Paul said that it was a very good meal, not Vasso’s, but very good for a woman who was not Vasso.
I spoke of the wine. “To have tasted it with my eyes closed,” I said, “I’d have thought it Italian.”
“There is much Italian influence,” Paul said. “It is not only the proximity, but during the war this part of Greece was occupied by the Italians. Indeed, much of the Andarte arms were Italian, you know, abandoned to us when Italy surrendered to the Allies. And you will remember—or perhaps you won’t—but the Garibaldi volunteers fought for Greek recovery of Epirus from the Turks in 1915. There is a monument to them in Ioannina.”
I was only half-listening to him. “Paul, would the woman, Maria, have spoken Italian?”
“It is very probable,” he said slowly, weighing the implications as he went on. “Most of the peasants do a little—from the occupation.”
“Then I think it was Maria who came for Webb when Markos sent for him that night. I did not see who it was. I assumed it was you. I was at the fireplace and Webb spoke a few words…. I couldn’t really hear, but the fleeting impression was of another language. I’m reasonably sure Webb knew Italian as well as French.”
Paul sat, his hands cupped tightly, and rocked a little while he thought. “They would of course have had to communicate. Markos could not have instructed her in every detail.”
“It isn’t that, Paul. Now we know how Webb and Markos communicated without Demetrios as translator.”
“Of course, of course! You have said it was daylight when Webb went to him and it was pitch dark, I know, when Demetrios was sent for. And I know for a fact, Maria came for him.”
“So we must assume Webb recognized Demetrios from a previous meeting,” I said.
“It is so. It is probably so. And there was a moment in the schoolhouse when Webb told me to say to Markos, he wanted to speak to him, Markos, alone, with only a translator. I had always thought, you see, that he was excluding you. But Demetrios was in the hall, and he was the one most importantly to be excluded.” He leaned back and rubbed his neck with his hands. “Oh, my brother, are we ever to know the truth entirely?”
“With luck—and if we have courage,” I said.
Paul gave a little laugh. “I am remembering something we said very early in our acquaintance—in Kaléa. We are both going back to where we were afraid. We are going together, but we must not be seen together. I will listen—and you will see. Let us talk about the festival. There will be a bus. I may attend. I have never been to the theater, you know.”
“Not even as a student?”
“Not the classical theater. It was the future of Greece I was then concerned with. We have said this before, you and I.” After a moment he added, “In prison I used to make up imaginary conversations.”
“With me?”
“No.” He smiled. “We would never have had very much to say to one another, I thought.”
“With Captain Demetrios?”
The smile vanished. “To him I had but one word to say: Die, Fascist.”
Two words, but I said nothing. I filled his wine glass. He tilted his head a little, listening to the sound. When the glass was full he played his hand across the table until he touched the stem. There was grace in the way he used his hands—a sculptor or a doctor—what might not this man have been?
“So,” he said, punctuating his own thoughts. “When we pass the road to Dodoni you will put me down as you would a beggar to whom you had given a ride.”
“That’s not necessary,” I said.
“Ah, but it is, Professor. You told me once that I was a blind man who could see with my ears, my nose, my hands. It is so. And to judge what I see, I must perceive it with my own faculties.”
“Where will you stay?”
“In the old town. It will have changed the least. I shouldn’t think too far from Lord Byron Street.” He reached into his coat pocket and took out his wallet.
“I have a money belt I’ll lend you,” I said.
“Thank you,” but he handed me the wallet open to the plastic identification window. “Read that to me, please.”
I took it and read: “Michael Panyotis, Kaléa, Boeotia.”
“The president of Kaléa prepared it for me. Now I too have another identity. I do not think my son would mind.”
“Do you know how much money you have?” I gave him back the wallet.
“Yes, but I would like to rehearse the coins with you again. It is the little things that change and give one difficulties. You will not worry about me, Professor.” He turned the sudden smile my way. “I promise not to go near the water.”
