The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

  ‘When all I think about is your comfort!’

  Comfort was an immorality Maro proposed to resist.

  ‘Oh, no, no, Pronoë! Go, Pronoë!’ Her voice moaned and reverberated round the marble peaks; while her sister remained standing on the plain.

  ‘As you hate me, I shall leave you,’ Pronoë promised. ‘All our life you have tried to hurt me.’

  Then Maro laughed, and called down, ‘My memory isn’t as good as yours.’

  On overhearing Aunt Pronoë as she passed, ‘What are we going to do if we lose her? What then?’ Costa understood he wasn’t being addressed.

  Immediately she saw him she said, ‘When I was a girl I played the piano hoping to give pleasure to others. But professional musicians become so egocentric they forget they have an audience. Excepting, of course, when they hear the applause.’

  Everybody drew a circle Pronoë was unable to enter. Even Paraskevi her maid.

  ‘What are you standing there for?’ Pronoë called. ‘Standing and standing!’ Perhaps it was hunger that made her voice so thin and shrill. ‘What do you think about,’ on one occasion she inquired, ‘while you are standing?’

  ‘I am thinking,’ said Paraskevi, her slow thoughts voluptuous for one so old and dry, ‘I am thinking how it felt in the days when our bellies were full.’

  ‘Oh, our bell– – our stomachs – that is all we can think about? When they are so low down? And unimportant?’

  ‘Important enough,’ said Paraskevi.

  Answering back made her mistress rush at the bibelots, dust the potiches her maid neglected, the books in which forgotten authors had written compliments for ladies of distinction, the icons which deteriorated whatever care was taken of them.

  Pronoë always wore gloves for dusting. Once in her rage for cleanliness and order she put out the flame beneath the icons, flickering in the drop of oil Maro had got from the Armenian for four silver spoons. Pronoë could not blame herself enough; it was as though she had committed sacrilege.

  But Maro opened her eyes and said, ‘Why, Pronoë, all lights are extinguishable. Except, apparently, my own.’

  She only opened her eyes now when there was reason for doing so. The lids seemed to creak back, uncovering a vision of old, brown, uncommon amber. Time might have passed unbroken, a long, slow, empty, soporific cold, if it hadn’t been for the machinery of Maro’s eyelids, and the shots they sometimes heard after curfew.

  That winter, the house in which they had always lived impressed itself on Costa Iordanou with a vividness which only sickness or hunger kindles. To turn the corner of the street was to re-enact a first glimpse: of this ochreous face which poverty had blotched and history pitted, under its tiara of terracotta tiles. Dun shutters on rusty hinges could be forced open to admit the sun, or dragged shut to bar the enemy. Any pretensions to grandeur the house ever had were somewhat reduced by the fact that it was now shared, admittedly by members of the same family, but in altered circumstances. Since Dr Stavro Vlachos and his wife Anna had taken over the ground floor, there was a hugger-mugger public air, of patients hanging around outside. Scabby old men could be seen sitting on the steps, awaiting their turn, under the doctor’s plate. But there was no longer any question of billeting, and whenever it was thought necessary to slam and bolt the shutters, there were no suspects amongst those who listened for approaching footsteps.

  Otherwise, living together didn’t make all that difference. Though Anna could be pretty bossy. They heard her moving about below, and she came upstairs and organized them. Their flat might have been a dolls’ house when Anna began pushing them around. Stavro was a busy man, who would more than likely die of his patients, Pronoë said. (Though they had never known how to exchange more than a few words, Costa loved his brother-in-law.)

  Upstairs the sloping rooms had been darkened by string-coloured net curtains and too much inherited furniture. Some of the furniture was so frail the sisters wordlessly dared callers to use it. There were the inscribed photographs of gentlemen in starched collars, ladies in demi-décolletage, everybody’s nose impeccably aristocratic without being ostentatious. President Iordanou’s photograph was set apart in a silver frame, which added to the cold distinction of his figure. Costa avoided looking at it, as though his father were present in the flesh. It shocked him to think he had once been a drop of sperm in the presidential pants. He preferred the crackled portraits of more distantly related admirals and noble brigands who had fought the Turk. His aunts’ conversation had always glittered with words such as ‘independence’ and ‘liberation’. They made them sound peculiarly theirs, till now, after bartering their other jewels, they brought these out more guardedly.

