The Firewalkers

by Francis King

The girl did not return.

  ‘I think I shall stretch my legs for a moment, before we go on.’ Götz got up and shambled off, hitching at his shorts, while Theo shouted after him:

  ‘I should have thought you could stretch your legs just as well on your bicycle.’ He turned to me: ‘It’s so undignified, this kind of behaviour. Village girls! I have to think of my name; I’m so well known.’

  It seemed late for Theo to begin to think of his name; but naturally I did not say so.

  Götz returned and sat down moodily. Theo put out a hand and playfully tweaked the albino hairs on one bare thigh:

  ‘Didn’t I say that the volta always ends at sunset? Mummy knows best.’

  At that moment both Theo and I imagined that this affair, like so many others, had come to its end: we would bicycle away, the girl would discuss us that evening with her friends, and by next week everything would be forgotten. Yet, for once, the established pattern was broken; Götz did not forget.

  For days, when there was a silence in our conversation, he would suddenly refer to the girl; he would wonder who she was, what her name might be, whether she went to school or worked, how old she was, where she lived. ‘I don’t know how you expect me to know the answers to such questions,’ Theo would say irritably.

  ‘I don’t expect you to know them.’

  ‘Then it seems futile to ask the questions in the first place.’

  ‘I was just wondering.’ Götz would sigh, smoothing down his hair with the palm of one hand. ‘She was very beautiful.’

  When next Sunday came round he inevitably suggested that we should make an excursion to the same beach; but, instead of giving what both Theo and I knew to be the true reason, he mumbled: ‘It was so beautiful there—it’s quite the best beach in Attica.’

  ‘And quite the worst road,’ Theo retorted. ‘I, for one, am certainly not going to do that bicycle ride again. If you want to go, you will have to go without me.’

  ‘Please, Theo! You yourself said what fun the day had been.’

  ‘Many things are fun when one does them for the first time,’ Theo replied sententiously. ‘That does not necessarily mean that they bear repetition.… No, my dear. Do by all means visit your—your beach, but don’t count on me as your companion.’

  Götz hesitated, agonisingly divided between his desire to go back to the village and his loyalty to Theo; Sunday had always been the day they spent together. Then he said with a morose resignation: ‘All right, I’ll go another time.’

  ‘Please don’t alter your plans on my account,’ was Theo’s somewhat ungracious reply.

  But by the following Sunday Götz could deny himself no longer. ‘You’ll come, won’t you, Frank?’ he pleaded with me after Theo had persisted in refusing.

  I, too, felt as Theo did, that our last visit had been one of those adventures which it becomes tedious to repeat, but when I looked into Götz’s face, like that of a child’s who is desperately anxious to be given something and yet fearful of being refused, I had to accede. ‘Yes, I’ll come,’ I said.

  The stones in the road seemed even larger, the mud thicker, the sun hotter, as we toiled towards our goal. But Götz never stopped singing, as his vast thighs thrust him through the countryside. Once more we bathed; once more we ate our picnic lunch, perched on some rocks; once more we lay back and dozed until the sun was setting. But all these things were done by Götz in a curiously perfunctory manner: they were, after all, no more than a routine that prepared for the evening.

  I was afraid that the girl would not be there; but she was, with the same companions, the fat one and the thin one, and in the same skirt of nauseating mauve. When he first saw her, Götz caught his breath in the back of his throat with a rasping, spluttering sound; the colour left his face and then seeped back, crimson. It would have been comic, if it had not been pathetic.

  This time we did not sit at the café, but ourselves strolled with the strolling crowds. The first time we passed her the girl did not look; the second time, she glanced up momentarily from under lowered lids; the third time she gave a cold, reproving stare; the fourth time she and her companions all swept past with lowered heads, giggling wildly; the fifth time her eyes flashed with a provocative impudence. It was not until the sixth time that she gave a small, furtive smile.

  It seemed to me a meagre return for so much effort; my legs had begun to ache, the back of my throat and my eyes were smarting from the dust. But Götz was overjoyed. ‘Did you see that? Did you see that, Frank? She smiled at me—she smiled!’

