The Greeks Have a Word for It

by Barry Unsworth

  He pressed a button in his desk and after a few moments Robinson appeared, wearing a navy-blue blazer and a green cravat. Jennings looked at him sourly. His assistant’s sartorial pretensions always affected him disagreeably. They marked Robinson as a man without real interest in English as a Foreign Language.

  ‘Has anything further been received,’ Jennings said, ‘regarding the arrival of Mr Slingsby-Merd?’

  ‘Nothing, I’m afraid. There is a cinema on Stadium Street which would be available in the mornings, but they require to be told exactly when.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  There was a short silence during which Robinson assembled his shrewd expression. ‘By the way,’ he said at last, ‘are you acquainted with the work of a poet, a contemporary poet, named Gilligan?’

  ‘Just a moment,’ Jennings said. ‘Gilligan, did you say?’ He never read poetry of any sort, being unable to tolerate the violence done to syntax. His reading consisted almost entirely of books about linguistics with, for light relief, property advertisements in newspapers of the sort that are accompanied by photographs. ‘The name has a certain resonance,’ he said. ‘It, ah, rings a bell.’

  ‘None of the people I’ve asked so far have been acquainted with his work,’ Robinson said.

  ‘Gilligan, Gilligan, Gilligan,’ Jennings said with a remote expression, as though summoning something from the depths. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well, you remember a person named Kennedy who called here some time ago?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jennings said. His alertness increased visibly. ‘I remember him quite clearly. Not a good type.’ He had made a note on his blotter about Kennedy while still in the grip of the rage those insolent sarcasms had roused in him.

  ‘Well,’ Robinson said, ‘he offered to give a lecture on contemporary poetry at the institute. Of course, I pressed him for details’ — Robinson shrewdness intensified — ‘I mean to say, anyone could just walk in here, couldn’t they? He mentioned this Gilligan as a key figure. I haven’t, as I say, been able to find anyone who has read him, or even heard of him.’

  ‘In my opinion,’ Jennings said, ‘that is not a young man to be trusted. An ill-bred and coarse-grained young man. He spoke of the Greeks as wogs, for example. In my hearing.’

  ‘That’s a bit thick,’ Robinson said. ‘I am coming to the conclusion,’ he added, ‘that Gilligan does not exist. Gilligan is simply a name he invented on the spur of the moment. It seems incredible.’

  ‘There was something inherently untrustworthy and semi-educated about him.’ Jennings lifted his upper lip in a slight snarl. ‘Also, if I remember, he had a cockney accent. Quite unmistakably.’

  He looked fixedly at Robinson, who narrowed his eyes even further and looked back. ‘So he did,’ Robinson said. ‘So he did.’

  The two men looked at each other in silence for some moments, then Jennings placed his fingertips together with renewed urbanity. ‘Is Mr Mackintosh out there?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ask him to come in, will you? And let me know as soon as anything further is received concerning Mr Slingsby-Merd.’

  ‘Will do,’ said Robinson, who was inclined at times to brisk abbreviations.

  While he waited, Jennings found Kennedy’s name on his blotter and put a ring round it, enclosing as an afterthought the date. ‘Ah,’ he said, when Mackintosh came in. ‘You wanted to see me?’

  Mackintosh inclined his head sideways to an angle of about forty-five degrees. His delivery, while lacking Jennings’ plopping virtuosity, had an exaggerated distinctness that promised well for the future. ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘it’s only a suggestion, sir, of course, but what I thought was, why don’t we have a sort of extra-mural weekly lecture?’

  ‘H’m,’ Jennings said. ‘Extra-mural. I see; yes.’

  ‘Yes; perhaps on Saturday mornings, but that would be for you to decide sir, of course. Each member of staff could deliver a lecture on successive Saturdays, on some aspect of English Language teaching, to a selected audience of students and practitioners.’

  ‘It sounds promising, promising,’ Jennings said. ‘I will give the matter my full consideration, Mr Mackintosh. Did you come to an arrangement with Eleni Polimenou?’

  Mackintosh righted his head, which he had been keeping tilted while he watched the effect on Jennings of his suggestion. ‘No,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact I didn’t.’

