The Greeks Have a Word for It

by Barry Unsworth

  Mitsos said he would have a coffee.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Kennedy said. ‘You said we’d be sure to meet, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did, yes,’ Mitsos said. ‘Athens is small. Or, rather, the area where people congregate is small.’ He looked from face to face for some minutes. He could not understand how it was he came to be talking to these people. Suddenly he became aware that the person in the cap was speaking to him in muttered conspiratorial tones.

  ‘Ken Simpson,’ he heard this person say. ‘American artist, exhibitions in every European capital. If you are interested in buying paintings I hope to be doing a series of impressions of Hydra shortly, or Mykonos, or Poros — Greek islands, you know. When I recover my easel, they lost my easel, not the Greeks, the bloody Germans.’ There was something odd about this person’s eyes.

  ‘I do not know a great deal about paintings,’ he said.

  ‘All the better,’ said Simpson. ‘The response will be fresh.’

  The other man, who had been shifting and fidgeting in his seat, now broke in with the air of a person performing a familiar duty of interpretation. ‘Mr Simpson,’ he said, ‘is at present without his easel which has been mislaid by the railways authorities somewhere in Germany. It is a very valuable easel with various unique attachments.’

  ‘I see,’ Mitsos said. ‘That was very unfortunate.’

  ‘Unfortunate?’ said Simpson unbelievingly. ‘I’ll buy that.’ He had begun groping in his top pocket and after a moment produced one of his cards, which he handed to Mitsos with old-world courtesy. ‘My card,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mitsos said. He was holding the card and seemed about to look down at it when the others saw his expression change suddenly. He stood up, looking across the square. ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the matter, old boy?’ Kennedy asked, looking up at him curiously, then following his gaze across the square. There seemed, however, nothing remarkable happening there. People passing, that was all. The pigeons. A pappas on the cathedral steps talking to a woman dressed in black.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Mitsos said again. His face had gone whiter. Still holding Simpson’s card in his hand, he took a few steps from the table.

  ‘Wait a minute, here’s your coffee,’ Roland called, afraid, it seemed, of further offending the waiter. But Mitsos began walking rapidly away from them towards Odos Mítropoleos. They watched in silence while he disappeared from sight.

  ‘Extraordinary way to behave,’ Roland said.

  ‘He saw something that shook him,’ Kennedy said thoughtfully. ‘I wonder what it was.’

  Simpson said morosely, ‘Look, that’s my card on the ground there. The bastard dropped my card.’

  All three of them looked for some moments at Mitsos’ cooling coffee, as though the explanation might be there.

  Simpson’s card fluttered down unnoticed from Mitsos’ fingers. His whole being was concentrated on keeping in view the man before him, the man whose face he had glimpsed on the square a few moments before. The man was bulky and walked slowly and was carrying, moreover, a very large black umbrella loosely furled, which he from time to time rested on his shoulder like a rifle, so he was not difficult to keep in sight.

  But as they proceeded slowly up Hermes Street his surrender of will, his present complete dependence on the other for direction and purpose, began to seem like faith — needing at least, if not exactly guarantees, yet certainly a revision of the steps that had led to it. He recalled the man’s features as though this constituted evidence: the face full, very pale, clean-shaven, a shallow cleft in the heavy jaw; memorable really only for the strange light eyes, almost yellow in colour, set at a slight downward slant in the head, like the eyes of a sad dog. … That look of mournful belligerence he had seen on the square just now, but he could not, at such a distance, have noted the colour of the eyes, that was a memory, not a present impression, a memory of fifteen years ago, when the men had come from Epirus to his father’s house, the man with yellow eyes among them, he who had turned at the door and looked back, at his father’s body, the whimpering woman beyond it, looked for some moments and then come back into the room. …

