Up the Line

by Robert Silverberg

  We talked about his political career and all the wonderful things he planned to do for Sparta and for Greece. Just as I was starting to work the conversation around to the personal side, to his family background, he looked at his watch and said, “It’s time for lunch. Will you be my guest?”

  What he had in mind was a typical Mediterranean siesta, closing the office down for three hours and going home. We drove there in his little electric runabout, with the mayor himself at the steering rod. He lived in one of the gray apartment houses, like any ordinary citizen: four humble rooms on the fifth floor.

  “I’d like you to meet my wife,” Mayor Passilidis said. “Katina, this is an American newspaperman, Jud Elliott. He wants to write about my career.”

  I stared at my grandmother.

  My grandmother stared at me.

  We both gasped. We were both amazed.

  29.

  She was beautiful, the way the girls on the Minoan murals are beautiful. Dark, very dark, with black hair, olive skin, dark eyes. Peasant strength to her. She didn’t expose her breasts the way the fashionable mustachioed receptionist had done, but her thin blouse wasn’t very concealing. They were high and round. Her hips were broad. She was lush, fertile, abundant. I suppose she was about twenty-three years old, perhaps twenty-four.

  It was lust at first sight. Her beauty, her simplicity, her warmth, captivated me instantly. I felt a familiar tickling in the scrotum and a familiar tightening of the glutei. I longed to rip away her clothing and sink myself deep into her hot tangled black shrubbery.

  This was not a Metaxian incestuous wish. It was an innocent and purely animal reaction.

  In that onrushing tide of yearning I didn’t even think of her as my grandmother. I thought of her only as a young and fantastically desirable woman. A couple of ticks later I realized on an emotional level who she was, and I went limp at once.

  She was Grandma Passilidis. And I remembered Grandma Passilidis.

  I used to visit her at the senior citizens’ camp near Tampa. She died when I was fourteen, in ’49, and though she was only in her seventies then, she had always seemed terribly old and decrepit to me, a withered, shrunken, palsied little woman who wore black clothing all the time. Only her eyes—my God, her dark, liquid, warm, shining eyes!—had ever given any hint that she might once have been a healthy and vital human being.

  Grandma Passilidis had had all kinds of diseases, feminine things—prolapses of the uterus or whatever it is they get—and then kidney breakdowns and the rest. She had been through a dozen or more organ transplants, but nothing had helped, and all through my childhood she had inexorably declined. I was always hearing of some new crisis on her road to the grave, the poor old lady!

  Here was the same poor old lady, miraculously relieved of her burden of years. And here was I, mentally snuggling between the thighs of my mother’s mother. O vile impiety, that man should travel backward through time and think such thoughts!

  Young Mrs. Passilidis’ reaction to me was equally potent, although not at all lustful. For her, sex began and ended with the mayoral pecker. She stared at me not in desire but in astonishment and blurted finally, “Konstantin, he looks just like you!”

  “Indeed?” said Mayor Passilidis. He hadn’t noticed it before.

  His wife propelled us both toward the living-room mirror, giggling and excited. The soft masses of her bosom jostled up against me and I began to sweat. “Look!” she cried. “Look there? Like brothers you are!”

  “Amazing,” said Mayor Passilidis.

  “An incredible coincidence,” I said. “Your hair is thicker, and I’m a little taller, but—”

  “Yes! Yes!” The mayor clapped his hands. “Can it be that we are related?”

  “Impossible,” I said solemnly. “My family’s from Boston. Old New England stock. Nevertheless it is amazing. You’re sure you didn’t have ancestors on the Mayflower, Mr. Passilidis?”

  “Not unless there was a Greek steward on board.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “So do I. I am pure Greek on both sides for many generations,” he said.

  “I’d like to talk about that with you a little if I could,” I said casually. “For example, I’d like to know—”

  Just then a sleepy and completely naked five-year-old girl came out of one of the bedrooms. She planted herself shamelessly before me and asked me who I was. How sweet, I thought. That saucy little rump, that pink little slit—how clean little girls always look when they’re naked. Before puberty messes them up.

  Passilidis said proudly, “This is my daughter Diana.”

  A voice of thunder said in my brain, “THE NAKEDNESS OF THY MOTHER SHALT THOU NOT UNCOVER.”

