I added, “As you were once yourself, grandmother.”
She caught my hand in hers and lifted it briefly to her lips. Then she fled into the twilight.
I felt my hand where the dry lips had brushed it, the touch of them as light as that of a moth’s wing, and I stood, aware that tears had come to my eyes. Why I wanted to weep I did not know except that I had meant what I said and she believed me.
Later, lying in the darkness and staring through the window at the myriad stars, I thought about the blind man coming. I wished in my heart that he too would come a stranger to Kaléa. But I knew, more deeply than the wish to gainsay it, that he was coming home.
6
I HAD ARRIVED IN Kaléa on a Thursday. The next day I walked several miles toward the sea to the point where I could look down on the miles of olive groves which lay, wind-rippled in the sun, like a monstrous green serpent easing up from the sea. I walked back through the bristling gorse from which the sheep cropped a stubborn nourishment. I spoke with a shepherd who had never been out of the hills, and I watched the threshing of grain on a sun-bleached floor, men and women flailing with sticks and then sifting the grain from the chaff. They invited me to share a meal of bread and cheese, and afterwards I divided the two oranges I had in my knapsack.
That night I sat with the old men outside the kafenion and shook hands with people who came, hearing I was there. The priest invited me to his house and promised me the loan of a book on the Siege of Missolonghi, the town where Byron died. He was a little pompous and spoke as though he had been present at the Siege. An old man with a stick, hobbled with arthritis, passed back and forth in front of us, glowering at me with open hostility.
Old Spyro, who had proclaimed himself my friend because we both had once lived in Boston, called out to the lame one, “Modenis, come meet my American comrade.”
“Your comrade,” he muttered and went on.
The old ones around me nudged one another and chuckled over a joke I did not understand.
“Who is he?” I asked.
I didn’t understand the word. Spyro explained: “A mountain fighter, but old, old. He is suspicious of everybody, not just you.”
“Why?”
Spyro, a wizened little man given to twisting and turning in his chair like a bird on a perch, wove his arm through the back rungs. “If he comes you will find out,” he said. “If he does not come, so much the better.”
“Aye, aye,” the others agreed.
I was sure they were talking about Paul Stephanou, but I did not question further.
Toward midnight I saw Vasso turn out the restaurant lights and walk up the street to the cottage next to the one she had rented to me and where she now lived with her mother and the boy. When I passed it later it was in darkness, but I heard the murmur of the women’s voices and I thought I heard the name Modenis. I wondered if the cottage where I lived had been prepared for Stephanou. No one had mentioned his name, but from somewhere I had got the impression that Vasso also was waiting for his return. Perhaps it was the searching look she had given me when we met—as though I might have been the herald of his coming. In Kaléa it was possible to imagine many things.
I went to the restaurant for breakfast in the morning so that Vasso would at the same time prepare a lunch which I could take with me. It was early, but no sooner had I sat down at a table outdoors than the garrulous old ones appeared and gathered around me. There was something different, not in their attitude toward me especially, but among themselves, as though they had something they wanted to tell that had not been told before. I can say this now, looking back: it was not quite so defined then, and I was probably first aware of the change in atmosphere when Constable Rigi, one of the village’s two policemen, came and stood nearby, his arms folded, his legs spread. His perpetual expression was that of a man suppressing a yawn, but his proximity that morning disquieted even those who had sat in camaraderie with him the night before.
I was about to offer coffee around when Spyro nudged the man next to him. They all turned to look in the same direction.
“Modenis,” Spyro said.
He came, rod-backed and steady-paced, dressed in a dark suit, shirt and tie, a straw hat on his head and his shoes so shined that they caught the glitter of sunlight. He was as old as most of the men around me, but by his gait and mien I sensed an iron will bearing him on this appointed journey. I was reminded of an old soldier about to take a last salute. When he was abreast of us I realized that Constable Rigi had moved off down the street. Modenis stood a moment glowering after him and then snorted. Disgust or contempt, I could not tell. I studied his face, searching it for a resemblance to the young Stephanou I remembered, for I knew even before Spyro said:
“Kalí méra, Modenis. So the hero comes home at last.”
A lump rose in my throat.