  Jennings looked at him in surprise. ‘Why was that? You went to see her, didn’t you?’

  Oh yes, I went to see her, only about half an hour ago, as a matter of fact, but when I got there she said she was fixed up already. She said she was quite satisfied. She’s got rather a raucous laugh, hasn’t she? Not what you’d expect at all. Someone from you had already been, she said. A big boy, she described him as. I thought this was hardly likely, so I asked who it was. She said a man called Kennedy. I was introduced to a person of that name some days ago, by Mr Willey. It might be the same man.’

  ‘Did you point out to her that he was not in any way an official person?’ Jennings spoke even more deliberately than usual, in order to disguise the rage which the mention of this name had awakened.

  ‘Yes, I did. I said I was pretty sure the fellow had no official backing, but she didn’t seem to care. She said Mr Kennedy knew his onions. Those were her exact words. She has a picturesque way of expressing herself.’ Mackintosh commenced what was almost a chuckle, but seeing no response on Jennings’ face, he tilted his head quickly and said, ‘It’s a bad show, sir, isn’t it?’

  ‘So he is one of Mr Willey’s friends, is he?’ Jennings said slowly.

  ‘I gather so, sir,’ Mackintosh said, restoring his head to the vertical. ‘I gather so.’

  After Mackintosh had gone, Jennings mused on Kennedy for a while malignantly. The man ought to be denounced, of course. But for a moment his hands were tied. If Eleni Polimenou pronounced herself satisfied there was nothing really to be done. She was not, Jennings sensed, the sort of person to be much disturbed by the illegality of Kennedy’s proceedings. Better to leave things as they were for the moment. At all costs Eleni Polimenou must not be antagonised. Jennings sighed. It was all so difficult. How much better, really, if humanity could be approached like grammar, such persons as Kennedy classified once and for all as irregular, like certain verb forms, for example. Then everyone could read and be apprised of them, they would never be able to deceive again by false analogy with regular people. …

  As a means of forgetting Kennedy and his own powerlessness, Jennings fell to imagining a perfectly arranged, rapturously applauded mandolin recital at the end of which people thundered, not for the performer, that mere adjunct Slingsby-Merd, but for the organising brain, Jennings. Jennings. Jennings. He stood blinking charmingly raising his hand for silence, waiting for a hush to fall over the vast audience. Ladies and Gentlemen, if I may be permitted to observe, in reply to your many requests for further recitals, I can only say …

  *

  The man Mitsos was following pursued a steady course, coming out on Amalias opposite the National Gardens. They passed the sponge seller on his customary corner, straw hat low over his eyes, his sponges strung round his body. Large-pored, ochreous, of all sizes, their soft organic shapes were in startling contrast to the hard edges of the kerb and the granite facings of the buildings behind.

  They went past the massive columns of the Temple of Zeus, then to the right along the avenue of Dionysus the Areopagite, past the theatre of that older pagan Dionysus of wild celebrations. Above them on the right the slopes of the Acropolis with the pale gold of the Parthenon at its crest. All the way along the mosaic pavement of the avenue, like the echo of his steps, Mitsos heard the chipping of metal on stone, coming clear from the Acropolis on the still air, through the intermittent trilling of the cicadas; masons were squatting amid the vegetation with which these slopes had been planted, fabricating items needed for more extensive, more evocative ruins; cornice, pediment, the fluted drums
of columns.

  At the Odeon of Herodus Athens they left the pavement and mounted the steps towards the Acropolis. They climbed past flagged terraces, clumps of laurel and umbrella pine, emerging on the wide, level terrace which partially girdles the hill from north to south, the southern side leading to the little kiosk where those who intend to ascend to the Parthenon itself buy their tickets, the northern broadening into a coach park fringed with stalls selling postcards, coloured slides, reproductions in plaster of antique vases and statuary. This was an area devoted entirely to chicanery and the importuning of tourists; below precincts sacred to Athena and Poseidon, light gauges twinkled and the gold molars of lurking photographers, and persons vociferated in broken English.

