Days Like Today

by Rachel Ingalls

  ‘OK, OK. Of course I wouldn’t. I just feel sorry for that island, where everything’s going wrong. And that old man outside –’

  ‘That old man is a sneaky old crook who sees another Greek with a big house. You forget him. I’ve known these people all my life. They’re not worth wiping your feet on.’

  ‘But I’ve got a photocopy of the sketch. We could compare them right now.’

  ‘I told you, all those damn Christ pictures look alike.’

  ‘It isn’t Christ. It’s the Madonna.’

  ‘Same difference. And it’s all lies, anyway.’

  ‘Not for the people who believe.’

  ‘What are you talking about? An icon doesn’t mean anything. It’s a representation of meaning. You know: a picture. The real thing … the real thing can’t be shown. It isn’t visible. A religious picture simply represents. Everything used to be that way once. Now people want to have a painting for what it is.’ He gestured towards the little Daumier and the Hobbema that Stratis had never appreciated until one day he’d looked at it again and began to like it, as if he’d never seen it before.

  ‘But he’s here. And he’s here about the icon – as far as I can figure out. How did he know what yours looks like?’

  ‘He doesn’t. That thing on the paper isn’t mine. It’s the one in the show.’

  ‘He wouldn’t know about that one, either. How could he get a sketch of the icon at the gallery?’

  ‘Easy You say the story about the lost picture was in the papers before this show opened? Well, he paid the price of admission once: saw that sketch, drew his own copy of it on some paper that looked the same size, and made a hundred photostats. Then he sells them with this line he’s got about collecting for the island. Oh, he’s collecting, all right.’

  ‘It belongs to the monastery there,’ Stratis said. ‘The whole island has had bad luck since it was taken away.’ He didn’t dare to repeat the word ‘stolen’.

  ‘You wait till you’ve worked for twenty years. Then you’ll know the value of things.’

  ‘But Grandfather, don’t you agree that a religious work of art is different from other kinds? I mean, it isn’t just a lot of nice colors, like one of those French pictures of lily-pads. To the people who believe in the religion, it has a special meaning above and beyond the way it looks.’

  The old man continued to regard him with a kindly expression. Then he laughed. He waved his hand several times, as if he were an overfed diner, disdaining additional offerings. The subject was closed.

  Stratis threw up his hands, saying, ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether it was stolen or not. The important thing is to put it back.’

  ‘I have never,’ his grandfather said, ‘never stolen anything in my life.’

  ‘Aunt Lydia and Uncle Maurice would agree with me.’

  ‘Your Aunt Lydia would send this entire family to Park Burnett if she thought she could raise some cash by selling us. Nothing is sacred to her except her gallbladder and her collection of Italian shoes. And as for your Uncle Maurice –’

  ‘But the people who live on that island –’

  ‘Enough,’ the old man murmured. He pointed to the door.

  ‘It should go back to the island,’ Stratis said.

  His grandfather rocked slowly to his feet and stood, balancing himself against the front of the desk. He leaned forward. ‘Don’t tell me what I should do,’ he said.

  ‘Their need is so great.’

  ‘No one’s need is as great as mine,’ his grandfather said emphatically. ‘You will not speak of this again, Stratis.’

  ‘Can’t you see –?’

  ‘Out!’ the old man shouted.

  Stratis bowed his head. He could feel his grandfather’s anger, as if it were heat or noise, still coming across the desk at him. He sighed. He shrugged. He looked up and muttered, ‘All right,’ as if agreeing that he’d lost the attempt to convince. He stood up, turned around and left the room.

  *

  When he went out for the evening, the beggar was still there, and when he came back.

  In the morning after breakfast he dropped in to the study and mentioned the fact to his grandfather, who simply nodded, and asked, ‘What makes you think he’s from the island, anyway?’

  ‘He has the accent.’

  ‘How would you know? You can hardly understand a word of ordinary Greek, much less the dialects. Even I have trouble with them.’

  ‘It has the same sound. It’s like hearing you talk to your friend, Costa, over the phone.’

  ‘If he’s anything, I bet he’s an art dealer. A lot of robberies still start by word of mouth. Somebody says, “Oh, they have a solid silver tea set”, or “a painting by so-and-so”: and eventually that information gets to the ones who are in a position to do something about it.’

  ‘Not according to what I’ve heard. Most theft is opportunistic: somebody sees an open window or they go down the street, trying the car doors.’

  ‘Professional crime, specialized. Art theft. And, as I said, big-time operators are always tied in with the insurance companies. China and jewelry, too. Rugs, furniture. That’s how they knew about Mrs Solomon’s silver. They didn’t touch the silver plate. They just look up your name, see what you’ve got. And then they ask around, to get an offer before they go to the trouble of stealing the stuff.’

  ‘How much have you insured it for?’

  ‘I told you: it isn’t insured.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s irreplaceable. Once you insure it, they know you’ve got it. They know, the tax man knows – everybody. Anyway, I don’t want money. I want what I’ve got.’ He threw himself from side to side in his chair and resettled himself more comfortably. ‘I paid for it,’ he said.