  I looked away, shattered, and covered my confusion with a coughing fit. Little Diana’s fleeceless labia blazed in my soul. As though sensing that I saw something improper about the child’s bareness, Katina Passilidis hustled a pair of panties onto her.

  I was still shaking. Passilidis, puzzled, uncorked some retsina. We sat on the balcony in the bright midday light. Below, some schoolchildren waved and shouted greetings to the mayor. Little Diana toddled out to be played with, and I tousled her fluffy hair and pressed the tip of her nose and felt very, very strange about all of this.

  My grandmother provided a handsome lunch of boiled lamb and pastitsio. We went through a bottle and a half of retsina. I finished pumping the mayor about politics and shifted to the topic of his ancestors. “Have your people always lived in Sparta?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “My grandfather’s people came here a century ago from Cyprus. That is, on my father’s side. On my mother’s side I am Athenian, for many generations back.”

  “That’s the Markezinis family?” I said.

  He gave me a queer look. “Why, yes! How did you—”

  “Something I came across while I was reading up on you,” I said hurriedly.

  Passilidis let the point pass. Now that he was on the subject of his family he grew expansive—maybe it was the wine—and favored me with the genealogical details. “My father’s people were on Cyprus for at least a thousand years,” he said. “There was a Passilidis there when the Crusaders came. On the other hand, my mother’s ancestors came to Athens only in the nineteenth century, after the defeat of the Turks. Before that they lived in Shqiperi.”

  “Shqiperi?”

  “Albania. They settled there in the thirteenth century when the Latins seized Constantinople. And then they remained, through the Serbians, through the Turks, through the time of Skanderbeg the rebel, always retaining their Greek heritage against all difficulties.”

  My ears prickled. “You mentioned Constantinople? You can trace your ancestry there?”

  Passilidis smiled. “Do you know Byzantine history?”

  “Slightly,” I said.

  “Perhaps you know that in the year 1204 the Crusaders seized Constantinople and ruled it for a while as a Latin kingdom. The Byzantine nobility fled, and several new Byzantine splinter states formed—one in Asia Minor, one on the Black Sea, and one in the west, in Albania. My ancestors followed Michael Angelus Comnenus into Albania, rather than submit to the rule of the Crusaders.”

  “I see.” I was trembling again. “And the family name? It was Markezinis even back then?”

  “Oh, no, Markezinis is a late Greek name! In Byzantium we were of the Ducas family.”

  “You were?” I gasped. It was as if he had been a German claiming Hohenzollern blood, or an Englishman laying claim to Plantagenet genes. “Ducas! Really?”

  I had seen the gleaming palaces of the Ducas family. I had watched forty proud Ducases march clad in cloth of gold through the streets of Constantinople, to celebrate the rise of their cousin Constantine to the imperial throne. If Passilidis was a Ducas, I was a Ducas.

  “Of course,” he said, “the family was very large, and I believe we were of a minor branch. Still, it is something to take pride in, descent from such a family.”

  �
�It certainly is. Could you give me the names of any of your Byzantine ancestors, maybe? The first names?”

  I must have sounded as though I planned to look them up the next time I was in Byzantium. Which I did, but Passilidis wasn’t supposed to suspect that, because time-travel hadn’t been invented yet.

  He frowned and said, “Do you need this for the article you are writing?”

  “No, not really. I’m just curious.”

  “You seem to know more than a little about Byzantium.” It worried him that an American barbarian would recognize the name of a famous Byzantine family.

  I said, “Just casual knowledge. I studied it in school.”

  “Sadly, I can give you no names. This information has not come down to us. But perhaps some day, when I have retired from politics, I will search the old records—”

  My grandmother poured us more wine, and I stole a quick, guilty peek at her full, swaying breasts. My mother climbed on my knee and made little trilling noises. My grandfather shook his head and said, “It is very surprising, the way you resemble me. Can I take your photograph?”

  I wondered if it went against Time Patrol regulations. I decided that it probably did. But also I saw no polite way to refuse such a trifling request.

  My grandmother produced a camera. Passilidis and I stood side by side and she took a picture of us for him, and then one for me. She pulled them from the camera when they were developed and we studied them intently.

