The Greeks Have a Word for It

by Barry Unsworth

  Now, while he waited, demotic music came from somewhere across the square, wailing in quarter tones and swirling repetitions, thinning and sounding frantic like a wasp in a box. Above him Kolokotromis pointed heroically on his charger. The shadow of his extended arm had been a mutilated stump merely when Mitsos had first positioned himself there, had lengthened gradually to a lance as the sun dipped westward; and his helmet had run from a boss, a deformity, to a spiralling, immense crown.

  The flower seller sat up and looked about him, then went behind his stall and came out with a slopping bucket of water which he scattered on the pavement around his flowers. And as though this had been a signal prearranged, during the next few minutes boys from restaurants and stores all round the square emerged with buckets and sluiced the pavements. The water glinted, and the sounds of its impact came to Mitsos like a long irregular respiration. There was a smell of wet dust, and the odour of flowers became more marked.

  Mitsos straightened himself, sensing in this ritual of the water the beginning of a new phase of the day; and almost immediately George emerged from the shop, hesitated in the doorway in the nonchalant portly way that Mitsos had come to know so well, and then went along the side of the square and turned left towards Athinas Street. With a sense of gathering up again the reins of life, Mitsos followed.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Kennedy said, speaking very slowly and deliberately, looking Mr Andronakis straight in the eye, ‘that your essay is far below the standard required for the examination.’ He paused for some moments before going on. He had given considerable thought beforehand to the way this interview was to be conducted. It was in a sense crucial, a test case. Andronakis, a private student of his, already unconfident about his English, needed to be shaken still further. ‘Below the standard,’ Kennedy said again, allowing a faint, regretful smile to appear on his face. He put up a hand delicately and undid the top button of his shirt. He was wearing one of Thorne’s and it was too tight for him. Andronakis, a burly man with a manner that was ingratiating without servility, shifted in his seat and passed a hand over his short and wiry hair. The canary in its cage on the balcony behind him commenced an abortive trill. ‘Give song, little bird, for Mr Kennedy,’ Andronakis said absently over his shoulder. The canary became abruptly silent. ‘It is not good, then, the essay?’ said Andronakis. Kennedy grimaced, as if he did not quite know where to begin. The essay, which was lying at this moment on the table before him, was entitled ‘Don Quixote’. Kennedy glanced once more over the opening paragraph:

  ‘This is one of the innumerable plays, one hundred less, or two hundred that anybody with good education must know. On his days and until now, it had passed about three centuries. In spite of so long time his plays are so fresh as if it had issued yesterday. It is very often happens only with great authors and well known and masterpiece plays that such plays are monument immortal in eternal keeping ever knews, or as in classical language says, classic. Don Quixote was also classical of Thervantes …’

  ‘No,’ Kennedy said. ‘Not very good, really. In fact you need more time, Mr Andronakis, before you can be ready for the examination. At least another year, possibly longer.’

  ‘The future is forward,’ Mr Andronakis said; one of his phrases, but he pronounced it now with less than customary conviction. He was a commercial agent, with some important principals in England, and he had now in middle age taken to English lessons because he had somehow persuaded himself that the Government was about to issue a decree making it illegal for anyone without the diploma to engage in such transactions with foreign firms. How he had formed this idea Kennedy did not know, but he had not attempted to rebut it.

  ‘I have to be honest with you,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, yes. Much appreciate,’ said Mr Andronakis, who was now looking distinctly discouraged. ‘What can do?’

  Kennedy looked austerely to one side and began speaking in measured tones:

  ‘There is a solution to your problem, Mr Andronakis. Of course, I wouldn’t do this for just anyone … but I flatter myself we have become friends during these lessons …’

  ‘Friends, yes,’ said Mr Andronakis, who had clenched his large fists in the effort of following Kennedy’s words.

  ‘And so I feel justified, as a friend, in putting this to you. As a matter of fact I have a friend who might help you with this examination.’

  ‘Friends, yes. Help me. Much appreciate.’

