by David Plante
‘I guess it’s gone,’ I said.
He found a restaurant in the nouvelle ville.
While we were eating, I said, ‘I really am sorry that restaurant is gone. It was run by an old woman, I remember. The floor was flagged with stone, and the restaurant smelled like a stone cellar. I remember the old woman, without being asked, bringing glasses and a carafe of wine, then soup bowls, those heavy, deep, white soup bowls, and a metal tureen of potage which she carried by its handles with a dish towel and placed on the table, where it steamed in the chilly air. We served ourselves. The big ladle was dented.’
‘We should have looked more carefully,’ he said.
‘This place is fine.’
‘But I want everything to be the way you remember it.’
‘Maybe it’s just as well it isn’t.’
In our hotel room, we undressed silently.
We lay flat on our backs in bed, our heads on the long bolster.
We didn’t sleep well.
In the morning, I got up before Nikos and sat in a chair before the window that looked out onto the back yard, where a young man was holding the front wheel of a bicycle off the ground and rotating it, so its small, rapid clicks became a whir. A woman came into the yard pushing a bicycle. By the time Nikos got up there were ten people with bicycles in the back yard; they spun their wheels and talked quietly.
I don’t know why, but these details are important to me, perhaps because our visit to Chartres was in every way important to me.
I said I’d go now to the cathedral, but he said he’d want breakfast first. Would he mind if I didn’t join him, but went off to the cathedral? He looked hurt, but he said, ‘Go, of course go,’ and offered me the map as he knew I wouldn’t be able to find my way on my own.
I didn’t take the map, but after a few wrong turns I came to the cathedral. A great cloud was passing high above the spires, and, as though my senses were caught off balance, it appeared to me that the spires were moving, the cloud was still.
I hesitated before I pushed open the frayed, padded door, and blinked in the inside dimness. From what seemed to me far below, I saw high pillars, and I walked among them. I came upon an altar, before which, stuck on rows of spikes on wrought-iron racks, were hundreds of burning tapers leaning towards one another and melting in the heat. The wax dripped onto iron sheets below the racks. I looked at the burning tapers and the flames reflected in hundreds of golden hearts hanging around them.
I leaned my forehead against a pillar and wept, but turned when I felt a hand on my shoulder to see Nikos standing by me.
He said, ‘Give in, give in.’
I asked, ‘To what?’
Greece
I finally got my driving license, and in a car Nikos is allowed as director of Thames & Hudson, I drove us – I’m tempted to use the old British expression, ‘we motored,’ which doesn’t indicate who drove, as if the motor car could motor itself – down through France and Italy on our way to Greece, and on the way stopped to stay with Elizabeth and Christopher Glenconner on Corfu.
As a car can’t reach the house, Christopher met us in a little boat, and then a walk along a path through pines, he, perhaps not knowing quite who we were, but, as guests of Elizabeth, his guests, and he laughed with the pleasure of having to meet us in a boat and the walk through the pines.
We arrived in time for drinks, Christopher taking charge, though I noted that he stared at the bottles for a long while to figure out what was what, but, as always, he laughed lightly as with the pleasure of preparing drinks. And Elizabeth looks on him with what I can only think of as a slightly unfocused, but, for all that, total love.
He told us about his exploits in the navy during the war.
Nikos said later that Christopher is a hero in the cause of liberating Greece from the Nazis.
Christopher has taken to painting, his favourite view that of the small bay below their house, down a rocky cliff.
Stephen and Natasha have stayed, and so has Steven Runciman, who gave to Christopher and Elizabeth an icon to keep the house blessedly safe.
And now in Nikos’ occult world, and I in it as if a Frank Kermode trying to find in it the occult meanings –
In Athens, where there are graffiti on walls from the years of the dictatorship, stenciled images of the phoenix rising from flames. Here and there, in scruffy plots of red earth, small playgrounds for children, I suppose to show off the concern the colonels had for the very young. And, given the colonels’ lack of zoning – thinking there should be freedom to exploit wherever exploitation was feasible – apartment buildings encroaching on the holy hill of Lycabettus, the least of exploitations. On a long walk, we passed an abandoned building where, Nikos said, prisoners of the colonels were tortured. Once again, when I hear about torture I can’t particularize any one person being tortured, and, much less, any one person applying the torture, as if this last can’t be attributable to a human being.