In the morning we drove up one of the best highways in Greece through a witches’ lair of crags and great dark pine trees into a fertile valley where the waters of the river moved swiftly. Women washed their clothes at its banks and spread them on the rocks to dry. When we reached the road to Dodoni I saw the signs advertising the festival. It would open that weekend with The Trojan Women.
I stopped the car. “I have promised Vasso to bring you safely back to Kaléa.”
“If you go back. She is not confident of that.”
“Are you?”
“Yes, my brother, I am.”
We shook hands. I reminded him that I would be at the Xenia Hotel. “God be with you,” I said as he got out.
“If there is a God, He will be with us this time.”
I drove on and watched him through the rearview mirror. His dufflebag in one hand, his cane in the other, his canvas hat perched far back on his head. For the first few yards the farther I got from him the younger he looked. I kept looking from the road to the mirror until, passing the crest of a hill, I could no longer see him. Before me lay the town of Ioannina, the two white minarets, red-turreted, gracefully rising above the walls like rockets suspended in take-off. The lake shimmered in the sun, and beyond it rose the ominous brown-backed ranges of the Pindos Mountains.
It was going into another world, stepping into the hotel lobby. The building itself was modern. So were the visitors thronging in for the festival. Passengers on the morning flight from Athens had just arrived. The women crowded a display of Epirot costumes and rugs, a glass case of exquisite silver work. In my few minutes’ wait to check in I heard French, German, Scandinavian, English. Cosmopolites and money, I thought, the other Greece, where even the Greeks speak French or a high-Greek which neither the peasant nor I could readily understand, just possibly because we didn’t want to. It gave me a certain pleasure to move among these people and no longer feel, as I would have felt a few weeks before, that I was among my own.
Having arranged for my room and seen to my luggage, I stepped out for a moment on the dining room terrace which overlooked the lake in the distance. Between was the gradual descent of red-tiled rooftops and the green of the abundant plane trees. There were children playing in the hotel garden, a uniformed governess overseeing them. A stork flew overhead and then another, the largest birds I have ever seen in flight. I asked a passing waitress if they still nested in the chimneys. “Oh, yes,” she said, “they come every spring,” and taking me to the end of the terrace she pointed to a nest on a nearby building.
I went down the terrace steps, around the building and out to Vassileos Georgiu B’, the main street, and that on which I had come in from Dodoni. I walked toward the town watching every car, truck and cart that passed, hoping to see Stephanou. I was opposite the university when a convoy of army trucks went by. They seemed like boys to me, the soldiers, their sleeves rolled up, their berets angled as only youth can angle headgear. They shouted at the girls grouped outside the university gate. The girls in turn waved back with a smartness that seemed almost like a salute. They all seemed very gay… the girls equal in a way to the boy-soldiers: that was what gave me pause, the modernness of the women. I could have been standing at the main gate of my own campus.
I was thinking about this when, aboard a donkey cart loaded with melons, Paul rode into town beside t
he driver. The driver cracked his whip, moving the beast to a trot, and Stephanou grinned, his head thrown back, with the air of one who owned the wagon and the earth beneath it. When they were slowed down by the clog of traffic at the intersection, I almost came abreast of them again, walking quickly. Then, given the right of way, they soon pulled far ahead of me. I lost sight of them as they passed the tower clock in the main square, headed for the market place.
I followed in the same direction, and in the square for the first time actually remembered the town. I had had one brief day of liberty there. The streets were crowded with both tourists and native Epirots. In the park were clusters of men, some in the black breeches of the countryman, some in tradesmen’s aprons, soldiers… as busy in talk as crows at grain in the reaper’s wake. The Greek was rarely a recluse. I stood a moment opposite the Army Headquarters building. It was being draped with bunting. I wondered for a moment if I should inquire of the guard there if Colonel Frontis might have an office there. I did not even know, of course, whether he was with the northern army. I decided against both inquiries and vigils for the present, and walked on to where Averoff Street narrowed. I thought, Averoff Street in Ioannina and Averoff Prison in Athens: they would have been named after the same man.
