The Greeks Have a Word for It

by Barry Unsworth

  ‘It grows on you,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose it does,’ replied Kennedy, who had been watching his face with some intentness. ‘I’ve never been anywhere long enough for that to happen to me. Except London, but you can’t count that; I was born there.’

  Willey returned no answer to this. He looked across the square, where traffic flowed and eddied ceaselessly. The ouzo, to which he was not really accustomed, had confused him and the light hurt his eyes a little — outside, beyond the striped awning, the world vibrated with light, as though sheathed in glass. Mica in the pavements glittered. The urge to confide in this clearly undependable person was strong in him.

  ‘I’ve had rather a trying morning myself,’ he said, and suddenly, almost before he knew it, he was telling Kennedy about the staff meeting, the terrible agility Mackintosh displayed in scaling the heights of official approval, his own diminishing prospects. Under Kennedy’s by this time serious regard it had all come out, his precarious and difficult position at the institution, Olivia and his desire to marry, buy a bit of land — she had the money for this, carefully saved over years — but he needed a guaranteed income, because Olivia would want to start a family fairly soon.

  ‘Everything, you see, depends on Jennings,’ he insisted, feeling the onset of drunkenness.

  ‘Yes,’ Kennedy said. ‘Yes, I see, old boy — I can think of people I’d rather depend on.’

  ‘We’ll have another, I think,’ Willey said. One for the road, as they say. Please note,’ he added, while they waited for the drinks. ‘Please note, my dear fellow, that my ambitions are not inordinate. I am not asking a great deal.’ He paused, aware of the absurdity of the pontifical manner that was descending on him, helpless, at the same time, to evade it. ‘I do not,’ he said, ‘demand anything in respect of permanence. I leave that quest to nobler minds. No, simply a permanency, my dear fellow — what is your first name again?’

  ‘Bryan.’

  ‘I require, my dear Bryan, only a permanency.’

  ‘I wish you the very best of British luck,’ Kennedy said. ‘You won’t forget to give me those addresses, will you? You know, the people who might want private lessons.’

  4

  Mitsos stopped for a few moments outside the Old Palace. On the paved area, before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, pigeons gobbled and strutted: people were throwing corn for them from little packets. From time to time children rushed shouting into their midst, scattering them in all directions.

  He looked across the wide avenue towards Constitution Square. The paved walks were the same, with their borders of cannas and wallflowers, the garden of olives and orange-trees in the centre, all this was the same, but he could not have recognised the buildings around the perimeter. Everything seemed much higher than he remembered. The enormous American Express building dominated the square now, and the big stores round Hermes Street, linked by new travel agencies and airline offices. The Hotel Grande Bretagne on the right was as he remembered it, with its sharp marble steps, the braided and constantly saluting person on the pavement outside, and the perpetual swarm of taxis at the kerb. A group of elderly, pastel-coloured American ladies came down the steps as he watched. It was as though the garden and hotel had been transplanted from some place totally familiar if he could only find it, and set down here in this strange square. He had come here quite often as a child, with his mother, after the ritual walk in the National Gardens, the ritual feeding of the ducks, for an ice-cream — a Special, with pistachio nuts and caramel. How long ago that seemed now, his greed for ice-cream conflicting with his desire for a distinguished seemliness of behaviour. … His mother’s face of that time too he could recall in every detail, the great delicacy of temple and cheek, the beautiful, shortsighted eyes, the mouth mild, too small for beauty. … He was swept by the feeling of desolation that had accompanied all his wanderings through the city. Whatever he recognised seemed arbitrarily transposed, as though some vast and pointless reorganisation had taken place in his absence. And as though to confirm the changes that had happened, he heard once more as he stood there the sound of this new Athens, the steady remorseless chipping of steel on stone, repeated at exact intervals. It came from across the square in the direction of Philhellinon Street, but for Mitsos this sound had ceased to be local: everywhere he went in the city it pursued him, sometimes light and quick, almost gay, sometimes heavier, more solemn, frequently overlaid by the screeching of traffic or the voices of people, threading the more abrupt and dramatic evidences of change, the roar of demolitions, the stuttering of drills; re-emerging in every pause, every lull, every interval of silence. It was the sound of Athens continuing her renewal, continuing to elude him.

