All This by Chance

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  He waited for perhaps ten minutes, then walked back up to the square. He had no idea how long it would last, how it would end, no understanding of what exactly it was that he was witness to. He and Lisa talked of it while they sat in the flat late that evening, after their classes and a souvlaki at the corner stall. She took the Metaxa and two glasses from the tiny kitchen and brought it through to the couch that folded out to their bed. The window was opened to where it pressed against the metal grill, young voices calling across the street coming down to them. There was the sweet corroding smell of some vine from the balcony of the floor above. Already the evenings had become too hot to be at ease in. She scored her fingernails down the label of the bottle. She said, ‘Tell me about the girl who wants you.’

  Their corruption was a game. One morning Lisa said as she came back from the shower in the bathroom, a space little larger than a wardrobe, with its faint reek rising from the drain, ‘I can’t believe how I was last night and the person I am now are quite the same. I hope they never overlap completely.’ She was dressed in a simple linen frock and ran a brush through her hair, standing in front of the circular mirror on the wall inside the door.

  ‘I didn’t think you people had hang-ups about sin. Not like us,’ Fergus said to her. His saying so did not amuse her as he thought it would. She looked at him as he buttoned his shirt, ran his hand across his chin and said he thought he could get away with it, no one would think him scruffy if he gave one day a miss? She told him, ‘There was nothing further from my mind. You miss the point at times, Fergus.’ And then, ‘No, I don’t think you can get away with it. We’re paid to look presentable as well as do a job.’

  They were silent then until they left the flat and walked towards the bus stop in front of the public hospital. There was a café on the corner of Ravini Street where they ordered American coffees, and spread honey on the still warm rolls. Whatever the coolness had been about back there at the flat, things now seemed as on any morning. Fergus spelled out the headlines on a paper left on the next table. Politics was about all he could make out, the initials for the parties which meant nothing beyond one being Left, the other Right. Photos of men in military uniforms, slabbed expressionless faces. He smiled across at her, their fingers touching briefly. They seldom spoke in daylight of what they said to each other at night, beyond his sometimes, almost as a little ritual, quoting some lines or other, by a woman writer about ‘wild nights’. At times he had no idea what Lisa might be thinking. If things were good why rock the boat?

  Decades later, in the wide garden of the Home, beneath the tree where he insisted they sat, he told a young woman—young to him, certainly—with her black hair and her sober professional skirt, her fingers flicking across the keyboard, that if he made a lot of all that now, the physical side of their being together, it was because they had made a lot of it then. Not for the sex of it only, the old man told her, it was more than that. This whole business of what goes on in another mind. As if we ever know.

  The flat was beneath street level. They saw only the legs of pedestrians when they looked through the sitting-room window. It was a posh street, Fergus said, the only reason they could afford it was that it was owned by a New Zealander they never saw, an archaeologist who was there only during the winter. It was a basement but of course it was fun. Hot as the summer came on, and crammed with the owner’s bric-a-brac, his scraps from distant centuries, but who cared about that? It was an exciting time.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe,’ he wrote home to his brother, ‘the hatred for the Left, at least among the parents of the kids we teach. If you are even moderately socialist you are branded a communist.’ It was clear-cut and absolute. Outside the rich, of course, it was different. You were waiting for revolution of a different kind. There was nothing much else to wait for. It will come, a fat Cretan in a shop in the next street told them. He meant the day of reckoning. The day the bastards went to the wall. But we knew few workers, Fergus will remember. We didn’t live in an area where you heard much talk like that. When a man in a neighbouring flat quietly asked, so what did they think of his country now, the cradle of democracy, Lisa said they were sorry, they were xenoi and simply didn’t know.

  Once a policeman knocked on the door and said they were using a typewriter at forbidden hours during the afternoon. He could hear it from the street. He was polite and advised them not to do it again: how would they know it was a regulation since the Revolution?

