‘Mackintosh was there tonight,’ he said. ‘Teaching his first-year class. Exuding keenness as usual.’
She said quickly, ‘But they couldn’t possibly … He’s only been there two terms.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I suppose not.’ But the fear he had experienced from the first about Mackintosh, seeing the immediate identification the other had made, between his own advancement and the progress of his pupils, reasserted itself now with the effect of a chill, in the cosy little room.
3
For three days following his arrival at his cousin’s house Mitsos did not go into Athens. He remained at Kifissia and went in the mornings for solitary walks through the straight, tree-lined streets of the suburb. The afternoons he spent on the terrace of a café in the main square, under the great-plane trees, reading the newspapers, drinking coffee.
He read in the papers the political slogans of the party in power, promises of construction, references to the achievements of the recent past. They had an effect on him of complete unreality, hollow-sounding; protestations not policies. He turned the pages, impatient of the words printed there, hoping however, irrepressibly, to find an item of marvellous relevance, something to chime with his own existence. When it was approaching five o’clock he folded his newspapers carefully, drank some water to clean his mouth of coffee grounds, and clapped for the waiter.
Alexei, his cousin, was worried about him, not so much worried as faintly outraged. It was not Greek, seemed moreover in some way belittling. He had known Mitsos well as a boy. They had been at school together, attended each other’s name-days, competed in examinations and carnival costumes. It was Alexei’s father, with the shipping office in London, who had found Mitsos the post. And it was he who had written to tell them of Mitsos’ wish, after fifteen years, to revisit Athens.
Alexei had made resolves to help Mitsos if he could; but fifteen years is a long time; their differences in temperament mattered much more, now that their lives had taken such different directions; Mitsos was like a stranger in the house.
‘There is something odd about him,’ Alexei said to his wife Kikki. ‘I would know this even without the letter. He looks too carefully at everything. Every time he looks at me I have the feeling he has never seen me before. Do you have this feeling too?’
Kikki assented. She was a beautiful girl with slow-moving, heavy-lidded eyes and a general air of being well satisfied sexually. She came from a land-owning family in Volos and had brought Alexei a good dowry, which he, as more in keeping with the times, insisted on calling ‘contribution’.
‘I know,’ Alexei said, ‘we must be considerate with him. He has suffered much. To see your father killed before your eyes and your mother violated, that is very terrible, Kikki. But the past cannot be changed. Ti na canome? We have to live. And there were many others, after all.’ He bore a resemblance to Mitsos, especially about the eyes, but was more strongly built and heavier in feature; and of recent years he had acquired a barbered look, a managerial gloss.
‘His father was a collaborator,’ Kikki said. ‘He was one of the first to go into the security battalions, when the Germans formed them. A volunteer officer.’ Although she had taken on her husband’s conservatism since her marriage, Kikki came from a district traditionally left-wing, a district, moreover, where memories were long.
Alexei frowned a little. ‘I don’t think we ought to speak of collaborators as though we meant by it always something bad,’ he said. Many men in public life, highly respected men, had been collaborators to some extent. ‘The guerillas did a lot of harm,’ he said.
He tried to discuss these things with Mitsos sometimes, in the evening after supper. ‘De mou les, Stavros,’ he would begin. Our job, the job of the young in Greece, is to build for the future. In our days in this country material considerations have the force of moral imperatives.’ (He had read this in Kathimerini.) ‘Greece does not need ideologies,’ he said. ‘She has made her contribution in this respect, as the world knows. She needs stability. We must have time to repair, rebuild, we must cement our differences. To revive the dissensions of the past, that is criminal, den eine?’
Alexei’s face worked energetically as he spoke. Mitsos looked into that face, so like his own. Sensing his less than complete concurrence, it was charged already with a combativeness ironically at odds with his general theme. Alexei was a lawyer, working for Shell and doing very well.
‘Den eine?’ Alexei said again. If only, Mitsos thought, his cousin were not doing so well, if only his views were a little at odds with his interests. The English suits, the four-bedroomed house in the fashionable suburb, the Volvo in the garage, the maid: fruits of stability.