  He crossed the avenue and went past the kiosk at the head of the steps leading into the garden. The man in the kiosk was picking his teeth with customary Greek discretion, holding his hands as though playing a flute, although he was alone there, behind Corriere della Sera and Athens News. Mitsos did not go directly through the garden but turned and proceeded round the outer edge in the shade of the orange-trees. He came out on the wide area of pavement covered with green tin tables and little stiff cane chairs. It was deserted now, in the hot mid-morning — clients went over the way to Zabaritis, where there was shade.

  After hesitating for some moments Mitsos himself crossed over and sat at one of the tables just off the square. He asked for coffee and, while he waited, thought again of earlier that morning, walking along Partriarchou Joachim, striving to persuade himself of a destination, past the new apartment houses, the new boutiques, the new florist with great sheaves of lilies and irises in his window, precisely on the site surely of the little shop where he had once gone for the breakfast yogurt. Round the corner and up a little, over the steep cobbles to Charitos Street, where he had been born, spent his whole life, until the night of his father’s death. He had known the house was no longer there — Alexei had told him — but he had expected at least to be able to see where it had been. The whole block was a maternity clinic now, with swing doors and a glimpse within of hushed green carpeting. Indeed in all the street only one original house was left standing, with its graceful wrought-iron balconies, wide-eaved roofs, tall narrow windows. It had clearly been empty, probably condemned. Jasmine grew over the closed green shutters. He walked up and down, past the clinic with its green neon cross, the sharp-edged apartment houses. The change was too radical, it denied his experience; the street denied him a past. He had not known that by new styles of architecture the past could be denied. As he walked up and down, the fig man with a basket on his head had passed by, uttering his trailing sibilant cry of Sica! Sica!, a sound well remembered from childhood in this street which was then another street. And into Mitsos’ ears as the calls receded came the slow, almost stealthy sound of hammering metal against stone, from somewhere further up on Lycavettos.

  Opposite him now was an obese pale woman in a black silk dress with short sleeves from which her soft white arms came billowing. She was eating with solitary greed a tiered cream cake, using for the purpose a tiny fork, almost lost in her plump white hand. Mitsos watched the fork dig deftly into the yielding cream, saw it freighted and conveyed to the moist lips above, saw the mouth shape itself at the last moment, the lips widen in a sort of grimace before closing over the fork completely in a perfectly round pout, to suck the cake softly off the prongs.

  Mitsos experienced a slight feeling of nausea. He closed his eyes for a moment. There were times when the obsessive observation of detail descended on him, like a sort of visual cruelty, that he was helpless to prevent. Without finishing his coffee, he put the money for it down on the table and walked slowly away.

  Not far away, in the Cathedral Square, Kennedy and Roland were having a beer together. It was one of Roland’s days off. He worked four days a week, Kennedy had discovered, for a big firm of architects and civil engineers with many foreign employees, correcting the inter-departmental minutes, which were always written in English, o
f a sort. He had got this job because of his training as a draughtsman in England.

  ‘I’m worried about Simpson,’ Roland said.

  ‘Oh yes?’ Kennedy was wary. He had not yet been able to discover who was parasitic on whom in Roland’s relationship with Simpson. Until he could unearth the self-interest he felt curiously hampered and powerless. There was no doubt that Simpson occupied a central place in Roland’s life. Roland had adopted, it seemed voluntarily, the rôle of translating Simpson’s predicaments into coherent form for the benefit of third parties. What did he get out of it? Kennedy dismissed as monstrous the suspicion that Roland might be really disinterested, might be experiencing, merely, a human concern. He was himself quite capable of the sudden anarchic impulse of generosity, even self-sacrifice, but he never gave considered kindness to another without some motive of gain, however blurred or impractical. And a faculty he did not possess himself he could not believe in in other people. ‘Simpson’s all right,’ he said. ‘He’ll still be all right when you and I are on the scrap-heap.’ He smiled suddenly and looked down at the tubby beer bottles on the table before him. On the whole he felt pleased with life this morning. Things were beginning to move. He had already secured three private students and had an appointment later with the girl that Sophy had told him about. Also, Eleni Polimenou, the actress, was back in Athens now. Kennedy intended to visit her later in the morning and offer his services.

