The Greeks Have a Word for It

by Barry Unsworth

  Nevertheless he persisted in making the association. Earlier, while it was still light enough, he had watched George watering his pansies in their neat pots along the window ledge. Seeing him there, so obviously caring for the flowers, Mitsos had been invaded by the same disbelief. The obvious wrong, the act of outrage all the years before, that was cool and reckonable, though attended with horror, so long as it could be kept firmly in the past and assessed there, like a debt. Much worse, almost unbearable now, was the very thing that had at first filled Mitsos with something like gratitude: the concurrence of their two lives, the rigid parallel lines that would go on and on for ever unless something was done to force a collision. The lines could not merge, obviously. One of them must stop then …

  His own? He had thought of suicide several times before, even in London, before he had met George. Now it presented itself as a definite solution. Now, in the cool dark, with the man before him so inoffensive, he did not feel he would mind dying. Easily it could be done, simply, the mere providing of a breach for the outside darkness to enter him, take what was in any case an inevitable possession. … The man’s mercy too could be cancelled, the idea of his murder in those yellow eyes fulfilled …

  A real hatred, stronger than anything he had felt before, rose in Mitsos. The man then was still a threat to his life. He looked up at the pale stars beyond the houses. From the taverna there came suddenly the sound of a bouzouki, and a man’s voice, raised in song: ‘Pou petaxe o agori mou?’ The birds fluttered in their cages. Mitsos glanced for the last time that evening at George, still studiously inclined over his paper. This man, then, in his own person, whether he was the same or another, was still a threat to life.

  It was a somewhat dazed but quite resolute Kennedy who descended from Lycavettos some time later, and made his way towards the institute, where Willey, he had calculated, would be just about finishing his teaching for the evening. It was by no means the first time that he had found himself in this position. Nearly all the radical changes in his life hitherto had been precipitated by one of two factors: either by getting drunk at an inappropriate time, or by committing some extraordinary rashness of generosity which forced him into courses of action previously only adumbrated in his mind. There were times when generous impulse flushed in him as ungovernable as violence, springing from his own delinquency, his basic contempt for the desired ends of life of the majority — competence, security, claims to respect other than the personal and inherent; contempt too for his own destiny. It was as though he indulged in these periodic acts of recklessness to add to the anarchy of the world. Underlying all this, however, was a deep, primitive conviction of the commonness of money, its availability to all. Like water it circulated the earth, but undammable, impossible to isolate in pools.

  This sense of fluidity involved him frequently in practical difficulties. Now, for example, because of this promise to Veta—which it would not occur to him to break — he found himself committed irrevocably, since there was no other way open to him of getting such a sum of money, to the piece of crookery that he had up till then been merely exploring. It was with a certain earnestness that he waited across the street for Willey to emerge. The next hour or so would be crucial.

  He did not have long to wait. He saw Willey’s thin dilatory form hesitate a moment under the light, and then break into a loping stride towards the square. He followed until they emerged on Vassiles Sofias and then, while Willey paused on the pavement waiting for the lights to change, he approached him and laid a hand familiarly on his shoulder. ‘Well, well, old boy,’ he said jovially. ‘We meet again.’

  Willey was obviously startled by the touch and the voice. He started somewhat, rearing back his small neat head, blinking rapidly. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said, without smiling. ‘You don’t want to take me to see any more actresses, do you?’

  ‘Ha, ha, no,’ said Kennedy. ‘She’s an interesting woman, though, isn’t she? No, what I wondered was whether you’d like a drink.’

  ‘I was just on my way to Olivia’s,’ Willey said.

  ‘A quick couple,’ said Kennedy, ‘on one’s way to Olivia’s, never did one any harm. Besides, I’ve got something I want to discuss with you. A little matter of business.’

  ‘All right, then. A quick one. We could go to the “Ellenikon” on the square.’

  ‘Just the ticket,’ Kennedy said. It all depended, really, he thought, on two things: the way they ran the examination, and the extent to which Willey wanted a permanent post. Better to begin with the carrot.

  The waiter came, took their order, returned with the drinks. Kennedy looked down into his ouzo reflectively. ‘I think,’ he said in measured tones, ‘that I’m in a position to give you a helping hand in the matter of that permanency.’

  ‘You are?’ Willey said, incredulously. The other, he noticed, had a jasmine in his buttonhole. Also he had pineneedles and odd bits of vegetation in his thick tweed suit. His hair was as usual dishevelled and he exuded a pleasant odour which Willey finally identified as resin. His round, very clear blue eyes regarded Willey steadily.

  ‘In fact,’ Kennedy said in the same deliberate tones, ‘I think I can swing it for you, I think I can honestly say that I can swing it for you.’

  ‘Oh, can you,’ Willey mumbled. He had frequently regretted having confided his situation to Kennedy. Indeed he was puzzled to know what had caused him to do it. ‘May I ask by what means?’ he said.

  Kennedy took a drink of his ouzo which left very little in the glass. ‘By using,’ he said, ‘certain influence that I possess.’

