The Greeks Have a Word for It

by Barry Unsworth

  The receiver at the other end was at this point replaced. Jennings’ chin had commenced to tremble during the latter part of this conversation, and continued to do so for some time afterwards. He gazed vacantly at the bust of the dignitary, which the afternoon sun revealed to be in need of some dusting. Gradually anger succeeded to fright. Kennedy, of course, for the moment was out of reach. He pressed the bell on his desk. ‘Please tell Mr Willey that I want to see him the moment he arrives at the institute this evening. He can set his class some written work and come immediately here to me. Immediately.’

  Willey received this message as he was entering the institute and fifteen minutes later he was facing Jennings in his office. He thought Jennings was looking rather ill.

  ‘Ah, Mr Willey,’ said Jennings. His lips writhed slightly. There was a short silence. Willey was entertaining the hope that now at least Jennings was about to offer him a permanent post. It was the time of year when such decisions are made. And it must be something of importance for Jennings to have asked him to leave his class. However, there was no hint of the congratulatory in the other’s expression.

  ‘I want to ask you one question, Mr Willey,’ Jennings said at last. ‘Have you at any time been instrumental in securing private students for a person named Kennedy?’

  ‘I put him in touch with one or two people who needed lessons, yes.’

  ‘Were any of these people ambassadors?’

  ‘Ambassadors?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Willey, ambassadors. Persons accredited to foreign governments as diplomatic envoys.’

  ‘Good heavens, no. They were quite unofficial people, students.’

  ‘It might interest you to know that your friend Kennedy has grossly insulted the Swedish ambassador, claiming at the same time to be a person sent to him by us.’

  ‘I am very sorry to hear that. I should hardly call him a friend.’

  ‘It was most unwise of you to become involved with a person of his sort. You occupy a certain position here.’

  ‘I am not involved with him. He was sent to me by Mr Robinson as a person needing some help in settling in, and so on. I found him accommodation and helped him to find one or two students. I have done as much for several newly arrived Englishmen while I have been here. In fact, if I may say so, it has become the habit to send such people to me more or less automatically. I do not complain about this, but it is hard to be blamed for what they subsequently get up to.’

  ‘I regard it,’ Jennings said, ‘as your responsibility.’

  The rage under which he had been labouring since this latest outrage of Kennedy’s became extreme again as he considered Willey’s drooping but undeferential posture. With a record such as his, the man was only there at all on sufferance. How dared he take this stand? ‘Your responsibility,’ he said again, and his voice, normally so deliberate, lost key suddenly.

  ‘That is unfair,’ Willey said slowly. The hope with which he had entered the room was all gone now, leaving a sort of void within him.

  Jennings placed his fingertips together. ‘I do not know if I have ever pointed this out to you before, Mr Willey,’ he said, ‘but our position here is a delicate one. It calls indeed for something of the qualities of an, ah, diplomat. We are representing our country abroad, Mr Willey, in our persons England is being judged. It is, to use a rather distasteful modern term, our image that we must be concerned with. Now I know that you are anxious to be taken on our permanent staff here, and I have been wanting for some time to speak to you about this. There are no complaints about your teaching ability, of course, but as I say, it is not purely a teaching matter. And I have to tell you that as regards what one might call the representative nature of such a post I could not find in my conscience to make a recommendation in our case. No, I am afraid I cannot recommend you.’

  ‘I see,’ Willey said. He thought how grotesque it was that the person before him, distinguished neither in character nor intellect, should have this power over his life and happiness. How could it have happened? There must be something wrong, he could not help thinking, with the processes of society that conferred power on such a person. He became aware that Jennings was regarding him intently through the thick glasses, and found sufficient resolution to keep his head up and say steadily, ‘That is for you to decide of course, Mr Jennings, but I think I have the right to ask you whether you are basing your decision on anything Mr Kennedy has done.’

  But of course he ought to have known that the other would not fall for that. Jennings made a gesture with his plump white hands and said suavely, ‘Oh no, not at all. I have had this opinion for some considerable time.’

  ‘You’d better start looking for another locally employed teacher,’ Willey said. ‘I shan’t be available next term.’

  ‘Don’t be too hasty,’Jennings said smoothly. ‘You might find it difficult to obtain a post anywhere else. Certainly you would not find one in Athens. Think carefully, Mr Willey. Oh, by the way,’ he added, as Willey was turning to go, ‘I should like your friend Kennedy’s address.’

  As Willey emerged on to the street he saw that the sky was overcast. Before he could reach the institute he was caught in a brief but heavy downpour of rain, from which he had to take shelter in a doorway.

  ‘Everything we fought for,’ said George, who had been drunk when Mitsos entered and was drunker now. ‘Everything was taken from us, and at the time when it was in our grasp.’

  Mitsos nodded, looking over George’s lowered head at the long row of barrels down the near wall, the rough tables with their checked oilcloth covers. This was the taverna neighbouring George’s house. It was the first time Mitsos had been inside it; the other had been so long in there that he had grown anxious finally and entered, to find him alone at a table, not eating, but drinking steadily, half-kilos of kokinelli. ‘Have some more wine,’ Mitsos said. ‘Akoma ligo crasi,’ he called into the dimness at the far end of the room, and the answering ‘Amesos’ came back immediately. George raised his head and looked squarely at Mitsos with an expression difficult to read, at once confidential, mournful and slightly derisive. He had shown no surprise at Mitsos’ appearance, perhaps because of the drink; also, possibly for the same reason, he had been easily led into speaking of politics, the troubles of the past.