  The man exchanged some pleasantries with the vendors, was evidently well known there. Then, passing further along the hill northward, he took up finally a position directly beside the rough steps leading to the summit of the Areopagus. He was directly in the sun there, and proceeded to open his umbrella, the purpose of which was at last fully revealed. It was a vast umbrella of an old-fashioned sort with a long handle and strongly arched struts. The black cloth was very thin, especially where the spokes distended it, so that to Mitsos, standing somewhat below the man at a point further down the path, the umbrella resembled a symmetrically arched membrane, partially admitting the light, like the fully extended wings of a huge bat. The man stood quite still beside the steps, his head and shoulders in shadow. From time to time he spoke to groups of passers-by, appearing to make to them some proposition.

  Mitsos looked over the westward side of the Acropolis where numbers of people, having obtained their tickets of admission below, ascended by degrees in a sort of slow swarm towards the massive portals of the Propylae. So pure and brilliant was the light that perspectives were obliterated, the slim pillars set into the sides of the hill among the Venetial bulwarks having the same apparent distance from him as the columns of the Sacred Way and the narrow summit of Lycavettos beyond, monuments and hills forming a great frieze against the depthless blue of the sky. The streams of new devotees, guide-books in hand, clambered up through the portals and disappeared into the blue distances beyond.

  He glanced down over the florid Roman façade of the Odeon. From this eminence he could trace the steps by which, following the man, he had arrived here, the ascending terraces, the careful mosaic of the avenue, the jumble of streets beyond. Always in Athens there were these prospects, this visual recreation or reminder of the way one had come, which gave a sort of dignity to journeyings about the city, a sense almost of wonder at human mobility and the tremendous intricacy of choices this involves.

  He stopped alongside the umbrella and stood there waiting. He had approached at a time when the other was looking away, and he thought in this moment how strange and probably unprecedented it would be for this man, who was accustomed to making the first move, to find a person standing waiting beside him in this deferential way, waiting to be noticed. Then the man turned his head and Mitsos was looking into the wide face, framed by the umbrella. The strange eyes, with their mournful downward slant, regarded him steadily. They were not the colour of the eyes he remembered, not yellow, but a sort of pale hazel. This confrontation must have been of the briefest, but seemed endless to Mitsos. He smiled painfully at the man, but as yet said nothing. He could get no distinct impression of the other’s face yet, only its width, and the eyes, like a dog’s. Surely the eyes were the same?

  ‘You wanna guide?’ the man said. ‘A guide for the Areopagus?’ His voice, which Mitsos had for some reason expected to be authoritative, was little more than a harshly intensified whisper. Somewhere inside that bulk, it seemed, vital passages were clogged.

  ‘I am Greek,’ Mitsos said. ‘You can speak Greek.’

  The man smiled. He had full, slightly everted lips and his front teeth were very widely spaced. ‘Usually they are foreigners,’ he said. ‘You are not from Athens, then?’

  ‘I am from Epirus,’ Mitsos said.

  The man lowered his umbrella and closed it. ‘Shall we go up?’ he said. ‘This hill,’ he whispered behind Mitsos as they were climbing, ‘the Areopagus, or Areos Pagus, as it was known in ancient times. …’ They stood together on the summit. ‘Down there, it was down there, the temple of Ares.’ He pointed down the north-west slope of the hill.

  ‘Ah yes,’ Mitsos said.

  ‘The ancient assembly, the Senate of the Areopagus, met here. While primarily a political body, it had the right to try certain criminal cases. …’ The voice whispered on laboriously, a few inches only from Mitsos’ ear, continuing its regurgitation of fact and legend. Mitsos listened only intermittently. He was possessed by the strangeness of his position, the strangeness of knowing exactly what this man had eaten for lunch. … ‘Also Orestes after the murder of his mother Clytemnestra is said to have appeared before this court. You have perhaps read The Eumenides of Aeschylus?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mitsos was impelled suddenly to get on to a more personal level with the man, the plane of opinion. ‘I have always thought he was justified,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think so?’

  ‘It was the crime of matricide,’ the man whispered. ‘An offence against the gods. … You do not speak with the accent of Epirus?’

  ‘I spent my childhood in Athens,’ Mitsos said.

