A groan threatened to burst from his throat when he remembered the thirty-six cents in his pocket. By an incredible feat of histrionics he converted the groan to a twisted smile.
"On second thought, dear lady," he said smoothly, "perhaps I better not take the entire kouloura. It is more than I can eat and will become stale."
"Is this some kind of game?" the old lady snarled.
"You’ve been here a half-hour now. You finally make up your mind .. "
Anthoula came to the old lady and touched her arm. "If a full loaf is too much for Mr. Matsoukas," she said, "we will be pleased to sell him half a loaf." She looked at him and he saw the glistening splendor of her eyes.
"You are very kind," Matsoukas said. With his flesh trembling he considered how it would feel to unbraid her hair and let it tumble free about her shoulders.
The old lady tore off the paper about the bread and picked up a long bladed knife. With a look at Matsoukas suggesting there were other things she might prefer to sever, she balefully cut the loaf in half.
"I must pay the full price anyway," Matsoukas said to Anthoula. "The entire fifty-two cents."
Anthoula shook her head.
"I insist!" Matsoukas cried scorning caution and restraint. "Let me pay for all and give the half to some needy child."
"Let him pay," the old lady slapped the wrapped half-loaf on the counter. "Help him make up his mind next time."
"Half a loaf is half the price of a whole loaf," Anthoula said firmly. She took the change from his hand and the soft tips of her fingers grazed his palm. Even that fleeting touch reverberated through the length of his body and a quiver swept her breasts as well. She turned away quickly and rang up the twenty-six cents on the small register. Without looking at him again she started back to the kitchen. He watched her marvelous buttocks swaying with a winged and rolling grace. He sighed and found the old lady watching him with a hard awareness in her dried prune eyes.
"Many thanks, Miss Barboonis," he said. "I will enjoy this bread."
The old lady grinned a toothless and unspoken leer that drove him in a disruptive retreat from the bakery, clutching the segment of kouloura against his heart.
He sat on a corner bench across from a schoolyard at noon and ate the half-loaf of kouloura. He tore the bread into chunks that he washed down with coffee he had purchased with his sole remaining dime. For dessert he ate the plum slowly and watched the children at their lunch-hour play.
The yard teemed with boys and girls of varied ages and assorted sizes. Yet all had in common an incredible agility, a marvelous nimbleness, their arms and legs flashing as they swarmed and scattered and screamed and ran. They skimmed and swooped like myriad butterflies above the earth, and he thought of his son, Stavros, a small black moth pinned to the ground in a raging shell.
He recalled the beginning, the sunburst moment when the child was born. The wild delight of those first months fondling the baby, playing with him, watching him grow. Until the dreadful nights when the child began clawing frantically at his eyes, pulling furiously at his ears. Each month revealing more of the savage impediments that stifled speech and made him flounder like a small crippled crab. The strange laughter without a smile, the eruption of weird sound from between the prison of his lips.
Hope scalded and withered with each visit to the doctors until Matsoukas ceased listening and treated the boy with his own will and spirit. The hours he spent talking to him, singing to him, dancing with him to crack the shell of total withdrawal that threatened to engulf him. The labor of a year of such hours to achieve the clumsy knocking together of two boxes. Another year so the boy might hit a suspended bell. Two more years before he could pound into a block, a single large peg, achieve a few added movements of the arms, a few additional graspings with his fingers. So much more than the cursed doctors had ever expected could be accomplished but so little measured by what needed to be done. Yet he had never lost faith. Long after even Caliope had tearfully abandoned hope, he had never lost faith that his son would someday gain movement and speech.
For he knew the roots were strong, the ground was fertile, his seed was part of the olive, the myrtle, the honeycomb, and the huge luscious grapes. His heart contained the wind and the stars. The stream of his blood ran through the enchanted caves where nymphs played, over jagged promontories on which wild shepherds danced, into valleys stained with the blood of heroes and giants.
The screams of the children grew wilder and he could not endure watching them any longer. He rose and for a moment looked in anguish at the gray heavy sky. He cried out a fierce oath and then walked quickly down the street, his head bent, until the voices of the children were lost within the horns and rumble of the city. When he could hear them no longer he straightened up and briskly paced the blocks to the Minoan Music Shop.
