by Francis King
Götz had once again become infatuated soon after I returned; and Theo who, in the past, had always been indulgent to these agonised enthusiasms, was now either indifferent, morose or openly scornful when the subject was mentioned. We had first seen the girl when we had gone to swim from a beach a few miles from Athens, opposite the coast of Euboea. Götz had ‘discovered’ this beach for himself two years previously, and whenever we went swimming, whether to Vouliagmeni or Varkiza or Phaleron, he would always exclaim: ‘Ah, but this is nothing compared to my beach. It’s vonderful there! Fantastic!’ Theo (who only paddled) would then pick a shred of sea-weed from between his long toes and say: ‘ I don’t believe this beach of yours exists.’
‘But of course it exists! I shall take you there.… The only thing is, there aren’t any buses.’
One day we decided to go on bicycles which we hired from a shop next to Theo’s house. ‘Let me have one without a bar,’ Theo said. ‘At my age it’s so much easier to mount.’ He was wearing knickerbockers, some canary yellow stockings and a blouse which made a large balloon between his shoulder-blades as he pedalled off. Götz had an enormous rucksack beneath which he crouched, his vast blond thighs, naked in the abbreviated shorts he was wearing, thrusting like pistons beside me. ‘But this is wonderful!’ Theo cried. All his melancholy seemed to have gone. ‘Why did we never think of this before?’ He tinkled his bell joyously as he wove through some pedestrians. ‘Why didn’t you tell me what fun biking was? I love this! How easily one moves! What grace! What smoothness!’
But soon he was grumbling, as his face broke out into red patches, sweat began to darken the blouse under his arms, and his breath came whistling from between clenched teeth. Götz had said that it was a mere eleven kilometres; that the road would be excellent; that the wind would be behind us for the whole journey (he all but promised that the wind would change to be behind us for the whole journey back). But it was now obvious that either his memory had been at fault or that conditions must have altered greatly since his last visit. Often we had to dismount; and when we did not dismount, we had to bump over stones and ruts, or pedal frantically to extricate our wheels from mud that was as sticky as melted chocolate. ‘It’s unfortunate it rained yesterday,’ Götz remarked.
‘It’s even more unfortunate that your memory is so bad.’
‘But it wasn’t like this when I last came.’
‘I know that Greece is falling to pieces pretty rapidly, but I can’t believe that that asphalt road you were talking about can have become this in the space of two years.’ Theo hit a large stone and swallowed the last two words as his bicycle reared upwards like a horse. ‘ Oh——’ he shouted, using what he defended as ‘a decent Anglo-Saxon expletive’ when we reproached him for his language.
‘Patience, patience!’ Götz said. ‘Look at that view. It was worth coming for that alone.’ A jeep at that moment passed us, and the dust swirled up, to fill our eyes and mouths and noses.
Coughing and spitting, Theo said viciously: ‘Charming, absolutely charming. Charming view!’
‘Wait till you see the beach.’
When we did at last see the beach, looking down at it from where the road plunged precipitously into a gully filled with rocks the size of a man’s head, we each of us gave an independent gasp of horror. Even the beach at Phaleron could not, at that moment, have been more crowded.
‘This is your beach, isn’t it?’ Theo asked.
Götz could easily have told a lie; there were, after all, innumerable beaches empty on either side. But lies had never come easy to him: ‘Yes,’ he said, going slowly crimson. ‘It looks as if someone else must have discovered it.’
‘Someone else!’ Theo gave a harsh, croaking laugh.
I tried to appease him by some remark about the gregariousness of Greeks. ‘It’s really an advantage, because those of us who like solitude can always find it. Let’s go on a little.’
‘And push this bloody bike! I’m going to leave it here.’ Theo dropped the bicycle with a clatter into the gully.
‘Take care! If it’s damaged, we shall have to pay for it,’ Götz warned. ‘You can’t leave it there, anyway. Someone will steal it.’
‘They’re welcome.’