  ‘I see,’ Willey said. He felt quite blank for a moment, then suddenly a wild irrational hope possessed him. He met the reckless candour of the other’s regard. It seemed incredible that this person should have any sort of influence, with his perpetual look of having slept in his suit, but on the other hand … ‘Are you serious?’ he said.

  ‘Serious, of course I’m serious. Guaranteed.’

  ‘But how?’ said Willey. ‘What? Do you actually mean a London appointment?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘But it depends on Jennings, as I think I told you.’

  ‘True,’ Kennedy said. ‘True words, old boy, but Jennings is open to persuasion, isn’t he? I am not on what you’d call an intimate footing with Jennings, but he doesn’t strike me as a sea-green incorruptible, not at all. Anyway, I don’t want to go into details just now. But I’m telling you definitely that I can do it. Word of honour. Within one week, the wheels being set in motion, Jennings will summon you to his office and with exquisite modulations, and hate in his heart, offer you a permanent post.’ ‘My dear fellow,’ Willey said, courteously, but with much less than complete conviction, ‘my dear fellow, if that were to happen, and through your good offices, I should be for ever in your debt.’

  Kennedy drew a deep breath, ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Not for ever.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Have another drink.’

  ‘Yes, all right. What did you mean just now?’

  Kennedy paused for quite a long time before replying. Now that he had come to the hub of the matter he discovered in himself a certain reluctance to go on. It was not a scruple, in the ordinary sense: he was, he felt, offering good value to Willey. It was rather that he felt the proposition, lacking as it was in tangibility, bore down too heavily on Willey’s scruples. He had not felt this at all while negotiating with the Greeks. That was a cash transaction, and cash removed outrage: spread money round a deal and you sterilised guilt. But the price he had to demand from Willey — and Kennedy set himself conscientiously to see it from the other’s point of view — was a betrayal of trust, no less. It was tricky. Moreover, he was not quite sure that Willey could help him, even if he was willing to. He did not know yet how the pre-examination machinery worked.

  ‘You are concerned, I believe,’ he said slowly, ‘in the diploma examinations?’

  ‘Con
cerned in them? All the teaching at the institute is based on them.’

  ‘No, I mean you have something to do in the actual conduct of the examinations?’

  ‘Yes, I am one of the supervisors.’

  ‘What does that mean exactly?’

  ‘Well, there is a great number of candidates, you know, and Athens is divided into a number of examination centres. Each of these centres has a supervisor who is responsible for the way the examinations are conducted. Giving the proper instructions to candidates, seeing to the spacing of the desks, that sort of thing. He has a number of what are called invigilators to help him.’

  ‘Yes, I see. And the examination papers, they are entrusted to you, I suppose?’

  ‘They are, yes.’

  Kennedy leaned forward. ‘On the day itself?’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t …’

  ‘Are they given to you on the same day as the examination?’

  ‘No, that would not be practicable. We have to be at our centres early in the morning and they are in various parts of the city. We collect the papers on the day before. This year the examinations are on Monday and Tuesday, so I expect we shall pick up the papers on Saturday morning.’

  ‘And keep them over the weekend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All the papers for the two days?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Look here, why are you asking me all this?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in a minute. How are the question papers held together?’

  ‘They are in brown-paper envelopes, one for each subject.’

  ‘How are the envelopes fastened?’

  Willey looked at him with a completely expressionless face. ‘They are stitched along the top,’ he said, ‘with some sort of very strong thread. You’d better tell me, I think,’ he added, ‘why you have become so interested in all this.’

  ‘Would you care for another drink?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘I should like to get a look at those papers,’ Kennedy said.

  Willey smiled. ‘I daresay,’ he said. ‘So would a great number of the candidates, I fancy.’

  ‘Or better still,’ Kennedy said, ‘I should like half an hour alone in the room where you keep the papers. ‘On Saturday morning, say, as soon as possible after you return with them.’

  They stared at each other for almost a minute. Willey’s smile faded slowly. ‘You are serious, then,’ he said, in strained tones.

  ‘Yes, quite serious.’

  ‘But you must …’ Suddenly Willey blushed crimson. The smile returned, but different now, painful. He lowered his eyes. ‘You are actually asking me to … show you the papers before the examination?’ he said, in very low tones.

  ‘Not show me them, no. Oh, no. I am not asking you to do anything positive. That’s, the beauty of it, from your point of view. All I want, you see, is half an hour on my own with the papers.’

  Willey seemed to gather himself together. He raised his head and looked at Kennedy inimically. ‘How dare you ask me to do such a thing,’ he said.

  ‘Think it over,’ Kennedy said. He had been watching Willey closely and was on the whole satisfied with his reactions. That initial embarrassment had worried him, he had not understood it; the hostility was all right, though it hadn’t the warmth of moral indignation, seemed merely annoyance at being thought lacking enough in integrity to have this proposition made to him: not an emotion likely to get in the way after some pause for reflections. What he could not know was that Willey, after the first wave of shame, had been able to discover in himself no emotion whatever, and was now merely putting on a face which might be acceptable to some hypothetical observer.