  When Stratis went out of the front door a few minutes later, he wouldn’t look at the beggar, nor when he returned. He reported back to his grandfather, saying, ‘He’s out there whenever I leave the house. He must be staying on the doorstep all night. If it isn’t so important, what does he want?’

  ‘Money, a home. He’s a Greek and I’m a Greek. That isn’t enough. I haven’t worked my guts out for nearly a century so that some freeloader from the old country can milk me. Stratis, my boy, it’s a good thing to have a soft heart at the right time, but it can also be a danger. It can lead you into cruelties you would never contemplate if you weren’t thinking of the immediate pleasure of flattering yourself. That’s what all this sentimentality is: you think for one glorious moment that you’re the good Samaritan, or Jesus Christ or God. And then people take you up on it. You’ve given them a promise, so they expect you to fulfill it. They want to know why you can’t carry them on your shoulders for the rest of their lives, seeing how much you have and how little they do. Ask yourself: what kind of a man gets into a state like that?’

  ‘A man who’s had bad luck.’

  ‘Bad luck comes to people who don’t make plans for sidestepping it when it’s there.’

  ‘That isn’t always possible, especially for a poor man.’

  ‘But why is he poor? Children can be poor. A woman with children can be poor. But a man? In the modern world?’

  ‘Things aren’t the way they used to be. Jobs –’

  ‘A man who remains poor all his life in a country like this is a man who deserves to be poor: a drunkard, a drug addict, a gambler, a man who’s extremely stupid or lazy or mentally deficient or insane, who can’t or won’t adapt to the normal requirements of authority, who can’t get along with other people, and so on. Why do you want to lift someone up out of his misery, just to drop him down into it again?’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that. Fate –’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘It can happen to anybody. Maybe he had a family and they all died. Maybe –’

  ‘Stratis, I want to talk to you about your future.’

  ‘I really could
n’t stand to be a lawyer. I couldn’t even do the studying. It’s completely deadening.’

  ‘Yes. Probably just as well not to begin, if you feel that way. And you can’t even out-argue me.’

  ‘Nobody does that, Grandfather.’

  The old man cackled. He said, ‘Well, you have a few more months before anything should be decided. We can talk about it again. Do some thinking. And then we’ll go for a walk on the golf course and plan it out. Let’s hope I don’t get any stiffer or you may have to push me in a wheelchair.’

  ‘That’s never going to happen, Grandfather. You’re going to stay on your feet. You could have walked to the sea with Xenophon.’

  ‘How do you know about Xenophon?’

  ‘High school. History 2A.’

  ‘You see? Education is important.’

  ‘Sure. It doesn’t make you happy. It doesn’t help you to get your girl back.’

  ‘Oh, Stratis. Some things you have to do for yourself.’

  ‘Grandfather, I can see that you’re trying not to laugh, but –’

  ‘I’m smiling. I’m fond of you and I know that you’re going to come through this discouraging time.’

  Stratis felt better. He remembered all the dangerous times his grandfather had lived through: yet the old man was kind to him, never suggesting that he might be spoiled because he had too much freedom and too many of the good things in life. He didn’t forget about the other old man, but he told himself that his responsibilities lay near to home, so that whatever injustice had been perpetrated, it wasn’t going to be up to him to redress it. And that was just as well, because his grandfather wasn’t a man who could be persuaded – his first instincts were strong, unquestioning and unquestioned. He didn’t care if that meant that he was sometimes wrong. He’d made millions out of the times when he was right.

  Ancient though he was, he’d also somehow managed, during their talks, to avoid allowing a direct comparison of icon and copy, and – whether by mistake or intent – had kept the photostat, which was the only one Stratis had bought.

  *

  He went out for an evening meal with two friends. On their way home, he took them to the café where Julia’s new lover worked.

  He and his friends sat down for a cup of coffee. They behaved themselves impeccably because a different waiter came to their table. He’s a coward too, Stratis thought. He was supposed to work the table we chose but when he saw us coming, he asked somebody to swap with him.

  On their way out, all three of them saw Julia walk across the other side of the terrace, probably going to meet the ponytail. Stratis turned his head. One of his friends, who had had a lot to drink, started to say something but the other one hushed him up and pulled Stratis by the arm. ‘Time to go,’ he said. ‘This way.’

  They were out on the sidewalk and saying goodnight without Julia’s name having been mentioned once. The sober friend said that he’d call in a couple of days. The drunken one waved and lurched away.

  Stratis walked. He hadn’t realized at the time how much he’d wanted to get into a fight, but now he was glad that other people had allowed him to avoid one. He was lucky to have friends who wouldn’t let him make a fool of himself. And he’d seen Julia again – that was the main thing.

  After a while he hailed a cab. By then his thoughts had drawn him back to the mystery of his grandfather’s icon. All during the ride, he wondered about it.

  It had to be the same one. His grandfather would have taken it with him when he left the island. He could imagine the old brigand, even when young, going about things in that high-handed way; just appropriating what he’d decided he ought to have. His grandfather had taken a beautiful, interesting, useful object and made it dead. That wasn’t right. No wonder all the people on the island thought that they had lost their way. Such an act couldn’t help but bring bad luck.