He said slowly, ‘According to the Ministry of Justice, the bodies of over one thousand persons were exhumed during the winter of 1944 in Athens alone. They were victims of E.A.M. Nearly all of them were civilians and quite a lot were women. A high proportion of these people had been blinded, or in some other way mutilated, before being killed. The men who did these things survived, many of them. They are walking about Athens now. Respectable middle-aged men. Certainly they would want that cement applied. Don’t you think it strange, Alexei, you might sit with one of these men in the café, a man who had deliberately blinded someone, before killing him, and you might find in him a complete agreement with your views?’
‘There are criminal elements, I agree. That must always be so, not only here. There is violence in the people, yes, but Greeks are not cruel, on the whole. At least, they cannot sustain cruelty. It is the cruelty of impulse. Things were done that were later regretted. The people were envenomed by the Occupation. It happened all over Europe.’
‘To blind a person that you intend subsequently to kill, that is … gratuitous. It is not something that can be “regretted”.’
Alexei became impatient. ‘It belongs, in any case, to the past. There is no point in unearthing these things now, paidi mou.’
Mitsos looked at him in silence. He thought he could see the line of Alexei’s life: managerial rank; after the Volvo a Mercedes; the committee perhaps of the Athens Tennis Club; a garsonnière in town somewhere and a series of affairs, conducted with discretion and generosity. Kikki would get fat, of course, and spend much time playing prefa with her friends.
‘I am not trying to unearth things,’ he said. But the evil had first to be acknowledged, if there was to be any effective collision with it of repentance or resolution or even caution merely. Alexei dissociated himself from the past, which had not been of his contriving. Perhaps this was the healthy way. Perhaps he too would feel the same if he had gone on living in Greece, trammelled in the days that succeeded. ‘It is not a question,’ he said, ‘of digging things up. The act of internment for everyone is personal and private. For me these things have never been buried, you see. …’
On Saturday they decided to make an excursion to the beach at Vouliagmeni. Kikki kept them waiting while she got ready, and Alexei spent the time dusting the cream Volvo; he kept a long feather brush in the boot for the purpose. Finally Kikki appeared and they were off down Kiffissia Avenue, skirting Syntagma, and then along Syngrou, slowing for the roundabout near the racecourse, coming out at a rather choppy sea at Faleron, where they turned left along the excellent coast road, pink oleanders whizzing past all the way down the middle of the carriageway, on the other side the glittering sea.
‘Vracho, vracho, to kaimo mou,’ Alexei sang, throwing back his head. He seemed very happy and Mitsos understood suddenly that this was the Greece his cousin was at home in, the complement of Alexei’s soft-footed competitive, air-conditioned weekdays. These were the fruits, this Saturday hedonism, the machine that obeyed, the triumphal singing progress beside the brilliant sea.
Later, on the beach itself, he felt for a while self-conscious about his thinness, the whiteness of his skin, among these assured, sun-bronzed bodies that sprawled or sauntered all around him, beaded with sea-drops or smooth with oil. The whole beach smelled
of salt and hot flesh and lotions.
The sea was pegged out with rafts at exact intervals. The rafts were covered with matting and anchored in place. Little paddle-boats bobbed across the captive sea, capsizing from time to time, plunging the paddlers into water that cleaved open for them like oil. No tremor of a tide in this sea; but it was alive with light, hot clear light; the surface glittered in uniform brilliance to the horizon where it paled, the blue turned misty to meet a paling sky — sea and sky attenuated themselves there, reduced their harshness, like lips that intend kissing.
After some minutes Alexei and Kikki ran down to the water leaving Mitsos alone at the table. He held himself still. The movement and light were like assaults on his senses. All around him limbs were flexing or reclining. Light rained from the sea, the teeth and eyes of bathers, the spine hairs, shin hairs, chest hairs, all burnished. Mitsos felt his gaze becoming irresponsibly selective: dwelling now on a thick forearm, now on the umbilical whorl of a girl, or the vast quaking buttocks of some Athenian matron. All at eye-level, all equidistant from his eye, none more beautiful or pleasing than the others, mere attributes of flesh. …
Kikki and Alexei returned from the bathe, laughing. ‘Why don’t you go in?’ Alexei asked. His body was deeply tanned, compact and muscular. Water gleamed on the dark hairs on his forearms and chest. Kikki’s skin was paler, almost golden. She lay down on the sand, laughing widely, her eyes closed against the sun. ‘I’ll bury you,’ Alexei said. ‘Let us bury her, Stavros.’
