by Francis King
Fortunately at this moment one of the women patients, who had been having a feud with Stavroula ever since she had accused the nurse of eating one of her chocolate biscuits, caught Stavroula from behind and tugged her away. I was swept out into the corridor, surrounded by a cheering, laughing, milling throng who accompanied me as far as the lift with cries, in both Greek and English, of: ‘Good luck! Good health! Goodbye! Cheerio! Happy Easter!’
‘I think I should have died there if you hadn’t come to take me away, Götz,’ I said.
Theo made a clicking noise with his tongue, his head on one side. ‘I still think it was foolhardy,’ he said.
‘. . After a major operation like yours.’
Chapter Four
THEO and Götz had been to a gramophone recital at the British Institute when I met them in the Zappeion Gardens; it was my second day out.
‘Like all Germans, Götz is so fond of music,’ Theo said. ‘And, of course, as you probably know, composing is one of my artistic activities—one of my many artistic activities.’ He linked one arm in Götz’s and one in mine, as he smiled and said: ‘ Daphne Bath—Lady Bath, that is—called me the Leonardo of the Lycavettos. My street, you know, is Odos Lycavettos.’
‘What did they play this evening?’
‘Oh, British music, of course. Parts of that superb opera by that young man—what’s he called?—Benjamin England, and then some Purcell, and then a modern concerto, to end with, about which Götz was quite crazy.’
‘A modern concerto?’
‘Yes, something to do with Prague or Sofia or one of those capitals behind the Iron Curtain.’
‘Warsaw?’
‘Yes, that’s right: the Warsaw Concerto. Götz loved it. Didn’t you, Götz?’ He spoke to the German as though he were a small boy who had to be coaxed to display his brightness.
‘Vonderful! Fantastic!’
So you’ve found your way to our Zappeion, have you?’ Theo said in a tone of playful insinuation. ‘Ah, but it’s not what it used to be! We’ve la sottise Peyrefitte and ‘‘Les Ambassades’‘ to thank for that. The moment that book appeared, they began to talk about putting these wretched lights here. And the absurd thing is that we have power cuts in Athens! … Excuse me a moment.’ He slipped off into the darkness under the trees in pursuit of some shadowy figure which might either be male or female.
‘How are you enjoying life in Athens?’ I asked Götz, whose face gleamed greyish green above me in a transverse beam of moonlight.
Götz sighed. ‘There is so much,’ he said, ‘so much that is vonderful … But the one thing …’ Again he sighed. Reaching up with his long arms he grasped the branch of a tree and swung himself back and forth. ‘Have you a woman, Frank?’
Fortunately I was saved from having to answer this question by the return of Theo. He whispered something in Götz’s ear and Götz at once brightened; again they whispered and I saw Theo pass Götz a note—it seemed to be for ten or twenty drachmae—which Götz first refused energetically and then at last accepted. ‘All right—be off!’ Theo gave him a push and Götz, his shadow leaping behind him, disappeared from sight.
Theo linked his arm in mine again: ‘It’s sad that these traces of Europeanism should cling to our friend. In so many ways he is Greek—I am sure that at heart he is Greek—but on this particular subject he’s so far from finding his true self.’ He pressed my arm: ‘And what is your true self? That is something we’d all like to discover.’ I said nothing and he went on: ‘Imagine that I’m your fairy god-mother. What would you like me to give you—here, now, in the Zappeion at this moment?’
‘A nice strong cup of tea. I’m really quite exhausted.’
Theo looked momentarily put out; then he said: ‘Come, let’s take a taxi. But you’ll have to pay for it. I gave my last scrap of money to Götz. I shall make you some tea at home. I think you will enjoy it. Usually I drink Earl Grey, but I am now trying a new blend: I believe it is called—’ he thought for a moment—‘ Lyons. Yes, Lyons. I like that name. It sounds grand and regal and utterly British.’