  ‘The Government ran away,’ he said, in his wheezing, laborious voice. ‘It was not a people’s government. The king ran away also, as he has done before. Who were those people, getting fat in Cairo, calling themselves the Greek Government? Did we fight the Germans for them? Here Greeks died. They died.’ Suddenly he slammed both fists on the table. ‘Pote tha ta feris?’ he called, his voice straining with sudden savagery. ‘When will you bring the wine, today or tomorrow?’

  ‘Amesos,’ came again the answering shout, and the waiter came padding towards them, carrying the measures of wine.

  George drank deeply. ‘That was not a government,’ he said.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Mitsos said, drinking a little of his wine, ‘that was the only official government at the time of liberation. What other government was there?’

  ‘You were not born then,’ George said. ‘What do you know? There was the will of the people.’

  ‘I was twelve years old then,’ Mitsos said.

  George shifted his bulk in the chair. ‘A child,’ he said. ‘I had friends who died, I tell you.’ He looked enraged suddenly, as though Mitsos were disputing his statement. ‘I am not lying,’ he said, with sudden clarity, and again his fists came down on the table.

  ‘My parents died during that time,’ Mitsos said softly, looking into the other’s eyes, which had grown wet with his vehemence. ‘My father was murdered, here in Athens. By Greeks, not Germans, Greeks from Epirus.’

  The moist eyes held his for a moment, then slipped away. George looked down at his glass as though in concentration.

  ‘I mention this,’ Mitsos said, removing his hands, which had begun to tremble, from the table, ‘I mention this to show that not only those
old enough to fight suffered losses.’

  The other drank again. He was blinking his eyes repeatedly, as though confused about something.

  ‘Think of it, paidi mou,’ he said. ‘Greeks shot down by Greeks in the streets of Athens, shot in the moment of victory by those who had been police for the Germans. Papandreou and his rabble approving, back, from their bolthole in Egypt.’ He opened his eyes wide at the memory of this senselessness. ‘No one could deny,’ he said, ‘what we had done. Even the Right had to admit the contribution we had made. But after that it did not pay to have been in the Resistance, the collaborators became the respectable ones, even those who had formed the security battalions, worked directly against the Resistance. They were given the jobs, the honours. We dared not speak. And even now …’

  ‘As I have understood,’ Mitsos said carefully, ‘the security battalions were recruited on a voluntary basis and there was no shortage of volunteers, because ordinary decent people were disgusted by the excesses of the guerillas. … In any case, all that is of no real interest to me. It is too abstract, too public. You suppose yourself to have suffered. I lost both my father and my mother at that time. Neither of them was yet forty years old. They were murdered, both of them, by Greeks from Epirus.’

  ‘From Epirus?’ the other said. ‘Then your father was …’

  ‘My father was a soldier,’ Mitsos said quickly. ‘Our house was in Charitos Street, number thirty-two. Now a clinic for maternity cases.’

  ‘Maternity cases?’ George said, as though incredulous.

  Mitsos attempted to smile, but his face stiffened as he looked into the other’s eyes which had widened and stared back at him now with something like curiosity or wonder, an expression which lasted a second or two only, before the eyes were lowered again to the tumbler of wine on the table before him.

  George expelled a long, slow breath. ‘Charitos Street I do not know,’ he said, but almost immediately looked up again with the same wide stare.

  Mitsos clasped his hands together under the table in an effort to stay their violent trembling. He could no longer look into the face before him, which in its heaviness seemed asserting already the inexorable gravity of decay, escaping from the bones that held it together, while the eyes above presided at this disintegration, wide open and staring, the eyes of a sick animal, neither defiant nor resigned. … The sting had been withdrawn, nothing awaited George, no shining evil before he died, but poverty, sickness and slow deterioration. …

  Not the uselessness of any present vengeance on the man had distressed Mitsos so profoundly however: he had been taken unawares by a sort of hideously self-abasing tenderness for George, a tenderness that had inclined him in the first moments of the other’s dissembling, to reach up and touch with his trembling fingers the other’s face, his eyelids, his hair; part of the reason for thus clasping and concealing his hands had been to prevent even now the perpetration of such a monstrous caress. For of course there was something he had forgotten, when he considered the intolerable parallel of their two lives: the line could be tangled together by love; and something abject and yielding in him responded helplessly to this suggestion, to the power over his life which this man or another, in a body younger and more brutal, had established all the years before. Not the man’s guilt but his own appalling subjection was confirmed, it was this he had been delaying, holding at bay …

  ‘No,’ said George in the manner of one who has considered. ‘I cannot say that I know Charitos Street.’