  At Syntagma the man in front paused briefly on the edge of the pavement, as though undecided. He had a slow, lordly way of moving his head on the short thick neck. His linen jacket was crumpled and ill-fitting, strained too tight across the heavy shoulders. The black umbrella was like a symbol of office. After hesitating for a moment he crossed over to the inner square, and Mitsos followed, to the left down the central path, where the man installed himself on one of the green wooden benches under the orange-trees. The sun was hot now, high in the sky, it was desirable to be in the shade. Mitsos chose another of the benches, at a considerable distance. He was not so much afraid of recognition — he had been, after all, only a child then, only twelve years old — as reluctant to be registered at all in the other’s awareness, at least for the present. The distance, however, was a disadvantage, in that he still could not see the man’s face clearly. The man himself was quite motionless, a fawn sprawl on the bench, the rusty black umbrella hooked on the seat beside him. Suddenly, while he watched, it moved to unbutton its jacket, loosen its tie. Paunchy, sluggish, without apparent occupation, encumbered with an eccentric black umbrella, what could such a person have to do with him? Everything that had occurred on that distant evening had seemed sealed off from all possible aftermath, since his father had died violently then, and his mother within a year, and he himself, the only victim to survive, could refer to no one for mitigation nor even for confirmation of what had happened — the others, the men who had done these things, having no objective existence for him at all, as though summoned only for that time, to perform that one rôle, afterwards too monstrous for any other imaginable context. And now by some chance the only face among those others that his memory had culled and retained was possibly across the square before him, possibly. In the continuing uncertainty of this, only faith on his part could persist in asserting the identity, since he had seen the face again so briefly, for those few seconds on the square, and age and daylight had altered it. The face he knew had been younger, leaner, ruddy in the lamplight, with glinting stubble along the jaws. It had looked back with those queer yellow eyes from the door at the three of them, his father’s body on the floor, himself crouched still partly stunned in a corner, and his mother standing in the middle of the room, body slightly stooped in an attitude of readiness as though awaiting the signal for a race, a repeated moaning note coming from her open mouth. That face had turned smiling at the door and glanced at them all in turn, his mother finally. For some moments the face had smiled, regarding his mother. Then some fixity, like earnestness had come over it, and the man had come back into the room. It was as though, it was exactly as though, those irrepressible noises of grief and shock had aroused the man, acted as the equivalent of female heat. Crouched there in his corner, he had seen it all happen, seen his mother straighten her body at the last moment, before the man reached her, straighten and raise her hands palm outwards and her moaning changed, not into words, but a higher more continuous note and then she was thrown down on to the carpet already soaking with his father’s blood, a bundle that jerked and threshed. He saw everything that was done to his mother and he did nothing, made no sound. The man rose from the body of his mother whose exposed legs were strangely inert now and shameless. While he fumbled with the front of his trousers he had looked at the boy in the corner and the boy had known that it was in the man’s mind to kill him. It was then that the man’s face had laid its final impress on his memory, the yellow eyes grave now, almost impersonal. The man had stared a moment longer, shrugged slightly, and gone. His father’s outstretched hand had quivered.

  The person opposite Mitsos stirred suddenly. After a pause to adjust his tie and unhook his umbrella he made his way diagonally across the square in the direction of Philhellinon Street. Mitsos watched him for some moments, saw him pause again
at the pavement, waiting apparently to cross the street. Then he got up himself and, keeping the other continuously in view, emerged from the square at a point somewhat higher up. There he waited. He knew that on no account must he allow the man to be lost to him ever again. To do so would be to offend irrevocably, put himself beyond help.

  Kennedy left the others sitting at the table, involved now in an animated discussion of Simpson’s easel, the favourite topic, it seemed, of both, and made his way to Carneadou Street, where his prospective pupil lived. The apartment was on the third floor of a new and imposing block of flats. An elderly woman in black with several whiskery moles, whom he assumed to be a retainer of some sort, came in answer to the bell and led him into a large sitting-room crowded with very new-looking furniture and with a great many pictures on the walls. Pride of place was held by a huge and shiny cocktail cabinet with a front of chrome and glass, and massive, incongruous webbed feet. It was not a room in which people would readily unbutton. Sitting on the sofa, wondering whether to smoke, Kennedy felt a growing discomfort. People, of whatever sort, could rarely abash him. He had considerable resources of effrontery and, moreover, a sort of naïve cynicism, an almost helplessly denigratory habit of mind, which did not permit the recognition of aspirations beyond the level of his own. But things, inanimate objects, especially when they were glossy and redolent of the wealth of their owners, had this power of discomfiting him when he was left alone among them. He felt belittled by these evidences of a fixed abode. He had had on occasion the impulse to defecate on deep pile carpets. There was an armchair opposite him now which especially aroused his resentment, fashioned in pink leather, encapsuled still in polythene. He was thinking of the joy of ripping out the stuffing when a stout, handsome woman, with the faintest of moustaches, wearing a green silk dress, entered the room and approached him, holding out her hand.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Logothetis,’ Kennedy said with considerable relief, uncoiling his legs and rising.

