The Greeks Have a Word for It

by Barry Unsworth

  Kennedy breathed out audibly. He looked once more at Lydia, with renewed astonishment that such a creature should have a goddess like that at her behest. Nothing could so well have illustrated the power of the drachma. He had still not fully recovered when the maid returned with the glass of water that Lydia had apparently demanded and which she took from the tray without a glance or a word of thanks. Again the maid met his glance, this time it seemed a fraction more lingeringly. He forgot to smile at her, and this too denoted the impression she had made.

  The rest of the conversation with Lydia was conducted on his part with a sense of unreality. Somehow they arrived at an agreement about the hours to be set aside for the lessons, and Kennedy stalled on the choice of a textbook, since he did not as yet know of one. He made a mental note to get some advice from Willey on the matter at the earliest opportunity. Lydia herself conducted him to the door, which was a disappointment, because he had hoped to see something more of the maid at his departure. Still, there would be time for that. Lydia had a curious and rather touching way of walking very close to the wall. As she led him along the passage her left shoulder was actually rubbing against the wall as though she would have liked to vanish through it.

  Once more on the pavement Kennedy found the harsher aspects of life obtruding. He had now to find Neofiton Vamva, where lived Eleni Polimenou, the celebrated Greek actress. He stayed the first passing Greek with a smile and a broad gesture. ‘Neofiton Vamva?’ he said, stretching his mouth round the vowels to assist comprehension. ‘Neofiton Vamva?’

  Meanwhile, about half a mile away Mitsos was following the man carefully down Philhellinon Street. The man moved slowly, as though conscious of leisure, moving his head from side to side in a way that seemed lordly, swinging his umbrella. Just before the English church he turned into a doorway and disappeared. Coming up to it in his turn, Mitsos saw it was a café bar with half a dozen steps leading down. The bar was below street-level, but outside on the pavement there were two small tables, and Mitsos, after a moment’s hesitation, sat down at the first of these, with his back to the bar. From here, if he turned his head, he could see below him through the glass front of the bar, the top of the other man’s head and the lower part of his face. Although there could not have been more than two or three yards between them, he was himself practically invisible to the man below because of a sort of ornamental trellis across the lower half of the bar front, through which had been trained the shoots of some creeper with glossy sharp leaves. The sun shone hotly on Mitsos, for there was no awning, and falling on the slatted trellis and faintly stirring leaves, dappled the interior of the bar with flecks of light, so that the man’s lowered head and his face and his fawn suit were chequered with shifting patterns, and Mitsos had the impression of looking down from the upper air into some leafy cage. There was no one else in the bar. On the table before the man were kephtedes, bread and white cheese, and a glass of beer. One of his hands was out of sight below the table; the other, large and very pale, quite hairless, plied a fork busily. He seemed from this angle of vision to have no neck at all, his blunt head balancing by a sort of miracle on the thick shoulders, while he fed steadily, chewing with an open mouth.

  Mitsos asked for bread and a little salad when the waiter came, and ate it quickly, without appetite, constantly turning his head to watch the man below. There was in that face and form as he was compelled to view it now no trace of the resemblance which had so shocked him in the Cathedral Square. Then the man’s pause and smile had seemed almost like a deliberate reminder; a vague smile, perhaps no more than a clench of the features against the sun; but then there were the eyes too, so distinctive, and, above all, perhaps that moment of irresolution, almost of bafflement. Fortuitous, of course, but recalling so strongly, so irresistibly, the other, distant, pause at the door, that other smile, that had turned from relish to purpose at the stimulus of his mother’s grief. …

  They were from Epirus, this had been stated at the outset: men come from far, intent on something. He remembered the curious contained peace in the house in the days immediately before that evening, with his officer father home from the north, the first time for almost a year they had seen him. A professional soldier, commissioned before the war, who had fought both Italians and Germans and, of course, in the latter years of the occupation exclusively Greeks. He had returned from the north changed, grimmer, always preoccupied. Mitsos had been too young then fully to understand the disgust inspired in his father, fastidious, authoritarian, deeply conservative like almost all his class, by the activities of the guerillas, who had turned to rend one another even before the Germans withdrew, turning what might at first have been seen as a movement of liberation into a murderous gibberish of initials, E.A.M., E.L.A.S., K.K.E. ‘Eamobulgarians,’ he had said, the bitter word of abuse twisting his lips under the neat moustache. ‘The only minds that have a sense of why they fight are in Russia, not in Greece.’