  ‘Kolonaki,’ Mitsos said dully. ‘Parallel with Patriarchou Joachim, higher up.’ He experienced a sensation of nausea. After some moments more he stood up. With a terrible effort he infused his tone with nonchalance. ‘I must be going, now,’ he said. The big man looked up, nodded his head slowly without speaking.

  Mitsos walked blindly out of the taverna, into the street. In his distress he walked for a long time without noticing his direction. When he began once again to take in his surroundings he found himself close to the northern flank of the Acropolis. He stood still, looking closely at a great swathe of convolvulus covering the entire side of one of the small houses with which the narrow, steeply sloping street was lined. The blue scentless bells of the convolvulus were out in great profusion. A group of children squabbling on the steps of the house opposite became silent when he stopped and looked at him curiously. Then they again began their wrangling, but now in changed voices, including him in their awareness. A cat recumbent on a low wall moved its ears and tail.

  All this time the sky had been darkening and suddenly while he stood there, not knowing what to do or where to go, it began to rain, large isolated drops at first, spattering the dust with dark stains, exciting the children to shrill celebrations, putting flight to the cat, causing the large blue flowers to tremble; increasing to a steady drumming roar, rattling on cobbles and tiled roofs. Mitsos stood still, raising his face to the rain, gasping a little at the faintly pricking coldness of the drops. Water ran into the corners of his mouth, beat on his eyelids. He sensed it falling everywhere, indiscriminately on the white city, flooding the gutters, swirling in the declivities of the street.

  The rain did not last long but after it everything was changed. There came to Mitsos as he stood there, drenched now to the skin, the abrupt carrying phrases of a bird’s song. There was a quality almost hallucinatory in the light, a sort of violence. Blue mists hung over Hymettos. The air was warm and resinous. The scent of pine and aromatic shrub washed over in waves from the Hill of the Muses and the wooded stretches at the foot of the Acropolis. Because of this shower little weeds would well up out of the stony earth, and seep into corners, a tide of green; and flowers would be revived in the cracks of the rocks. Mitsos felt all this is happening, in all the pockets of earth in the city, simultaneously.

  A man with a large basket of carnations on his shoulder entered the street at its upper end and came slowly down towards Mitsos looking from side to side at the windows of the houses. He was forced proud by his burden, deep red and shining white carnations, wet from the rain. He seemed to walk in the protection of their scent. This scent, cool and sweet, very penetrating in the rinsed air, superimposed like a pale wash over the thicker odours of revived vegetation, was always to be associated for Mitsos with the memory of this rain, the seeping green he had imagined in its wake, and the knowledge which came to him now as something revealed, not reached as a conclusion, that the man he had just been talking to must be put for ever beyond the hope of such renewals.

  10

  The note was delivered by hand of Nikos the porter to Kennedy personally, informing him that Mr Jennings would like to see him at his earliest convenience. It was a curt note, but not, on the surface, threatening. Kennedy was in an accommodating mood when he presented himself at Jennings’ office. He winked at Sophy knowingly on his way up. He had purchased recently, as a first step towards the new, leisured, cosmopolitan Kennedy he hoped to be before long, a stiff straw hat with a round crown and a bright green band. Although aware that it did not quite go with the tweed suit, he wore it constantly. He removed it now, courteously, when he entered Jennings’ office.

  He was surprised and angered by the upbraiding tone which Jennings assumed right from the start. For Jennings had determined in advance to be scathing.

  ‘How dared you, you,’ Jennings demanded with icy but undistorted modulations, ‘pass yourself off as coming from our organisation?’ He began at Kennedy’s dusty shoes and worked his gaze up slowly, pausing with a marked derogatory intention at the straw hat in the other’s hands. ‘In a court of law that would be called false pretences. The ambassador takes a very serious view of it. I take a very serious view of it myself. We are considering what further steps to take in the matter. The ambassador, I am at liberty to say, is furious. This could have serious repercussions.’

  Kennedy stared at Jennings for some moments before replying. ‘Don’t try to make an international incident out of it,’ he said at last. ‘The ambassad
or is annoyed because he is a mean old bird and he doesn’t want to pay a fair rate for lessons. You should never have agreed to fifty in the first place; you only did it because he is an important person. That is creeping, Mr Jennings. And I didn’t tell him I came from you. He might have assumed it, of course.’

  ‘You will go to the ambassador immediately and apologise.’

  ‘You must be joking,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘I shall take this matter further. From whom did you obtain this information? It was from Mr Willey, wasn’t it?’ It had not occurred to Jennings to suspect his clerk, whom he regarded as simply a vehicle for telephone messages.

  ‘Missed again,’ Kennedy said. ‘I hardly know him.’

  ‘Very well,’ Jennings said threatening. ‘Very well.’ He looked fixedly at Kennedy for a little while. He was at something of a loss as to how he should proceed. He had expected to reduce Kennedy quite quickly to a sort of loutish shiftiness and unease, but this had not happened, despite the authority of his office and the other’s complete lack of official status. It was becoming clear that this insolent and unrepentant fellow cared nothing for official status. ‘It’s no good talking to you about the spirit of service, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Has it occurred to you that we have a very special responsibility here? It is not too much to say that we represent our country. England is judged through us, Mr Kennedy. It is, to use a rather distasteful modern term …’