  ‘Yes, I saw.’

  Once again she smiled, and then she disappeared.

  From then Götz paid frequent visits to the village and, since he always urged me to accompany him, I too would sometimes go. It seemed to me an extraordinarily laborious wooing: as Götz won now a smile, now a murmured ‘Good evening’, now a passing comment, and now, at long last, a few words under the shadow of some trees where the volta ended, he appeared to me like a man who, scaling a mountain, slips back two yards for each three he conquers. But to Götz the effort was worthwhile; he was determined to reach the top. Sometimes he was full of elation; at other times he would return in the blackest gloom—she had not been there, she had been talking to some village youth, she had merely nodded instead of smiling. When things had gone badly, it was impossible to cheer him up: he did not wish to go out, to eat or even to do his usual chores around the house.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Theo exclaimed on one such occasion. Always so patient in the past towards Götz’s infatuations, even a mention of this girl could now exasperate him beyond all endurance: it was as if he sensed that this was different from all those other affairs. ‘If you want a woman, George the pastry-cook has an excellent one for you. She’s just nineteen, and he tells me that she’s in the pink of condition. She’s working as a maid at the Abyssinian Legation. She’s from Chios—and you know how warm all the Chiotes are!’ George the pastry-cook, whom I had never met but of whom I had heard often, was Theo’s chief ‘agent’—as Theo himself called him. ‘ George has himself tried her out,’ he added.

  ‘Theo—don’t, don’t, don’t!’ Götz cried in an agony of protest. He put his clumsy paws to his ears and rocked from side to side. ‘How can you make such degraded suggestions? I don’t want a woman. Can’t you understand? I only want one woman. And you know who that is. It’s so vulgar to talk as you were talking. Sometimes I think——’

  ‘All right, all right, there’s no need to get hysterical. When you’re my age, you’ll realise that one woman—or one man, for that matter—is very much like another. If only you could see how foolish and absurd you are being!’

  Certainly Götz’s situation at that moment had about it all the folly and absurdity which seem to be inseparable from any profound love affair. It was, as Theo had discovered, easy enough to ridicule him and, through that ridicule, to sharpen the agony in which his days were passed. ‘Fancy getting yourself into such a state over some common village slut’ was the general tenor of his mockery: and because Götz himself was conscious of the humiliation of being pointed out and commented on and even laughed at in the village, he would wince each time that Theo drove this barb home. No lover needs to be told when he is making a fool of himself; he knows already.

  Yet surely, I used to say both to myself and sometimes, in consolation, to Götz, Theo himself must, at some stage in his life, have been in the same classic predicament? Surely he, too, had loitered away an evening outside a house, waiting for a face at a window or the sound of an opening door; surely he, too, must have sent notes which he had later regretted, had then waited in agony for a reply, tilling himself that the note had fallen into the wrong hands, or had caused annoyance, or had never been delivered at all, and had, at last, decided that all was over. He, too, must have discussed interminably how to interpret a word, a nod, a smile; he, too, must have complained of sleeplessness, an inability to eat, and vague pains and feelings of nausea; he too must have neglec
ted his work, his friends, and all his other interests. Above all he, too, must have known those feelings of exaltation combined with utter abasement.

  Yet now he behaved towards Götz as if the German were guilty of the most unusual and shameful kind of conduct.

  Typical of this period is one incident which, of many other incidents of a similar nature, clings to my mind. Götz had been told by the girl (whose name, we now discovered, was Kiki) that on a certain evening she would be coming to Patissia to visit an aunt. When she left she would be in the company of an older, married cousin who ‘understood’, and if Götz would wait for her outside the house between half past ten and eleven, they could walk to the’bus together. Götz was delighted. From tea-time onwards he did nothing but fidget, making Theo exclaim: ‘ You really ought to see a doctor—that’s the third time you’ve wee-wee’d in the last hour and a half … Do settle to something! You make me feel so restless.’