He entered the door beneath the dust-crusted sign that swayed in creaking rondos to the wind. The interior was a maze of racks and alcoves, shadowed shelves laden with sheafs of sheet music undisturbed for years. The walls held faded concert posters of Caruso and Galli-Curci. From a hidden corner a shrill phonograph scratched out a tuneless song.
Matsoukas moved deftly down the aisles, around the corners, between the shelves, to the alcove where the owner, Falconis, sat at a paper-littered desk.
"I beg your pardon," Matsoukas said. "Do you have a recording of, 'Forty Years a Married Virgin' by that world-famous soprano, Ena Meros Adeio?"
Falconis sighed. He was a somber-visaged man with the eyes of a sparrow in a landscape of hawks.
"I have no time for your sad jokes, Matsoukas."
"That is the trouble with you," Matsoukas said. "Laughter is therapeutic. Man reaches fulfillment, society gains balance, children learn to sing, all through laughter. It is a catharsis and a means of purifying the bile of the spirit."
"You wish to play or to lecture?"
"I did not come here to purchase one of your cracked records," Matsoukas shrugged.
Falconis motioned toward the bottom drawer of his desk which contained the ledger of his accounts. "There is the matter of your debt," Falconis said coldly. "You know the house rules."
"The curse of modern life," Matsoukas said. "A mother-in-law, the devil, and debts." He made a casual movement with his hand as if reaching for the pocket which contained his wallet. "By the way, old sport, I think you understand that when honor is concerned, I always pay in the end."
"You will pay soon or be faced with a dreadful beating," Falconis sought to mask his timid eyes with a glint of menace.
Matsoukas laughed loudly and reached across the desk. Falconis flinched in fear and then relaxed sheepishly as Matsoukas clapped him gently on the shoulder.
"You are not suited by temperament for violence," Matsoukas said.
Falconis looked mournfully at the soft cushions of fat nestled across his palms. "How wretchedly true," he said softly. "If I had been born a few hundred miles west of Greece I might have sprung roots in Roman soil. My name might as easily have been Falconelli and I might have become one of those stalwarts chosen for that illustrious organization, the Mafia." A wistful longing swept his face. "The Greeks are incapable of such unity and dedication."
"Do not despair," Matsoukas said soothingly. "Join the Board of Trustees of some of the Hellenic churches. They include men eagerly emulating your idols." He looked impatiently at the drapes which concealed the panel leading to the other rooms. "By the way, old sport," he said. "How much is my tab?"
"You know very well," Falconis said. "Four-hundred and eighty-three dollars." He coughed as if mention of the amount caused him an obstructive disorder in his throat. "I cannot understand how I let it go so far."
"Very soon now I will clear it off your books," Matsoukas said. "In fact I feel fate tingling a bountiful bell before me today. I have a solid bet going on a marvelous little filly but if she has lost, perhaps a small additional advance to ..."
"Not another dime!" Falconis exclaimed.
"How can
I repay you if I do not play?"
"That is what you told me four hundred dollars ago," Falconis said. "Look where we are now. This kind of credit can ruin my reputation." He fell silent and when he spoke again a note of apology had entered his voice. "Don't count too much on my not having a temperament for violence. That is what I pay Youssouf for."
"That Turkish gorilla has been hungering to eat my kidneys for years," Matsoukas said. "One of these days we will determine who eats what."
"Don't underestimate him because he is a clown," Falconis said darkly. "He has the strength of three bulls. I have seen men he has beaten in that dreadful basement below us. They are not men anymore."
"Get rid of the animal," Matsoukas said. "If you need muscle hire a good Greek gorilla."
"Do you think I like the beast around?" Falconis looked uneasily over his shoulder at the panel. "He chills my blood but he also chills the blood of others. What can I do? I am a mouse and the cats would gobble me if I did not keep a wild dog." He shook his head dolefully and bent to press a button beneath the center drawer of his desk. The panel behind him slipped smoothly aside and Matsoukas walked into a high-ceilinged and cavernous room. The panel closed swiftly and silently behind him. He felt as he always did when he first stepped through the opening that he had entered the teeming landscape of another world and the lunge of his spirit broke loose with a wild cry.