  ‘Yes, but the drinking, Bryan,’ Roland said. ‘I do hope he recovers his easel soon.’

  ‘You believe in this easel, then?’

  ‘Believe in it?’

  ‘Believe it exists, I mean.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Roland said indignantly. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Well, it strikes me as a bit fishy, if you want to know the truth.’

  ‘I know a dedicated man when I see one.’ Roland was quite flushed.

  ‘Listen,’ Kennedy said, ‘he’s dedicated all right, he’s dedicated to surviving.’ Artistic bums like Simpson he had met before and always disliked, mainly for their spurious sense of caste, the way their cadging always got muddled up with feelings of privilege.

  Roland’s flush had faded. His face was pale, deeply lined for one so young. He declined his head a little and Kennedy could see the pale gleam of scalp beneath the thin hairs on his crown. He would in a few years be quite bald. It seemed to Kennedy that this was a particular result of a general lack in Roland of nutritive oils. He was essentially a sparse person. What impulse, what sudden image of himself, had taken him from his parents’ home in Wimbledon, his safe job in a drawing office — for he had told Kennedy something of his life — to be Kitty’s oldest resident, Simpson’s defender, lay almost beyond speculation.

  ‘You may be right,’ he said now. ‘But that wouldn’t stop you from being hopelessly wrong too. I mean wrong from beginning to end. You don’t care about anything, that’s your trouble. Everyone should care for something; Kenneth does.’

  ‘Here endeth,’ Kennedy said. He was somewhat disconcerted by this unusual directness of Roland’s and to cover this he looked away across the square, smiling broadly.

  Roland took a nervous swallow of his beer. ‘They are an extraordinary people in some ways,’ he said, with an abrupt change of subject. ‘Just look at this city, marvellous natural site, between the sea and the hills. Numerous eminences commanding extensive views. Wonderful climate, brilliant light, almost no industrial pollution. An architect’s dream, you might say. And yet there is hardly a building of any distinction in the whole place. Excepting the antiquities, of course.’ He looked across the square at the pigeons, the slowly moving people, the vast straight shadows of the cathedral. ‘Just look at this ghastly cathedral,’ he said. ‘It has no merit of any sort, unless size is a merit. Certainly it’s big. You’d think they’d know, wouldn’t you, with all these beautiful little Byzantine churches in Athens. … Well, just compare it with the little Metropolis over there. About seventeen centuries between them …’

  They looked for some moments in silence at the tiny church, the exquisite proportions of cupola and façade, the warm flush of the walls, in which fragments of antique marble were inset, the Byzantine reliefs of symbolic birds and beasts, the coats of arms of the Frankish lords of Athens. Then, because any claim on his piety irked him, Kennedy shifted suddenly in his seat and said, ‘By the way, the fellow who had my room, what are the theories?’

  Roland immediately began to look uncomfortable. ‘There are conflicting stories,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Some say he exposed himself to Kitty one morning on the stairs. Others that he misbehaved in some public way on the balcony overlooking the street.’

  ‘I shall wait for a favourable moment,’ Kennedy said, ‘and ask Kitty.’

  At this moment they saw Simpson approaching from the direction of the Plaka. He was wearing his maroon cap. He walked with outlandish loping steps, his head lowered so that his features were quite concealed beneath the long peak. For some reason he was walking close to the walls of the houses, and so he was frequently held up by the steps from the street doors on to the pavement. Instead of swerving to avoid them he stopped dead at every one and side-stepped sharply. It was as though he were demonstrating his powers of co-ordination.

  When he reached their table he raised his hand in a sort of salute before sitting down. ‘Jesus,’ he said, sticking his jaw out, ‘I’ve had a hell of a morning.’ He always conveyed the pressure of events, though what he did when he was not at Piraeus enquiring about his easel nobody knew. This morning, not being drunk, he had his features more under control. There was still, however, that curious staring quality, the grey film round the irises.