  When we had supper Götz, who had been left to stir the scrambled eggs, let them burn in the pan: an accident which he could afford to shrug away as he himself did not wish to eat anything.

  ‘Must we have the radio while we chew on this carbon?’ Theo asked acidly. ‘And if we do have it, can we please stick to one station?’

  At a quarter to ten Götz rose to his feet. ‘Well …’ He pulled his sweater down so that it approximately joined his trousers; it had shrunk when he had washed it the day before. ‘I suppose I’d better go. Wish me luck!’

  ‘It’s only a quarter to ten. You can get to Patissia in less than a quarter of an hour,’ I told him.

  ‘But the ’buses may be full.’

  ‘Not as late as this.’

  ‘Or I may have difficulty in finding the house.’

  ‘You know the number, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I drew back the curtain from the window. ‘It’s begun to rain. You don’t want to stand needlessly in the rain.’

  ‘I think I ought to go.’

  ‘Just as you like.… Shall I come with you?’

  ‘Would you?’ His melancholy immediately brightened into eagerness. ‘It’ll make waiting so much easier. We can talk together.’

  I knew from experience that conversation with Götz was impossible at such moments, but I nodded and said: ‘All right. I’ll come.’

  ‘Unwise, Frank,’ Theo said. ‘ You shouldn’t take these risks with your health.’ Ever since my operation Theo had persisted in regarding me as an invalid whenever it suited him. ‘ These autumn evenings are chilly and, if you get yourself soaked, you may have a nasty bout.’ He seemed even to be jealous of my sympathy for Götz. ‘You can be quite sure that she won’t turn up anyway.’

  We pulled on mackintoshes and borrowed from Theo a vast umbrella, green with age, under which we both ran for the ’bus.

  Outside the house in Patissia we waited, huddled together. Götz said: ‘ When she comes—you won’t mind if … if …’

  I smiled: ‘I shall leave you both together. You’ll find me at that café.’ I pointed up the road.

  Götz squeezed my shoulder. Then he asked: ‘But will she come?’

  ‘It’s only just half past ten.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true.’

  Twice he thought he heard the door; once a hand raised the blind but we could see no face. ‘Do you think this is the right house?’ he inevitably asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Haven’t you got the number written down?’

  He pulled out a cheap note-book and flicked through the pages, holding it up so that it caught the light of a street-lamp. ‘Forty-three,’ he said. ‘That seems to be right.’ Then he added: ‘But perhaps there are two forty-threes.’

  ‘Oh, that doesn’t seem likely.’

  ‘One never knows in Greece.’

  I agreed that one never knew.

  ‘Or perhaps there are two Capodistria Streets,’ he added. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I have never heard of any one but this.’

  ‘Shall I ask that policeman?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Well, hold the umbrella.’

  He returned, shaking his head sadly:

  ‘This is it. And it’s past eleven o’clock.’ A chill, damp silence followed: I was by now cold enough to believe in Theo’s prophecy that I would suffer ‘a nasty bout’. I shivered, and stamped my feet.

  Götz said: ‘Perhaps it was not today.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Perhaps it was not today. Perhaps it was another day.’

  ‘What date did she say?’

  Again the note-book was held to the light. ‘ October the twenty-seventh. Thursday.… What is the date today?’

  ‘October the twenty-seventh.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘Thursday?’

  ‘Thursday.’

  At twenty minutes to twelve, I said: ‘Let’s go, Götz. There’s no point in waiting. Is there?’

  ‘But she may come yet.’

  ‘She won’t be as late as this. She’ll have to take a’bus to Calamos and walk four miles from there. The last ’bus to Calamos leaves at eleven.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because I once took it.’

  ‘There may be a new schedule.’

  In the end it was not until ten past twelve that we eventually moved off. ‘ What do you think has happened?’ Götz asked. ‘Do you think she’s ill?’

  ‘She may have a cold.’

  ‘Perhaps her mother and father have discovered about us.’

  ‘Would that matter?’

  ‘Oh, yes! She says that they mustn’t know—on any account.’