The flat of Nikos’ mother, in Tsoha Street, has green mottled marble floors in the entrance and parquet elsewhere, and there is a sense of white space in the rooms.
Here I am, where Nikos’ world is most emblematic in objects that he tells me about, and that I am possessive of, as if possessive of his world.
The silver dish is from Constantinople, taken with whatever the family could take, at the time of the exchange of populations in the 1920s.
On the dining-room table is a green bowl on three pedestals, a great chip broken from it, the result of a bomb meant for the airport near where Nikos’ family lived in Elliniko but exploding in and destroying the house next door, the shockwaves causing a fragment of the ceiling of the dining room in the family house to fall and break the bowl on the dining-room table. The shockwaves also caused the locks in the house to jam. This was when Nikos and his mother and aunt Fula were hiding under the dining-room table, the live-in maid with them, all crowded together.
In the living room, furniture designed by Nikos’ father, an architect who designed the neo-classical Athens College, where Nikos spent ten years of his life as a boarder.
Also in the living room, small chairs with carved wood frames and string mesh for the seats, from, Nikos said, an island, though he wasn’t sure what island, as his family do not come from an island about which they can say, ‘Our island,’ and return there for holidays. His mother has no interest in the Greek islands.
In fact, his mother had no interest in Athens, having lived in Constantinople, to her Athens a dusty provincial town, the Greeks there not Greeks but Albanians.
The rugs, which Fula identified, also brought from Constantinople.
Nikos told me that she still has her dowry, gold sovereigns, which she keeps in secret places but she forgets where. When she forgets, she blames the maid for stealing the coins. She came out of the kitchen with a tea caddy – only, Nikos said, for fascomilo tea, mountain tea, drunk only when not feeling well – and from it took out a little bag with a draw string and from the bag a gold sovereign which she gave to Nikos. He showed it to me: a small coin minted with the profile of EDWARDVS VII D: G: BRITT: OMN: REX F: D: IND: IMP. To read in Athens on a gold coin minted in Great Britain an honorific in Latin – to account for the history of these conjunctions would, I thought, require a study in Western history, and here it was in the palm of my hand. Nikos said that these gold sovereigns are still the basis of calculating, say, the price of a house in a contract. As for aunt Fula’s dowry – her prika – it was never used, for her role was set for her to take care of her older sisters, she the cook, the over-looker of the maid, the factotum.
Once I said to her that Nikos is a complainer, which she took in with her jaw stuck out and her lips pressed tightly together. Nikos told me that she then went to him to inform him not to trust me, as I speak behind his back. So I am warned.
In the kitchen, even there I look for totems of a world that I want to be mine, and note the large tin of olive oil beneath the sink, the bottle of ouzo on the marble
counter, and in a cup a thin gelatin made, as Nikos explained, by the seeds of quince – kidonia – in water, prepared by Fula for her to drink, Nikos wasn’t sure for what reason.
And then, oh yes, there is the ceremony of the gliko koutaliou and cold water and coffee, all prepared by Fula for when Nikos and I wake up from our naps, those deep, deep naps that seem to come with an Oriental stupor in the afternoon, a stupor which needs the shock of the sweet and the cold water and the coffee to wake one from.
And the walks about Athens, Nikos’ Athens, the Athens of his youth – such as the nineteenth-century apartment building behind the cathedral where his extended family lived during World War II, when, he said, family life was a circle of devotion. He pointed out to me the balcony where his family kept the turkey that flew down to the street and was grabbed by an amazed passer-by.
And in the entrance hall of the apartment building, the floor, Nikos showed me, is paved with white and black squares of marble, which often come into his dreams. And so, I am able to participate in his dream imagery.