I had always been told that Theo was a poor man, and therefore it was a surprise to find that his house was in that district of Athens which is called Kolonaki. Sandwiched between two immense, guttering blocks of flats (one of which, Theo told me, belonged to Dino’s family) this ramshackle box with its sagging wooden balconies and Turkish style sash windows appeared either squalid or picturesque, according to the tastes of the observer. Theo obviously thought it picturesque as he let me into the shadowy courtyard, and I was inclined to agree with him. ‘Dino’s uncle keeps trying to buy my house from me. He doesn’t like the house—one wouldn’t expect him to like it—but he likes the site.’ Theo chuckled. ‘ Well, he won’t get it while I’m still alive.… Look at those monstrosities!’ He waved his hand in the direction of one of the blocks of flats. ‘Bauhaus!’
Some rickety outside stairs led up to the front door which was on the first floor, and I had just begun to climb when I halted astonished. Standing in the doorway I could dimly see the enormous figure of a military policeman. He was wearing shorts, and his naked thighs and knees gleamed through the darkness. As I paused I heard Theo chuckle again beside me. ‘Go on!’ he said. ‘He’s not real!’
I then realised that this superhuman figure had been painted on the doorway.
‘Tsarouchis did it for me. I particularly like the position of the knocker. That seems to me a good joke.’ He gave a smart rat-tat, and then giggled. We both looked up at the square-jawed face, with the horizontal black line of its moustache, its eyes set close together and its high peasant cheek-bones; the same kind of stylisation had been achieved with the male Greek face as is achieved on the cover of Esquire with the American female one. On the bare forearms and thighs black hairs sprouted like the prickles on a cactus. In a corner was the single Greek word: Ela!
‘You know what that means?’ Theo asked. ‘ It’s pleasantly ambiguous. It can be a challenge; it can be an invitation. ‘‘Come and get it’‘ was Maurice Bowra’s translation.’ Theo sighed, and again banged the knocker. ‘I feel he’s an appropriate guardian to my shrine.… Enter, please!’
I accepted the invitation, but having once stepped into the hall, I looked about me in amazement. On one wall there was suspended an aeroplane propeller surmounted by two archaic Greek helmets and a straw boater which, Theo told me, had belonged to a young Etonian, the son of a former British Ambassador. On the other wall there was a long string of the masks which Greeks wear during the Carnival period, a picture by Zographos of the War of Independence, a photograph of Theo in a sailor suit at the age of eight, and a glass-covered case in which a number of regimental badges and buttons rested on red velvet. Everywhere there was dust and a strange sweet-sour odour.
‘Go through to the sitting-room, my dear, and make yourself comfortable.’
But to make oneself comfortable in a room that is half a museum and half a junk-shop is not an easy task. Once again I looked in amazement about me, and once again Theo was delighted that I should do so. As I discovered later, he had some excellent pieces of furniture, many of them English, which he had saved from the old family home in Corfu; but every table and chair and desk was piled so high with the random accumulation of a lifetime that one’s immediate impression was one of unrelieved dirt and squalor. Then, slowly, objects detached themselves from the general murk and dust: a plate to celebrate the Coronation of King Edward VII; a French sailor’s hat; an old-fashioned wooden camera, propped on an upright piano which was lacquered with roses; a beautiful Cretan ikon, which Dino had often tried to buy for his collection; a pottery horse as obscene as the position of the two riders seated upon it; a small copy of the Delphic Charioteer and innumerable surrealist objects made of plasticine, scraps of cloth and paper, sea-shells, vegetables, old hair-pins, picture postcards, buttons, stamps, and, indeed, any odds and ends that could ever have passed through Theo’s hands. At these last I began to stare with an uncompreh
ending astonishment, going from one to another while Theo shuffled behind me.
