The Greeks Have a Word for It

by Barry Unsworth

  ‘She’s celebrated for more than just acting,’ Olivia said, with a little smile — she went in for little smiles when she was wounded.

  ‘I daresay she is.’

  ‘They say,’ said Olivia, looking straight before her, the little smile coming and going, ‘that she pays people to sleep with her. She must be fifty if she’s a day, and, of course, when you get to that age …’

  ‘I say, look out, Olivia,’ said Willey urgently, but it was too late. While she had been speaking the path had narrowed further and Willey was now walking a few paces behind. What she did not appear to see, and he only at the last moment saw, was that the path took a sudden tilt downward, the steepness of which was partially concealed by the shrubs that straggled over it on either side. Olivia, rigid with grievance, was precipitated downward before she knew what was happening. She slipped, clutched wildly, and fell headlong. She lay where she had fallen, without a sound of any sort, several feet below, in a rocky and tangled declivity roughly circular in shape. Willey scrambled down after her.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ he said wildly, bending over her.

  ‘No,’ she said quietly. Only winded. Give me a hand up.’

  Perhaps it was reaction to his fears for her safety, but the Girl Guide, matter-of-factness of this reply infuriated Willey. And when he had lifted her to her feet; regarded the pallor of her rather equine face, the eyes moist and vague, either from pain or vexation, the dishevelled hair, above all perhaps, the burrs which she had collected in her descent, which liberally adhered to the peasant skirt; when he considered these things his fury mounted until it refused any longer to be contained.

  ‘Tell me, Olivia,’ he said, ‘why is it that you are so bloody clumsy?’

  Her face did not change its expression, as though no further damage could be registered facially. And immediately Willey felt ashamed, ashamed of the words he had uttered and the entire unfairness of his anger. He was not able, he would never be able, to explain to Olivia his anger and his shame, the ideal of physical grace and adroitness that accompanied him on these expeditions, for ever trembling in his imagination on the verge of its adolescent incarnation, lithe legs stepping delicately and surely where poor Olivia had tumbled and rolled. …

  Now, unable to speak, he looked about him blankly for some moments. It was a hollow where Pan might have fluted, completely secret and enclosed, tangled with vegetation, savage with seamed granite. A place that appeared for the moment menacing, as though ready to blast the intruder with myth.

  ‘I don’t like it very much down here,’ Olivia said. ‘I’m sensitive to atmosphere, you know.’

  The rank sweetness of thyme was in Willey’s nostrils, cicadas shrilled all around and the more solemn liturgies of bees resounded. Beyond this he could sense the stony silence of the hills. There was something exciting to him in the heat and seclusion of the place; he felt that any stealthy act could be cancelled on emergence, or left down here, rather, to vibrate for ever. In order to create a diversion he stepped nearer to one of the several umbrella pines in the dell, and looked closely at the burnished quills on which the sunlight seemed to dwell with particular care. ‘Aren’t they beautiful trees,’ he said, ‘really?’

  Suddenly, however, he heard behind him Olivia exclaim with disgust, ‘They’ve got some sort of pest in them!’ Then he saw that the boughs higher up were clothed with great white silky balls, slung hammockwise, glinting in the sun. The nearest of them was outlined against the sky, revealing a black squirming lump of life at the centre. Thousands of caterpillars moved blindly in there, which within hours probably would break through on to their green pastures.

  While he stood gazing with repugnance upward — a similar activity was taking place on all the other pines in the hollow — he became aware for the first time, in this landscape, among these trees, of a sound he had grown accustomed to in Athens itself, the sound of chipping and tapping, metal on stone, made furtive here by reason of the impossibility of tracing it to its source, and also, strangely, by the infected trees among which it was taking place. The sound of invisible construction.

  ‘I have it down here,’ Olivia said suddenly. ‘Please get me out.’

  From some perversity which he did not analyse, Willey made no immediate reply to this. He was still looking upward at the branches of the pines. Olivia began circling the hollow, too quickly, stumbling over the rocky, uneven ground. Once she tripped and nearly fell. ‘Did you hear what I said?’ she demanded furiously. ‘I want to get out.’

  Willey removed his gaze from the caterpillars and looked across at her.