  ‘No, I mean another friend. As a favour to me, you understand, I might be able to persuade him to give you some information before the examination which would help you to pass it successfully. I couldn’t guarantee success, of course. But it would give you a very great advantage.’

  The canary on the balcony broke suddenly into a melodious cadence.

  Kennedy glanced at Mr Andronakis’s face. It expressed bewilderment.

  ‘If you knew what questions were going to be asked,’ Kennedy said very slowly, ‘you could prepare yourself better for the examination, couldn’t you?’

  ‘You mean to let me know the questions?’ A look of delighted comprehension dawned on Mr Andronakis’ face.

  ‘I cannot promise,’ Kennedy said. ‘I can do nothing myself. But this friend of mine in London …’

  ‘Understand perfect,’ said Mr Andronakis. ‘Among friends is much possible. How can I say you my thanks, Mr Kennedy?’

  ‘Of course he would do it to oblige me,’ Kennedy said. ‘But a gift from you would help things along quite a lot. Oil the wheels, you know.’

  ‘Excuse, please. Oil wheels?’ Mr Andronakis reached by force of habit for his notebook and pencil. ‘Is this idiom?’ he said.

  ‘Never mind that now. If I could offer my friend ten thousand drachmas as a little gift from you, to show that you appreciate …’

  ‘Much appreciate, ho, goodness, yes! Ten thousand drachmas is much.’

  ‘Think of it, Mr Andronakis. You would have your licence safe. No further worries. Your rivals and competitors closed down because of their bad English. You safe, laughing, with your certificate hanging on the wall. The future is forward, Mr Andronakis, remember that. What is ten thousand drachmas?’

  ‘Eight thousand.’

  ‘Nine thousand.’

  They regarded each other closely for some moments. Mr Andronakis looked serious and impressive. ‘For nine thousand drachmas,’ he said, ‘there must be no mistakings, my good friend.’

  ‘No mistakings,’ Kennedy said. His little burst of oratory and his sense of being near a successful conclusion had brought him out in a sweat. Now he had two prospects: well over two hundred pounds. Another three, and it would be worth doing. Of course, he didn’t know as yet whether he could get access to the papers, but there must be a way, he told himself. If people were willing to pay money for it, a way must be found. ‘I will speak to my friend,’ he said.

  ‘Sing, sing for Mr Kennedy,’ said Mr Andronakis, holding out his hand, sealing the bargain. ‘The future is forward,’ he added, which made Kennedy laugh heartily.

  After this highly successful piece of business he proceeded to Eleni Polimenou’s flat. He would be glad, he reflected, in a way, when the lessons with her came to an end. They had been interesting certainly. He felt it a privilege to see an artist such as she undoubtedly was, actually at work on the script of a play. All this had been a novel experience for Kennedy. Nevertheless it had been tiring. Several times she had received him in her bedroom with no script in evidence; and she was demanding, quite without tenderness, needing much patient preliminary before her angry cries signalled his release. He bore the marks of her nails on his back. He had not minded it unduly. He knew that she regarded him as an instrument, just as the playwright was an instrument. But he was well able to perform without being attracted; and in this case his sense that Eleni Polimenou could be very useful to him was a sufficient stimulus. All the same, he hoped, as he ascended to her flat, that today’s session would be theatrical, rather than fornicatory. He wanted to preserve his
tissues for Veta, whom he was meeting later that afternoon.

  He was relieved therefore to find her fully clothed in the drawing-room with the script of the play open on a table. They sat down and began reading the last act together, he making his responses in normal conversational tones, she in a more vibrant and highly charged manner. Occasionally he stopped her to correct a pronunciation. As always, towards the end of the play, when they brought home her shepherd son fatally shot by the police, her voice throbbed with feeling, quavered on the brink of sobs. Looking across at her, Kennedy saw the usual tears in her eyes. He wondered briefly if she had ever had children. He thought it on the whole probable that she had not. Suddenly the telephone rang. ‘Shit!’ said Eleni Polimenou. ‘Excuse me, darling.’ A moment later he heard her, shrill and blasphemous, in the passage. Amazing, he thought. He was repelled by these swift changes, much more so than if they could have been called hypocritical. Some lingering Puritan distaste was aroused in him.