  Over Maro’s bed hung the tremendous small icon of the Panayia. As a little boy he used to climb on the bed, to rub his nose against the Virgin’s brown Byzantine beak. Once when nobody was looking he scratched a flake of gold off the nimbus; it tasted disappointing, and made him cough. By the time his pimples came, She had grown sullen towards him, he too conscious of the acne of wormholes in the wooden cheeks of the Mother of God. Their relationship finally settled down, half formal, half ironical. (From visits to the museum he suspected his aunt’s icon was not a very good one.)

  Till on a night of their present winter spattered with bullets smelling of damp cold of boiled weeds of blood his own love or hunger overflowed the eyes of his Panayia and he was drawn towards her like a drop of water to another into one crystal radiance.

  Aunt Maro opened her eyes and asked, ‘What are you looking at, Costaki?’

  He stood trembling in a shamefully uncontrollable glandular stench of dripping armpits.

  ‘You!’ He lied smiling, ashamed equally of his cowardice and his unconfessable experience.

  Maro made an almost flirtatious grimace, which did not fit her hewn-out features or her old hair. He ran at her, and began to work her hands: they might have been tokens in plaster or wood articulated by leather thongs. At the same time he looked into her eyes, the opacity of brown amber he had always known. It was possible that he had never communicated with his aunt, but he worshipped her imperishability, if not that same radiance of his Panayia.

  In the morning the doctor came.

  Most mornings Dr Vlachos, a stocky man from a village of pine-trees and rock, visited Miss Makridis. His heavy footsteps on the stairs were something Costa took for granted.

  Maro would never have admitted to her niece’s husband that he was the person she most respected, just as she wouldn’t admit she could never forgive him for marrying Anna, thus thwarting a grand design.

  As he went through his early-morning scales, Costa could hear his brother-in-law. If he turned on the stool, he could see the back of Stavro’s large head, his thick, unyielding neck.

  ‘It is a matter of willpower,’ Stavro was explaining. ‘There is nothing wrong with you, Maroula. Except – where is your will?’

  Costa knew that Maro’s head would be beating time on the pillow as she spoke. ‘I know all about will. My own in particular. When to use it. And to what extent. If I decide not to, that is my own business.’ She began to mumble. ‘My contribution. To the children.’

  Anna was always tempting their aunt, for some of the doctor’s patients were in a position to pay him: a couple of eggs, a medicine-bottle filled with oil, once a goat cutlet which drove the household wild.

  That morning Anna had brought a soup-plate with watery rice. It was mostly dust from the bottom of the sack, more than usually glutinous. Mrs Vassilopoulo had got it – no one would have asked how – and it pleased her sense of vengeful charity to offer the little Vlachos a handful for that old creaking snob, her aunt.

  Anna said, blowing on the rice, ‘Just a little mouthful, Maroula.’ Then she added, with a touch of the brilliance she hadn’t otherwise inherited, ‘It is so insipid, no one should suffer any moral qualms.’

  At least they were able to laugh together.

  But Costa could tell his sister had failed. He heard
the dring of spoon on porcelain, followed by Anna’s demonstrative sigh.

  Presently the Vlachos went downstairs to begin plodding through the stages of their morning. Patients’ voices floated up from the surgery. Costa could recognize the extra-cheerful, while tremulous, tone of those who were unable to pay.

  He willed himself to believe in music. The blood of music flowed through their veins as his hands splattered through preliminary scales. If he could only live for music, music would give him life in return – spirit, as old man Bach had demonstrated so sensibly. It was consoling to realize sense and not daemon led to God.

  When suddenly he had to run, the ways so tortuous, so dark, in their cramped flat. He had to reach the bathroom. Scarcely had time to arrange himself. It was the weeds they mostly had to eat. The spirit was finally reduced to a stream of green slime.

  Or not finally.

  Finally he sat pulling at himself, without an image, scarcely erect. So much for sense, for Bach, for Maro and Pronoë – for the worm-holed Panayia. He bowed his head at last above his impoverished stickiness.

  And remembered the afternoon not long after the enemy had taken possession, when Pronoë began springing from room to room, an obscene, elderly ballerina inspired by expectation or fear. His own heart exploding. Glad he was only the young nephew.