  The beggar was still on the doorstep and remained there all night, as if holding vigil. And he was there the next day. By that time all the relatives knew about him, although not about his need to recover a lost icon. No one else but Stratis had given him any money or stopped to listen to what he was trying to say.

  The day after that, he was gone. According to the rest of the family, Aunt Ariana found him still on the front steps when she went out to do some early shopping. She screamed at him in Greek, calling him a dirty beggar, and when he didn’t move, rushed back indoors, beyond the kitchen to the back pantry: to find a broom. She re-emerged, broom in hand, and proceeded to beat him furiously, all the while screeching without a pause. One of the things she kept saying was that she was going to call the police and let them take care of him. Her vehemence didn’t impress the man but the sight of a patrol car in the distance seemed to make him apprehensive. He gathered his papers and briefcase and hobbled away. He didn’t come back.

  *

  Down in the country, visitors would soon be arriving. There were many springtime and summer distractions: tennis, trail-riding or – the most popular – going out to dinner with other families in the neighborhood. Across the road from the old man’s land – and just before the hills began – was a golf course much in demand by city men who left the concrete and plate glass behind them every weekend, looking for a slower pace, fresher air and relatively uncrowded peace.

  After the golfers finished playing their rounds, the old man used to walk over the fairway with Stratis and they’d talk. Whether his grandson joined him or not, he invariably took some exercise every day; he called it his ‘constitutional’. Stratis had been tagging along with him ever since childhood, starting with the years when his parents were traveling through other countries, having left him in his grandfather’s care.

  They’d cover all kinds of topics during their rambles, at times going off into laughing fits together and then becoming serious or impassioned, straightening out many of the world’s most difficult problems.

  The large and comfortable house was easily able to accommodate regular visitors or unexpected guests. It was built around a small, partially covered courtyard, in the center of which was a fountain. The old man preferred that to air conditioning. The ancients, he used to say, knew a lot of things. And they did most of them better than we did now. Courtyards and running water were the old ways of regulating temperature; and positioning your house on the rise of a small hill so that it caught the breezes but not the full force of wind and cold. By such simple methods you could ensure that summer days cooled down at night and winter evenings escaped the penetrating chill of the nearby mountainside. Trees were important too: to shade and protect, to shelter the birds and to lend beauty to your surroundings.

  He never referred to early civilizations as things of the past or to their rulers as men and women who had lived a long time ago; they were always ‘ancients’ and their historical period was ‘in ancient times’. When he mentioned them, it was as if he were relating family gossip about his cousins from a few generations past, who just happened to be kings and queens and the heroes of legend: no ordinary people.

  *

  ‘That tree is sick,’ Uncle Zenon said. Stratis walked over to see. The tree appeared to be perfectly all right but he didn’t know about such things. Uncle Zenon did, or said that he did. Not only did the tree seem all right: it was lovely. It was one of Stratis’s favorites. If he looked out of his bedroom window from inside the house, its branches led his eye along a graceful curve of feathery leaves and – through minutely differentiated levels of green – to the landscape beyond. It gave the vision a way to proceed by stages and to enjoy near and distant sights as if the view were a musical experience. What would life be like when the tree was gone – when he had to look out at an empty space and a far horizon for which there was no preparatory flourish, no introduction of line and shape? The outer world would sit there in the distance, unconnected and uninteresting.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes. Look at the back, there.’

  He looked more closely. Everything st
ill appeared normal to him. Nothing had happened yet but already the death of the tree and its future absence had darkened his mood. The future wasn’t always going to be new and bright and at the same time full of everything from the past out of which it grew. That wasn’t the way it worked. Things disappeared all the time.

  All that night he wondered about the future. If only he hadn’t had the quarrel with Julia, his path would be clear. They’d have married, he’d have qualified in some skill or other; maybe, to please his grandfather, he’d have chosen business school, and possibly even have started to raise a family shortly after marriage. That would have pleased the old man enormously. And Melinda would have friends to play with when Sylvie brought her to visit.

  The wind blew hard from nightfall till dawn, tugging and releasing one of the window hooks in its catch, so that the room began to seem like a boat that was straining against its moorings.

  In the morning the weather and news programs reported a storm moving up the coast. Gales had already caused widespread devastation to the south and drivers were being warned to be prepared: if they were commuters, they ought to consider leaving their cars in town and taking public transport home, or even spending the night.

  The sky was white, brightening occasionally to let a sunny luster show itself for a few moments. The wind blew relentlessly. Gradually the day dimmed. By lunch time the sun was gone, and an hour after lunch Stratis said that he couldn’t stand being cooped up indoors for another minute. He went for a walk in the hills.

  Everyone called after him that he shouldn’t go out. He took one of the umbrellas from the hall stand, and left without answering.

  Thunder muttered at the back of the sky. It began low and muffled, far away. He thought that he’d have plenty of time to take his walk – maybe a little faster than he’d figured at first – and be home again without getting wet.

  As he pushed forward, the thunder retreated. He entered the more densely wooded, higher ground with the feeling that he could relax.