With the street’s narrowing the congestion became fierce and marvelous, modern cars among the wagons and carts, with carriages not unlike those in New York’s Central Park jogging the tourists over the cobbles. Pedestrians folded in and out of the street in the wake of the wheeled traffic, and now and then a bus of high-chassised and ancient elegance, which reminded me of a dowager lifting her skirts, prodded all other traffic out of its way.
I made my way to the street market along the ramparts of the old city, a wild bazaar of crafts in silver and weaving, garden produce, live chickens hung in clusters by their legs. The hawking of merchandise, the babble of bargaining: history stands still in every marketplace. I spotted Stephanou perched now under an umbrella atop the melon cart. The owner unhitched the donkey and led it to the shade near the wall. While I watched, a woman went up to the wagon, selected a melon and handed it to Paul. With the savoir-faire of an expert, he shook it, smelt it for ripeness, felt it for weight and gave it back to her. She put it in her stringbag and gave him the money he had asked for. He fingered the coin, put it in a box, and raised his voice in a melodic chant: “Buy a melon, oh! The ripe, sweet melons of the Grecian sun!”
Paul, I thought, could take care of Paul for now.
I proposed on my way back to the hotel to have a look at the old prison but, cutting through the maze of narrow streets, I found myself on Lord Byron Street. I walked on until I saw the house over the doorway of which a plaque bore the legend that Lord Byron had stayed there. I looked up at the second story—there was a tailor shop below. Like most of the old buildings the upper story protruded in a bay effect, a bulge rather like an old man’s paunch. The windows had been newly washed. A woman came out with one of the short-handled brooms which in Greece spare neither dust nor the backs of the sweepers. She swept the step beneath the plaque. We spoke, and I told her I was working on a life of Byron. She invited me to see the house where she, her husband and her daughter now lived. While she served me cherries in the parlor, she told me of her son who attended an American university. It was a solemn room, immaculate and sparsely furnished, all its richness in the deep-blue rug upon the floor. I thought again as she smiled and questioned me about my own work of how rarely the Greeks collect “things.” They keep that which is useful and decorate their lives with conversation.
We talked for well over an hour—of the festival, and the fact that the Princess Royal would attend it; of the new university, and the number of women now going on to higher education; of Epirot culture and its mixed feelings about Ali Pasha, who in Byron’s times had made Ioannina his capital when he rebelled against the Sultan. She was, I thought, a deeply caring patriot.
She showed me the narrow room which had been Byron’s during his brief sojourn, a bedroom now. A man’s raincoat hung on one of the clothes pegs on the wall. I walked across the room almost as though bidden by an unseen guide. I was remembering Webb as we were about to leave the schoolhouse, Stephanou waiting to show us where we were to be billeted. We took our coats from pegs such as these, and Webb, about to put his on, stopped and went over it, the pockets, the belt, the collar. I think I asked him if he had lost something. “Nothing I’m likely to need,” he said and motioned me out ahead of him.
The woman came up and told me that the coat belonged to her husband. I apologized for my curiosity and said I had one like it. I looked out the low window. The traffic was thinner and across the way a shopkeeper was drawing his shades. It was almost time for the afternoon closing. I asked her if she thought the scene had changed much since Byron’s time.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “The Turks are gone.”
“And his Albanians? Byron always called them his Albanians.”
“We call them Northern Epirots,” she said, a remark I was to remember.
On the streets once more I found only the walls of the old jail. The building had been torn down and the ground leveled. I did not feel deprived. The wall remained because it supported the houses and shops which had been built against it, most of them a century or more before. In one of the shops a butcher was asleep, curled up on his block, his stockinged feet like bagged hams.