  He had known, of course, must have known, that he was in danger. This would be the reason for that grimness, that absorbed quality in his father. His mother, too, would have known. That calm then, remembered now as happiness because of the horror that succeeded it, but of a peculiar tension nevertheless, had perhaps been a sort of despair. For the departure of the German occupation force had delivered the country to the andartes, which meant increasingly, as Zervas was confined to his perch in the hills, to the groups of the extreme left. It was a time when public and private motives had become confused — a time for the settling of old scores. All the collaborators who could, including the rank and file of the Security Police, had sought immediate obscurity and there were some no doubt who had escaped detection and the certain death that followed upon it, survived until the following year when justice was again in official hands and the courts, moreover, disposed to be lenient. … His father, however, had been an officer, commanded a battalion. He had made no effort to hide himself. Where, after all, was he to go? He had come home to Athens to the house that had been his father’s. No doubt, with customary cold incredulity he had misjudged the lawless temper of the people on liberation, trusted too much to the immediate re-establishing of order now that the common enemy at last was gone. A bullet in the street was the worst he could have expected, otherwise he would not so have endangered his family. And Epirus must have seemed quite far away. …

  ‘We are from Epirus,’ had been the first words Mitsos remembered from the group of shabby men who had come in from the street that October evening. They had been frighteningly without gesture, without extravagance of speech or behaviour, confronting his father and mother in their softly lit living-room. Where is your uniform now?’ one of the men had said quietly. ‘Your fine uniform.’ There had been in this colloquy a note, a feeling as though this were the beginning of a quarrel, rather than the end of it. What words, if any, his father had said he had not retained in memory. He did not know which of the men had moved, it was not the man with yellow eyes, he felt sure of that, an amazingly casual gesture of the arm but swift too, as though he was trying to dislodge something possibly noxious, possibly about to sting, from his father’s collar, but there was a short knife in his hand, and his father stepped back sharply, he looked startled, exactly as if he had in fact been stung, and began to raise his hand to the side of his neck, but the blood came spurting over his hand, staying it, and he was suddenly red to the waist. He fell face forward on to the carpet, not as though collapsing but as though struck down, and he died then or a little later, died without another look at anyone, face pressed against the carpet. Mitsos himself, with that great jet of blood before him and his mother’s cries in his ears, had sprung wildly forward, to minister to his father, not to attack the men, only to receive a heavy blow on the side of the head which flung him partially stunned against the wall, from where he had endured the rest, the smile, the hideous moments of irresolution, his mother’s reduction to anonymity, his own mute plea for life.

  He glanced down again through the tre
llis into the interior of the café. The man was fed now and still, stippled by the light that rayed through the leaves and bars. Mitsos clapped his hands for the waiter, wanting to be ready — time spent in paying his bill might result in the man’s being lost to him, since no destination had yet been established. He had barely finished paying in fact when the man came up the steps into the sunlight and stood for a moment with raised head and narrowed eyes as though himself seeking a scent or a direction. Mitsos had turned away, but there had been no need for this, the man did not look towards him at all, but, after that brief pause, proceeded steadily up Philhellinon Street.

  And Mitsos followed. The pavements were crowded, but he had no real awareness of other people. He saw no faces, heard no individual voices. Noise and movement of people formed a sort of element through which he tracked the man, comforting as cover might be, more comforting, since they took away his particularity, gave him a reason for walking down this street where other persons walked.