  ‘I don’t understand these extraordinary tabus in Greece.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s sick of me.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense.’

  ‘Perhaps she just told me to go there to pay me out.’

  ‘Why should she want to pay you out?’

  When we reached home, all these possible explanations were once more reviewed before Theo, who was sitting in his dressing-gown at the fire, sipping some cocoa and munching a petit-beurre. His beret was on his head: I often wondered if he slept in it.

  ‘What do you think, Theo?’ Götz eventually asked, when Theo had failed to make any contribution to the discussion.

  Theo bit decisively into his biscuit, and then examined the bite as he said: ‘Frankly, my dear boy, this topic bores me.’ He got up and went into his bedroom.

  There was a silence in which I was conscious of nothing but Götz’s shock and pain. He carefully put another piece of coal on to the fire, the tongs trembling clumsily in his hand, and then he looked at me and asked: ‘Tell me, Frank, have I become an awful bore?’

  No man should ask that question of another and I was at a loss how to answer: for the truth was that under all my feelings of friendship and sympathy and pity for Götz there was an ever-increasing ennui. It is, after all, only our own sufferings that manage to hold unending interest for us.

  ‘Have I?’ he repeated.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  He got up and, clutching the mantelpiece with both hands, began to rock himself backwards and forwards on his heels. ‘I know I’m beginning to get on Theo’s nerves. I can see that. But what am I to do? I can’t help it.’ Now he leant forward, his enormous buttocks protruding, and scanned his face in the blotched mirror, stuck with old picture postcards, invitations and newspaper cuttings, that hung over the mantelpiece. ‘ My God, I am ugly!’ he at last broke the silence.

  It was a horrible moment and unable to watch him any longer as he stood there, confronting his own reflection, I got up and said: ‘Would you like some cocoa? I’m going to make myself some, before I go home.’

  ‘I’ll make it.’

  ‘No, you stay here. It’ll warm us up,’ I added.

  As I passed Theo’s room, the door was ajar and the candle, which he always said that he preferred to a bedside lamp, was sending shadows
flickering over the pink-and-white smoothness of his Victorian washbasin and jug. Theo himself I could not see, since his bed was behind the door.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he called. ‘ Götz?’

  ‘No, me.’

  ‘Ah, Frank. Are you going, dear boy?’

  ‘Not yet. Can I make some cocoa for Götz and myself?’

  ‘Of course.… But come in here first.’

  Theo was not in bed, as I had expected, but seated on the edge of it, his bare feet dangling, yellow and crumpled-looking, and his hands in the sleeves of his worn tartan dressing-gown, while he rocked backwards and forwards, making the springs creak. His face, under the beret, looked perplexed and despondent. Lying on the floor was an old copy of The Illustrated London News which he had presumably dropped there while he was reading it.

  ‘So Götz’s girl didn’t turn up?’ he said.

  ‘No. I think if I hadn’t been there he would have stayed outside the house for the whole night.’

  ‘What kind of madness is this!’ he muttered, rocking faster and faster. I did not give an answer; the words did not seem to require one. ‘It is madness, isn’t it?’

  ‘But, Theo, surely you’ve felt the same, many times. I know that I have.’

  ‘Of course everyone feels the same,’ Theo said crossly. ‘But we don’t all make such a fuss about it. The boy has no self-control whatever.’

  ‘I think he’s suffering a lot.’

  Theo brooded on this in silence; then he demanded: ‘So you think I’m unsympathetic?’

  ‘No—o. Only …’

  ‘Well, you do, don’t you?’ Again he rocked back to a noisy creaking of springs. ‘And I am,’ he added surprisingly. ‘ I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I never used to be like this. Now I just feel I can’t stand any more of these emotional messes, like—like so many pieces of raw meat being handed back and forth.’ He stared at the candle, the warts on his long, gruyère cheese face throwing monstrous shadows as the flickering light caught them. ‘But I must try.’ He sighed. ‘I must try to understand—to make things easier for him. Poor boy! It’s not that I’m not fond of him.’

  ‘No, of course not. He knows that.’