I walked back toward the hotel trying to probe my mind for more associations such as I had experienced seeing the raincoat. What I wanted most desperately, of course, was to conjure a picture of Captain Demetrios. Markos I could remember quite clearly. I wondered if Demetrios would have as much trouble remembering my face. Again my mind, my memory, was flitting maddeningly close to something…. I had thought him the only civilized man in the camp. Why? The little act of courtesy, the matter of helping a man off with his coat? Ah, but Webb’s examination of his coat: it could be said now that he was suspicious of Demetrios from the moment of meeting him, and that the suspicion must have come from prior knowledge of the man, probably from a previous meeting.
Why would neither of them have acknowledged it? I was quite sure they hadn’t, but I needed to question Paul more closely now on those first moments. I remembered Paul trying to explain our presence to Markos, and Webb’s intervention. Where was Demetrios then? Markos had wanted to know that too. Then he came in, saying something that made—Stephanou, was it?—laugh. It had to have been he or Markos. Demetrios had spoken in Greek. But we all understood: he pulled down his jacket with one hand and checked his fly with the other. Christ! I could see his hand at his fly, but I couldn’t remember his face!
Even the policeman’s box was empty at the main intersection. The idle carriages stood in the shade in the square, the horses flicking their tails at the flies. Two policemen were reading the front pages of the newspapers where they hung on a glass-encased board outside the Acropolis Hotel. I glanced at one of the headlines: it concerned the festival and the Princess Royal’s arrival. The world was not collapsing if the headlines could go to a theater festival.
The two policemen, a corporal and a sergeant, were talking about the parade, apparently a preliminary to the festival. The sergeant was smoking a cigarette. The corporal wanted to know the order of precedence in terms of authority, the local constabulary or the security police. I did not hear the answer. The sergeant became aware of me and stiffened as to attention. I nodded gravely. The corporal too now came to attention.
“It will be a large crowd,” I said, speaking in English.
“Yes, sir.” One hand behind his back, the sergeant dropped his cigarette. “We are prepared.”
I could think of nothing more to say except “good day.” I moved on, virtually alone in the sun-scorched street. I wondered if every tourist drew that reaction. It did not seem likely. They had taken me for someone important, someone to whom one might have supposed they felt answerable. But to whom, an American? I had no answer.
Ent
ering the hotel lobby I came face to face with Constantin Helmi. He offered his hand but I could see he was searching his memory for name and place.
“John Eakins,” I said. “We met at Dr. Palandios’.”
“Of course, of course, Madame Storme’s friend.”
I did not contradict him.
“How splendid we are to have a reunion. I understand Madame Storme comes in the morning. My poor Elena, she is all nerves as though it were her debut.”
“I understand the Princess Royal will be present.”
“And the Count and Countess Braschi—you know, Alexander Webb’s widow.”
I nodded. “I remember our conversation that night.”
“Then you will also remember that I was not to be quoted in the matter,” Helmi said.
“To whom would I quote you?” I asked blandly.
He smiled broadly. “You are right. Now, you will forgive me, dear sir. I am due at the airport. I shall be back tomorrow. There will be a reception after theater. You must have an invitation….” He had taken a notebook and small gold pencil from his pocket. “Professor, isn’t it?”
I spelled my name to save him the embarrassment of having to admit he had again forgotten it.
Not wanting to face the crowded dining room, I had soup and fruit sent to my room. I had not unpacked, and I felt undisposed to, but if I were to attend the reception I should have to have my dinner clothes pressed. And I proposed to attend it, once more to meet Margaret. My nerves reacted badly. I dug out a bottle of brandy along with my dinner jacket… and then put the bottle away again. I phoned the desk for the valet and presently opened the door to the chambermaid. Before taking the clothes she drew the drapes against the heat where I had opened them. When she was gone I opened them again, and the glass-paneled door besides. I stepped out on the balcony. I could hear the rattle of cutlery and dishes, the hum of conversation from the dining room below. I had not arranged a theater reservation. I decided to leave it to Elsa Storme. If she were coming in the morning she would probably be on the regular flight from Athens.
Enemy and Brother Page 19