We went to neo-classical Athens College, designed by his architect father. There, Nikos spent eight years of his youth, and, from outside, he pointed out the window of the dormitory room where he slept.
He showed me the cinema, Rex, where he was awakened to sex by a man sitting next to him who unzipped him and masturbated him, Nikos so amazed that he got up and left the cinema with his penis exposed.
And we stopped outside the basement garçonière (I noting the use of French) which he had rented to get away from home, acceptable among Greeks of his world, though assumed without it being said, for the sexual life of a young man that he cannot have at home; and I did have more than a twinge of jealousy for the past Athenian sexual life of Nikos, as I fantasized it, there in the basement of an apartment building, a sexual life that of course left me out, but in which I should have been the partner.
As we passed a low, abandoned building somewhere up the hill from the American Embassy, and not far from the American ambassador’s residence, Nikos said that here people were tortured during the dictatorship, the building spiritually and morally and, I felt, physically contaminated, now left to decay.
Nikos’ mother, Natalia, is a delicate woman, in no way the prototype of a Greek mother.
Sustaining a fashion that has long gone out of fashion where it originated in Paris and London, Nikos’ mother has at-homes every Wednesday. When Nikos was living at home, he used to like to shock the friends his mother received by revealing family secrets, as he cannot abide by the secrecy that seems to be the way all of Greece works: don’t tell, don’t tell, keep it a secret. In Constantinople, an impoverished member of the extended family went to the opposite side of the city to work as a seamstress to keep the humiliation a deep secret, or, again in Constantinople, an impoverished family would take out their best china and silver and clink the silver against the empty china, the windows open, so that neighbours would think they were having a feast. Never mind, Nikos said, what the government ministers are keeping secret, to which his mother quietly demurred, but she then did say, ‘You see, we were so long under the Ottoman Empire, and had to keep our secrets.’
Mrs Stangos – or I like to address her in the Greek Kiria Stangou, which seems to me to add a linguistic dimension to her name – speaks perfect English, with the soft accent Nikos has. She also speaks French and German and Russian, but only kitchen Turkish, though born and brought up in Istanbul. She winces at the Greek pronunciation tri-buison for the French tire-bouchon, and in English will use French expressions such as vernissage, which Nikos used to use until, in London, he changed to ‘gallery opening.’ I note that, in Athens, he uses English expressions that he has taken on, I think, intentionally, such as ‘that’s rich,’ or ‘that’s rum,’ or ‘stuff and nonsense,’ as if to claim his foreignness in a country where he has always felt a foreigner.
Fula, not the mother, answered the door when Nikos rang, I behind him, and Nikos and Fula embraced warmly. His mother, in granny shoes, came and held Nikos lightly. They spoke in English, I thought because of me, and she greeted me in English. She had been a teacher of English at Athens College. I noted that her most overt sign of affection towards Nikos is to tap him on the arm and smile at him, somewhat sadly, and he smiles back somewhat sadly. A refined woman, of a deep culture that evolved over more years than her age, she wears her hair in braids curled in spirals that cover her ears.
We went to visit his aunt Tato. He had talked to me of her, a formidable woman whose formidability was rounded out by history that made her presence historical. She is, as I learned to distinguish, from other Greeks, Cosmopoliti, those Greeks from Constantinople a class apart, in fact more cosmopolitan than Athenian Greeks.
She was dressed in black, her grey hair pulled back in a small chignon, and I immediately felt that I was in her good graces when Nikos introduced me as a young writer, which to her meant that I was of course a cultured person. Nikos had told me one of her novels was based on a very intense relationship, a loving relationship, between two girls, equal, he thinks, to anything written by Colette. We spoke in French. A maid served us ouzakia – the glasses and bowl of pistachios served on a round tray covered in a cloth embroidered in gold, details that I am always attentive to – while Tato spoke with the kind of authority that can only come from having lived through what many others were defeated by, with no nonsense. There were piles of books everywhere, books with paper covers as is the way in Greece, and among them Nikos pointed out a collection of American Black poetry translated into Greek by Tato’s husband, now dead. He and she had monumental rows, monumental. She told me she would very much like to go to America to see the Mississippi River.
