The Europe That Was

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘And so we parted. I wept. I knew I should never feel such godly pleasure again. And there was the Losted Sheep shrieking and moaning. I put out my hands to her to stroke her as I had stroked Fifi. She ran. And so I woke the agent Socrates and we went away.’

  Mr Angelopoulos was silent, brooding over the splendour of his past divinity.

  ‘But your thumb?’ I asked.

  ‘My thumb—yes, my dear, I had forgotten. Hubris and Nemesis, of which is sitting with you the sad example. A week later I was in Constantinople. I had businesses near the port and I was coming home at night from Galata to Pera. There are streets with steps, no? Little stairs with stinks. There was a street with cats on all the steps. I stopped to talk to them—I, Dionysus, the catman who is chums with leopards. But I forgot that I was sober. I was a man and no more a god. I was a danger to all beasts. There was a pail of ordures and a grey kitten eating fish-heads from it. I stroked him and he bit me in the thumb. How should he know I did not want the fish-heads? If I had been tighted and a god, he would have known I needed no fish-heads.

  ‘And so you see, old chappie, my thumb was tinctured red and then blue, and then it was green and white like marble. Thus I hospitalized myself, and they cut it off. Nemesis, old chappie, or the godly tit for tat as we say in English.’

  LOW WATER

  Gino’s was an island. Its inhabitants had a single culture; it was surrounded by a sea as acquiescent as they. In summer the happy Mediterranean disturbed Gino’s not at all; in winter harsh little waves, last remnants of storm beyond the narrow bay, spat fiercely at the weed-draped jetty and gurgled away in dark impotence beneath the flooring. The piles which supported Gino’s were rotten; the planks which joined the café to the mainland stayed in place by sheer inertia. Every year the many slopes of the tiled roof, the angles of the wooden walls, became crazier by another inch. When anything fell off, Gino, eventually, put it back again. Neither screw nor nail would grip in the soft timber. A hole under the eaves which had mildly annoyed his clients for two seasons he stopped with a broken frying pan, leaning a balk of driftwood against the wall to hold the patch in place.

  The culture of Gino’s island was listless and Levantine. His nationality was Turkish; his father had been Maltese as much as anything, and his mother half Greek and half Italian. The ancestry of his girls resembled his own in so far as they were of mixed blood and obscure descent. The island industry was the provision of routine entertainment for summer visitors. Somebody had to undertake the job. It called neither for shame nor self-congratulation; it merely fulfilled a social need like unloading coal or selling hashish or cleaning sewers or becoming a policeman, and demanded—at any rate from Gino—no undignified activity of the body.

  Gino was very long and very thin. His interior was full of national and foreign parasites, for he had been poor and a traveller. To him his island was home at long last, and upon it was no more need for energy or emotion. His only token of feeling was an undulation of the spine, which might have expressed satisfaction, at the same hour every morning when he rose from breakfast, took rod and line and started to fish from the stage outside the kitchen door. He fished from eleven to six, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing, hunched over the Mediterranean which sparkled and laughed at the foot of his steps and spread out beneath his island into a still lake of deep greens and browns sown with traps and nets of his own devising.

  He caught fish. He caught fish continuously. They came, it was said in the town, all the way across the Mediterranean for him to catch; and indeed Gino’s island was about as far east as they could swim. It seemed to be a fish terminus and round point; after a quick nip from Gino’s garbage or the soft ooze beneath his island there was nothing for it but to turn back to Greece and Gibraltar and the rich North African banks.

  Gino himself looked like an old grey mullet set up by a bad taxidermist who had put back the skin over insufficient stuffing. His head was hairless and his dull eyes were too large. His fishlike mind knew none of the enthusiasms of humanity except the cooking of his catch. For this he was famous. Whether he fried to biscuit hardness in deep oil or adventured in the casseroles and herbs and wine of French cuisine or served his fish boiled and cold and decorated, they were products of high human art. His other cooking was vile. Indeed all of Gino that was not fish was distasteful.

