‘She is my wife’s aunt,’ Stephen said.
The woman then telling him, as matter-of-factly as if she spoke of ordinary things, ‘She was with my sister when she died. But there is more than that we have in common.’ And of all things, her suddenly laughing. Stephen startled to hear the soft, throaty laugh, as though a woman is explaining something to a child, as she says, ‘The unexpected joy of seeing her here!’
1968
Then barazei, wasn’t that the phrase the Greeks used to say. Never mind, it meant. What the hell.
Just better bloody live with it. Among the few phrases Fergus remembered from the time they spent there. It was a rare and casual world, Greece in the Sixties, before the military camp. It was a simple enough matter to set up private English lessons, which needed to pay only moderately well to cover rent and getting by. There was no need to think beyond the day, and the weather, and the kind of immediacy that made them believe that the movie of Zorba the Greek, and the music that belted from tavernas and beach resorts and the ships between the islands, was the key to whatever stood against the puritanism New Zealanders loved to tax themselves with, believing they shucked off its long shadow as they danced and pissed it up and loved into the world of light. As Fergus had told her while they sat on the ferry’s deck on the way back from several days in Samos, the sea glinting with the late sun tracking across to the Turkey they never visited yet talked so much of getting to, their skins and minds alive—‘their souls’ too, he even grandly said—as they had never been at home. ‘You know, Lisa, if I ever had a tattoo, know what it would be? Right across my back, in big letters? Fuck Westmere, that’s what it would be.’
When Lisa sometimes thought of it later, even out there at the Mission, what stayed with her was the inane simplicity of what they thought life might be. And how much they misunderstood of the country they lived in, reading their Penguin Odysseys, their Alexandria Quartets, diligently learning their words each day, even the word for ‘revolution’, which in a few weeks they would hear more often than any other.
The pupils they taught were from well-off families, pleasant youngsters who by twelve or fourteen carried the charm, the incipient panache, of the pampered adults their parents paid good money to ensure they became. ‘That’s only Kolonaki,’ an Australian girl told them. ‘That’s the flash part of town, remember. Come out my way to Nea Smyrna it’s a different story.’ Lisa liked her. The girl talked about the linguistics course she would begin in Paris at the end of summer, and Lisa said there was a course in London she would love to do, but that was years off yet. It was nice to talk like this because mostly it was just herself and Fergus, who was generous and fun and for the moment there was no call to think past that. Soon, but not quite yet. She liked the fact that she enchanted him. She was excited by the idea as well as the fact of sensuality. At how she did not greatly care for the person she saw herself not becoming exactly, but heading towards, on the way towards being someone else. When she tried to say something of this to Fergus, he laughed and told her, ‘There we go, us puritans all over.’ That was not what she had meant.
Lisa had no notion that she might enjoy teaching, and found that she did. She took her pupils seriously and did not follow Fergus’s advice to joke along with them. They always liked you he said if you made them laugh. But she encouraged them to have a shot at saying things, to catch their interest enough for them to want to tell her what the words were not quite there for, and so want to grasp at more. She liked the quiet sitting rooms with their heavy furniture, their flashy lamps, the glimmer of ikons in one corner, the plush cover on the table they sat at, the small glass cup of coffee that was brought to her, the gold patterning around the blue or green glass, the matching plate with its loukoumi or baklava. The pupils seemed to like her. ‘The boys can be little pricks,’ Fergus said. ‘If there’s two of them together they’ll try to have you on. Little capitalist shits.’