  “Like brothers,” she said over and over. “Like brothers!”

  I destroyed my print as soon as I was out of the apartment. But I suppose that somewhere in my mother’s papers there is an old and faded flattie photograph showing her father as a young man, standing beside a somewhat younger man who looks very much like him, and whom my mother probably assumed was some forgotten uncle of hers. Perhaps the photograph still exists. I’d be afraid to look.

  30.

  Grandfather Passilidis had saved me a great deal of trouble. He had lopped almost eight centuries off what I was already starting to think of as my quest.

  I jumped down the line to now-time, did some research in the Time Service headquarters at Athens, and had myself outfitted as a Byzantine noble of the late twelfth century, with a sumptuous silk tunic, black cloak, and white bonnet. Then I podded up north to Albania, getting off at the town of Gjinokaster. In the old days this town was known as Argyrokastro, in the district of Epirus.

  From Gjinokaster I went up the line to the year 1205.

  The peasant folk of Argyrokastro were awed by my princely garb. I told them I was seeking the court of Michael Angelus Comnenus, and they told me the way and sold me a donkey to help me get there. I found Michael and the rest of the exiled Byzantines holding a chariot race in an improvised Hippodrome at the foot of a range of jagged hills. Quietly I affiliated myself with the crowd.

  “I’m looking for Ducas,” I told a harmless-looking old man who was passing around some wine.

  “Ducas? Which one?”

  “Are there many here? I bear a message from Constantinople for a Ducas, but they did not tell me there was more than one.”

  The old man laughed. “Just before me,” he said, “I see Nicephorus Ducas, John Ducas, Leo Ducas, George Ducas, Nicephorus Ducas the Younger, Michael Ducas, Simeon Ducas, and Dimitrios Ducas. I am unable to find at the moment Eftimios Ducas, Leontios Ducas, Simeon Ducas the Tall, Constantine Ducas, and—let me think—Andronicus Ducas. Which member of the family, pray, do you seek?”

  I thanked him and moved down the line.

  In sixteenth century Gjinokaster I asked about the Markezinis family. My Byzantine garb earned me some strange glances, but the Byzantine gold pieces I carried got me all the information I needed. One bezant and I was given the location of the Markezinis estate. Two bezants more and I had an introduction to the foreman of the Markezinis vineyard. Five bezants—a steep price—and I found myself nibbling grapes in the guest-hall of Gregory Markezinis, the head of the clan. He was a distinguished man of middle years with a flowing gray beard and burning eyes; he was stern but hospitable. As we talked, his daughters moved serenely about us, refilling our cups, bringing more grapes, cold legs of lamb, mounds of rice. There were three girls, possibly thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen years old. I took good care not to look too closely at them, knowing the jealous temperament of mountain chieftains.

  They were beauties: olive skin, dark eyes, high breasts, full lips. They might have been sisters of my radiant grandmother Katina Passilidis. My mother Diana, I believe, looked this way in girlhood. The family genes are powerful ones.

  Unless I happened to be climbing on the wrong branch of the tree, one of these girls was my great-great-multi-great-grandmother. And Gregory Markezinis was my great-great-great-multi-great-grandfather.

  I introduced myself as a wealthy young Cypriote of Byzantine descent who was traveling the world in search of pleasure and adventure. Gregory, whose Greek was slightly contaminated by Albanian words (did his serfs speak Gheg or Tosk? I forget) had evidently never met a Cypriote before, since he accepted my accent as authentic. “Where have you been?” he asked.

  Oh, I said, Syria and Libya and Egypt, and Rome and Paris and Lisbon, and to London to attend the coronation of Henry VIII, and Prague, and Vienna. And now I was working my way eastward again, into the Turkish domain, determined despite all risks to visit the graves of my ancestors in Constantinople.

  He raised an eyebrow at the mention of ancestors. Energetically hacking off a slice of lamb with his dagger, he said, “Was your family a high one in the old days?”

  “I am of the Ducas line.”

  “Ducas?”

  “Ducas,” I said blandly.

  “I am of the Ducas line as well.”

  “Indeed!”

  “Beyond doubt!”

  “A Ducas in Epirus!” I cried. “How did it happen?”