  He employed six performers. Each year they were sent to him by an agency in Alexandria. One of the batch had to be able to dance efficiently; two must be endurable however sordid their acts; the remaining three had just to get on and off the stage without incident and were usually over forty. He paid wages and commission to the upper three and commission only to the lower three, and put them all up in rooms like sunlit bathing hutches on the floor above the café. Gentlemen were strictly forbidden both by Gino and the police to visit this second floor; but the holiday season was short and the police were very poorly paid. As for Gino, he had signed a Notice To Customers and thereafter was indifferent to what went on upstairs unless the noise was too great. Then, in a barely audible voice, he pointed out that the house was very old and might fall down. If anyone were injured, he said, there would be a scandal.

  That year there were scandals enough. They were the fault of Tatiana. She was an Egyptian with a Russian mother; and in her character a faint and purely traditional Russianness had remained proof against the lethargy of Egypt. Tatiana was the star performer and neither better nor worse than dancers whom the Alexandria agency had sent to Gino in other years. Her morals, which mattered to nobody, were above the usual standard. Her behaviour, for so conventional an island, was indiscreet. She gave parties to her favourites. She considered the whole upper storey as her own and dashed in and out of bedrooms at awkward moments. Her colleagues, who themselves observed the decent melancholy proper to Gino’s, accepted Tatiana’s instability as a new fashion from worldly Egypt and a useful topic of conversation.

  The other two paid performers were Miriam and Elena the Greek. Miriam, being half Sudanese, was too black for popularity; Gino’s clients preferred to cherish the illusion that they were being entertained by pure Europeans. Elena the Greek was born at Marseilles of port parentage into which, somewhere, had entered a strain of Chinese blood; she was called the Greek because that was the language she spoke most fluently. The three girls who worked for commission alone had the names and nationalities that the agency had given them. They were old, pink animals who answered to these names. How or in what memory each addressed herself could not be known. They lived in a dead present untroubled by remembered suffering. They had no clear thought left to them and little revealing speech.

  Gino’s season was short and it was not much of a season. The little town was Turkish; the islands which closed the western horizon were Italian; the inhabitants of both were largely Greek. It belonged nowhere and had nothing to offer the moneyed tourist. Yet the two hotels and the red and white villas set irregularly among dusty country lanes suited the pockets of small businessmen with the faiths and customs of Europe and were reasonably full of their families attracted by the hard and waveless beach. The fathers and elder sons, dignified and respectable by day, considered it proper to relax at night. Gino’s represented for them the smart cabarets of French plages and Florida beaches familiarised by the cinema.

  Upstairs and downstairs Tatiana disordered the island. She was always surrounded by two or three young admirers who were fascinated into outrageous behaviour though not into any lavish spending. She had a dashing habit of throwing her cocktails overboard ‘to feed the fishes’. This might have been good for trade if she and her parties had not thrown the glasses and crockery as well. To Gino Tatiana was a liability, a shock, a devastation. She kept the older, slow consuming, steadily paying clients away. The noise and scandal raised the weekly subvention paid to the police. The glasses, if they could not be netted, were replaceable only at fantastic prices.

  Gino increased the bills by erratic and exaggerated items which led to endless ar
guments with the clients and, after all, had to be reduced. He left his basic charges unaltered. They were reasonable—little more than those of the hotels although there were a band and three waiters and the performers to be paid, and a cook who attended to Gino’s stove when Gino himself was reluctantly gazing at the dance floor. He felt that he ought to gaze—so far, that is, as ought had any meaning for him—but he said no word, he took no action. He had no interest in women, individually or collectively. They were like the bottles of Egyptian whisky. There was a demand for the stuff and he supplied it.

  His fitful attempts to keep up with rising costs and wages were always a year behind. He had made his calculations when he bought and fitted out the island, and felt that the one effort should be sufficient for his life; it had to be done but thereafter there should be no necessity for thought. Beneath the floor the bountiful sea worked for him in darkness. Above was modest catering for eternal desires of men. Neither one nor the other could fail.

