey cart across a tidal stream. Cohen took off his shoes and waded the stream, the cold shocking his knee. A slight figure approached from the west.
He halted to skip stones in the waves. It was a pudgy young woman with windblown rusty hair, in jeans. “Hi,” she called, approaching. “You American?”
“Australian.”
“I'm Budgie. From Canada.” She grinned roundly. “Where in Australia?”
He shrugged. “Sydney.”
“What's your name?”
“Clyde,” he said lamely.
“I seen you before.” She peered sideways up at him. “You on television?”
“Me? Never.”
“I seen you somewhere. A jock, aren't you? That's what you are.” She nodded. “I remember faces.”
He smiled lopsidedly. “Never even owned a jockstrap.”
“I remember faces. I'm with a bunch in the Hotel Europa. Mostly Yanks but three Canadians. One's a Canuck, really. You talk a lot.”
“Too early.”
“The beach is good for sleeping. I'll show you where it's warm and dry.”
“No thanks.”
“It's nice here, the sea, the town, the hills.” She blinked. “Lie on the beach, Clyde. Good for your heart.” She trudged eastward, Cohen noticing her again when she was the size of the avocets pecking at the waterline, her splayed footprints paralleling the donkey cart tracks that merged into a single line that vanished beyond her in the morning maritime haze.
BUDGIE'S LED THEM to me: Gurkhas closing in over the dunes, Enfields glinting. Dry-mouthed, he woke, the sun high. Ignoring the knee, he trudged quickly along the hard sand by the sea, scattering birds.