  ‘You fool,’ she said loudly. ‘You fool.’ Her head was lowered as though she were about to charge him. Hair had escaped from the bun at her nape and hung over her face. Her eyes strained upward through this screen, regarding him with hatred. He was astonished. Suddenly the shrilling of cicadas seemed to intensify, grew deafening. It was very hot in the hollow, the scent of thyme was almost overpowering. He had not thought Olivia could look so baleful. Why did he not reassure her? Suddenly he knew they were not house-hunting at all, that was a pretence, they were passing some time before dying. ‘Good heavens, Olivia,’ he said.

  ‘I want to get out,’ she said.

  ‘All right,’ he said quickly. ‘This way we can get out, there, where the rock goes up, there are footholds. I’ll go first and you follow.’

  Slowly, slipping, clambering, clutching at tree roots and jutting rocks, they were able to emerge. They discovered a faint track that led further round the hillside, and followed this. For several minutes they walked on in silence. The path improved steadily. Then Willey said, ‘We must have taken the wrong path, somehow. Before, I mean. The proper path couldn’t possibly lead into that hollow, could it?’

  After a very long pause Olivia said in her normal tones, ‘Well, I think it’s very dangerous, especially for old people, don’t you?’

  ‘Extremely so,’ he said promptly.

  ‘The municipality ought to do something about it,’ Olivia said.

  He nodded. Something happened down there, all the same, he thought. Something quite important in its way, to be folded into their lives, just as the declivity itself, now lost behind them, was enfolded in these violated, doomed hills. For those few minutes they had lapsed, they had failed to accord to each other the habitual, the human indulgence. Such a thing must never happen again, he told himself. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that I’d care for a house on this side all that much, you know. Rather exposed and in the winter …’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s so far from the sea, too. Say what you like, the sea is an important consideration.’

  ‘Perhaps Old Faleron would be a good place to look,’ he said. Of course, we’d have to have a car.’

  They passed through a screen of trees to emerge, amazingly, upon a surfaced and sedate strip of road, up there, miles from anywhere, laid out dead straight, with concrete lamp-posts and a neat roundabout, running for a few hundred yards only, beginning and ending in the wilderness of the hills. The sounds of building grew more marked, echoing all around them.

  ‘You’d need a helicopter to use this road,’ Willey said. ‘Quite unrealistic.’

  Now they began to see houses, set behind trees, sugary white in the sunshine, granulated and blinding. Glimpses of paved courts and terraces, puny lemon trees in pots. Here and there the blue gleam of tiled swimming pools.

  ‘There are people living here already,’ Willey said. ‘There must be another road somewhere. … By the way, if you don’t want me to go tomorrow night, I’ll find an excuse …’

  ‘Oh, no, you must go,’ Olivia said. ‘It might lead to something quite important. Call in on your way home, if you like.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I was intending to do that.’

  8

  ‘Simpson will be all right. I keep telling you,’ Kennedy said patiently, ‘that Simpson will be all right.’

  ‘He’s more delicately balanced,’ Thorne sa
id, ‘than you or I. That’s the artist in him.’

  ‘It’s the brandy in him, I should say.’

  They were sitting in Thorne’s room having tea and biscuits. Thorne had made the tea. He was punctilious about this, warming the pot carefully beforehand, using freshly boiled water, which he poured on to the tea from a certain height. He had even acquired from somewhere a red woollen tea-cosy. Thorne’s room was an oasis of luxury and grace in Kitty’s rather sparse establishment. He had prints of English landscape paintings on the walls, a copper vase with carnations in it, even a bright red lambswool rug on the floor. And when he was bustling about in the room, Kennedy had remarked, he had an air of purpose and contentment that was not evident at other times.

  ‘You don’t understand Simpson, I’m afraid,’ he said now, creasing his pale forehead, stirring his tea.

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘He comes in here sometimes and pours his heart out,’ Thorne said.

  ‘I expect he does. Any news of the easel, by the way?’

  Thorne’s air immediately became more consequential. ‘They have given him a deadline,’ he said. ‘Within two weeks he should have either the easel or the money.’

  ‘Well, that’s good news.’

  ‘Ye-es … He’s not short for the moment. He got some money by selling his blood.’

  ‘By doing what?’

  ‘Selling his blood. At the hospital. He got three hundred drachmas for it.’