  Paraskevi returned upstairs. It surprised him that anyone so tough and fibrous as their maid could tremble quite so violently. ‘A German officer,’ she announced.

  ‘Of what rank?’ babbled Pronoë.

  Though her fingers were performing all the arpeggios of fear, there were certain formalities to be observed.

  But Paraskevi had never been able to learn about rank, and in any case, a German was a German.

  Suddenly too old to react any more, Pronoë let fall, ‘They have come for us, then.’

  All three continued in extremis awaiting guidance if the saints hadn’t turned to wooden boards since God withdrew His favour.

  Maro got up from her chair. Everybody realized this was what they had been hoping for. Maro was the one saviour who might possibly deliver them.

  They all went down. As a mere hoplite, Costa breathed more easily.

  There was a wind blowing. That winter the wind never stopped blowing on Lykavittos. Stavro had been called to a patient, Anna was out digging dandelion. So the phalanx faced the whole cold afternoon opening blue and rainy at them through the doorway.

  The mortal gravity of the situation drove all four of them out of the house into the street. Pronoë held her hair to her head, but Maro’s hair blew. She might have appeared cloudy if it hadn’t been for her features: their cutting-edge was of weathered stone.

  The young lieutenant – everyone but Maro afterwards admitted there was nothing objectionable about the lieutenant – standing unnaturally upright outside their house in Patriarch Isaïou, was offering a neat, oblong parcel.

  ‘Miss Makridis,’ he began composing in timid Greek, ‘please accept with the greetings of Professor Schloszhauer, of whom I have been a student – in Munich – this small parcel of genuine coffee.’

  The silence swelled in Patriarch Isaïou.

  Then Miss Makridis, in a German stiff from disuse, though still thrillingly accurate, said, ‘Professor Schloszhauer could not have realized he would force me to commit treason by accepting his parcel of coffee. I am sure the professor would not wish me to.’

  Above her marble face, her hair was blowing about in tormented streamers of white cloud.

  Paraskevi did not stop grunting and muttering.

  Maro was actually moistening human lips. ‘Tell him,’ she began. ‘Tell,’ she practically sang. But the rising voice had a flaw in it. It cracked on its highest, purest note. And shattered.

  The German lieutenant clicked. Saluted. Turned. Still carrying the parcel of coffee. Routed by the phalanx.

  The victorious Greeks went upstairs. It was not an evening for celebration. Pronoë snivelled on and off; she had a permanent cold since they were without heating. Old Paraskevi kept calculating aloud how many little cupfuls she might have squeezed out of the parcel. Where a scent of coffee should have floated, there hung a stench of boiling nettles.

  As Costa Iordanou sat in the bathroom mopping at his thighs with a handkerchief on the morning of his shame, there wasn’t even the stench of weeds. There was a smell of cold. And excrement. The flat was empty by now. Paraskevi, Pronoë, each had gone in her chosen direction – to hunt. One day somebody might kill. In the meantime, it was hoped, they would all survive on weeds.

  Costa went into Maro’s room. After hoisting her higher on the pillows, he embraced his cold aunt. The plateful of tepid rice on the bedside table gave him a whiff or two of aged, human flesh. His aunt’s eyelids reminded him of hens he had seen peasants tying by the legs, but her lips had the bluish, gelatinous look of old, resigned, human lips. He couldn’t look any longer. He went out, he didn’t know, nor care, where. Slamming their front door. He was the disgusting genius whose shortcomings embittered his throat, and stuck to his thighs.

  Even so, the little pure notes of truth trickled at intervals through his eyes into his mind: a sky still tolerated the scurfy roofs of the houses below, a geranium still burned in a pot, a donkey dropped a poor, but still sweet-smelling, turd.

  He went down Callerghi Street buttoning his jacket. He went down Thessalogenous. His ankle twisted on a stone, and nearly threw him. He glanced back to curse the stone. In Meleagrou, Mrs Vassilopoulo looked out from the ground floor of the block she owned. She had been putting on her hat, but took it off, and called Costaki in.

  Mrs Vassilopoulo explained, ‘Somebody is giving me a lift. To my sister at Porto Rafti. Where I go if possible once a week. It is from my sister’s – at Porto Rafti – that the eggs come.’