At last he chuckled and said: ‘This is my art.’ He added as my bewilderment remained: ‘This is my fantasiometry.… Here, for example, is the Baroness Schütz.’ The face had been constructed with a brilliant economy out of a potato, now black with age, into which two jet hat-pins had been thrust to make eyes glittering malevolently on the end of their antennae. ‘The hat-pins were, of course, her own. I purloined them when I went to tea at the German Embassy—entirely in the interest of my art, of course.’ His blue eyes twinkled. ‘The ribbon round the throat is also hers; I snipped it from one of her evening dresses—fortunately she did not notice.… Oh, and her hair is also hers—I got it from her hairdresser. Here she has only one breast, as you see—’ he indicated a sea-shell—‘in fact, she had two. But I wanted to symbolise her Amazonian nature.… This, next to her—’ he pointed to a dried frog from the head of which the main spring of a watch curled quivering upwards—‘ is Bakolas, the famous banker. You will see that I have had to mutilate this creature—’ he turned the frog upside down—‘as poor Bakolas, who was in love with the Baroness, suffered from a psychological impotence.… Ah, you’re looking at the watch spring. That, of course, symbolises his fanatical precision—and it enters into his brain as, in the end, it drove the poor man mad.… Now who else would interest you? That is one of those muddled, and not even always well-intentioned young Britishers who were dropped into this country by your Government in the war. The body, as you see, is made from a Gordon’s gin bottle, and the face is a piece of what I believe you call ‘‘lifebuoy’‘ soap. There used to be a halo which was made of one of those gold sovereigns which you used to scatter with such generosity—thus permanently dislocating the whole economy of Greece—but alas, at an hour of need I had to go and sell it.… Yes, that’s a German swastika on one cheek and a Communist hammer and sickle on the other—your policy there was always two-faced, if you will forgive my saying so. The bloodstained bit of rag lying at his feet I cut from a young man whom I found dead outside my house in the civil war.… The whole thing is, as proper, surmounted by a Union Jack.’
He continued to explain other objects at random, while I listened, amazed both by the patience and skill that had gone into their construction and by their dotty and often macabre appositeness. ‘I regard myself as simultaneously a poet and a sculptor,’ Theo declared at one moment; and there was a quality of inspiration about these extraordinary works that gave him the right to make that boast, in spite of their absurdity.
‘But enough of this. You sit at the piano and play something, while I get the tea.… Cecil is in, but must not be disturbed,’ he added in a whisper, pointing conspiratorially at a door that was half covered by a length of tattered and dirty William Morris curtain. He winked.
‘But I don’t play the piano.’
‘Ah well—then amuse yourself in some other way.… Look through the keyhole, if you want to.’
I did not accept this invitation but instead took up the first magazine that came to my hand: it was called Brüderschaft and had been published in Hamburg in the August of the previous year. At least a quarter of it was devoted to advertisements, many of which had been circled with red pencil by some unknown hand.
Theo returned with a tray on which there were two chipped Crown Derby tea-cups, resting on white utility saucers, a battered tin tea-pot and what looked like a tea-cosy, made to resemble a thatched cottage out of coloured silks and raffia, standing not over the tea-pot but apparently on its own. He rummaged in a cupboard, scattering old magazines and letters to the floor, and at last produced a tin, with a Scottie painted on the lid, that contained petit-beurre biscuits moist and crumbling with age.
‘Milk?’
‘Yes, please.’ Then I realised that there was no milk jug on the tray. ‘ Oh, don’t bother. I’d just as soon have it without.’
Theo gave a smirk. ‘No. You shall have milk. I was hoping you would ask for it.’ Deliberately he poured the tea, and then, with the theatrical assurance of a conjurer revealing some surprise, he plucked the tea-cosy off the tray between thumb and forefinger.
Next to the tea-pot there now stood a large and realistic phallus which Theo raised, in a pretence of nonchalance, and inclined towards my tea-cup. The milk trickled out, and as it did so, he glanced up at me mischievously from under his bushy eyebrows to see how I was taking the joke.
‘But, Theo, where on earth did you get that object?’
‘Peasant art, my dear. There was a man, in Peiraeus, who used to make them—alas, he’s had a stroke, and his son, who has taken over from him, refuses to continue with that—er—line. It’s charming, don’t you think? And extremely practical. It unscrews here—rather like a cocktail shaker. Of course the Greeks wouldn’t use it for milk, but for ouzo.’ Ruminatively he ran the knobbly fingers of one hand over the gold fronds; then he said: ‘I used to have three. I gave one to the wife of the former French Ambassador, and one I sold to an insufferable American who said he wanted it for the Anthropological Museum at Mexico City—I never really believed him. But this is the biggest, so of course I kept it for myself.… Do have another biscuit.’
‘No, really, thank you.’ One had been enough.
Theo sighed. ‘ That’s a change I’ve noticed in the English. They used to eat tea; but now, when I have guests here, they never seem to want anything.… I wonder how Götz is doing? Poor boy!’