  The season was disastrous. At the beginning of September there was nothing in the bank and the night’s takings were paid out every morning. The wages of Tatiana, Miriam and Elena fell into arrears. As yet they did not complain. It was not the first time in their experience that the boss had been in difficulties.

  On the next payless Saturday morning there was a row. Wages and commission were now three weeks overdue and obviously lost for ever. Even the three working crones, holding around their shapeless bodies wraps of pink and pale blue chiffon, stared at Gino with sad eyes in which was understanding of their fate. Tatiana, trim and terrifying in a beach suit, screamed at him in good Egyptian Greek. He was impassive. He bent his shoulders humbly over the till, as if it were the sea, and opened it and showed that there was nothing in it. Tatiana raged around the unswept room, buzzing like an angry insect of undoubted grace and comparative cleanliness between four greasy, wine-splashed walls, foul ashtrays, spilt food, tables stinking of sweat and debris. She hurled a bottle into the sea and was led upstairs weeping by Miriam and Elena. The other three returned to bed and their daydreams of the impossible. Gino went out to fish.

  The sun shone. The paintless wooden balconies of the upper storey gave back the light of the day and the stored light of a hundred years, sparkling with the fawn and white of timber on the southern edge of a forest. Tatiana, Miriam and Elena lay in the shade of the eaves, cursing Gino. When they were silent they could hear the plop of his tackle re-entering the water, or the reverberation of a sea bream smacking its arched body against the planks of the back-door jetty.

  Night brought the end. There was no band. There were no waiters. There was no assistant cook. All had gone to the hotels to make what they could in the last week before the season finished. A few habitual customers drifted in across the creaking bridge of planks. They listened to abuse of Gino and agreed. They helped themselves and the girls to drinks and paid what they liked or nothing at all. Gino did not appear.

  In an hour the café had emptied. There was no gaiety, no romance; the island and its inhabitants appeared exactly what they were. The girls, like the clients, had looked to the night and music, even at Gino’s, to create an endurable illusion. Now there were only themselves and the sea and the slap of moths and beetles, before unnoticed, against the glaring lights. They sat still, scattered about the room at the tables where they had been left, without energy or desire to move together.

  Gino came in from the kitchen bearing a huge casserole of fish. The scent, rich and appetising, overwhelmed the staleness of the room. He put the dish on a table with six flat cakes of bread, beckoned to the girls and went out.

  They moved to the food slowly, and as if ashamed by their failure to retain a single customer. Then with a brisk exclamation Tatiana threw away the filthy table cloth. The others, catching her mood of self-respect, swiftly washed knives and forks, glass and plates left untouched since the previous night. They chose clean chairs and sat down at the bare table, three a side, as in some institution for homeless females deserted by all but themselves. They began to laugh and chatter. Gino’s fish was in no way institutional. It warmed and delighted.

  They went to bed early, breathing for an extra four hours, instead of smoke, the cool air currents of the bay, and awakened to a vague feeling of holiday rather than disaster. Miriam made coffee and they breakfasted on the balcony. Then, as the heat of sand and dusty tracks consumed the morning, they saw their position in all its hopelessness.

  It was Gino’s responsibility to return them to Alexandria, and it was certain that he could not do it. They all spoke loudly of their contracts and of the Law that would, if necessary, compel him to sell his island to pay their fares. They gesticulated at a just and imaginary judge, but in their hearts they knew that they were terrified by the Law, upon whose edge they lived, and had no intention of calling to their aid the unknowable, uncontrollable gods of policemen.

  They were too far east for chivalry. Tatiana and Miriam ran over the characters and probable bank balances of their devoted followers in the hope of finding one who might be gallant. Any, they decided, would provide food and especially bed for the few more days that he would remain at the seaside; not one would commit the generous folly of advancing the fare to Alexandria or even—in view of their known economic distress—of allowing it to be earned. There were no capitalists among the fathers and sons who took their holiday by that horned beach. Money counted, even when Tatiana was feeding the fishes and creating an illusion of imperial excess.