  Mrs Vassilopoulo made a phlegmy noise in her throat, a gesture with her head to indicate the bowl of eggs. Eggs today had acquired the status of flowers. Their smooth, passive forms disturbed. The sister’s hens gave brown eggs. There was a bloom on their porous shells. They were the perfection of eggs: not for eating.

  Perhaps for that reason you started to hate Mrs Vassilopoulo’s eggs. She had a greasy skin, particularly about the eyelids. She had a just noticeable goitre. She smelt of body, and looked like bruised, browning pears.

  While she spoke she kept on lowering her black eyelids.

  ‘My sister at Porto Rafti.’

  Flickering and smiling behind the powder.

  ‘Where the eggs come from.’

  Then Mrs Vassilopoulo stopped smiling. She drew down the corners of her mouth, her eyeballs straining out of her head, her face darkening as she screwed it up into a tight ball of wrinkles. You would have said Mrs Vassilopoulo was suffering from a belly-ache.

  ‘Costaki,’ she began panting in short sharp peppermint gusts, ‘every day you pass I ask myself what have I done that he never looks. Of course,’ she said, ‘I know,’ she said, ‘young boys go through a brutal phase. And realize too late –’ the teardrops were bounding out of Mrs Vassilopoulo’s eyes, ‘– what they have missed.’

  All at once she took his hand and stuck it right inside her nest of rotting pears. The sweat began prickling on him, and he had never felt so cold, so limp, between his legs.

  Mrs Vassilopoulo was smiling again. It was more alarming than her belly-ache. The smell of body lying in ambush under powder shot up his nostrils as she moved in.

  ‘I don’t believe’, she breathed, ‘you are all that brutal. Not such an angel. Not underneath.’

  Just then he succeeded in tearing his paralysed hand out from between her hot pears.

  ‘You and your old eggs!’

  Under the influence of the emotions which were swirling round them, the eggs in the bowl seemed to have swelled, to have increased in number, just as he and Mrs Vassilopoulo had begun to overcrowd the small palpitating room.

  ‘My eggs?’ she shrieked. ‘You know there were never larger! Or fresher!’

&
nbsp; Her breasts were bounding between her shrieks.

  ‘But what are eggs?’ As though to illustrate, she began picking them up. ‘That’, she bellowed, ‘is all I care for eggs!’ She threw. ‘And you!’ She threw and threw. ‘And your stuck-up, crazy aunts!’ Always throwing. ‘Nasty pousti boy! Every sign. From away back.’

  He went out. It was fortunate Mrs Vassilopoulo had worked herself into such a state she could only hit the walls of her own saloni.

  He walked down the hill, down the narrowing, the practically deserted streets, which bobbed about under him like gangways over a rough sea. The clearest mornings were perhaps the bitterest in their city now, their fragility a constant warning.

  In a gutter in Bouboulinas Street an old lady was lying. The hat she should have been wearing had disappeared from the neat swathes of her hair. The shoes were gone from her stockinged feet. Her legs, sticking out too straight, too wide apart, marked her as a carcass rather than a corpse, yet her decent black-silk, white-spotted dress, everything about her except the face, was that of his own, living aunts.

  Death had not parted her from her handbag. Costa had a look inside the bag, because nowadays nobody, excepting no doubt his aunts, let an opportunity slip. Naturally the bag was empty.

  He walked on through the labyrinth, between the blanks made by iron shutters. In the entrance to an empty arcade stood a German corporal offering a tin of something on the palm of his red hand.

  ‘Guck mal!’ he coaxed. ‘Fleisch kaloh.’

  The unopened tin was so dazzlingly immaculate it could have contained the true answers to all the riddles.

  Costa was fascinated by the tin.

  Then the corporal compressed his voice in a lower, straining, hopefully seductive key.

  ‘Seh gamo kaloh, paithee. Ehla! Nimm’s doch!’

  The corporal’s hand, perhaps once-bitten, was trembling like his voice.

  Never given the time, never, to think of historic replies, Costa Iordanou simply said, ‘Go and stuff it up your own arse.’

  It should have sounded thunderous as it rebounded off the peeling walls, but came out thin, wavering, schoolboyish, finally a warning of danger.