Modenis turned on us, his dark brows fierce. “Americans, you shut up!” he shouted.
Spyro appealed to his cronies. “What did I say?”
“He is a blind boy and a patriot,” Modenis said. “While you were making Yankee dollars he was fighting Fascists.”
“And for that they put him into prison?”
“Yes! For that they put him into prison!”
“Come, Modenis,” Spyro said, “have coffee with us. Your taxi driver must first butcher a lamb. You do not need to fight his battles, old friend. A blind man has no enemies.”
While two of the men scraped their chairs back from the table, Modenis came a step closer, leaning heavily on his cane. His eyes were on me. “Who are you and what is your business?”
“My name is John Eakins,” I said, getting up.
“Modenis, Modenis, what’s the matter with you? The man is a friend. He is a professor, a writer. We are not savages in Kaléa.”
“What do you write?” Modenis demanded.
“The life of a poet,” I said.
“A poet,” he repeated, the fierce brows slowly relaxing. He sat down, a gnarled, shaking hand steadying itself on the table to support his weight while the other groped for the back of the chair. He had to drop his crippled body into it like an abandoned puppet. He drew a deep breath and looked at me. “A poet?” he said again as though he might not have heard correctly.
I nodded.
“Sit down,” he ordered me. To Spyro: “I will have coffee. And tell Vasso I want to speak to her.” He took off his hat and laid it on the table. His head was as bald as the rock of starvation.
One of the men went to the doorway and clapped his hands.
Modenis touched his chin where he had nicked himself shaving. “A Greek poet?” he asked.
“An Englishman, Lord Byron.”
The old man nodded. “My sister’s son who is coming home today… he has been away for a long time….” His voice trailed off and his eyes strayed around the faces of the cronies, solemn and watchful, men with no cares left in the world save their own comforts. Then he wagged a finger at me. “Do not believe what these old gossips tell you!”
“Is your nephew a poet?”
“Once he was. Now—who knows? except that he is blind. God wither their souls in hell!” He crashed his hands down on the table and bent his head as low as his wracked body would allow, his eyes closed, his jaws clenched.
I thought of the night in a Greek prison when I had myself cursed as bitterly. I said, “Homer was blind, and so was the English poet, Milton.”
Modenis opened his eyes, then nodded his head a little.
Vasso came and set a cup of coffee before him. “Godspeed, Uncle of Paul,” she said.
“I will tell him that you said it, Vasso.”
Old Spyro clapped me on the back. “Tonight, John Eakins, you will learn what a Greek homecoming is like. We will all get drunk and we will laugh and cry, and nobody will talk of politics.”
“Ha!” another man cried.
“He cannot be a Communist any more. And if he is, who will argue with him? I swear by the sweet Virgin Mother I will
not say a word.”
“Nor I, nor I,” the others chorused.
I heard the words and did not hear them. I looked at Vasso, the color high in her cheeks, the dark eyes darting from one face to the other and then to me as if to plead the welcome. I could see in her the girl she would have been when Stephanou had left her—for war and revolution. But, oh, dear God, what would she see in him who was coming home—the dead man looking for a grave?
Vasso brought us coffee which the old boys sipped noisily as though to dissipate Modenis’ brooding silence.
The butcher drove up in his Chevrolet. Modenis put on his hat and raised himself from the chair. No one dared to help him, but each man grunted sympathetically. I stood up and moved the chair out of his way.
He extended his hand to me. “I am sorry I was lacking in hospitality.”
“Godspeed,” I said, although the word was bitter in my mouth.
I walked far that day, crossing through the olive groves and climbing to the rocky cliffs above the Bay of Corinth. I was trying to walk off a sudden anger, or at least to understand it. I supposed it lay in the resuscitation of that dread feeling of being used, and of having got myself into a position where I could not avoid it: I was to be part of the welcome—I’d seen it in Vasso’s face—as though she had said, “I am glad you are here, someone of his caliber. You will be useful in his rehabilitation.”
