“Have there been other people inquiring about Mrs. Varvaressos?’
“The police at first. Now every month they come to see her. I think she pays them money… I paid them money too. Much good it did me.” He spat three times.
I supposed I had learned all I was likely to of Mrs. Varvaressos from this source, and I certainly wanted to know no more of my informant’s personal affairs. I got up, thanked him and told him gravely that I would hold his information in confidence.
He said, “You are not the police. You are perhaps a lawyer?”
“I am an insurance appraiser,” I said.
When a Greek woman leaves the village of her birth she will be better remembered than were she to have died. It is not a proverb, but it might be.
I drove to Corinth in the morning and thence to Skandi, arriving in time for church. Mass over, I spoke to the sexton. He had not only known Mrs. Varvaressos, he had grown up a few doors from her father’s house. He was close to her age.
“What went wrong with her son?” I said, hoping to reach the heart of the matter quickly.
“My friend, only God can say that. And he is in God’s hands now.” He crossed himself.
“How did he die?”
“He was shot trying to escape the island.”
“It would have been hard for the family,” I said. “I suppose that’s why she moved away.”
He looked at me and said nothing. I realized that he knew I was pretending to more knowledge than I had. I also suspected that he knew more than he was likely to tell me unless I was more frank with him. I saw no other way. So I said, “He did an evil thing to a friend of mine in prison. One wonders why.”
The sexton snorted. “Money.”
“Do you know that for a fact?”
“For a fact, no.” He stroked the back of one hand with the other. His wife brought us coffee and, going out, closed the parlor door. “For a fact, perhaps the answer is yes. We are not an ignorant people in this village. People from all over the world pass through every day of our lives on their way to the ancient shrines. When Stavros went to prison we were not surprised. He had been in trouble before. But we did not blame his mother. He was a boy in arms when his father was taken by the Andarte. He never came back. The boy had much hate in him. But he loved his mother. All the while he was in prison, she lived by scratch and charity, and the promises he wrote to her.
“Then one day last summer, without a word to anyone, she packed two boxes—one of his things and one of her own—and got on the bus to Athens.
“The first question was where did she get the money for the bus fare? It was a thousand drachma note out of which she bought her ticket. Her own family did not know. They have never heard from her since. They opened the letter to her telling her that Stavros was dead. But they could do nothing with the letter then except turn it over to the police. Our own Inspector has told them that she has been informed. She is living in Piraeus, the proprietor of a hotel.”
“It’s only a rooming house,” I said. “But she is said to own the building.”
“The postmistress told how she had received two very special letters last year, envelopes of a certain thickness and heavy paper. It may be assumed from this observation that no matter how she tried, the postmistress could not at the time see what was inside the envelopes.”
“Last year,” I repeated. I would have liked to place the dates of those letters relative to Stephanou’s blinding.
“Would you wish to speak to the postmistress?”
“I think not,” I said. “I would rather let the matter of my visit end with us.”
“It would not have been the money from the payroll, you see. That had all been recovered. The police used to come regularly and question his mother. They had searched her house, board by board, and then one day they came and they found the money where he had finally told them it would be, under the floor of the blacksmith shop where he had worked as a boy.”
I sipped my coffee. Reaching the dregs, I said, “Did he blame the Andarte for his father’s death?”
“In this village we blamed the Andarte for many things, my friend, and they gave us reason, taking our young men by force, and then burning us to the ground.”
16
“WE WERE NEVER FRIENDS, Professor. I should not have told you that. In such a prison friends are very rare. I did not know about his father. I can see now how it was possible for him to hate me enough.”
“Did he offer you money, Paul?”
“No. I never saw him again after the incident. But he said to me, ‘Andarte!’ and threw the bucketful of this terrible burning stuff. It was all very natural.”
Paul ran his hand along my desk as a sighted man might, cleaning the dust from it. Indeed he felt the dust in his fingers afterwards. “Grandmother Panyotis has other things to think of these days besides her professor.”
“Why was it necessary for you to lie to me about the money?”
He shrugged. “It seemed easier to tell you that, and I was afraid you would not find out everything if it was just the matter of a man hating a Communist.”
“You underestimate me. I do not call myself a scholar, but I have some of the characteristics. I will not settle for less than it is possible for me to learn.”
“It is so. I know it now—and I will not lie to you again. Probably it will not be possible. You made me tell you it was not the money. Did you not?”
“But the fact remains, Paul. He was given money—or his mother given it to keep for him. By whom?”
“That is the question, isn’t it? And why was it necessary for me to be blind?”
I said quietly, “Does it go back to the Webb case?”
“I should like to know,” he said. “Professor, I want to go to Ioannina with you. When you are ready I shall be ready.”
I had not been prepared for that, not at that moment. “I hadn’t planned to go there directly,” I said, trying to keep the dismay out of my voice.
“I know. You will be going first to Missolonghi, Prevesa…. So much the better. We shall learn how to be independent of each other. I do not wish to be a burden to you. I want only to know that you are there. Is it too much to ask?”
“I must know why you want to go, Paul.”
He banged his fist on my desk. “I do not know myself or I would not need to go. If I knew I would not have been in prison. I would not have been blind today.”
