Out of This World

by Graham Swift

Then he said, ‘But there’s no logic in that, you know. He’s in his element. He knows a damn sight more about the Company now than I do. He’s a good MD. He’ll be a good chairman.’

  ‘But you’d rather have had me?’

  ‘No. I don’t feel that now. Not now.’

  He looked at the silent pictures on the TV.

  He said, ‘You know, if someone had said to me when I was ten years old that in my lifetime men would land on the moon – not only that, but I’d watch them do it – I’d have said they were mad.’

  I said, ‘How do we know they’re really there? It could all be happening in some studio mock-up. It could all be a trick to con the Russians. To know, you’d have to go yourself.’

  ‘I mean it, Harry. He knows more about it than I do. It’s not simple stuff any more.’

  ‘You mean, not nice, clean, simple ways of killing people?’

  He said nothing. As if he hadn’t heard. Perhaps he thought: This is an old routine. We’ve been through this routine before.

  He said, ‘Let’s get some air.’

  We opened the French windows. The garden was still. A slight rustling in the trees. The moon had disappeared and the sun was just catching the tops of the cedars. A scent of honeysuckle. I thought: Four weeks ago I was with the Marines in the A Shau, in the wake of the Hamburger Hill carnage. Fucked-up and far from home. Or, as one hollow-faced Marine lieutenant, who was at the frivolous stage, put it: Dug-in, doped-up, demoralized or dead. They were still there now, like the men on the moon who we couldn’t see, though we could stare at the sky. And I was in a Surrey garden.

  We strolled to the end of the terrace. As we turned, I wanted to do that simple but rare thing and take his arm. He had been on my right, so now was on my left. But just for a moment I forgot and my hand felt the hard metal beneath his sleeve. I suppose he felt nothing. But perhaps in that ever-replaced arm, over the years, he had developed some obscure sense of touch.

  He said, ‘I’ve never told you, have I?’

  Anna

  Dear Harry. Dear husband Harry …

  I was born in Drama. But I was brought up in Paradise. Though they say that it’s all spoilt now. Even Thassos. The tourists have come and invaded, each one of them wanting their piece of paradise, and you wouldn’t recognize now, as you wouldn’t recognize a thousand places in Greece, the little bay and the hollow in the hillside amongst the pines where, when my uncle first saw it there was only a solitary summer-house with its weathered stucco and balcony, its terraced garden, its well under a canopy of vines, and the name above the lintel, chosen back in Turkish times by my Aunt Panayiota’s first husband, who must have been a happy, uninventive man: ‘The Villa Paradise’.

  But paradise is never where you think. It’s always somewhere you once were and never knew at the time, or somewhere you never guessed you might find it. And Uncle Spiro never thought that his villa was paradise, even before the war. He thought paradise was England.

  Paradise was once a shabby apartment off a street called Küfergasse in the middle of a ruined city. And yet you never knew how often, in that room where we found so much joy, I had wept. Not for the fate of mankind. Though I suppose people must have wept for that, in Nuremberg. But for the fate of Anna Vouatsis, orphan and virgin of one-and-twenty, who had made her way all alone – clutching the credentials of an official translator to the International Military Tribunal, afraid of bandits, afraid of her own conscience – from the country of her birth, where (but this was her secret) she never intended to return.

  Happiness is like a fall of snow, it smooths and blanks out all there was before it. And, yes, everything is relative, and my complaints were nothing to what you could find in those Nuremberg depositions. But you never quite understood – with all your keen-sightedness, with all your professional interest in the world’s troubles – how your Anna, your very own Anna, was one of the world’s walking wounded.

  Not that I blame you. How can I do that? I am the one to blame. I am the one to blame. But I won’t ever forget that happiness. Don’t mistake that. That snowfall of happiness. Switzerland, the white mountains, and those first four years. With Frank it wasn’t happiness. It was a tactical affair. A tactical desertion.