Or was it jealousy that ailed me? Of all the god-damned nonsense! I was jealous of his coming home to Vasso even as I had once been jealous of the relationship between him and Webb as we had gone north together. I thought then of the son who bore Vasso’s maiden name, Panyotis, and felt a satisfaction in the breach I presumed it manifested in her fidelity. Then how I castigated myself for that bit of nastiness! I was incapable of measuring honest sentiment to the depth of a handshake, I thought. I had never loved a woman I had touched or touched a woman whom I had loved. Pitiable if not funny. I had pitied myself too much and had rarely if ever been able to laugh at my own expense. For a flickering instant as I looked down on the dark, night-blue water, I asked myself at what Paul Stephanou was laughing that night when we had looked for Webb, both of us frantic—or so I had thought him as well as myself—for the safety of the man, only to discover him tossing on a sea of bliss.
Christ in heaven! Was that not funny? I could no more laugh now, explaining the joke on myself to myself, than I was able at the time to see it that way. But the loathing I had felt at that instant for Webb and for the laughing Greek had, over the years, shifted its focus… I had come to loathe myself for the victim that moment had made of me.
“The wretch, concentred all in self….” I said the words aloud even as they surfaced unbidden in my mind.
I moved away from the precipice and turned my back on the sea, my mind clinging, much after its usual fashion, to the contemplation of some poet whose words I had plucked with apt timeliness from my subconscious as from a jewel box. Thus did I substitute ornament for truth. There was something in the exchange of correspondence between Scott and Byron I ought to explore, I told myself, a key perhaps to the puritanism behind the sham of the libertine.
It was late afternoon when I returned to a much-changed village. Word had spread of Modenis’ mission, and by now the name of Paul Stephanou was on everybody’s lips. Women were home early from the fields, picking flowers from their gardens, or braiding their hair as they gossiped at the windows. Girls, most of them too young to remember him, were out in fresh frocks. When one of them said something, they would rush together to join in paroxysms of glee. They reminded me of nothing so much as undergraduates on a football Saturday. One had to suppose from this activity that there was a legend to the man returning home.
Children were dispatched to the shrine where the road turned down to Kaléa. Outside the church a close-shaven young man was rehearsing a boys’ chorus in folk songs. I wandered among the men gathered at the kafenia. The talk was politics no less than usual, but the consensus, if I judged it right, was that since Paul was coming home all must be well with the government in Athens: political leniency was the sure sign of stability.
I approached Constable Rigi and remarked on the excitement. He shrugged and said, “People remember what they want to remember. To me it is no great honor to have been in prison. But if I said that now….” He made the gesture of cutting his own throat.
I watched and listened with a kind of horror, not because of my own feeling about Stephanou—who here would believe me if I told of his false testimony? Constable Rigi!—but because I kept remembering the lawyer Helmi’s description of him. I wanted to prepare the people, particularly Vasso. I watched her come from the house to the restaurant, her arm across Michael’s shoulders. She sped him on to join in the children’s vigil.
She smiled as I came up. “You will like the Greeks tonight, Professor Eakins.”
“I do not have to wait for tonight. Have you seen him, Vasso, since he went away?”
She shook her head.
“There are few afflictions worse than blindness,” I said.
“He will have a hundred pairs of eyes.”
I said no more. Going into the cottage, I looked up the correspondence between Byron and Sir Walter Scott.
He came as the first shadows fell upon the valley. I knew it from the ringing of the church bell, then from the sound of the grandmother as she ran past my window. I looked up in time to see her cross herself again and again as she ran. I closed my books and went out. Everyone was gathering in front of the restaurant, the boys’ chorus, the giggling girls. The priest came out from his house, striding in black magnificence, his wife scurrying after him.
The car came down the hill, the dust in its wake veiling the children who ran after it, the flowers still in their arms. That it had not stopped for their gifts was to me the first omen.
As the car drew to a halt, the singing master signalled and began himself to sing, but the boys, far more interested in the passenger than in their director, sang in neither tune nor time. And one long moan went up from the women who had glimpsed the men in the back seat. The butcher’s wife handed her husband a towel in which he wiped his face. Vasso, waiting with towels for the others, could not get the back door open and no one helped her until I pushed through the crowd and, reaching through the front window, unlocked it from the inside and opened it. Paul Stephanou sat like a stone man, his face grey, save for the pinched red lids that concealed the sightless eyes. His closely cropped hair was white and his lips tight, the color and shape of a slashing scar. I would not ever, ever have known him.