It was Nepheloccygia, the city of birds, the "Cloud-cuckoo-borough," of Aristophanes. All were gathered in this room, the owl, jay, lark, thyme-finch, ring-dove, chicken and cuckoo, the feathered company of dark-winged dreamers, pigeons of the scratch sheet tip and sparrows of the fifty-cents-across-the-board-parlay. Around them lurked the falcons and hawks, the ticket writers and spotters perched on high stools behind the long counter, their heads poised sharply as beaks.
The birds milled about until the Lydian flute of the wire service announcer erupted over the loudspeaker with the running of a race. Then they scattered to flight, swarming before the wall on which the track sheet was tacked. They waited and beat their wings in frenzy at the calls and now and then uttered shrill wild cries.
Matsoukas swept through them, joining the fever of their bodies to his own flesh, answering their greetings with a flutter of his shoulders, a smile, a nod.
"Anything good today, Matsoukas?" An old woman with fingers like talons caught at his shoulder.
"If we are lucky, mother, a glass of wine for supper," Matsoukas said.
"Can Salmi beat Maud Princess on a muddy track?" A young man called to him.
"Only at a mile or more," Matsoukas said. "And no more weight than a hundred-twenty."
"Want something hot in the third?" A tout who did not know him whispered.
"Away from me, buzzard!" Matsoukas cried. The man scurried away with his feathers ruffled. A few of the men and women around them laughed.
Matsoukas moved beyond the clutching hands and the restless eyes and walked to the chart that listed the day's races at Monmouth. His heart gave a small gratified leap when he saw that his little filly, Dolphina, had won. He walked jubilantly to the end of the room where the pale bespectacled cashier sat behind his ledger and the cash-drawer. On a stool at his side sat the Turk, Youssouf.
He was built like a massive wild boar, huge-boned with immense ridges of muscle the length of his powerful body. He had a totally bald head, glistening with a coating of some green heavy oil. The waxed tips of a long moustache hung suspended over the tusks of his teeth.
When he saw Matsoukas he grinned and the corners of his wide mouth cut almost to the twisted lobes of his shapeless wrestler's ears, giving him the droll appearance of a clown. But the fool's mask could not conceal his eyes, small and deep and almost without pupils, their gaze sharpened by cold and transparent lids.
"Hey, Matsoukas," he said, and his voice came in a mirthless banter from his throat. "How's the old whoreson Greek?"
"Who is your bubbling companion?" Matsoukas asked the cashier. "He has all the charm of a squid."
The cashier looked nervously at Youssouf and fumbled through his book. "Matsoukas," he read the entry. "Four to win on Dolphina. She paid $23.80 for two. You got $47.60 coming."
"You are a wizard!" Matsoukas said. "Keep up the good work and someday you may become bookkeeper in a Turkish whorehouse."
Youssouf leaned forward and winked with a frozen lidding of one eye. "I got a little Greek dancer girlfriend, Matsoukas," he said. "I screw her six maybe seven times a night. She won't even spit on a Greek anymore."
Matsoukas smiled and turned back to the cashier who was counting out the money quickly with his Adam's apple bobbing.
"Any talent in the back room?" Matsoukas asked him.
"The usual bunch," the cashier said. "And a new fellow I never seen before. They call him the 'Fig King'."
"We must not keep a 'Fig King' waiting," Matsoukas said. He pocketed the bills and started away, pausing thoughtfully before the Turk.
"I tell you something, gorilla," Matsoukas said pleasantly. "You stink like a maggot's picnic. You know? I tell you as a friend that a bath in batshit would improve you."
The cashier slid off his stool in a frenzy to get out of the way. The clown's mask left Youssouf's face, a scabbed savage hate taking its place. He clenched his massive fists until the knuckles gleamed like white stones.
"Greek," he said, and a few drops of spittle foamed in the corners of his mouth. "Someday, Greek, I am going to kill you."
Matsoukas felt the hair along his arms and back bristle with rage. At the same time a strange tight quiver of fear swept his body.