  ‘The council was still functioning in the fifth century B.C., the Great Age. Pericles took away its political powers. Thereafter its chief purpose … The deserters of Chaeronia were tried here and condemned, in 338. Demosthenes also. … If you will come this way a little …’ He led Mitsos along a rocky terrace on the eastward side of the hill. ‘Here,’ he said, pointing upward to a higher rectangular terrace. ‘That is the highest point. It was there they conducted the trials of the criminals. And there, to the left, do you see that square stone, the big one, standing alone? That was used as a seat for the disputants. There were two originally it is said, the Stone of Outrage for the accused, the Stone of Resentment for the accuser.’

  ‘Which is the one remaining?’

  ‘No one can say.’

  ‘I think it is the Stone of Outrage,’ Mitsos said, with the same painful smile.

  He was beginning now, with an almost unnerving distinctness, to take in the minutest details of the man’s face, the fair stubble along the jaws, the dark pitting of the long lower lip caused perhaps by some infection of the mouth, the ramification of lines and wrinkles round the eyes, the ruptured veins over the cheekbones showing darkly below the tan.

  ‘If we go round to this point … There you will see it, down towards the foot of the slope, that open space there, this was the sanctuary of the Erynes, infernal goddesses, avengers of murder, called also sometimes The Kindly Ones. Come once more this way …’ He led Mitsos to the central part of the terrace. ‘From here you have a good view. There is the Saronic Gulf, you see, and over there Mount Kithairon. Below us now the Agora, with the library of Hadrian beyond …

  ‘In the year A.D. 50,’ the man said, with suddenly increased power and volume, ‘St Paul delivered on this hill his Homily on the Unknown God which converted the senator Dionysus, known thereafter as St Denis the Areopagite. St Paul gave utterance to many solemn truths here, which, though received at the time with mockery and jeering …’ The voice went on rapidly, without faltering in the order of the words, though sinking at times into its former harsh and laborious whisper. ‘St Paul extolled the exalted ideal of humanity, without distinction between Greek, Jew or barbarian … foretold the collapse of the Hellenic world at that time so glorious. … The new religion that he brought was destined … The single force to which we Greeks owe everything, our nation, our language, our literature. This way, please. Take care down the steps, paidi mou.’

  They descended to the broad terrace at the foot of the hill.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Mitsos said. ‘That was most interesting.’ He took out a twenty-drachma piece and handed it over.

  ‘My pleasure,’ the man
said.

  ‘What is your name?’ Mitsos asked. ‘In case I should need a guide again.’

  ‘Ask for George. That is what the foreigners began by calling me and now everyone does. I am well known here.’ He turned away, preliminary to raising the umbrella.

  Mitsos was visited by a sharp feeling of discouragement. There was no legitimate pretext for detaining the man further. He was alone again. He went slowly back down the hill until he found a wooden bench under one of the pine-trees. From here he could still see George at his station.

  While he waited many hundreds of people ascended to the Parthenon. George said his piece several times. Finally, just after six o’clock, he lowered his umbrella for the last time, furled it loosely, and began to make his way northward in the direction of the Agora. Mitsos followed circumspectly. The steps descended steeply, between red-roofed Turkish-style houses, with the mounds and rubble of the Agora on the left, towards Morastiraki Square. Before reaching the square, however, George turned off into a maze of very narrow streets, little more than alleys. Mitsos walked with an exaggerated lightness. If the man had turned to look behind he must have recognised him, but he went on his way, looking ahead, as one very familiar with his surroundings. They emerged on a street that Mitsos thought he recognised, without remembering the name. Here it was close and airless, with tall, dun-coloured buildings rising on either side. From a side-turning Mitsos heard the desperate tearing sounds of an accordion. George turned again down an alley-way that led between blank whitewashed walls into a tiny square, with a kiosk and two orange-trees, and at the further side a small dilapidated taverna built in one floor, with silent birds in cages on its front wall, around the entrance. Immediately alongside the taverna ran a narrow cobbled lane with the outer wall of the taverna on one side and the windowless backs of several small houses on the other. Standing at the corner of the square Mitsos was able to see George turn into the last of these houses, which was the only one to face on to the lane. A few yards further on the lane ended in a brick wall. Thus, although this was a densely populated district, no one could actually overlook the last house in the lane except from the exact position at the corner of the square where Mitsos was standing.