He began to heap the hot pale sand up round her thighs and shoulders. Where the skin was dry the sand slipped away, but it adhered to her in patches. Alexei persisted, grew intent. Soon the lower part of her body was completely covered. He took a handful of sand and creasing his palm like a funnel poured a trickle of hot grains deliberately down the front of her costume in the valley between the breasts. She squirmed in the sand, which partly fell away from her, and the frontal convexities of her thighs showed through. …
Abruptly Mitsos rose and made his way down to the water. He swam out to the farthest of the rafts and hauled himself on to it. From here he could see the whole sweep of the coast as far as the headlands hiding Cape Sunion, the whole south-western flank of Attica, abutting on its blue, enamelled sea. Thus, or almost thus, would the invading Persian fleet have seen it, lying off Salamis; at this distance the sort of changes that had occurred were not apparent; the same colours, sage and olive and terracotta; the same scents wafted from the land, pine and thyme and summer dust. Thus they had looked at it, secure in their power and the omens, surmising beyond, Athens, basined in the hills, guarded by its divinities.
He felt the sun hot on his back and the taste of salt on his lips. It seemed to him that he, no less than they, had come with an intention of conquest. To conquer a city is to make it habitable for oneself.
That Saturday morning Kennedy had shaved carefully, paid particular attention to the details of his toilet. He gave his tweed suit a good dusting. It was three days since he had arrived in Athens, high time to start looking for a job. The previous days he had spent in what he called ‘getting the feel of the place’, but he knew himself well enough to know that if he allowed the settling in process to go on too long his deep distaste for work of any sort would submerge him altogether and he would have to be helped home by the consul. He had drunk large quantities of Greek brandy the evening before, in company with Simpson, and was not looking so debonair as he could have wished. This morning, he told himself, nodding and winking at his shaving mirror, he would try the commercial institutes. The veins in his eyes, he noticed, were inflamed, his tongue the palest shade of sulphur. Coffee was what he needed.
But he met Kitty at the bottom of the stairs, grieving over one of her cats who had returned that morning with his right eye destroyed. She thought it the work, not of other cats, but of Athenian hooligans, though Kennedy could not discover the basis for this belief.
‘C’est dommage,’ he said politely.
‘Le pauvre,’ Kitty said. ‘The unfortunate animal.’ Sorrow had infused her great cheeks with a bluish tinge, the prow of her nose lifted nobly. The cat, pressed against the pink flannel of Kitty’s dressing gown, regarded Kennedy steadily with one golden eye, the other was gummed with mucous. ‘They are not compatriots of mine,’ Kitty said. ‘I throw back the connection. I am a Greek from Constantinople, de l’ancienne race. It is we, the émigrés, who have taught them to live. La cuisine, everything. Before we came they lived like beasts. Constantinople was a Roman city. But Athens — c’est l’Orient, monsieur.’
He escaped finally and found a little café where he got coffee and rolls. Then, refreshed, he began to plan his morning. Which one to begin with? he wondered. He bought a street plan of the city at one of the kiosks. He was, he saw from this, quite close to Constitution Square, where several of the institutes were situated. He chose one at random: Brittano-Hellenic Institute, Director Mr Melas. He would try that. Hermes Street. Ten minutes’ walk brought him to the square itself.
Hermes Street proved easy to find, the institute itself even easier, since a large board jutted out over the pavement with the full name in white letters on a blue background, visible for hundreds of yards in all directions. It consisted of the two top floors of a rather expensive-looking six-storey block. Kennedy rode up in a smooth German lift and went into a small room marked ‘Enquiries’. He asked the girl inside if he could see Mr Melas. He had not an appointment, he explained, but he had recently arrived from England. … The girl asked him to wait for some minutes, and then returned to say that Mr Melas could see him immediately. She led the way along the corridor and tapped at one of the doors. After a moment she opened the door and ushered Kennedy into the room, closing the door softly behind him. He found himself facing a heavily built, dark-jowled man, younger than he had expected, wearing a grey suit with a broad pink stripe.