“I see,” I said.
“What is the price I must pay so that you will take me to Ioannina? It is not money, I know. I shall take enough to provide for myself from Vasso’s dowry, but I know it is not that. You are not afraid for yourself, are you? Or are you ashamed to be seen with a blind man who has been in prison?”
“You know it isn’t that. But if I am to be the eyes of this pursuit of yours, I need to know what or whom we are pursuing.”
He sat for a moment drumming his fingers on the desk. Then he got up. “It is all right. I did not realize how much I was asking. If a blind man trusts it is because he must trust. I know that. A man who sees must see everything. I shall find another way of going to Ioannina, Professor. Now we must try to pretend the issue did not come up between us, that I did not even ask. We must not be embarrassed, you and I.”
So it was to be on his terms all the way. Like hell the blind couldn’t lead the blind!
“We shall leave on the Wednesday after the wedding,” I said. “Can you be ready by then?”
“Yes, I can be ready.” He smiled and reached out until he found my shoulder. He clapped it gently. “I have been preparing for a long time—perhaps from the day I last started out to Ioannina.” He made sure the chair was steady and sat down again. “What you read in the old newspapers… everything was not always the way I told it at that trial….”
I could have cried out, hearing such an admission from him. And suddenly I realized something about him now that he might not have known about himself: he tested the temper, the credulity of his
confidant; then, having a commitment on terms he had himself set down, he proceeded to the confidence. It was much as he had himself described, more characteristic of the affliction than of the man Stephanou.
He chose his words carefully: “General Markos did not invite Alexander Webb to visit him. Markos did not believe in any American. He did not believe his cause would ever gain sympathy in the capitalist countries. It was, as I understood it, Webb’s own idea that he should go north if the contact could be made. It was made through our sympathizers in Athens when I reached there. I could not tell this at the trial without jeopardizing our Athens people. But I was party to the decision to take him north with me. I took Webb to his death.”
“And the man charged with his murder?” I said.
“Him also.”
“To his death?”
“That is possible. After the trial he escaped from prison. I was in that same prison. Early on the night of his escape I was removed to another part of the building. It is possible that those who rescued him, if that is the word, intended to have taken me. It is to me the only explanation.”
How strange this conviction of his, I thought. I have remarked elsewhere here on the “feeling of truth” and its power to deceive the believer. I could tell that over the years Stephanou had come to feel absolutely the truth of this theory, starting perhaps with the need to feel that his comrades would not have abandoned him. And of course the calculated rumor had spread that I had escaped behind the Iron Curtain. The irony of the moment was that it made understandable his complete acceptance of “John Eakins” even as the time drew rapidly near when I should have to reveal to him who I was or had been.
I asked him then, “What would have happened to him when the Andarte discovered their mistake?”
“He would have been shot in any case.”
“Rest in peace,” I murmured.
Stephanou turned his head toward me. “You do not believe he deserved to die. Why?”
“What was he doing there in the first place?”
“Ah, I see. Alexander Webb would not go without him.”
“Why? I know enough about newspaper men and the value they put on an exclusive story.”
“I will tell you what I believed at the time. It was Webb’s explanation: he wanted a witness, a collaborator—no, the word is corroborator. There is a difference! He wanted an all-American witness who was not likely to be called a Communist sympathizer. He wanted someone who would write the same story, but in his own way.”
This was as close to the truth as I had come myself: Webb had proposed that I could write my head off—after he had filed his story and released me. But why then had he excluded me from the critical interview with the guerrilla leaders? Something had happened in the interim, on the journey, in his first meeting with Markos. I tell it in some detail now, but all that really flashed through my mind at that moment was that Stephanou was telling the truth as I knew it.
I said, “So Webb chose to take his wife’s lover.”
“Or did he choose Webb? That is what I wondered many times.”
“I do not understand,” I said.
“I do not know if I can make you understand what this man was like. He was too innocent—that is not the word. He was… false. Pretending, that is better. It was my duty in Athens, when I knew Webb wanted to take him, to find out everything I could about him. He ingratiated himself with Webb’s wife. Where she went, he was there also, following like a worshipful dog. She was a lonely woman—married to a man much older than herself. They talked a great deal about Webb, about his work, his ideas. I am convinced this was part of Emory’s game. I have thought it was Mrs. Webb who persuaded her husband to take him, and that was what Emory wanted of her all the time.”
“You didn’t like him, Paul.”
“That is the truth, and after a while I became afraid of him.”
“Afraid of him?” I repeated, truly incredulous.
He nodded. “But by then it was already too late. We had been five days on our journey. We traveled mostly by night, sometimes by boat, sometimes by land. We had to avoid the towns and I had to be sure not to endanger the people who helped us. We were in government territory. And then when I became afraid, it was for these people as well. But let me tell you: one night in Prevesa—we shall be going there, shall we not?”
“Yes.”
“Being on the seacoast it was the only town we stopped in. This night Webb and I were talking. I had come to like him. He wanted to know everything deeply, you know? How I had come to be a Marxist. It had started in my student days in Athens and then during the occupation. But that is not important now. He knew a great deal about Marxism. More than I did. And more than the companion he had brought along. At first it was almost as though our conversation would contaminate him.