  ‘I got a commission,’ he said, ‘for some paintings of Hydra. Rich bloody Americans. How the hell can I give of my best without an easel?’

  ‘What will you have?’ Kennedy asked.

  ‘Cognac,’ said Simpson. ‘Without ice,’ he said to the waiter. ‘Don’t you put any ice in it. It’s perfect,’ he said, ‘if only I had my easel. They say they want views of Hydra because they’ve just been there. I’ve never been there of course but all these bloody islands look the same, anyway. I could do it easy, if only I had my easel.’

  ‘Maddening,’ Roland said.

  ‘Can’t you just work on a table or something, for this once?’ Kennedy said.

  There had been something derogatory in his tone and Simpson stiffened. ‘I’ve got my reputation to think of,’ he said. ‘These paintings will be shown to friends, back in the States. “That’s a Simpson”, they will say.’

  ‘Quite so, Kenneth,’ Roland said. He gave Kennedy a reproving glance.

  ‘It’s like what I said to Halpin the other day — I met him in the Plaka, he is often there hanging about, he’s been telling people I don’t pay my debts, the bastard — I was talking to him about these blisters I get in my heels from wearing baseball shoes all the time and he said to me … he wears these coloured scarves and he has these long sideburns. God, I hate his guts! He knows it too.’ Simpson looked at them triumphantly as though this was the end of the story, Halpin’s knowledge of his hate.

  ‘What did he say then, Kenneth?’ Roland prompted.

  ‘I happened to meet him in the Plaka, he lives down there, and I was showing him these blisters and he said to me, “Ken, you’re a bum, admit it, Ken.” I looked at him a minute, then I said to him, “I’ve got my talent, Halpin, what the bloody hell have you got? I hate those bloody scarves you wear,” I said to him.’ He fixed Kennedy with the look of considerable animosity, then he delivered a right hook at the air before his nose. There was a remarkable savagery in the gesture. ‘What the bloody hell have you got?’ he said.

  ‘Look, old boy,’ Kennedy said. ‘I don’t give a monkey’s for any bloody Halpins, but are you telling me you can’t paint anything at all without your easel?’

  ‘I’m telling you,’ said Simpson in a loud voice. ‘I’m telling you …’ He paused for a moment as though baffled.r />
  ‘You’re up the creek, that’s what it is,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘Please, Bryan,’ Roland said.

  ‘You may be all right at kipping in parks,’ Simpson said, ‘but you don’t know your arse from your elbow when it comes to painting. I hate that bloody suit you’re wearing.’ Saliva had collected in the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Don’t get excited, Kenneth,’ Roland said.

  ‘I asked a civil question,’ said Kennedy.

  At this moment the waiter returned with the drinks. ‘Look,’ Simpson said, ‘the bastard has put ice in my cognac.’ He stood up suddenly. ‘Take this fucking ice out of my cognac,’ he said.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Kennedy said, in some disgust. ‘If you can’t behave like a gentleman, piss off.’ He was about to say something else when he saw a person he knew passing across the square. It was the Greek he had tried to touch for a pound or two on the boat. ‘Hey!’ he called. ‘Come over and have a drink. Hey you,’ he called again, as the other did not appear to have heard him.

  Mitsos turned his head and looking across the square saw a tall gesticulating person in a red cap with a strangely long peak. Then he saw the Englishman who had shared his taxi from Piraeus sitting at the table together with a worried-looking young man. While he looked, Kennedy beckoned to him, smiling broadly. ‘Come and have a drink,’ he shouted again. Slowly Mitsos walked towards them. He saw the man he knew reach up and draw the capped person down into his seat again. He stood smiling and inclining his head while Kennedy performed the introductions.

  ‘What was your name again?’ Kennedy said.

  ‘Mitsos,’ he said. ‘Stavros Mitsos.’

  ‘Stavros, that’s right,’ Kennedy said. ‘I remember your surname, of course. Come and sit down. What will you have?’