She considered it carefully when Vicky from Adelaide told her that ‘bourgeois’ was a word you could use here as you never could back home, the word for those families in the handsome white marble apartments, with the mothers gracious to you because they knew there was nothing to fear from a young foreign woman who would sit here with textbooks and someone else’s children for seventy drachmae. Some liked to show off the English they knew. Sometimes the coffee was carried in by maids, who were always dressed soberly. Living here, she said to Vicky, was like getting very slowly into a story that was set in places you knew nothing about, so everything came as a surprise. Everything you are looking at, Vicky said, is built on the fact that the country exists because of its peasants. That is what these kind of people float on, the people whose children we teach. Lisa considered that too. ‘I just don’t know enough to take that in.’ How unlike Fergus she was when it came to that. She joked with him that he would have made a good detective in some big store. The way his eyes flickered. Never missing a thing. He was so much quicker at taking things in, sizing them up. She was slower to decide, more attentive to what might lie behind what she saw.
She began to see that what Fergus and Vicky talked about had nothing immediately to do with themselves, but with an idea, a sense of structures and organisations, and yet they could miss a beat when it came to people.
He smiled as she dissected him. They sat in a taverna called the Dolphin, where you could eat well and for next to nothing. They had gone there often enough to be known by name, to call the waiters and the large woman on her stool behind the till by theirs. Sometimes two men would take instruments from battered cases and play, and customers dance. Always someone invited Lisa to join in. Fergus was happy to watch. She had no idea of course but quickly picked up on a few sufficient moves. He liked seeing what she was quite unconscious of, an innate gracefulness that people liked to watch. She quickly learned how to move to most advantage as she made her simple steps seem rather more than they were, to snap her fingers and yet all the time to hold a distance which offended no one, which the elderly woman at the till admired. There was nothing of the pushy tourist waiting to perform, to show how well she fitted in, none of what Fergus described as ‘your average antipodean arse-trailing’.
He watched Lisa as he sat sipping at his retsina, into which the owner’s wife slipped a sliver of apple. She danced with a handkerchief held high between herself and the man in a sharp jacket and a gold chain around his neck who moved through the steps with her. His name was Kostas and he had become a friend. He was frank and good-natured and a master of the kind of inaccuracy that Fergus admired and thought especially Greek. He was a teacher who supported his widowed mother, his father he said had been killed by the communists in the mountains beyond Karpinisi. His father had been a teacher like himself. He played with a key-ring from the moment he sat down. There was a leather and metal attachment that spelled out BMW. Unless you knew he walked back to a cheap room behind the station at Monasteraki when he left the taverna, as he confided to Fergus, a rented room where he slept with his trousers carefully laid beneath his mattress each night to keep them sharply creased, you might well think, as he intended you to, that he was perhaps in business and drove an English car. ‘You have to love him for that,’ Lisa said when she heard the story.
‘What, the bullshit of it?’ Fergus laughed.
‘No, not that,’ Lisa said, but left it there. She made a point that Kostas always sat by her. She knew he liked being marked, in front of everyone, as if a special friend. And it is so good for my English, he said. It is better than talking with Australians. And shamelessly, ‘I tell my mother how my English teacher is a doctor. She is very proud of that.’
‘Going to be,’ she corrected him. ‘That is a long way off.’
Fergus said that he liked places like Greece because people gave themselves away all the time. Everything, he said, is a performance, so there is always something to see through. ‘There is always this space between the surface and the acting out, and both are real to them. I like that.’
<
br /> Lisa said, ‘I’m not quite with you. I don’t know how we can know that.’
‘Never mind,’ he told her. And with a touch of conceit, as though this explained what she was unable to share: ‘My mother used to warn me about it when I was a child. Don’t watch people so intently.’