  ‘How do you do, Mr Kennedy? I am afraid,’ she added hesitantly, ‘that my English is not good.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Kennedy said, allowing his eyes to linger on the lady’s abundant, scarcely differentiated green bosom. She belonged to an age group in which he had scored some notable successes in the past.

  ‘I have not called my daughter yet, as I wanted to have a little word with you before you begin.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘She has the diploma examination very soon now. She has a good basis in grammar and vocabulary. But she lacks the confidence to speak. She is not like her mother in this respect.’ Here Mrs Logothetis laughed a little and looked somewhat gaily at Kennedy, as though inviting him to approve her maternal freedom.

  ‘Ha, ha, no, that’s only to be expected,’ said Kennedy. ‘Perhaps she’s a bit on the timid side?’

  ‘Yes.’ Gravity once more descended on Mrs Logothetis. ‘And this causes me to be worried about the oral part of the examination.’

  ‘It is a problem,’ Kennedy said, with a sense of brilliant improvisation, ‘with which we often have to deal. Practice, constant practice, is what she needs.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Certainly. I suggest she has at least three hours a week.’

  ‘You think?’ said Mrs Logothetis again. Her seriousness deepened. It seemed to Kennedy that her bosom heaved somewhat. ‘She is not accustomed to being alone with a young man. We could send her to an institute, but these institutes are not always … The parents think the girl is in class applying herself, but often it is otherwise. She is walking out with boys. We do not want this for Lydia.’

  ‘Quite so.’ Kennedy nodded slowly, striving to assemble his features into a compound expression which would indicate his full realisation of the dangers of such contacts, his own professional integrity, setting him far above suspicion, and at the same time, in order to establish a vital link with Mrs Logothetis, the sense they shared of the potential delights of such contacts once the period of sheltered youth was over. It was a difficult expression to achieve.

  ‘We believe in protecting our girls, Mr Kennedy. We accompany Ketty everywhere, the beach, the cinema. We take her for excursions in the … Studebaker. Do you not think we are right?’

  ‘Well,’ said Kennedy, ‘I think you are.’ His concentration had lapsed a little and he was no longer sure whose virginity they were talking about: Ketty’s imperilled one in the present, or Mrs Logothetis’ judiciously abandoned one in the past. What emerged as the only real positive was the general randiness of the male population of Athens. ‘In England’ he said, making a slight recovery, ‘as you probably know, our young people have more freedom. It is what you might call a more permissive society.’

  Mrs Logothetis pursed her full, rather pale lips and shook her head sorrowfully. ‘All that is for after marriage,’ she said. ‘How much do you charge for the lessons?’

  ‘One hundred drachmas an hour.’

  ‘Ah yes.’ Mrs Logothetis looked simultaneously pleased and worried. ‘The last teacher only charged sixty. We were not pleased with the progress Lydia was making with her. A hundred, however, is too much, I think. You will take eighty?’

  ‘A hundred is the official charge,’ Kennedy said, ‘among us qualified teachers.’

  ‘But since it is for three hours a week …’

  ‘Let us say ninety, then,’ said Kennedy, conveying by his smile that for Mrs Logothetis’ sake he was lowering standard hitherto strictly maintained. Ninety drachmas was twenty-two and six, after all, he reflected. Not bad for an hour’s gentle dalliance with the delicately nurtured Lydia.

  ‘I will bring her now,’ Mrs Logothetis said.