  ‘It’s a genuine offer,’ Kennedy said, recalling suddenly a phrase from his encyclopaedia-selling days. ‘Think it over, old boy,’ he repeated. ‘Nothing to do for it. No risk. Wild horses wouldn’t drag your name from me. And you are guaranteed a permanent post. Put it this way: if you are offered a permanent post between now and the Saturday morning when you collect the papers, if you are definitely and officially offered it between then and now, will you agree to give me half an hour alone in the room where the papers are?’

  ‘The whole thing is absurd,’ Willey said. ‘How would I know it was through your agency?’

  ‘What does that matter to you, if you get the job?’

  Willey stood up. The consciousness that he had not borne himself in an appropriate way during the conversation was beginning to make him genuinely angry. He stood for a moment looking down at Kennedy, who had now, the proposition made, reassumed his characteristic sprawl of arms and legs. Once again the complete apparent candour of the other, the absence of any sign of shiftiness, defeated whatever further rebukes Willey might have been contemplating.

  ‘I’m going now,’ he said curtly. At least he would make a dignified withdrawal.

  ‘I wouldn’t say anything to Olivia about all this,’ Kennedy said, smiling steadily upward. ‘Women get things distorted.’

  And this made Willey angrier still, because he realised, before he had gone far, that he had already decided not to say anything to Olivia about it.

  9

  ‘A Norwegian,’ Simpson said. He winked at Kennedy and made a sort of growling or gargling sound, deep in his throat. ‘She doesn’t speak much English.’ He growled again, as though this disability formed part of the girl’s sexual equipment. He was washing his socks in Kennedy’s hand-basin, since there wasn’t one in his own room. He washed socks every day, drunk or sober, but Kennedy had never seen him actually wearing socks — it was one of several mysteries about Simpson that he had not yet plumbed.

  ‘How did you meet her?’ Kennedy said. He was getting ready to go out.

  ‘I happened to be down at Piraeus, making enquiries about my easel, that the bloody Germans lost; they lost my easel, not the Greeks, the bloody Germans …’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘She was having some trouble about collecting a trunk. I was able to help her. I am well known down there, of course, they all know me, ah, Americano …’

  ‘Bit of all right is she?’ Kennedy said, moving towards the door.

  ‘Listen,’ Simpson said. ‘I want to tell you about the other night. This girl, this Great Dane …’ He growled again and stamped lightly on the floor.

  ‘I have to go out now,’ Kennedy said. ‘I have a private lesson.’ He didn’t really like leaving Simpson alone in his room but could see no help for it.

  ‘Listen, we both had a hell of a lot to drink. I was so pissed I could hardly get my pants off. Jesus! And she just flopped on the bed and started sort of kicking about. She’s big, you know, a big ’un. All I could see were these big white hams of hers.’

  ‘Where was this, then? Not here?’

  ‘No, her hotel. Listen, I thought she’d passed out on me, but …

  ‘I really have to go,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘What a night!’ Simpson said.

  ‘See you later, then.’

  ‘I never thought I had it in me,’ Simpson said.

  ‘Did you get it in her?’ said Kennedy, leering back from the door. ‘That’s the point, old boy.’

  ‘Of course I wouldn’t do this for just anyone, Mr Dranas,’ he was saying a few minutes later. ‘But I have always thought you a very deserving case. I do not like to see such industry as yours go unrewarded …’ He spoke deliberately, keeping his head averted slightly. Practice had considerably increased the impressiveness of his delivery. At the same time his growing taste for rhetoric was making him less and less intelligible to his victims. ‘But unrewarded,’ he said, ‘I fear it might go.’

  Mr Dranas looked at him with bright, rather doe-like eyes. Kennedy was accustomed to think of him as a shy, malleable youth. He had just taken a degree in law from the University of Athens, and was now trying to get a scholarship to go to Cambridge to study criminal law. He needed the diploma badly, as a proof of his competence in English, and this was why K
ennedy had chosen him, even though he seemed poor. Play upon their fears, Kennedy had said to himself sagely.

  ‘If I give you money, you will give me answers,’ said Mr Dranas, ‘that is the meaning?’

  ‘I will give you the questions,’ Kennedy said. ‘Not the answers.’

  ‘I have not ten thousand drachmas.’

  ‘Well, how much have you got?’

  ‘Question is not that, excuse me very much, Mr Kennedy. Question is, how much I give?’

  ‘Well?’ Kennedy lost some of his noble aloofness. The initiative appeared to be passing from him. He encountered Dranas’ bright, diffident regard. ‘Well?’ he said again.

  ‘Answer to that question,’ said Dranas, with an air of mild triumph, ‘is nothing at all.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Kennedy. ‘In that case, there is nothing more to be said.’

  ‘But yes, there is. Excuse me very much.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t …’

  ‘I am not the first, I think?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Others have agreed to pay.’

  ‘Did I not say you were a special case?’