"Turk," he said slowly and spit the word through his teeth. "Someday, Turk, you will try."
CHAPTER THREE
For a moment Matsoukas absorbed the suspensive beauty of the warm and cloistered room, a windowless nest secure from the world. In the center of the room a large round table of walnut, the green felt surface lit under the beam from a drop cord light in the ceiling with a fan shade around the bulb.
There was the soft echo of the dealer's litany calling the fall of the cards, the trails of smoke rising in silver coils to merge into a swirling cloud above the light, the smell of tobacco and sweat. And on the green felt surface of the table the frivolous one-eyed jacks flirting with the elusive queens under the eyes of the somber kings. Around the edges of the cards the fingers of the players glittered, their hands severed at the wrist by the perimeter of darkness just outside the circle of light.
Matsoukas knew the hands without seeing the faces of the men. There were the plump and clumsy fingers of Fatsas who could not win for losing, the dark leathery fingers of the guitarist, Charilaos, curling as if he were striking chords, the desultory fingers of Poulos who played to pass the time and the never-resting fingers of Babalaros who played to keep from going mad. A pair of soft and diamond-studded hands, strange to him but with a certain pomposity, he apportioned to the "Fig King." And, finally, the hands of the dealer, his dear friend, Cicero, a small and frail-bodied man with a thin pale fleshed face but with slender and beautiful fingers, long and supple, the flesh gleaming like marble in moonlight, holding the deck as a king might hold his scepter, with a grave and leisured grace.
As Matsoukas passed around the table, the "Fig King" raked in a pot and smiled genially.
"My apologies, gentlemen," he said. "Since I play for sport and not to win, I do this to you reluctantly."
Cicero smiled wryly and gathered the cards for the deal.
Matsoukas sat down in a chair against the wall beside a chair in which old Gero Kampana dozed with his scarred and ancient head tilted slightly to the side. The old man had been abstemious in all facets of his life but cards, playing poker for seventy-five of his ninety years. He had never married, never given any woman more than embers from the fire of his true love. Now grown blind and deaf he could no longer distinguish the faces of the cards or hear the dealer's call. Still he sat most of the day and night in the room where cards were played, assimi
lating in some disordered way the rhythms and the tensions. As Matsoukas sat down he raised his head with a start.
"Who is that?" he asked peering toward the light.
"Matsoukas."
"I knew it was you," the old man snapped.
"Of course," Matsoukas said and patted the old man's knee.
For almost forty minutes he sat and watched the game and studied the play of the "Fig King." He watched him through a score of stud poker hands, fifteen of which he won. When Babalaros was driven from the game, Matsoukas rose and took his place.
He winked fondly at Cicero, nodded and greeted Charilaos and Poulos, and slapped Fatsas on the shoulder. "How are you, old sport?" He asked cheerfully. "Still playing your canny and skillful game?"
"I'm still losing if that's what you mean," Fatsas said with irritation.
Matsoukas smiled benignly at the "Fig King." "Play for sport," he said politely. "Those were your words, sir, and I completely agree." He rose slightly in his chair and bowed. "I am Leonidas Matsoukas."
"Poker for sport!" Fatsas said incredulously.
The "Fig King" extended his hand limply to Matsoukas who shook it vigorously. "Elias Roumbakakis," the tycoon said gravely. "One must be able to afford to lose," he said. "Only then is the game a sport. Do you agree?"
"Absolutely!" Matsoukas said. He peered closely at Roumbakakis. "Your face is very familiar," he said. "Tell me, sir, were you not in last Sunday's National Herald?"
"Not this last Sunday," Roumbakakis said, "although they often have my photo with dignitaries. Perhaps you saw my recent photo in the Ahepa Magazine? I was presenting a basket of figs to Alderman Pasofski, a very close friend."
Cicero bent his head and smiled crookedly as he raked in the cards.
"That must be where I saw you!" Matsoukas said. He stared somberly around the table at the other players. "I hope you all appreciate what a singular honor it is," he said, "to be playing with such an eminent leader of the Hellenic community."
Roumbakakis raised his hand in a silent demurrer but could not conceal the pleased flush that sprouted in his cheeks.
A Dream of Kings Page 3