Beside him old Modenis sat staring ahead, his fierce dark eyes blinking. He was like a poised eagle.
Vasso held the wet towel close to Paul’s hands and said his name. He pushed her hand from him and said harshly, “Butcher, drive on!”
The priest came up, trying to move Vasso away and himself take over, but she elbowed him back and slammed shut the door of the car. I thought she was going to faint, such was the pallor of her face. I offered my hand and she caught it and held it fiercely as the car moved slowly, jerkily, from the curb. The white towels lay at her feet.
The chorus faded out altogether with the sound of the car’s motor and mercifully did not start up again. Only the moans of disappointment. What in hell had they expected? The return of a laughing boy?
I said one word to Vasso, “Courage!”
Her lips were parted. She nodded a little without looking at me and then, letting go my hand, followed after the car. She walked in the slow march of a ritual to where Modenis had gotten from the car in front of his cottage. He put the small, cheap suitcase on the ground and gave his hand to the blind man who then got out of the car, cane in hand, and permitted his uncle to guide him into the house. Vasso picked up the suitcase and followed them.
The butcher circled back and parked the car, immediately becoming the center of a men’s jabbering council. The children pelted one another with the flowers, the girls went home to pu
t away their pretty dresses and some of the boys from the chorus staggered mockingly into the street, groping the air in a sort of grotesque game of blind-man’s buff.
I walked to the opposite end of the village to the shop where I had myself been given my first welcome to Kaléa just two days before.
7
A MAN CONSPICUOUS BY his absence from Stephanou’s homecoming was George Kanakis, the village president. I sought him out in his shop. He was at the forge, turning the blade of a plow that had been cruelly bent as by a rock. I watched him try to hammer it into shape while he looked at the fading coals and cursed the boy who had deserted the bellows. I volunteered to try my hand at them. I was more a menace than a help, sending up a cascade of sparks with my first attempt.
“It can wait,” Kanakis said, and laid aside the plow.
“I can learn.”
“Why? It is an ancient trade and you are a modern man. What is happening with the return of the hero?” I could not tell: sarcasm or acclaim?
“He is old,” I said. “He would not speak.”
“Not to Vasso?”
“To no one except the butcher, telling him to drive on.”
Kanakis led the way to the front of the shop and offered me one of the two chairs there. At the door he clapped his hands, a signal to the kafenion-keeper two doors away. “You will have a coffee with me,” he said.
“I would be honored. What was he like before he went away?”
“Before he went away. I remember Paul when he was a boy and I was already a man.” He threw up his hands. “I remember when he was born. His mother died, may she be with God. His father was killed in a street demonstration in Athens. He too was a radical, a self-educated man. Modenis, his uncle, brought Paul up like his own son, sent him to school. He was a fine student, very good in languages at the gymnasium. Then before the war he won a scholarship to the university in Athens. Modenis gave a party that night—oh, I tell you, it was beautiful.” He tilted back in his chair, remembering, his toughened face soft with the visions he saw. “Everybody got drunk. A scholar from Kaléa. It was like having a doctor from the village, you know? It was like all of us together were part of him. And we were. We all gave something so that he should live well in Athens, like the son of a merchant or a lawyer. But the war came, and Paul fought in the north with our ragged and heroic army and then afterwards when everything was lost, he came back and the terrible time of the German came on us. He could have gone to Egypt with the government… the flight into Egypt….” Kanakis smiled at the bitter image. “But he chose to stay. He taught school at night—in the cave where a candle burns to this day. Our children were like moles, but they learned to use words, to read and write their own language. He was like a young priest. And later, when he roused us all by his passion—he would tell us in the church while the priest—it was the old priest, not the one here now—watched from the belfry lest the Germans come. He would tell us of our ancient heroes, of our rising amongst the graves defiled by the Turk, and then afterwards our young men and some not so young—I was among them—would follow him in the night and we learned something else—how to kill, how to blast with dynamite; I who turn my back like a woman when the butcher sticks a pig. In this village we were not afraid of the Andarte. In those days we were the Andarte.”
Enemy and Brother Page 6