  Neofiton Vamva proved not difficult to find. Eleni Polimenou had an apartment on the sixth floor, with polished parquet and chintz and sketches of nude rotund females on the walls. There was a fine view from the window of the eastern side of the city, extending from the wooded hill of Pangrati across to the Byzantine Museum with the suburb of Kaisariani beyond it, and the tawny foothills of Hymettos in the distance. Kennedy had full leisure to dwell on all this because Eleni Polimenou kept him waiting for a considerable time. He had in fact abandoned the view and was looking fixedly at the photograph of a smiling man in a big black hat with the words ‘Kindest regards, Eugene’ inscribed in one corner, when a door must have been opened somewhere, for suddenly he heard a harsh voice talking, he realised after a moment, into the telephone.

  ‘But, darling, shit! shit! shit!’ he heard this voice say. ‘What? Yes, I know, I understand, angel, but there are things in this play to make you vomit green, my love. … No, not bad, impossible. Yes. My meaning is, no human tongue could frame them. Some changes, yes. … Also, this, what do you call it, this biographical note. … Yes, I know they ask for it, darling, but I think it is better not to go on and on about the years as though I will soon be getting the gold watch. Nor do I like references to my middle period. You can say mature, if you like. … Better, yes. …’ The voice spoke English with a plangent American accent, and this, in conjunction with the habit of heavy aspiration retained from Greek, made it a vehicle of considerable harshness and carrying power. The phone was replaced and a few moments later a slim middle-aged woman of striking and energetic appearance entered the room, smoking a cigarette in a short holder. She had auburn hair, narrow eyes and a mouth of slightly peevish sweetness. Guessing from the outset that Kennedy was a foreigner, she said to him in English, ‘You want to see me?’

  ‘I’ve heard,’ began Kennedy, ‘through the Cultural Centre …’

  ‘Ah, so you have come from the man Jennings?’ Miss Polimenou’s eyes were chestnut-coloured and brilliant, but not very efficient, it seemed: she screwed them up and advanced her head a little to get a good look at Kennedy. Myopia, which lends to many an aspect of peering benevolence, did not achieve this for her.

  ‘An odd little man, somewhat shitty,’ she said, still referring apparently to Jennings. ‘He said he would send someone. Well, this is what I want, darling, I will just tell you now because I have not much time, some men are coming to take pictures. I am appearing in a play on the British television in October and I have the script to look at now. It is a kind of family tragedy about Greek peasants in the Peloponnese. There is a good part for me, the mother, a strong part, but we have to make some changes in the script.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘Also you must correct my accent. It is too American. I must speak English as the English expect foreigners to speak it.’

  Miss Polimenou produced from the pocket of her robe a leather spectacle case and donned tinted glasses of a greenish shade. She gave Kennedy a long look through them. ‘My God!’ she said. ‘You are a tall man. How much do you weigh?’

  ‘About thirteen and a half stone,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘Good beef, ah!’ said Miss Polimenou. ‘Do you think you can help me?’

  ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘You will not regret it, darling. How much is that in kilos?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘In kilos, how much you weigh?’

  ‘I’m not sure; a kilo is about two pounds, isn’t it? That would be …’

  ‘I like a big man,’ Miss Polimenou said. ‘Let’s have a look at the play now. We can do the first act maybe. It’s in my bedroom.’

  ‘But the men,’ said Kennedy, suddenly disquieted. ‘The men who are coming to take the pictures.’

  ‘They can wait.’ She laid a beringed hand on his arm. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  The bedroom was predominantly blue, Kennedy noticed. Miss Polimenou made no move to get the script. ‘Got good biceps muscles too, I bet,’ she said.

  ‘They’re not bad,’ Kennedy said, ‘I suppose. I don’t really get enough exercise.’ He was unable to prevent his voice from quavering a little during this utterance, for Miss Polimenou, while still apparently looking through her tinted lenses at his arms, had laid her hand elsewhere.