  ‘I should think Simpson’s would be mostly alcohol.’

  ‘They took it anyway.’

  ‘By the way,’ Kennedy said, ‘can I borrow another shirt? I’ve got to meet a girl this evening, and mine are all to pot.’

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  ‘And would you mind throwing in a tie with it? I haven’t a great range of ties.’

  ‘Yes,’ Thorne said, ‘you can borrow a tie.’ He looked somewhat critically at Kennedy. ‘That suit is very crumpled,’ he said. ‘And don’t you find it hot, in this weather?’

  ‘I’ll be frank with you,’ Kennedy said, ‘old boy. The reason I’m always in this suit is because it is the only suit I have. I allowed myself to get a bit down on clothes in London. My wardrobe needs replenishing, as you might say. I can’t wear the trousers without the jacket because the trousers come up high. Quite a bit higher than the waist, actually.’ He unbuttoned the jacket and opened it to show Thorne. The trousers did indeed rise considerably towards the armpit. ‘I can’t lower the braces, you see,’ Kennedy said. ‘It would make the trousers altogether too baggy round the seat and crutch. There is nothing for it but to keep the jacket buttoned the whole time.’

  ‘H’m, yes,’ said Thorne. ‘Well, it’s no good my offering you a pair of my trousers, they wouldn’t fit, and I don’t suppose Simpson … I’ll tell you what, I don’t mind ironing the suit for you, if you can wait twenty minutes or so. I’ve got an iron that I brought from England.’

  He made a very good job of the ironing, and it was a relatively resplendent Kennedy who strolled down Vassilas Sofias later that evening on his way to meet Veta. He was so conscious of his elegance that he picked a jasmine from a garden wall and stuck it in his buttonhole. And the scent of that single flower came to his nostrils intermittently throughout the evening, an element of its momentousness, marking it in his memory, during the short remainder of his life, as a time of self-surrender.

  Already the purity of evening was in the sky, and the sliver of the new moon hung there, gaining in distinctness from moment to moment as the daylight faded. He was a good three-quarters of an hour early for his assignation with Veta, whom he had arranged to meet at eight o’clock at the point where Gennadion Street opens on the lower slopes of Lycavettos — the evening slopes of Lycavettos constitute one of the very few places in Athens where concourse with the opposite sex can be enjoyed in the open air. As he walked along Kennedy debated within himself whether he should spend the interval having ouzo in the square, or whether he should go on and have a look at Lycavettos itself, climb to the top perhaps, and get a view of the city. Both of these courses seemed equally attractive. In fact, the prospect of meeting Veta gave a glow to all preliminary activities whatever. He decided to go on.

  Lycavettos rose above him, surmounted by its little white church, a cone of limestone lunging up in the centre of the city, the city’s highest point. He began the ascent, up steps bordered on either side with huge, savage cactus. But something in the activity of climbing thus, some quality of mingled pain and aspiration, more like a memory than a present sensation, almost immediately began to oppress him. The slope grew progressively more arid; lower down, clay and soil in the rifts of the rock supported some pines, and seams of pale grass and grape hyacinths; but as he climbed higher there was only the milky green cactus and the stony outcrop. There was no sound of bird or insect. The white walls of the church above him gleamed in the darkening air. At the top, where even the cactus gave out, would be the church. A recollection of an agony on a stony hill came suddenly to Kennedy, read about, sung about in quavering unwilling unison in the days of his childhood. He stopped abruptly where the steps levelled off into a terrace. Above him the church was lit now. Darkness was descending on the city and the first stars were pricking out. Beyond the city he saw the cruel sheen of the sea. Bats had begun to flit about, low over the cactus — one of those spikes could impale a bat, he thought. He wondered if it had ever happened.

  He was suddenly afflicted by feelings of loneliness and self-pity. He began to retrace his steps to the foot again and then along the flank of the hill where it descends in a long sweep, once more through pines, towards Leoforas Alexandras. He waited at the top of Gennadion Street for Veta and after a few minutes made out her form, walking quickly towards him up the street. She was a little breathless, either from the steep climb or some agitation, and at first she said nothing. They went together in silence off the road, and a little way up among the pines. Here among the trees it was very dark. They were quite concealed from anyone who might be passing in the street below.