Fergus’s mother at the other end of the Crescent, although Lisa had scarcely known her. A big busy pleasant woman, her son the only boy among several girls. She and Mrs Costello smiled at each other when they passed in the street, when her son worked for the shop after school and delivered prescriptions on the black clunky bike with the cane basket on the front, and its placard, ‘Ross’s Pharmacy’. When occasionally he called in home, delivering something her father asked him to drop off, her mother smiled but said no more than a few words as she thanked him, but Babcia made a fuss of him and plied him with treats, saying things he had no hope of understanding. Once she asked him to walk through with her to the sitting room to feel for a dead fish in the aquarium, and scoop it out. He and Lisa both lied for a year before their parents knew they were ‘friends’, and lied again, during her first year as a student at med school in Dunedin and his as a junior reporter on the Evening Star, as they planned for Greece. Ignorant and romantic and carried away by watching Zorba half a dozen times, and buying the soundtrack LP and reading Lawrence Durrell. ‘A year off,’ as they both said, a year that would force them to grow up. Take them into a bigger world than Westmere so much as dreamed of. One holiday weekend they went with a bus-trip from the tennis club to the mountains at the centre of the island. Neither knew how to ski, but fumbled about on the learners’ slopes, and became lovers, and were blind to pretty much anything else. Head over heels, her father said. He told her, ‘I was the same in London so don’t think I don’t understand.’ He had guessed and asked her and she had told him yes. ‘Better not to bother your mother with this, perhaps.’ She bluntly asked, ‘You mean lie to her?’ And Stephen said, without needing to explain, ‘Do what’s best for her.’ His assuming Lisa understood why he told her that, and she admired him for it. She told him, ‘I’ll come back in a year’s time and finish my degree. You needn’t worry about that.’ Her father replied, ‘I know. I know you will.’ There were things they felt no need to spell out. Her mother said little, and accepted the girl’s saying she needed time to think, surely she would understand that? And Eva said, ‘It saddens me your going, but yes I do. There is no real freedom until you have worked things out for yourself.’ Lisa again struck, as so often, at how clearly she understood whatever Stephen said to her, but was puzzled, or taken by surprise, at her mother’s remarks, by the train of thought she could only guess at that lay behind them.
Within a few weeks of flying in from Delhi, each had a roster of private students. Their lessons were taught from old-fashioned textbooks that used words like ‘klaxon’ rather than ‘car horn’, that taught ‘may’ and ‘might’ in ways that they themselves would seldom use with such precision. Other books were about Greek legends and the marvels of the ancient world. On the walls of the quiet rooms they taught in were hand-tinted formal photographs in thick gold frames, grandparents with granitely solid women and men with aggressive moustaches, ikons with a lamp burning before them, and all but the faces and hands of the saints, the Virgin, covered in hammered tin. Fergus quickly decided the children were spoiled and lied about their homework and were insincerely polite, and Lisa teased him that he was unable to cope with the rich, that he saw them through the simple-minded, watered-down socialism that New Zealanders thought it their right to inflict on the world. He came back that she had the political insight of a chook. The argument was good-natured but serious at heart. But they agreed their young pupils assumed that the good things in life were on call, and would come when whistled for.
He learned to say ‘As God wills’ in Greek to the aunts or the mothers who handed him cash at the end of the lessons and waited for the children to be praised. The saying from a foreigner delighted them. Some smiled as though he had attempted a joke. One older aunt patted his arm and told him New Zealanders were good people, she remembered them from the war—men with red faces but good hearts. She tapped her bosom and repeated for him, ‘kali kardia’. He liked the feel of the folded drachmae in his hand, the pretence that to teach was not quite to be engaged in trade. One pupil was a girl of fifteen whom he suspected may have welcomed mild advances and then cried if he had done such a thing. He could be wrong, of course, but an Englishman he knew had told him of such things. Her name was Tasoula. She pushed her sleeves back to show the honey-colour of her arms to advantage. She leaned back with her hands clasped behind her head so her breasts in her ribbed sweater thrust towards him. She sometimes put her hand so close to his on the opened pages of a book that their fingers brushed above a picture of Odysseus tied to a mast, or Nausicaa girlishly tossing a ball. The less notice he took of her the more little tricks she employed. He knew she disliked the handsome thirty-year-old woman who had married her widowed father, a man related in some way, from what he gathered, to the Metaxas fortune. Every evening, last thing, he and Lisa drank a glass of the cheap brandy with the name on the label. The girl could afford to condescend a little. She knew Mr Costello, a name she liked saying, must be poor or he would not be teaching as he did, walking from street to street, hurrying once his lesson with her finished to his next hour with a very clever student—Fergus knew he riled her telling her that—in Amerikis Street. He guessed what she might be thinking, that if one day his hand brushed across hers, or his hand even paused against her breast, it would pay back her stepmother for so much. He guessed, but was wise enough to leave it be. He insisted they pay rather more attention to grammar than just the word-lists she asked him for, the words in pop songs, the slick talk she heard on the radio from the American base. But when he made love to Lisa he sometimes said, I am thinking of the brandy girl who would like me to grab her tits. Which Lisa knew was not in fact the truth, but as a game it was quite fun. One lie was worth another. She invented a pupil whose father was a banker, an unattractive boy who touched himself beneath the table while she explained to him the perfect tense. He knows that I know, Lisa said, he knows too that I shall never tell him to stop, which means he thinks I like his doing that, or I cannot be bothered caring, and it drives him crazy not knowing. Each invented more to goad the other.