  They saw the tanks along Vasilissis Sofias Avenue, the soldiers with machine guns at the entrance to the Gardens behind Parliament. It was exhilarating but remote, as if they were children allowed to observe how grown-ups lived. Making love was more important to them than revolution. Fergus said with a sudden acuity Lisa was uncomfortable with, ‘The whole point of travel anywhere is to define ourselves to advantage.’ Yet how could they be anything but ignorant of what went on around them? They could not buy English papers for weeks. Time magazine had blocks of black ink obliterating any mention of Greece. The mothers and aunts in the houses where they taught did not discuss what dominated every conversation behind closed doors. They understood nothing of what they heard on the radio. Then the same man from the flat above their basement quietly asked again, he hoped it did not offend them that he asked, but please not to listen to the BBC on their transistor, it was sometimes difficult for those passing in the street to tell exactly where the sounds might come from. Another evening they were in a restaurant, a place rather more up-market than normally they would have eaten at, but it was Fergus’s birthday. There was a sudden movement from a family eating at a table close to theirs, a group of several adults and a child. The mother quickly took her child with her, the father spoke to the waiter and another man who approached him. The men shook hands, the people left. It was nothing, a young waiter said, winking when his back was towards his boss. The child had been calling aloud the name of a fish that was only a letter different from the name of one of the Colonels. Such small things, an elderly man said to them, as the family left. A few minutes later the bouzouki player refused a polite American’s request for music by a composer the regime had banned. That is how dictatorship works. It moves slowly, like a crab. We are here as voyeurs, Lisa began to think.

  In the flat they took turns reading the Odyssey aloud to each other. They said to other young foreigners they casually met up with, that of course there was only one side one could believe. Did the friends they spoke with not know about New Zealand, Fergus sometimes said, its social experiments, its welfare state, its first giving women the vote? Where women, Lisa rephrased it, first took the vote. She was a little embarrassed by him. It was a short cut for Fergus to then claim a natural gift for fraternising with the poor, his insisting those who milled in the lavish lobbies of the hotels they could not afford to enter were indeed the enemy. He was good at the game. He had read a student guide to Marx, which was more than Lisa had, and so was armed with telling quotes. He knew the approved phrases to earn from a passing acquaintance in a bar the friendly tap of a glass against his own. If the other drinker was middle-aged, he would call Fergus kalo pedi and they would feel close to each other for as long as the bottle lasted. Lisa smiled and knew the older men liked her being there, even if she said little. Everything was something of a game in any case. When they walked in the big gardens behind Parliament, Fergus said, ‘See those men flitting behind the bushes there? They come here to suck off.’ She wondered if that was really true. She wanted him to tell her, even if it was not. She said to him one evening, when the weather suddenly became almost unbearably hot and they sat out late at pavement tables, ‘You know we are all on a stage here, Fergus?’

  ‘You mean pretending?’ he said. ‘But who’s pretending?’

  ‘The opposite to that. We believe every minute of it. Everyone believes it. History is performance. Acting up. We’re excited because we’re theatre.’

  ‘Lost me!’ Fergus had laughed at her. They liked life too much to argue. Lisa th
ought, without it bothering her, that the man she lived with for the moment did not care much about ideas that could not be seen in front of you, touched with your hand, tasted on the edge of a glass. But then didn’t she do the same, or would do, once her own life took up again, as in a few months’ time it would have to do? A doctor might be a philosopher, but not at the same time, she once joked with him. Stitches are what work for others, quotes for oneself. But as she thought it, admitted too what a fraud she was becoming, even putting it like that!

  There were weeks in August when they had few classes. Several children went down with measles, many were on vacation, some set off to remote villages where families gathered for the Virgin’s feast day. A flat malaise seemed to stall the city. The military looked back, indifferent, when you looked at them. If you glimpsed the Acropolis at the end of a street, from the window of a bus, even that was like a prop behind the wrong play. They lay on the beach at Phaleron, or sat under pines, Lisa reading de Beauvoir and Fergus underlining Orwell carefully enough to try writing like him in the cahiers he bought in a shop near the university. The French word on the covers made it seem more likely that these were the notebooks a writer would use. Neither for the moment thought too much about the inevitable fact of when they would need to leave. Take one day at a time. Then barazi, pedaki mou. The great seductive lie of the Mediterranean seeped into them. Then how quickly it was decided.