  At the end of the reading she sat back in her chair and smiled at him. Only one more time, darling,’ she said. ‘Next Saturday can you come?’

  Kennedy said that he could. ‘Are you leaving Athens?’ he asked.

  ‘I shall be busy now with rehearsals for the Epidavros Festival, the Greek Tragedy.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ Kennedy said. ‘I would like very much to see you in that.’

  ‘I can get you tickets. You tell me when.’

  ‘That is very kind of you.’

  ‘We must speak now about payment for the lessons.’

  Kennedy said gallantly, ‘I have had payment already, many times over.’ He had surmised, however, from the tone of her words earlier and the quality of her smile, that there would be a further instalment next Saturday: they would end this coaching as they had begun it, in bed.

  ‘Never do anything for nothing,’ Eleni Polimenou said.

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, instead of giving me money,’ he said, ‘I would rather you did a favour for a friend of mine. An Englishman named Willey.’

  ‘Yes? He must be a good friend.’

  ‘He is a deserving case. I wonder if you’d mind if I brought him to meet you, just for a few minutes, one evening this next week.’

  ‘Let me see. Yes, if you like. Wednesday evening I am here from seven to eight o’clock. Is it a healthy friendship, darling?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Kennedy said. ‘Nothing like that about it. I just want you to do something for him that I think you could do quite easily. He works for Jennings, whom you’ve met, I believe.’

  ‘Yes, he came here. What is the favour you want me to do?’

  ‘It’s just to put in a good word for him, more or less.’ In a few words he told her about Willey’s position at the institute. ‘Is it something you would be able to do, do you think?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I think probably yes. Jennings, when he came here, seemed to me mainly concerned with prestige. Perhaps if that aspect could be emphasised … These people, you know, I have had dealings with before in my life, cultural organisations, councils, bodies to sponsor the arts. They are sometimes difficult to manage, sometimes easy. This is because they are vague about their function. To a business man you can say, “Do this, it will make money for you,” but these people do not aim at profits, their salaries are sure. They have no special skills, usually, like an artist or a doctor, for example. They are all the time simply sponsoring things, you see. They depend on the people they handle for glory. So they are sycophantic, usually. When they are not arrogant.’

  Kennedy was impressed. ‘I think that’s a very sound analysis,’ he said.

  She looked at him rather narrowly. There is more to all this than you are saying, I’m sure of that. Still, if that is what you want I will try to do it, yes. You let me know when.’

  ‘It is very kind of you,’ Kennedy said. ‘I’ll see you on Wednesday evening, then, with Mr Willey.’

  George and Mitsos walked for some time in the streets adjoining Omonia Square. Mitsos had lost all sense of direction now. This man might have killed my parents, he told himself cautiously and with wonder; almost indeed with reverence. True, his mother had not died of the rape. But within a year she had died. She had begun to forget the simple order of things, the normal sequences of speech, the way to lay a table. And shortly afterwards she had died, in hospital. Right up to the moment of death her face had worn an expression of perplexity, so that it was only after she had stopped breathing that she seemed once more certain of things. A cerebral tumour, the doctors had said, which might have been clambering for years inside that small skull, but which Mitsos in the obstinacy of his grief had attributed to the events of that one evening. Merely the suspicion of being the perpetrator conferred on the man before him a value unique in the world and a curious fragility despite his bulk. Only when it occurred to him how easily the other could still get away did Mitsos feel at all savage towards him. George might even now be contemplating a change of job, a journey. Perhaps the little house in the blind alley was not his at all, and he was only a lodger there, free if the whim took him to leave at a moment’s notice, leave at a time when Mitsos was sleeping or unavoidably elsewhere, take a bus or a train to where he could never be found again. There was no way he could be certain of George’s intentions, except by depriving him of intentions altogether, immobilising him — skewering him, as it were. But he was still too grateful, too indebted, to be able to want this, except in slack unguarded moments. It may not, of course, be the same one, he told himself. Latterly he had needed to remind himself of this quite frequently; it seemed to be mattering less, or rather mattering only to one who sought a pure metaphysical truth: his impure tangible truth was the man before him, who had been vouchsafed, surely, for something.