Fergus had picked up on more than Lisa was aware of, the sense of lust that he sometimes thought pervaded the city. Because he had seen men on the prowl, he said, witnessed the cars pull up to the kerbs, inviting women to walk across. He was drawn not to that so much as the excitement of hypocrisy, the game that seemed to be played out wherever one looked. The men in the public lavatories below Omonoia Square, the rows of young and old who would have killed had their masculinity been questioned, standing at times for hours, glancing left and right, exposing, stroking. Or the middle-aged well-dressed women in the fashionable arcade near Syntagma Square, their hair expensively attended, gold glinting at their throats and wrists, casually passing and re-passing the fashionable shops, waiting their assignations, waiting the chance of something new.
How did he know, Lisa quizzed him, how could he know all that? They might just do it for a job.
They are not whores, he said, they are women who will go home and tell their families they have been shopping or meeting friends. Lisa said he was obsessed, that the obsessed always see what is not really there. Yet she told him yes, tell me more about what you see. It became as though Athens had turned them into different people. But at other times, her thinking it is not especially Athens, it is just our being in a place where the cages we lived in have had the bars removed.
Fergus told her he thought of those animals, he forgot their name, that exist for months in the constant reek of musk. He was in the street one afternoon that led down from Omonoia to the railway station, passing buildings pocked still by the spraying of bullets from twenty years before. He picked up the staleness of clothes, the see
mingly idle drifting of those without work. He believed he could tell those who had come to the capital from the north, or up from the Mani, and were lost and fascinated by how vile yet commanding the city was. That afternoon there was a drama he never fully comprehended. At first he guessed that what he saw must be the making of a film, although he saw no cameras, no assistants with lights and clapboards. Yet there was a sense of reality so intense it could only be artificial. A woman with that heavy Mediterranean radiance movies made so much of, a woman in a short black leather skirt and a shiny golden blouse and black stockings whose edges did not quite reach the level of her skirt, waited at the corner of one of the grey bullet-scarred buildings. She walked a dozen paces in one direction or the other, then walked back. A crowd of thirty or forty men of all ages, most in the drab clothing of those who could not find work. The closest were standing several yards from her. She ignored them completely. None of the men spoke together yet there was an air of complicity, of a herd obsessed by the focus they could not break free from. There was a sense too among them of crude amusement, of undeclared contempt, yet these were subordinate to the enthralment gripping them as surely as if they had been trussed animals across a spit. There was nothing threatening in the scene, no sense that anything violent would occur, yet the word that strangely came to him was fury. A dark heavy resentment at something intolerably distant, yet the sense of the woman’s magnetism pressing back to them, goading, mocking them, her searing reckless display as close as that, close enough to touch, to taste, yet no one moving closer, none crossing what seemed the boundary set between them implacably as razor wire. It held him too with its weird primitive force.
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