  Lydia must have been waiting in an adjoining room, because after only a very few moments her mother returned with her. She was short and plump with shining shoulder-length hair, a completely round face, puffy lips, pale like her mother’s, and an extraordinary passivity of demeanour. Her face registered no expression during the introduction. Her hand was soft and cold.

  ‘Hairo poli,’ she said tonelessly.

  ‘Ah,’ said her mother, with a sort of raillery, ‘you must speak English now. “How do you do?” That’s it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kennedy said, smiling broadly. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘How do you do?’ Ketty said. She regarded him steadily. Her eyes, though large and well shaped, were not clear, but yellowish round the almost black irises. And in the depths of them, unrelated to any change of feature, he discerned the light of a pure and relentless hostility. He also divined in that moment that these English lessons were entirely an idea of her parents.

  ‘I will leave you together now,’ Mrs Logothetis said. ‘For today I suggest not a complete lesson, but to discuss your programme and become acquainted. Lydia knows the times she has free. She has private lessons also in French, German and piano. And this year she has the final examinations of the Greek Gymnasium. So, you see, she is quite busy.’ Mrs Logothetis smiled richly.

  That might be it then, Kennedy thought, but without much hope, as he smiled goodbye to the retreating mother; possibly he had been mistaken, and the girl was not antagonistic at all, simply dazed with study and controlled trips in the Studebaker.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘shall we sit down? I won’t keep you long today, since it is the first time. Your mother wants you to have three hours a week of English.’

  There was no reply to this and after waiting some moments Kennedy said, ‘How do you think we should arrange the lessons?’

  Lydia said something in Greek in a low and rapid voice.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Kennedy said, keeping up his smile, ‘that we shall have to talk only in English. This will be practice for you and, besides, I don’t know any Greek.’

  Looking once more into the girl’s unwavering eyes, he knew that he had not, after all, been mistaken: the inimical light was blended now with what seemed the beginnings of a more personal antipathy. There was a fairly prolonged pause which Kennedy spent calc
ulating how much this girl’s father must be spending on private lessons alone. Ten pounds a week at least. Straight down the drain. He had no idea at all of how to proceed, having never given an English lesson, nor any other kind for that matter, in his life before.

  ‘Well,’ he said with something of an effort, ‘this is what I suggest. You read something in English in your own time, something on the shortish side, of course, a story or such-like, and then I can ask you questions about it, and then …’

  Suddenly, without warning, without any preliminary tension of features, without even turning her eyes away, Lydia opened her mouth wide and uttered straight towards him a loud and piercing cry.

  Kennedy was horribly surprised. He sat bolt upright in his seat. For a moment he wondered if Lydia was subject to fits. But no further sound came from her, her face was quite impassive. ‘What on earth… ?’ he said.

  At this moment a full-bodied girl in the uniform of a maid came into the room and stood quietly at the table at which they were sitting. That screech had been a summons, then. Still in the grip of the surprise and alarm it had aroused in him, Kennedy looked up at her and immediately Lydia and all disagreeable thoughts faded far away. The maid was beautiful. In Kennedy’s mind, as in the minds of many men, there was an ideal feminine type. It could perhaps best be summed up in the word bovine. And in the first hasty upward glance it was that sort of serenity in the face that impressed him, a quality of mindlessness. The eyes were widely spaced, very gentle and cow-like, not brown, however, but luminous grey, the colour of a shallow pond; very level under rather deep brows. The whole face was broad, inclining to heaviness, but the cheek-bones were high and the large mouth well shaped, with a tendency to hang open a little. A face almost breathtakingly reposeful.

  ‘Fere mou ena potiri nero,’ said Lydia, with graceless abruptness.

  ‘Amesos!’ the girl said. Her voice was rather deep, Kennedy noted. In the moment before turning away she gave him an unhasty neutral gaze. He watched her leave the room, observing the square, steady shoulders, the regular, unselfconscious sway of the hips, the high firm buttocks. The back of her thighs and legs were heavy, but her ankles neat, even in the thick stockings and clumsy black shoes she was wearing.