  Such a tough little bitch was sitting somewhere inside me, while the rest of me was ready to melt. In Nuremberg, adding my own little contribution to the paperwork of grief, I understood what the war had done to me. It had made me a thick-skinned, old-young thing, with a limited capacity for outrage and for assimilating the ills of the universe. When you told me about Robert, when you said he made bombs, I let the words wash right over me. I said to myself: That has nothing to do with anything. When we drove that first time through those gates at Hyfield and up that gravel drive, I didn’t see any bombs. I saw the fairy-tales my Uncle Spiro had told me coming true. When you said – oh, with such wary pride – ‘Dad, this is Anna,’ I didn’t see a monster. I saw a perfect English gentleman.

  And in any case, I think, someone has to make them. Maybe we just need them, for our safety and protection and to guard the things we love. People hurt easily, they need armour. And if they hadn’t dropped bombs on Nuremberg, we might never have all been there, to mete out justice and put the world to rights. And you and I, Harry, might never have met.

  At first I thought that I would change your mind – that I had changed your mind. Then that Sophie would change your mind. Then –

  And what I never told you is that he knew. I mean Robert. Even wanted it to happen. Oh, only so far. Just so you would feel a touch of persuasive jealousy. He never stopped wanting you back. ‘Into the fold’, as he put it. Never promised Frank anything. And he must have known he had an ally in me that very first time we met. He smiled so welcomingly. He took my coat so graciously and chivalrously. It was like some scene in one of those films that Uncle Spiro used to take me to see before the war, in Salonika. It surprised me that he used both arms. Then he led us in (a log fire! Oak panels!), and it was as though he were ushering me into some home that, he knew, had been waiting for me all my life.

  He knew. But you never guessed. With your eyes always straying, like some person guilty of your own happiness, to the window that looked out on the world. Couldn’t see what was under your nose.

  It’s funny how what I always remember are the winters, though people – English people – used to say, It must be wonderful – coming from somewhere so sunny! When you live on an island in wartime, it’s like being wrapped in a shroud – is it better or worse to be cut off from the mainland of events? And when the rain and mist moved in from Thrace it was as though the world was obliterated: now anything could happen here, and no one would know.

  Once, as if a veil had been lifted, we saw two, three warships, solidifying out of the gloom, beating westwards through the drizzle. They came close enough so you could see the water pluming off their bows and the outlines of their guns. They looked so beautiful. So heroic! Uncle Spiro said they must be Italian ships. Or Italian ships commandeered by the Germans. Because by now the British would surely have trounced the Italians. They were too fast, too modern-looking to be Bulgarian. They couldn’t be Turkish. We were down on the beach gathering driftwood, and we forgot the cold and our hunger. We argued, long after they’d disappeared, knowing nothing about ships, over whether they were destroyers or frigates or corvettes or minelayers. It was strange, that rapt animation, as if to hide our disappointment.

  Because the main thing was, they weren’t British ships. If they’d been British, we would have known about it beforehand. And they would have steamed right into the bay to rescue us.

  Uncle Spiro used to say: ‘Greece was once the cradle of civilization, but what is Greece now?’ He would pick up a handful of stones or dust. ‘Greece is this’ – he would empty his hand. ‘And Greece is this’ – he would rub his thumb, in the gesture of crude greed, against his fingertips. And we were not even Greeks! We were Macedonians. Miserable Macedonia! Quarrelled over by Turks and Bulg
ars and Serbs, and chopped about by the Big Powers. ‘You know what the French mean, little Anna, when they say “Macedonia”? They mean “fruit salad”!’ My grandfathers and great-grandfathers had fought in those bitter little wars that the Great War had swallowed up. No wonder the latest generation, who could officially call themselves Greek, had the minds of brigands. Feuding with each other over piles of tobacco, waiting for the brown leaves to turn into banknotes.

  He had told them as much, recklessly, as a young man with scholarly ambitions. And they had said, ‘Very well, if you must, go and become an educated man, but don’t come knocking on the door when you are starving.’ But he’d surprised them all. Found his way to far-away London, even seen the tranquil lawns of Oxford and Cambridge. Then returned to marry a rich widow – Aunt Panayiota, whom I can’t recall – who in turn had left him a rich widower, strolling the paralía in Salonika, in finely cut English suits. It was they who had had to humble themselves before him, even permitting their little jewel, their late, unexpected blessing, Anna, to spend summers with him at his villa on Thassos. Until that warehouse fire which had left Anna parentless, after which Uncle Spiro became her permanent guardian.