As we walked about Athens, Nikos stopped at the bust on a plinth of Ersi Hadgimihali’s aunt, which I remembered Nikos mentioning when Ersi visited us in London, Ersi now dead.
In Ermou Street, we saw a man goading a dancing bear to keep on dancing, stepping from side to side, the bear with an iron collar with a chain that the man held in one hand as he goaded the bear with the other. And we saw beggars exposing their stumps of legs and arms. And there was a barrel-organ player, turning the handle to play folk tunes.
From time to time in London, Nikos has severe migraines, so severe one of his eyes becomes bloodshot and weeps. Here in Athens, his migraines are frequent. Though it is not done to close a door – I closed the door to our room where I withdrew to lie down but Nikos’ mother opened it, asking didn’t I prefer to have the door open for the air to circulate? to which I demurred – when Nikos feels a migraine come on he asks me to come into our room with him and, he sitting on the edge of his bed and I standing before him, he presses his forehead into my abdomen. This fills me with feelings too strange to sort out, from an erotic charge to the greater charge of such love for him in his helplessness that I would like to stay forever with him there, he in unendurable pain pressing his forehead into my abdomen.
His mother does not open the door.
She treats me with delicate affection.
Nikos had warned me not, in Athens, to call him Agapi mou, allowed only between lovers.
Nikos has shown me photographs from his past:
Nikos orating before a class at Athens College.
Nikos with mates from Athens College in a taverna. He is on the extreme right.
Nikos with someone he said he would rather forget, on an excursion to an island.
And then Nikos showed me documents from the German Occupation:
On the back is written, in cursive Latin letters, ‘Stangos’, and in English, ‘He will help you unload things give him a tip I will pay the five hundred,’ signed illegibly, and also in English, ‘Received with thanks,’ and signed in cursive Latin, ‘Adamantiadis,’ Nikos’ uncle.
And this, with stamps costing 2,000,000,000 drachmas each:
From a more remote past, this photograph, taken in 1913 by Nikos’ mother of a friend in Constantinople, the friend dressed
as an ancient Greek.
How can I get all of Nikos’ past life in here, as I want to, as I am possessed to do?
I went with him and his mother to the cemetery, the Second Cemetery where refugees are buried, to wash the family tomb, where his father is buried, and stood to the side when Nikos asked a priest to come and say a prayer before the tomb, he in his long black robe and high black conical hat, rocking back and forth, chanting the prayer, for which Nikos gave him a coin. Nikos’ mother appeared hardly able to endure being there, as if it was all Nikos’ desire to be there, to wash the tomb, to have a prayer said, his desire a stubborn need for ritual.
This need in him occurred to me as if for the first time, for observing Christmas and the New Year and Easter, and, especially, birthday celebrations, he insists on, as a matter of principle that he – yes, stubbornly – must not give up on, as if against a fate that threatens to defeat all such rituals. He will say he doesn’t want to socialize, but he will be the one to insist on having many friends round for a holiday celebration, for which we spend a lot of time preparing.
London
Nikos came home with a copy of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, published by Faber & Faber in what Nikos complains of as a shoddy publication of a great work. This comes to me: Nikos’ admiration of Pound goes beyond the amazing use of images, as amazing as any images in all of literature, but for an ideology that is in fact opposed to Nikos’ ideology, as opposed as Communism is to Fascism; for, though Nikos is in his very instincts opposed to the imposition of any ideological dogma, he has a vital sense of the importance of ideology as inspiration, and has the deepest appreciation of someone whose vision is of ‘un paradiso terreste,’ as was Pound’s. But, deeper than that appreciation of a vision of a ‘paradiso terreste,’ as different as they are in their visions, what they share, as I sense Nikos senses in Pound, is that in their visions of a ‘paradiso terreste’ both are defeated. I may think to myself, thank God both visions are defeated, but I can feel that the defeat of an ideology aspired to is tragic.