‘How are yaw?’ this person said. ‘Glad to see yaw, my dear felloo.’ He had the weirdest accent Kennedy had ever heard, an almost unbelievable parody of English upper-class speech.
Kennedy shook the hand offered to him. It lay inert and podgy, slightly moist, inside his own. ‘Kennedy,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
While he was explaining the reason for his visit, Melas wriggled with the utmost understanding and said ‘Haw’ several times. He had a dark and coldly lustrous eye and a wide almost lipless mouth, like a frog’s, that looked both exultant and suffering.
‘Which universitair were you at, Mr Kennedair?’ he said at last. Oxford, Cambridge?’
‘Oxford,’ Kennedy said.
‘I was at Oxford and Cambridge, matter of fact, old chap,’ Melas said. ‘I was five and a half years in England.’
‘Oh, were you?’ Kennedy said, observing the complacent stretching of the other’s mouth. He was having very considerable difficulty in comprehending Melas, who spoke in a series of extraordinary bursts or gushes, each of about five seconds’ duration and each terminating in a long-drawled aspiration of ineffable aplomb.
Melas indicated the room where they were sitting, the large desk with its swivel chair, dove-grey carpeting, cream telephone. ‘What do you think of it all, old chap,’ he said. ‘Haw?’
‘Very nice.’
‘My Director of Studies is also an Oxford man. He is in England at present for a spot of blightair.’
‘What was that? I didn’t quite catch …’
‘Blightair, spot of blightair. Here he is, in his Oxford uniform.’ He pointed to a small framed photograph on the desk. It was of a large-nosed, rather scrofulous-looking man in a mortar-board and gown.
‘Blighty,’ said Kennedy. ‘I see, yes.’
‘Tophool felloo,’ Melas said. ‘Invaluable. Let me show you round, Mr Kennedair.’ They went out together into the corridor. Melas talked continuously, his vowels alternately gobbled and drawled. He was full of schemes. He spoke of his friends in high places, his belief in tours, visits, courses, culture, modern literature.
But he did not seem eager to discuss in any concrete way the possibility of employing Kennedy in his institute. ‘We have five classrooms,’ he said. ‘Three on this floor, two on the upper floor. I cannot show them to you now, because they are all in use. But I can show you the lavatorairs.’ He opened doors, stood aside beaming to reveal lavatory pans with imitation mother-of-pearl seats, immaculate hand-basins, folded towels on racks. ‘Try the chain, my dear felloo,’ he said. ‘Give it a jolly old pull.’ Kennedy gave the chain a gentle tug. It flushed immediately. They stood smiling at each other, waiting for the roar of waters to subside.
‘Excellent,’ said Kennedy at last. ‘Light, airy, spacious.’
‘The emphasis is on education, of course,’ Melas said. ‘But these are aids, visual aids, old chap. Haw.’
They stepped outside into the corridor again. ‘Well,’ Kennedy said. ‘I would enjoy working for you very much …’
‘Oh, no, no,’ Melas said, raising his hands. ‘Not these Teutonic terms, to work for, work under. Here we prefer to speak of collaboration.’
‘Well, I should very much like,’ Kennedy said laboriously, ‘the opportunity of collaborating with you in …’
‘Do you know the works of Mr Thomas Eliot?’
‘Yes.’
‘I know them all, the poems, the plays, completelair. Murder in the Cathedral, The Familiar Reunion, The Bottle Party — a great play. I am going to organise Thomas Eliot tutorial groups all over Greece. You have not yet seen my new canteen.’
The canteen took up about half of the upper floor. It had polished parquet flooring, little tables covered with flowered oilcloth and a long counter decorated with Pepsi-Cola advertisements. It was quite deserted.
‘What do you think of it, haw?’ Melas said.
‘Very nice indeed.’
‘Canteens are the up-and-coming thing in education. It is entirely an idea of my own. I do not know of any other institute in Athens that has a canteen. They will come flocking, Mr Kennedair, in the breaks between lessons. They will arrange to meet their friends here, new students will be enrolled.’
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