  Either Miriam or Tatiana might perhaps make enough for herself to go, but not enough to release a companion as well. Though they had not hitherto been conscious of much liking for each other and though the three wage earners despised the three commissionaires, as Tatiana christened them, the solidarity of their profession—they called it the theatrical profession—prevented them from leaving behind any of their number to end, with certainty, in some horrible village brothel.

  Tatiana could raise—probably—from an old friend in Alexandria the money for her fare. Miriam had a contract half promised for the winter and thought, not very hopefully, that the agency might lend her what she needed. Elena the Greek, who could dance just well enough for a joint such as Gino’s but looked, without make-up on a blazing morning, like a slender Chinese grandmother, had no hope at all. The three commissionaires listened with dazed attention to the discussion among their betters. They would not have been surprised if Tatiana had produced thousands of piastres from a hat or if she had told them to go and prostitute themselves upon the beach. Whatever she decided they would perform.

  Tatiana and Miriam decided nothing. They dived, exasperated, from the balcony into the caressing sea, two worn but serviceable arrows of black and white startling Gino and wrecking his fishing for that morning.

  The day passed in intolerable nervousness. Tatiana, Miriam and Elena the Greek were not accustomed to be idle, to be without some vague and nearly objectless occupation. They rose usually at midday, fiddled with their breakfasts and complexions for a couple of hours. practised a few dance steps, showed themselves in whatever public place was temporarily in fashion, then passed the evening with some admirer until it was time to go to work. Now, however, with Gino’s island ruined and the season nearly over, there was nothing to be gained by visiting the town, nor had they the heart for it. They remained in their rooms or on the balcony, quarrelling, screaming, in tears, demoralized.

  At sunset Gino shut the wooden doors on the gangway to his island and put up a notice of CLOSED. Then he took his boat and lamp and fish spear and disappeared into the darkness of the bay. He said nothing whatever to the girls, accepting their forced occupation of his island without resentment, without pity, without helpfulness.

  The soft splash of Gino’s oars recalled them to sanity. They stared after him into the calm blackness of the sea. They could hear him; they could see the twin phosphorescent puddles of the oars receding into the distance, but the boat itself was invisible. Their fear of this isolatio
n was extreme. All quarrels forgotten, they drew together on the balcony. The lights of the little town glittered half a mile away. The villas were nearer, but their lit windows were so scattered over the coastal plain that they only increased the sense of loneliness. In the girls’ minds, and indeed in fact, they were castaways; it mattered nothing that their island was joined to all Asia by only a dozen planks.

  They crept downstairs and turned up the lights in the kitchen. All day they had not had the energy to eat. There were bread and vegetables and a few eggs. Fish there was none, for Gino never kept it overnight. Miriam again turned cook. They ate in silence, exhausted and hopeless.

  The effort of cooking and feeding did them good. Their washing-up extended itself spontaneously from the plates to Gino’s revolting kitchen. They were six women who had seldom had goods of their own to scrub and polish. Not one of them would have done a stroke of work for Gino, but this was for themselves. The silence, the closed door, the sea around and under impressed on them that it was for themselves.

  By morning the unconscious, communal spirit of discipline was dead. No one made breakfast. They drifted down to the café and drifted back into the bedrooms to continue the interminable discussions. At least they were all calmer. One of the commisionaires had a touch of sunburn; it made her pudgy face look firm and elastic.

  At ten Tatiana took command and persuaded Miriam to the kitchen. It was clean as they had left it. On the table were two flat baskets, a yard in diameter, piled with fish, among them a dozen fat, expensive soles. Tatiana, pacified by this industry, observed that Gino had eaten nothing. Outside on the jetty his indifferent back was towards them, hunched over the rod. Patronizingly she offered him a cup of coffee and the last of the bread. He accepted without pleasure or surprise and thanked her. His words were formal Levantine courtesies meaning nothing: phrases by which two human beings could converse for minutes without the need of any thought at all. She asked him what to do with the fish. Gino shrugged his shoulders. If people came to eat, they ate it; if they didn’t, nobody ate it. He landed a red mullet and paid no further attention to Tatiana.