  Jennings sat at his desk, wheezing very slightly, tapping softly with his fountain-pen on the blotter before him. Beyond the blotter was his papier-mâché tray, with tea things and shortbread biscuits. He was musing on the inconsistencies of the English language and on the imminent arrival in Athens of an English mandolinist for whom a recital and afterwards a cocktail party had to be arranged. The difficulty was that although the hall had to be booked in advance and the invitations for the cocktail party issued, the mandolinist had not yet said definitely when he would be arriving. I hope, Jennings said to himself experimentally, that the fellow arrives in time. But, of course, that was ambiguous. It might mean arrive in time to perform at the appointed hour or it might merely mean arrive in the course of time. There existed, it was true, the radiantly precise on time, but that argued an attitude to a mandolinist (admittedly a minor one), more appropriate to a person one directly employed — a plumber, perhaps, come to mend a pipe. The amazing range and complexity of the English prepositions, no other language could approach them. The puny French à, for example, the heavy German mitt, made to do service in a dozen different contexts, they came nowhere near the ease and grace of the English. Once the prepositions were abandoned, of course, one met with difficulties. Consider clauses, some extraordinary things happened in clauses. If he, Jennings, for example, were to say to his assistant Robinson, during the cocktail party, ‘It will soon be time the mandolinist was going,’ then they would both, clutching their glasses, be confronted by this stark, this inexplicable, this mystical past tense. Was going. Robinson, of course, would notice nothing, make some glib reply. Not a spiritual man, Robinson. There was an alternative, to be sure, time for him to go — the boundless infinitive, spanning like the participles all times, without number, without tense. Still, he was reluctant to abandon that dark irrational past. It gave power to the user. ‘It will soon be time the mandolinist was going or went.’ He heard himself answering with impeccable modulations the flurried questions of foreign students rendered distraught by this inconsistency. ‘If you will permit me to observe, ladies and gentlemen,’ or ‘If I may be allowed at this point to observe, to your many questions my only answer can be, that this is the language we use,’ accompanied, as he glanced from face to face, by the impenetrable blandness of the Zen master.

  Some of this blandness had appeared on his face, but it faded as he thought once again how undesirable it would be that the mandolinist should return to London in any way dissatisfied with his reception. It must not be thought that he, Jennings, was indifferent to the arts. Perhaps Robinson had some news. He did nothing for the moment, however, to summon his assistant. He sipped tea for some while and nibbled a biscuit. The biscuits, he no
ted, were not quite fresh, unduly friable; little crumbs fell over the dark serge of his lapels. He must register a complaint, a sharp one, to the administrative office about the quality of the biscuits that were reaching his table. Hard, when one could eat almost nothing else, to have crumbly biscuits sent up to one. He made a note on the blotter, and this purposeful activity recalled to him the question of prepositions. It would be a good idea, he thought, to get Willey to prepare a paper for him, taking a single substantive and proliferating examples to give, as it were, in miniature a demonstration of the richness of English in this respect. It might make a useful appendix to his book. Hand for example ‘to hand’, ‘by hand’, ‘in hand’, ‘on hand’, ‘at hand’. That would serve admirably. Willey’s was a temperament perfectly suited to this sort of research. The donkey work, as Jennings humorously put it to himself, without which no scholarship was possible. Not an original mind, of course, no feeling for the marvellous paradox at the heart of grammar, a structure monumental yet always in flux. All right in his place. Latterly, though, he had not seemed to know that place. Jennings had not forgotten his insolence at the staff meeting. ‘Permit me to observe, Mr Willey, that I know something of your previous history, and to your many requests for a permanent post I can only say …’ Mackintosh was the man for a permanency. He had recognised Mackintosh’s promise from the outset, his devotion to grammatical forms, the absence of any sentimental reluctance to inform on less-conscientious colleagues. Jennings even felt some slight affection for Mackintosh, who recalled his own first faltering steps as an untried Teacher of English as a Foreign Language, in Istanbul, all those years ago. Mackintosh would be waiting outside for him now. Presumably he had been in touch with Eleni Polimenou, in accordance with his instructions. It was of the utmost importance that nothing be allowed to ruffle Eleni Polimenou. There must be no reservations in the glowingly favourable report Jennings hoped she would make of him in London as courtier, scholar and wit. Besides this any number of mandolinists paled into insignificance. Eleni Polimenou’s word carried real weight.