  “We came here with the Comneni, after the Latin pigs took Constantinople.”

  “Indeed!”

  “Beyond doubt!”

  He called for more wine, the best in the house. When his daughters appeared, he did a little dance, crying, “A kinsman! A kinsman! The stranger is a kinsman! Give him proper greeting!”

  I found myself engulfed in Markezinis daughters, overwhelmed by taut youthful breasts and sweet musky bodies. Chastely I embraced them, as a long-lost cousin would.

  Over thick, elderly wine we talked genealogy. I went first, picking a Ducas at random—Theodoros—and claiming that he had escaped to Cyprus after the debacle in Constantinople in 1204, to found my line. Markezinis had no way of disproving that, and in fact he accepted it at face value. I unreeled a long list of Ducas forebears up the line between myself and distant Theodoros, using customary Byzantine names. When I concluded I said, “And you, Gregory?”

  Using his knife to scratch family trees into the table top at some of the difficult points, Markezinis traced his line back to a Nicholas Markezinis of the late fourteenth century who had married the eldest daughter of Manuel Ducas of Argyrokastro, that Ducas having had only daughters and therefore bringing his immediate line to an end. From Manuel, then, Markezinis took things back in a leisurely way to the expulsion of the Byzantines from Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade. The particular Ducas of his direct line who had fled to Albania was, he said, Simeon.

  My gonads plunged in despair.

  “Simeon?” I said. “Do you mean Simeon Ducas the Tall, or the other one?”

  “Were there two? How could you know?”

  Cheeks flaming, I improvised, “I have to confess that I am something of a student of the family. Two Simeon Ducases followed the Comneni to this land, Simeon the Tall and a man of shorter stature.”

  “Of this I know nothing,” said Markezinis. “I have been taught that my ancestor’s name was Simeon. And his father was Nicephorus, whose palace was close to the church of St. Theodosia, by the Golden Horn. The Venetians burned the palace of Nicephorus when they took the city in 1204. A
nd the father of Nicephorus—” He hesitated, shaking his head slowly and sadly from side to side like an aging buffalo. “I do not remember the name of the father of Nicephorus. I have forgotten the name of the father of Nicephorus. Was it Leo? Michael? Basil? I forget. My head is full of wine.”

  “It does not matter that much,” I said. With the ancestry traced into Constantinople, there would be no further difficulties.

  “Romanos? John? Isaac? It is right here, inside my head, but there are so many names—so many names—”

  Still muttering names, he fell asleep at the table.

  A dark-eyed daughter showed me to a drafty bedroom. I could have shunted instead, having learned all here that I had come to know; but it seemed civil to spend the night under my multi-great-grandfather’s roof, rather than vanishing like a thief. I stripped, snuffed the candle, got into bed.

  In the darkness a soft-bodied wench joined me under the blankets.

  Her breasts nicely filled my hands and her fragrance was sweetly musky. I couldn’t see her, but I assumed she must be one of the Markezinis’ three daughters, coming to show how hospitable the family could be.

  My palm slid down her smoothly rounded belly to its base, and when I reached the junction of her thighs, her legs opened to me, and I found her ready for love.

  I felt obscurely disappointed at the thought that Markezinis’ daughters would give themselves so freely to strangers—even a noble stranger claiming to be a cousin. After all, these were my ancestors. Was my line of descent muddied by the sperm of casual wayfarers?

  That thought led logically to the really troublesome one, which was, if this girl is really my great-great-multi-great-grandmother, what am I doing in bed with her? To hell with sleeping with strangers—should she sleep with descendants? When I began this quest at Metaxas’ prodding, it wasn’t really with the intent of committing transtemporal incest—but yet here I was doing it, it seemed.

  Guilt blossomed in me and I became so nervous that it made me momentarily impotent.

  But my bedmate slithered down to my waist and restored my virility with busy lips. A fine old Byzantine trick, I thought, and, rigid again, I slipped into her and pronged her with gusto. I soothed my conscience by telling myself that the chances were two out of three that this girl was merely my great-great-multi-great-aunt, in which case the incest must surely be far less serious. So far as blood-lines went, the connection between myself and any sixteenth-century aunt must be exceedingly cloudy.