  That fire, he told me, after a year or two had passed and he knew that my feelings for my dead parents were of a kind with his for my dead aunt, was arson, no mistaking. Though it had never been proved. An act of mercantile vandalism that had gone further than was intended. Ha! The nemesis of the Vouatsis! Burnt by their own tobacco! Greed and brigandry! But he spoke more softly and more carefully when my older brothers, Sotiri and Manoli, were killed within six months of each other, one in Albania and one on the Aliakmon.

  What did I do in the war? I lived in Paradise. And never knew it. I spent the war in a summer villa. Though during the hot, blue, harsh days of summer I dreamed of cool, green England. Of fleecy English skies and English meadows and English willows draped over the cool Thames. And during the winters I dreamed of English tea-times on winter evenings, beside roaring fires and brass fenders in solid brick houses (you recognize what were once my dreams?), with toast and tea-cakes and scones and muffins (I learnt all the words) and anything else Uncle Spiro’s memory could muster or his own dreams invent, while the wind howled round the Villa Paradise and our stomachs gnawed on hunger and dread.

  What did I do in the war? I learnt English. A dangerous thing to have done, given the circumstances. Whole evenings, whole days sometimes, when we would speak to each other only in English. With Uncle Spiro I read Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Doctor Johnson. And at first I really thought that this devotedness would make it all be over sooner. It was like a prayer. It would make the British hurry so much more to save us.

  He said they would come. It wouldn’t be long. He said this in ’41. But they hadn’t come. They’d got out of Greece altogether. But only, so he said, so they could return in proper strength. Before the last war, when he was a boy, British policemen had come to Drama to show the Turks how things were done. And in 1916, the British had cleared the Bulgars out of Macedonia in two weeks – and they’d never have been there in the first place if it hadn’t been for that fool King Constantine.

  They’d come in submarines. Or they’d come dropping out of the sky on thousands of parachutes. They had the finest navy and army in the world and would make short work of it. The British were a peace-loving people who cherished fairness and freedom, but, like the ancient Athenians, they understood the value of military strength to preserve those very things. The British were the most civilized nation on earth. That was why they had ruled half of it. They were so civilized that they studied and revered our ancient past, while we let our temples crumble and destroyed ourselves with our eternal bickering and ignorance.

  What did I do in the war? I was lucky, amazingly lucky. I held on to my luck. First there was a German garrison, then the Bulgars. If there had been a choice, we would have chosen the Germans. Some things I never told you, Harry, you learn to wipe them out. I stayed a virgin. At an age when I knew I was becoming beautiful, I learnt to make myself look ugly. At an age when I knew I was growing up, I learnt to turn myself into a perpetual, stunted child – Uncle’s little niece whom no one dare touch. I wasn’t raped or sent to the brothels in Kavalla. We weren’t made homeless. Uncle Spiro wasn’t mutilated or shipped off to a labour camp.

  But I knew that if they searched the villa and found even that small handful of English books that he brought with him from Salonika, they could decide to shoot us. Shoot us, like they shot the three men who hung one evening, heads down, from the plane tree in the village square. They had been shot many times. You could see that. And three the next evening, and three the evening after that.

  I used to think if I took the books and burnt them or bundled them up and threw them in the sea, then perhaps I would be saving our lives. But then if I threw them away I would be throwing away the one thing that made those months after months on that island endurable, which gave them some thin, vicarious purpose. And, again, if I threw them away, perhaps we would only deserve it if the British never came.

  But they did come. In the autumn of ’44. The Germans and the Bulgars departed. So then it was all right for the Greeks to fight each other …

  I said I didn’t want to leave him. I would soon be back. Before the winter. But I think he knew, as we stood on that railway platform, that I wouldn’t return. One English watchword he could never convert into reality was ‘stiff upper lip’. He was a Greek. His face contorted. His eyes streamed with farewell emotion. And I saw how when I was gone he would start to think, achingly, of how glad and proud he’d been looking after me, my gallant guardian, in what, now it was over, now new troubles were coming, might start to seem again like Paradise.