“Emory began to talk about the importance of the individual—human personality, that what a man earned by his own sweat he appreciated. As though a Greek would not know that, eh? And liberty. In Greece we had liberty under Metaxas, eh? Under Hitler, the King’s friend. And America was giving us liberty—the monarchy again. It was returned by vote of the people, he said. I looked at Webb. He had a way of smiling upside-down. He said, ‘Now you see why I invited Mr. Emory to accompany us.’ Mr. Emory did not talk any more. But he was listening. And once I looked at his face. I studied the way his jaw was set and I thought, I have seen this face before. I tried to remember. I had seen some pictures in a book, paintings of people—in Iowa, I think. The cold blue eyes, the mouths like ribbons of steel….”
“Grant Wood,” I said. “American Gothic.”
“That is so. And I thought, Greeks are better. America needs Greeks more than Greeks need Americans. I explained this to Alexander Webb and he understood. The other one, nothing. He understood what he wanted to understand.
“Later that night—I had left them sleeping in a loft over the restaurant—I went up and Emory was not there. When he did not come back in ten minutes I wakened Webb. It was decided I should look for him. Two of us would be conspicuous. I walked—searching the town at one o’clock in the morning. Suddenly I realized I was being followed. I did not dare go back—to lead the police to the house that sheltered me? I made up my mind what I would have to do: I would have to kill whoever it was that followed me.”
“But it was Emory,” I said, remembering well the circumstances I shall set down in time.
“Yes. I shortened the distance between us and turned back suddenly and confronted him. He had been unable to sleep and had gone for a walk and got lost. Mother of God!”
The motives were more complicated but the explanation I had given him was essentially the truth. I had suffered my own panic that night.
“Foolish of him,” I murmured.
“Foolish! Don’t you see, he was following me? It was my practice each night to do my real work among our people. The word would pass when I arrived, and after my companions were settled for the night, I would go to where our sympathizers were waiting. It was the only communication, a few men like me, in the whole of Greece.”
“Did Emory know that?”
“If he did not, he was a fool. But he knew it. Webb knew it. And in the morning, when Emory was doing what he always did alone, I said to Webb, ‘What do you know of him, what do you really know of him?’ ‘Not much, actually,’ he said. ‘My wife vouches for him and she is an excellent judge of character.’ ‘I have watched your wife with him,’ I told him, ‘and she was not judging his character.’ Webb burst out laughing. But I said to him, ‘It is very important to both of us: do you think he could be an agent for your government?’ He did not laugh any more, but he said, ‘No, I do not think it is possible.’ But from then on he was as much guarded as I was.”
Merciful God, I thought. Was this the reason Webb had excluded me from the Markos meeting? Much more intolerable to think of then: had he died believing this of me? I could not sit so near the blind man any longer feeling the need within me to cry out my prot
est. I got up and went to the door and opened it. In the midst of all my turmoil at that moment, I remember thinking, that a Communist should accuse a Puritan of a closed mind! How bloody appropriate.
“Professor?”
“Yes, Paul.” I saw Vasso leave his cottage and start down the street in my direction. “Vasso is looking for you,” I said.
“Ah,” he said, “I have promised to go with her to the priest. You must come also. It will not take long.”
I realized what was ahead of me: to stand before the altar of God and wish this man happiness—peace—the blessings of this earth and children to inherit them.
He had risen and now came toward me.
“Paul,” I said, “do you always distrust men with blue eyes?”
He stood a moment, I supposed nonplussed. Then he smiled. “Do you have blue eyes, Professor?”
“Yes, and I dare say some people would call them cold.”
“This I do not believe. And now I know a man with blue eyes whom I do not distrust.” He put his arm around me and propelled me toward the door.
Vasso, seeing us thus, fairly flew toward us and embraced us both.
17
THEY WERE MARRIED THE following Sunday and there was great feasting. It was small wonder the people of Kaléa rejoiced with the blind man’s return home, three feasts in six weeks. Old Spyro said, with a sad shaking of his head, “It will soon be the festival of our patron saint—but we shall have to pay for that ourselves.” I heard over and over the phrase, “It is like before the Germans came,” followed by the spit and curse on them as though the blindness of Kaléa’s golden warrior were attributable to them. Remotely, perhaps, it was.
Late afternoon of the wedding day I left the village and drove forty kilometers to Delphi, having promised Stephanou to return for him on Tuesday night. I did not think he had yet told Vasso that he was going north with me.
How I welcomed the awesome stillness of that most solemn of all the ancient shrines. It was swarming with tourists but to me they were no more than ants crowding the edge of infinity. A friend once sent me a postcard: “See Delphi and die.” I thought about that, looking down on the sacred plains where a vast wash of olive trees goes darkly to the sea I drank the waters of the Castalian Spring and from the sanctuary of Apollo gazed up toward Parnassus and the height from which Aesop was said to have been flung to his death—for pilfering a golden cup. Not for pilfering, I thought. There would have been more to it than that. And yet, the legend surviving, the modicum of truth in it had contented many at the time… if, of course, there ever lived such a person as Aesop!
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