  She stood somewhat above him, her back resting against the slender trunk of a pine; he balancing rather awkwardly on the slope, with his feet planted at different levels. He could make out the pale shape of her face above him; the rest of her was lost in obscurity. She was silent for a long time, but he could hear her breathing.

  ‘I have only a little time,’ she said at last.

  ‘It came to me just now,’ he said, ‘that I am quite alone in the world.’

  ‘You have no one in England?’

  ‘No one at all.’

  ‘I am alone too.’

  ‘So you save up your money, your gold pounds.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are saving to be married, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, it is for my prika, my dowry.’

  ‘What will you do with it?’

  ‘With one hundred gold pounds I could buy a piece of land. A small piece. To make a little farm.’

  Her face glimmered above him. The hesitancy of her speech, the frequent pauses, gave to her words a strange sort of authority, a quality almost sibylline.

  ‘But it’s taken you three years to get fifty,’ Kennedy said. The scent of his jasmine rose up to him, coupled with the heavier smell of resin from the pines. The night seemed to have opened wounds in the trees. All around him he smelled the gum of their bleeding. He succeeded in scrambling on to Veta’s level. Her face was raised to his mutely. He took her in his arms, bracing himself against the hillside, feeling her firm body against his. Again the scent of the jasmine rose to him, crushed between their bodies. He looked over her head into the darkness. ‘I will give you the other fifty gold pounds,’ he said.

  For a moment the girl said nothing and Kennedy thought she had not understood; then he felt her body stiffen and draw slightly away from him.

  ‘Plaît-il?’

  Kennedy looked blindly into the night beyond the trees. He said, ‘If it will take you anot
her three years to save the money, three years of being screamed at by the tribe of Logothetis, I tell you I will give you the fifty gold pounds.’

  ‘I cannot believe,’ she said.

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘When will you give it?’

  ‘In about ten days’ time.’

  ‘You are not saying this to me so that I will lie down with you?’

  ‘No, I will give it to you whether you lie down with me or not. It’s a promise.’

  Suddenly he heard her breath catch sharply and then her hands were behind his neck, drawing his head down, and she kissed him on the lips. Her lips did not move in the kiss, but rested on his firmly and warmly.

  ‘I will lie down with you, if you want,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I want,’ Kennedy said. ‘Of course I want.’

  ‘Now, tonight?’

  ‘Yes, now.’

  She took his hand and without any further speech they walked further up the hillside together, among the pines, further from the lights of the street. After a while they found a small level area, covered with pine-needles. Veta knelt here.

  ‘I cannot believe it, still,’ she said. Her voice was slow as ever, but it shook a little.

  Kennedy put his hands on her shoulders and pressed her back gently. ‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘I swear I mean it.’ She was obedient to his touch, as though undergoing an operation of some sort; and he was very gentle with her, holding himself in check, but he could not help giving her some pain, because she was still a virgin.

  On the wall of the taverna that faced on to the square were three birds in cages, goldfinches, all blind, as Mitsos had remarked previously. The dusk had stopped their singing, but he could hear them moving in the cages, the fluttering of wings, the occasional musical rasp of their bodies against the thin bars. The kiosk in the centre was still open, it would not close for another hour, Mitsos knew that; yellow light from inside it fell on the small, brilliant areas of colour, packets of toothpaste and razor blades, the cases of ball-point pens. From where he was standing Mitsos could see the top of the proprietor’s motionless head as he sat in there, screened by his merchandise. The smell of warm stone came to him and the cooler, more austere smell of vegetation from the two stunted orange-trees in the square. Mitsos was always grateful for nightfall now; it brought George home to his house. He was watching George, at the end of his alley, sitting outside his door on a canvas chair. There was a small lamp set against the wall above George’s head, by the light of which he was reading a newspaper. He was in shirt-sleeves, his bulk disposed comfortably, as he bent his head over the paper; and he had donned a pair of thin-rimmed glasses to read by. With the glasses on he looked benevolent and studious. Watching the man in his lonely, purely private activities had been a curious experience for Mitsos, pacifying yet painful too; it made him seem, as an adversary, more manageable, but less credible, as though somewhere in the intervening years the evil had been extracted like a sting, leaving only the sagging body, the disappointments, the asthma.