  Although they might more cheaply buy in the market and eat at home, it seemed against the grain of things to do so. In the weeks when classes dropped off and money was tight, they went most evenings to a little place—even taverna was far too grand a name for it—a few streets from the flat, where the Maniatis, as his customers called out to him, stood behind the counter, above his trays of chopped onions and tomatoes, the pile of pita bread he attended to and slapped at, his large knife almost always in his hand, waiting to slice from the slowly turning gyro between its heated panels. There were four tin tables on the concrete floor, enough plates for a dozen customers, a wall of bottles and the long low refrigerator the Maniatis dipped across to draw out frosted beers. His business may be small but it was certain, mostly customers who waited and then carried their souvlaki with them, and the big man made no attempt to charm.

  ‘Being a prick defines me,’ Fergus joked as he watched his abruptness, his grunted response to questions, his handing back change as if he had taken offence. Yet he took to the young foreign couple who ordered bottles of cold beer and waited for the food he brought across to them on chipped white plates rather than placing it on the top of the counter for them to retrieve themselves. It seemed to have much to do with the fact that they were not Americans or British or Germans. As they came to know him a little more, they saw his contempt for most nationalities was a gift he cherished. An obligation, even. It amused Lisa when he showed her that if he turned a photograph of the King stuck with strips of sticky tape to the wall, it was attached to the back of a poster from before the coup, a party notice of some kind with the hammer and sickle large at the head of it. Such things of course had been put away with the assumption that their days would come again. The first rule of a changed regime is to lie with one’s hand on one’s heart. Above the King there were two crossed flags. But the man liked them enough to show how his heart for the time being was turned to the wall, and was patient as they spoke to him in their meagre Greek. He liked it that Lisa especially took such trouble to talk with him. At times his shoulders lifted with laughter, a tremor at his fat throat, his head slightly tilted back, these moments of solidarity that had no need to be spelled out. There would be times when Lisa thought yes, that is my happiest memory of Athens. The Maniatis. His poster. The shared quiet jokes. And that curious sad memory too which came back to her as though one story could not be in her mind without the other tangled with it.

  Even the day of the week she remembered, Friday. There had been a sudden burst of rain. The air smelled of wet pine trees and the branches in the park they passed ran with bright fat drops as the sun again came out. They were walking back from checking their mail at Thomas Cook’s. They passed the flower stalls in front of the high iron railings near the Gardens as the owners eased back the awnings drawn across when the quick storm pelted down. After rain the scent of flowers and wetness seemed almost thick enough to touch.

  As they waited to cross the main street a convoy of army trucks drove past. They then climbed a side street towards the yellow-painted public hospital a few hundred yards from where they lived, where always there seemed to be groups of poorly dressed people gathered at the entrance, convalescing patients waiting to be collected, families arriving with children in their arms. If Fergus was alone he would walk further down Vasilissis Sofias to take another street back to the flat. He preferred not to see them. But Lisa insisted they walk this way when they were together.

  It was hot again after the rain. The surface of the street steamed. The sun fragmented into shards and glitters on the trees above the pavement. As they looked from the brightness, the shadows were intense around an unmarked doorway and its shallow flight of steps. An old-model car was pulled in at the kerbside. Its boot was opened like a dark mouth, an elderly woman in black holding it high with one hand. Lisa and Fergus halted as two young men carried an unvarnished coffin from the doorway and down the flight of steps, and across the pavement to the waiting car. They were close to the raised boot when the man at the back of the coffin stumbled, and the plain wooden lid swivelled to one side. It seemed held by a single screw. For no more than a few seconds they glimpsed the suited figure packed inside. The head was concealed by the board that now slanted across the coffin. What they saw were two hands, one folded across the other. And the bare feet below the black trousers. The hands and the feet, for that instant, a glaring whiteness.