Eventually Götz himself retrieved the bicycle and pushed it along with one hand while he pushed his own with the other. ‘We’d better leave them all at that cottage over there,’ he said.
There was a young man sitting in the sun outside the cottage, while a cat and a child of indeterminate sex scrabbled together in the dust at his bare feet. He took the bicycles from us and then, with the usual insatiable curiosity of the Greeks, asked if we were American.
‘No,’ Theo said. ‘ Japanese.’
‘Japanese?’ His small eyes widened in his sunburnt face. ‘But that’s a long way away, isn’t it?’
Theo shrugged his shoulders. ‘Far enough. We came by airship,’ he added.
‘By what?’
‘Airship.’
‘Oh.’ The young man had now begun to look alarmed. ‘And what are you doing here?’
Theo put a finger to his lips: ‘Sh!’
I had begun to giggle at this childish deception and, to hide my giggles, was playing with the cat. Theo pointed: ‘In Japan we worship cats.’
‘Oh.’ The young man seemed no longer capable of saying anything else.
‘Cats are holy. We think they have souls.’
‘Oh, come on, Theo,’ I said.
‘My friend doesn’t like me to talk about religion to strangers.… Goodbye—thank you so much.’ Then, as we walked off, he exclaimed: ‘Fool, incredulous fool! That’s the Greek peasant! Will believe anything!’ In the past he had always praised the Greek peasant for his gaiety and courage and natural intelligence and it was sad now to hear the rasping scorn with which he spoke these words.
Suddenly the youth was shouting above us, his hands cupped to his mouth.
‘What does he say?’ Theo demanded, halting.
‘He says something about a shark,’ I answered.
‘A what?’
‘A shark. At least, I think that’s the Greek word for a shark.’
Theo shouted back: ‘ What did you say?’ He listened, and then turned to us appalled. ‘Did you hear that? He says that two years ago a girl was eaten by a shark when bathing from this beach. We’d better not go.’
‘Oh, nonsense, Theo!’ Götz protested.
‘He’s obviously getting his own back on you for having pulled his leg,’ I added.
‘Besides, a shark doesn’t stay in the same place for two years,’ Götz said.
Theo shook his head from side to side and tightened the knot of his scarf: ‘I don’t like it.’
Götz had already begun to race down the path that zig-zagged between rocks and stunted wind-blown olive trees and I followed with Theo behind me. ‘Come on!’ Götz yelled. ‘It’s vonderful! And no one in sight!’
It was one of those long, golden, deserted beaches which, miraculously, one can find even ten miles from Athens. ‘I’m hot,’ Götz said. He threw off his rucksack and then began to wrestle with his sweat-shirt which he had tugged over his head; he always gave the appearance of having been poured into his clothes hot, and to get himself out of them was like peeling an orange. Soon he was standing before us naked.
Theo, perched on a rock, stared at him with a morose admiration. ‘Aren’t you going to put on your bathing trunks?’
‘Why should I? There’s no one about.’
‘Are you really going to bathe?’
‘Of course.’
‘And you, Frank?’ I, too, had begun to throw off my clothes; after the heat and dust of the journey it was wonderful to feel the breeze cool on my naked skin.
‘Yes, I shall bathe.’
‘It seems to me most unwise.’
‘But why, Theo?’
‘Most unwise,’ he repeated. He looked from one of us to the other and then said: ‘You look like Homeric heroes.’ He was
not being ironical, of that I am sure: and I glanced at my own body and then at Götz’s in silent amazement.
‘Now get your shoes and stockings off,’ Götz said, like a nanny to a peevish child, ‘and have a good paddle.’
‘Certainly not! I’ve no intention of going near that water. With that—that monster about, it’s most inadvisable.’ We both began to laugh, but Theo reproved us angrily: ‘ That’s right—laugh if you wish. But let me tell you that only last year the cousin of a very dear friend of mine in Corfu was eaten by a shark with hundreds of people around her.’
‘But no shark is going to come as far in as where you paddle.’
‘I shall have a nap,’ Theo said. ‘But please—please, I beg of you—don’t go too far out.’