  Yet it was I who, just as much – more – had looked after him. And he saw that too. I was twenty-one. I didn’t want to become a nurse.

  He was just fifty-three then. Though he looked older. His career of scholarship had been brought to a halt in what should have been its prime years, and, now, there was little chance of his picking up again the pieces of his former life.

  Pneumonia? Or a broken heart?

  The station hall was full of slogans and posters. People clutching all they possessed.

  Of course, he didn’t know that my journey would take me, eventually, to England. So as compensation for having lost me he would have the knowledge that I had settled in the land of his dreams – as if all that training he had given me in the war had borne fruit. His niece – an Englishwoman! That I would write him letters like the fulfilment of wishes – he is even called Harry (‘God for Harry!…’); there is this house in Surrey – yet which remained strangely vague about what my husband did (a ‘journalist’) or what my father-in-law did, and never mentioned, before the letters got less frequent and finally stopped altogether, what must have been obvious to both of us, especially given what was happening in Greece – that he might have come to England too. Perhaps he would not dare suggest it, till I did. Perhaps he had become disaffected with the British now they were, in reality, the arbitrators of Greece. Or perhaps he had come to feel, as prematurely old men may feel, that this was his country, he was born in it, and he would die in it, even though it was a mess.

  They were still fighting when Sophie was born. I used to skip the reports in the English papers. And to think you very nearly went out there – to take photographs!

  But I think he knew. I think he saw it all, unblurred by those farewell tears. More than one kind of desertion.

  More than one kind of desertion. Dear Harry. If it hadn’t been for that sudden telegram, you might never have known at all – my confession spilling out with my own farewell (farewell!) tears. Because we’d made up our minds. I would get rid of it. Go to someone. While you were away. Then we’d stop. And say nothing. Before two homes got broken.

  In the plane to Athens I thought, I want this journey never to stop. I want to stay up here for ever. I have nowhere to go. No home. No one to fo
rgive me. When we landed, there wasn’t even any of that famous Greek sunshine. It was raining. The custodial faces of King Paul and Marshal Papagos looked down at me in the arrival hall. I was suddenly shocked to be where I was. To be speaking my own language to my own people. Shocked by the beggars and touts, the jumble and disrepair of the streets and all the signs of a country crawling out from a decade of misery. In England it was Coronation year, and Frank had said the best was yet to come. Shocked to be in the capital city of the land of my birth, where I had never been before and where I felt a total stranger. Shocked by the sudden sight of the Parthenon, bony white against the grey sky, as if I had never expected it would be there. I booked into a hotel for the night and thought of that girl arriving in Nuremberg. It was all like a reproof. I thought: I should get rid of it here, somehow, here in this country. I phoned the hospital in Salonika and they said there was little time. It was still raining the next morning when I took the plane north. The sky was dark with clouds and I thought: Even the gods are angry.

  Sophie

  Brooklyn. ‘Broken Land’. Somebody told me, Doctor K, that’s just what it means.

  Every so often I still go up to the Heights, above the Expressway, just to look at that mirage of Manhattan across the water. The views in this place still knock me out, even though I’m no longer a goggle-eyed Limey. They still give me a kick. And do you know what’s so great about them? It’s that they’re absolutely man-made, they’re as man-made as you’re ever going to get. All steel and concrete and lights and lines and glass and electricity. But they aren’t human. That’s the big kick, that’s the come-on. It’s pure man-made, but it ain’t human. Oh sure, the humans are there, never so many of them, never so packed together, milling around under the towers like ants under lifted stones. But you have to get up real close before you see them, you have to get through all the glass and concrete superstructure before you feel their hot, below-decks breath. Or else it’s the other way round: you’re down there at people-level, amongst the voices and faces and the fogged-up windows and the smell of coffee and pizza, then you step out and say to yourself, Wow, I’d almost forgotten: there’s this edifice.