  Today George was not carrying his umbrella; perhaps this meant he was not going to work. They were quite close to Omonia Square now, the long parabolas of water from the fountains in the square glittered at Mitsos as he glanced from street intersections. At the corner of Peraius Street, George turned into a very large, old-fashioned café with high chairs backed in dark hide, and heavy, marble-topped tables. After hesitating on the pavement for some moments Mitsos followed him in. It was cool and hushed inside. A few men sat alone with newspapers. As he walked between the tables, George was in the act of sitting down and pulling a newspaper from his pocket. He glanced up as Mitsos approached and their eyes met. George showed no sign of recognition, but Mitsos immediately smiled and held out his hand. ‘Not at the Areopagus today, then?’ he said.

  No particular expression had appeared on the other’s face. Mitsos said quietly. ‘You showed me round the Areopagus some time ago. You remember me, don’t you? It turned out that we are both from Epirus.’

  ‘Yes, now I remember you,’ the man said, and once again, even though Mitsos had been prepared for it, that harsh laborious whisper, issuing from such a heavy man, was astounding. ‘But you are mistaken, I am not from Epirus. There are so many, you understand,’ he added, excusing himself, it seemed, for his failure to recognise Mitsos.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ Mitsos said. ‘I thought you were from Epirus.’ He looked down at the chair nearest him. ‘How strange,’ he said, ‘that we should meet again so soon.’ The other said nothing. Mitsos nerved himself to look into the pale eyes. For some seconds they stared thus at each other, then abruptly Mitsos sat down at the table. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. A weakness had attacked him under the scrutiny of the man, not out of fear of the other’s recognition, but at the terrible familiarity of those features, that face which he had been constructing in the nights when he could not sleep — an exercise in his insomnia curiously calming. Every line and mark he had recalled, until it was like an image springing directly from his own creative energy, rather than a face existing in life. So intimately did he know it now that blindfolded he felt he could have identified it, just by the merest tracing of the fingertips: the complications of the soft, dark skin under th
e eyes, the pitting of the lower lip, the prickle of bristle round the mouth; minute indentations of his fingertips could even register the life below the skin, the local suffusions of blood and the patterns of little bloodbursts along the cheek-bones. The whole of that face was known to him, more fully than he had known any other, more fully by far than he knew his own; no object of love could have been better known.

  ‘I happened to be walking,’ Mitsos said. ‘I came in for tea. They serve tea here, I suppose?’

  George looked at him rather intently for some moments. He seemed to be trying to decide something. ‘You are on holiday in Athens?’ he said, after a while.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From Epirus?’

  ‘No. I have been living abroad, in England, for several years. Since I was thirteen, in fact.’

  The waiter appeared and Mitsos made an order for both of them: lemon tea for himself, ouzo for his companion.

  ‘In that case …’ the other said, shrugging his heavy shoulders.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I had a feeling that somewhere before we had met. Not very recently. But if you have been out of Greece so long … I myself have never been out of Greece.’

  Mitsos looked down at his hands. ‘It is not very likely,’ he said. George’s shirt, he noticed, was stained and crumpled, and his pale blue tie had darker stains where it broadened below the knot. The collar of his jacket was greasy and there was a scurf of dandruff on it. Seen thus, at close quarters and indoors, everything about him indicated poverty and neglect. Mitsos could smell him too, an acrid smell, as of clothes that have been put away damp. There was nevertheless a kind of authority in the set of the large head, the reclinations of the thick body as it shifted in the high-backed chair. ‘Perhaps it was in Epirus,’ he said.