Theo did not sleep: he sat on his rock, his hands clasped together, and watched us as we raced, and splashed, and attempted to duck each other. He looked curiously forlorn and old as we looked back at him from the water, his green beret and his yellow stockings and his plum-coloured shirt all seeming to melt back into the landscape of multi-coloured rocks, sand and olive trees that was now quivering in the midday heat. One felt that, if he stayed there long, all that was Theo would be absorbed and nothing would be left for us.
As we came out of the water, he exclaimed: ‘Thank God—you’re safe!’ I had failed to take his anxiety with any seriousness, but now the tone of these words and his obvious and touching relief made me realise that he had genuinely feared for us. Götz, too, must have made the same surprised discovery for, all wet as he was, he went and got on the rock beside Theo and put a long, stringy arm about his shoulder. ‘There, Theo,’ he said. ‘Your chicks are home safely.’
From that moment Theo’s petulance and moroseness passed. As he munched a sandwich he began to sing
‘It was the good ship Venus,
My God, you should have seen us …’
in his still vigorous baritone.
‘Where on earth did you learn that, Theo?’ I asked.
‘Oh, from one of the boys,’ he replied. ‘I learned a lot from your British tommies,’ he added with an outrageous wink. ‘Come on, Götz—fill up our glasses.
‘The captain had a daughter,
She fell into the water …’
Götz, who had a strain of prudishness in him, protested: ‘Theo—please, please, please! Why do you want to spoil all these vonderful things around us with a disgusting song like that?’
Theo replied by cracking his hard-boiled egg on the back of Götz’s head.
Looking back now, I realise those were some of the happiest hours I spent in Greece: and yet it would be hard to say why. There had been other picnics by the sea; on other days we had eaten and drunk as well, the water had been as beautiful, and each of us had been in an equally cheerful mood. Yet it is this occasion, and not all those others, which now comes back to me with a terrible, choking force, as I crouch over a gas-fire.
We dozed, and bathed again, and then dozed once more. Theo collected some shells, tying them up in a handkerchief which he then forgot and left under an olive tree. Götz put a crab on my chest while I lay with my eyes closed: a practical joke of a kind that I have always found hard to appreciate. He even croaked part of Isolde’s narration in his unmusical bass, making Theo sigh, again without irony: ‘Ah, you Germans—so musical, so musical.’ Then, regretfully, we packed the rucksack and began to climb the hill.
The young man was still where we had left him, lolling on his chair. He smiled sleepily and, tugging with his bare, prehensile toes at a tuft of grass before him, offered us a glass of wine. It was from his own vineyard, and he was delighted when we expressed our appreciation of its harsh, ringing flavour. We all felt a little ashamed of Theo’s deception earlier in the day.
The wine made us drowsy and at the first village at which we arrived we got off our bicycles at a café where the tables straggled on to the road, and ordered ourselves some coffee. It was that hour, just before sunset, when on Sundays Mediterranean people drift up and down a crowded main street or water-front to take the evening ‘ Volta’. The village at which we had stopped had a main street of less than two hundred yards, and that two hundred yards must at that moment have held all its inhabitants. They walked, arm in arm and girls separate from boys, slowly up and down, in a cloud of dust that had already made an iridescent sheen on the tops of our cups of coffee. The boys wore dark grey or dark blue suits, the girls dresses of purple or orange or mauve or lemon-yellow or bile-green, which in a light less dazzling would have been horrible in their clashings with each other. Sometimes a car or a bicycle would slowly make its way between the thronged strollers who would part reluctantly to either side of the thoroughfare.
‘What a curious custom,’ I said. ‘Do you suppose we’d do it in England if the weather were better?’
‘You would, if that was the only way you could see a girl,’ Theo replied.
‘Look!’ Götz exclaimed excitedly; he had been watching the crowds.
‘At what?’
‘There!’ His hand gripped my arm. ‘She’s fantastic.’
‘Who?’ The effect of so many faces passing and repassing had been that I could no longer distinguish one from another.