  Lisa was shocked, more for the young men whose faces were distraught than for the sudden brute fact of death barring their path. She heard Fergus’s sharp gasp as he felt the rush of blood to his head, the street swaying as if he were about to lose balance. But then it was the brilliance of the sun he was again aware of, the confused image of the shadow from the hospital wall cutting across the pavement, the angled unvarnished coffin, the now wailing woman who had let the boot of the car fall shut. Lisa at once went across to raise it. Another man, a stranger to the others, rushed forward from the door at the top of the steps and swung the pivoting lid back into place, concealing the man who lay beneath it. There was the strange sense as though something shameful had taken place. The two young men she thought the dead man’s sons pushed past the old woman who continued to wail, leaning forward, unaware that a small group of people on the other side of the road had stopped and were looking towards her. Lisa continued to hold the raised metal flap while the coffin was placed sideways, awkward and suddenly grotesque, projecting to either side of the car. The sons did not speak to her as she stepped aside and they began to fix the box in place with ropes that passed around the boot and beneath the car. Lisa opened the back door of the car and helped the old woman get inside. The whole episode was quick, cluttered, somehow horribly attention-seeking. Then the car drove off with its crudely roped-in freight, people continued to walk on, the man who had rushed down the steps went back up and closed the door.

  ‘You all right?’ Lisa said.

  ‘Fine,’ Fergus told her. And then, ‘You were great.’

  They walked on towards the street and the corner where their laconic friend would be standing in his stained apron, his knife at the ready to carve from the slowly rotating pillar of meat. They were more disturbed than they would admit. For Fergus it had been a brushing against something he resented, almost as though a personal affront. The startling pale nakedness of the hands and feet. The grunting of the sons as they righted the balance of the tilting box. His sudden sense, so intense and yet not possible to speak of, of how closely death and poverty and shame so lay together.

  He told Lisa again, ‘You were great.’

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p; She said, “The quickness of it all. It came as a surprise.’

  Fergus put his arm across her shoulder, her bare skin so much warmer than his hand. A thin film of sweat. The faint lemony smell from her hair as his mouth brushed against it. ‘I love you,’ he told her, and she allowed her head to lean closer to his own. Poverty and shame in her own mind as well, closer than she had ever really been to them. She was conscious too of a reprimand to herself in the drama and crudeness of it, its jerk from how complacent her life had become. The stage effects of mere chance. She saw how rattled Fergus was, how he wanted her not to know. As if he apprehended that the surface of things had buckled. Without either deciding to, they passed their friend without stopping for a beer, as they would have any other afternoon. ‘Later,’ Lisa smiled at him. ‘Apopsi.’

  They walked on through streets they were less familiar with. They found themselves trailing a group of tourists up to a square with a view across much of the city. The sky was hazed above the white glitter of the city. Neither wanted for the moment to go back to the dimness of the flat with its one iron-barred window, its feeling of looking up from a pit to the street and its passing cut-off figures. When they spoke, it was Lisa reminding them they must renew their permit again in the next ten days. If that was even possible. Since the coup it had become so much harder for foreigners to stay on. Fergus groaned at the thought of it, the hours waiting at the police station, the surly officials, their never quite knowing whether an assistant might help at the discreet slipping of a banknote or ostentatiously take offence. It was not a good time to talk about it. ‘Must we?’ Fergus said.

  ‘We have to sometime,’ she said. ‘Even the lotus eating came to an end.’ They had put off raising it for days. When time ran out. Fergus’s plan to go on to London, finding work with a paper. Lisa herself needing to go back, back to the studying, the ‘hard yakka’ she said, using the phrase that had always amused her, and her father as well, when Mr House the builder who lived further along the Crescent, with his team of blond-haired children, complained of what life added up to. Hard yakka and mouths to feed, and a fortune spent at chemist shops. Whoever makes iodine would close down if we weren’t here, he told Stephen, close down like a bloody shot.