As he began to speak of the German with a kind of paternal sorrow—of his ugliness, and goodness, and of the women who repaid his devotion with jeers or demands for cash or merely indifference—I realised, for the first time, the extent of Theo’s affection for the other man. He liked Cecil, he liked me, I could see; but this was something different—obsessive, all-embracing, unremitting in its ardour.
‘He has made a great difference to my life,’ Theo said. ‘I don’t like being alone—I never have. When my wife first left me, I almost went mad.’ I was startled; I had never guessed that Theo had been married. ‘Cecil has, of course, been here off and on these last two months, but that is another thing. He lives his own life and leaves me to live mine. He’s generous to me, so I really shouldn’t object if he regards my home as a maison de passe. But Götz—Götz is different, quite different. You see, he relies on me; that is the important point. And I—I have come to rely on him. I don’t simply mean, of course, that he does so much about the house or even that he’s been such a help to me with my work. It’s more than just that. We really understand each other; we are, in a sense, complementary to each other.’ He got up. ‘Now let me play you the ninth movement of the Athens Concerto.’ He opened the piano and, putting his left hand on his knee, began to rub it with his right. ‘It was Götz who suggested this movement to me. Originally there were to be ten movements; now there will be eleven. This is to be called ‘‘The Tavern Dancers’‘ and in the course of nineteen minutes you will hear—if you are clever—no less than sixty-nine different popular tunes. Quite a tour de force, eh?’ He continued to rub his hands gleefully as he spun round on the piano stool to face me. ‘ You may not believe this, but I never had a music lesson in my whole life. I’m entirely self-taught.… Well, andiamo.’ He spun back on the stool and scrabbled some arpeggios. Then, breaking off: ‘ You must understand, firstly, that the work is still in a fluid state, and, secondly, that I shall have to try to suggest to you the various instrumental parts. My scoring is most elaborate,’ he added with a certain self-satisfaction. ‘ Ready—steady—go!’
As in the case of his ‘ fantasiometry’, so now, while he played, I felt that there was a certain dotty genius at work. By all conventional standards, the dissonance was horrible—Theo not only seemed incapable of hitting a note without smudging the notes on either side of it, but he also appeared to be under the impression that, in fortissimo passages, the loud pedal should be kept permanently down. From time to time he would shout out ‘Flute!’ ‘Harp!’ ‘Bassoon!’; and wou
ld go ‘ Oompah! Oompah! Oompah!’ for a few bars and then explain, in a dignified aside, ‘That was the trombones’; would bang with a teaspoon on the tin tea-pot with his left hand as he hammered the tune with his right, hissing ‘Cymbals, now—cymbals!’; would make a curious whistling sound from between half-closed teeth (‘ Wind-machine!’), or would merely hum, falsetto, swaying from side to side as he introduced yet another of his sixty-nine themes. It was an extraordinary performance.
‘Drums!’ he was shouting. ‘Drums! More drums!’ when, from the room next door, there came a noise as if heavy furniture were being dragged about and then flung to the floor. Theo glanced up, but went on playing. Another thump; yet another; the windows began to rattle.
‘What’s happening?’ I shouted above the music. ‘Is Cecil all right?’
Still playing, Theo nodded and gave me his boyishly mischievous grin. Then, modulating with surprising skill into a bar from the Britten opera which he and Götz had heard at the British Institute, he chanted out: ‘Grimes is at his exercise! Grimes is at his exercise!’, following this up with peal upon peal of laughter.
Soon the bangs and thuds ceased; but Theo never succeeded in playing me the whole movement, since five minutes later Götz shambled in.
‘Well, how did it go?’ Theo broke off to ask.
Götz, his wind-jacket and hair stuck with dry twigs, shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘As it always goes. Anticipation—pleasure—disgust.’ He sank into a chair, which creaked noisily as he drew up his dusty plimsolls and curled himself into a ball. ‘ How I hate that argument about money,’ he said moodily.
‘But I’d fixed it all. I said ten drachmae to her.’
Götz sighed: ‘ Yes, but she thought I was an American—or English. So we had this awful shouting-match.… Oh, how sordid it all is. Aren’t there any nice girls in Athens?’