‘She’s gone now. But I think that she saw me.’
It seemed to me not unlikely; we were sufficiently conspicuous for everyone who passed to examine us with that curiosity which Greeks never feel it impolite to show.
‘There!’ Once again Götz clutched my arm; next morning, when I took my bath, I would find two bruises.
She was certainly a girl of more than usual charm, with her dark hair falling smoothly from a centre parting, her long, smooth brown legs with their childish ankle-socks and flat-heeled strap-shoes, and her small, slightly pert face in which the eyes lay oblique and large and glistening. She was sixteen, I guessed, and she had that air of precocious maturity which is at once the most attractive and most touching feature of peasant girls of her age. She was walking arms linked on either side with two other girls, one fat and one thin, who were certainly not her equals in charm, and all of them were giggling, with their eyes lowered, as they swayed past our table.
‘Vonderful!’ Götz said.
‘What is it, Götz?’ Theo asked irritably, as he attempted to fish some unidentifiable object—a fly or a piece of grit—out of his coffee.
‘That girl!’
‘Girls, girls, girls. You think of nothing else.’
‘Look, she’s going to pass us again! She’s deliberately going to pass us.’
‘She could hardly do otherwise, seeing that our table is almost in the middle of the road. Most of the village has been passing and repassing us.’
Götz stiffened, leaning forward, his mouth half open to reveal his uneven, tobacco-stained teeth, his nose twitching like a rabbit’s and his albino lashes blinking nervously up and down as he stared at the approaching figure. He looked like some enormous shaggy mongrel, straining at its leash to jump up and pounce.
The girl sauntered forward, eyes lowered in affected indifference, while her companions tittered on each side of her. Then, when she was barely a yard from our table, her glance swept upwards.
Theo crowed with delight, clapping his hands on to his thighs as he rocked backwards and forwards. ‘At me! It was at me that she looked!’
‘Nonsense,’ Götz said crossly. ‘She looked at all of us.’
But the extraordinary thing was that, without any doubt, it was at Theo she had looked.
‘I told you,’ Theo said. ‘Didn’t I tell you? The Greeks are all gerentophiles. That’s been their tradition—look at Socrates! She looked at me—at me, at me!’
‘Oh, shut up,’ Götz said rudely.
We sat in silence but for the noise of Theo chuckling to himself and Götz rapping one fist impatiently on the table; until once again the girl could be seen approaching. She now had a spray of lilac in one hand which she kept raising to her small, uptilted nose. ‘Now let’s see,
’ Götz said grimly.
This time she was on the outside of the trio, and they came so close to our table that her skirt (a nauseating shade of mauve) brushed against the side. Something fell. But such was her deftness that, at first, we had no idea from where it had fallen. Beside Theo’s cup there was now a spray of lilac.
‘Well?’ Theo asked triumphantly. ‘What do you make of that?’
‘It’s no nearer your cup than mine—or Frank’s.’
Theo measured the distance with his hand. ‘Twice as far to Frank, three times as far to you,’ he said. It needed no proof; one could see it with one’s eye.
‘She couldn’t look to see where she was dropping it. She just dropped it. That’s all. It was meant for all of us.’
Theo clapped his hands for the waiter, with obvious satisfaction. ‘Let’s be on our way,’ he said.
‘Oh, no. Let’s stay a moment,’ Götz protested. ‘ Then we can ride back in the cool of the evening.’
‘The sun has set,’ Theo said. ‘And once the sun sets, you will find that in Greece the volta quickly terminates. But as you wish.’
Glumly we sat: I amused myself by listening to the conversation of the three old men seated at the next-door table (it was difficult to make out whether the one who was talking, was talking about his wife or his goat) and Theo began to clean, first his nails with a tooth-pick and then his ears with a corner of his handkerchief. Götz was now not merely rapping with his fists but also stamping his feet in the dust in a disjointed rhythm.
‘Please don’t do that,’ Theo said. ‘There’s dust enough already.’