Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

The Son

IT’S TRUE: EVERYTHING CHANGES. WHAT you think you know, you don’t know. What’s good or bad at one time isn’t good or bad at another. Once I cut off the fingers of my own mother. You don’t believe me? It was during the war in Athens. She was dead. She was dead because there was nothing to eat. And we younger ones were too conscious of our own empty bellies to waste time grieving. There were three fat rings on Mama’s fingers — rings to barter for food. But Mama’s knuckles were swollen and you couldn’t get the rings off by pulling. So, because I was the oldest and expected to make decisions, I got hold of the bread knife …

Thirty-five years ago I chopped off the fingers of my own mother. And now I chop onions in a restaurant. I don’t like the way the world’s going. Thirty-five years ago the Germans killed Greeks for no reason at all, cut off their hands and put out their eyes. And now, every summer, they flock to Greece in the thousands, take snap-shots of the white houses and the smiling men on donkeys and suffer from sun-burn.

But it’s Adoni who tells me about the Germans and their cameras. How should I know about Greece? I haven’t been there for thirty years.

What do you do when your country is in ruins, when a war’s robbed you of a father, then a mother, and of a nice future all lined up for you in the family business? You do what any Greek does. You find a wife who’ll go halves with you; you get on a boat to New York or England, where you’re going to open a restaurant. In five or ten years, you say, when you’ve made your pile, you’ll go back to Greece. Twenty years later, when you’ve only just saved enough money to open that restaurant, and you know there’s no money in restaurants anyway, you wake up to the fact that you’re never going to go back. Even if you were offered the chance you wouldn’t take it.

Yes, I want sunshine. I’m a Greek. What am I doing in the Caledonian Road? I should be sitting in one of the big, noisy cafés on Stadiou or Ermou, clicking my beads and reading To Vima. But that’s how it is: You’re made for one soil, but you put down roots in another and then you can’t budge.

And why do I say “Greek”? There are Greeks and Greeks. I was born in Smyrna in Asia Minor. When I was a tiny baby, only a few months old, I was bundled with my parents onto a French ship, because another bunch of butchers, not the Germans this time but the Turks, were burning Greek houses and lopping off the heads of any Greeks they could catch.

Yes, that’s the way it is: We’re born in confusion and that’s how we live.

I can hear Anna clattering in the kitchen below. She’s talking to Adoni just as if nothing has happened, everything’s the same. It’s funny how women can make changes; it’s men who are obstinate. “Go and lie down, Kostaki mou,” she says. “You’re tired. Leave the clearing up to Adoni and me.” And so I climb the stairs, take off my shoes, my trousers and shirt and lie down in the cramped bedroom from which we can never quite get rid of the smell of food — just as I do every day for a half hour or so between when we shut after lunch and when we open again in the evening. But, today, a little longer.

Tired. Why shouldn’t I be tired? Yesterday — what a day! — I had to get up early to meet Adoni at the airport. Then we didn’t get to bed till nearly three in the morning. And then, these last two weeks, I’ve had to work extra hard because Adoni suddenly takes it into head to have a holiday. In Greece. After thirty-five years, he wants to have a holiday.

Adoni, Adoni. Who could have given him that name that sounds so preposterous in English? Adonis. It wasn’t us who gave it him. Though Adoni was none the wiser. Adonis Alexopoulos, son of Kosta and Anna; born, Athens, 1944; and carried away by his parents — just as I was carried away from Smyrna — to a new land. How was he to know that his real father was in some mass grave in Poland and his mother had died bringing him into the world? He was taken in by Anna’s family, who lived only a block away from us in Kasseveti Street and just a stone’s throw from where Adoni’s real parents — whose name was Melianos — had lived. Anna said when we got married we’d adopt Adoni as our own son. I wasn’t sure if what she meant was: If you want me, then you’ll have to take Adoni too. But I agreed. I thought: All right, Anna can have Adoni and sooner or later I’ll get a real son of my own. But what Anna never told me was that she couldn’t have babies. She was an only daughter and all four of her would-be brothers had been still-born monsters.

What a shameful thing for a man to live thirty-five years not knowing that his parents are not his parents at all. But what a worse shame for a man to have to be told. We always said: When he is old enough we will tell him. But “old enough” always seemed to be just a little bit older. What you put off starts to become impossible. We even began to kid ourselves: He really is ours; he isn’t anybody else’s.

Perhaps there’s a curse on adopted children. Perhaps the fact that they don’t have any real parents comes out, not consciously, but in the sort of stunted way they grow up. What did he become, this Adonis of ours? Slow at school, bashful with the other kids; silent; secretive. Every year we waited for him to bloom like a little flower. We said to ourselves: One day he will start chasing the girls; one day he will stay out at night and not come home till late; one day he will stand up and row with his father and say, I want nothing to do with this crazy idea of opening a restaurant, and slam the door on us. I actually wanted these things to happen, because that’s how real sons behave with their fathers.

But none of it happened. At eighteen, when we buy the restaurant, and when he’s still as chaste and sober as a monk, he puts on a waiter’s jacket without so much as a murmur. He learns to cook dolmades and soudsoukakia. He gets up early every morning to clean up from the night before and to go and order meat and vegetables, and when he does this he doesn’t swop jokes with the traders, he simply sticks out a big, podgy finger at what he wants. In the evenings, he doesn’t prance and scurry like a waiter should; he lumbers between the tables like a great bear. For even in appearance this Adonis is a rebel to his name. His flesh is pale and pasty; at thirty-five he has the thick build of a man twenty years older. When I make introductions to some of my more enthusiastic customers, when I say, like a proud Greek restaurant owner should, “This is my wife Anna, and this is my son Adonis” (for I’ve told that lie to half of Camden), I see a snigger cross their faces because the name is so absurd.

“Adonaki,” I tell him, “try to use a little charm — you know, charm.” But it’s no use trying to make that pudding face sparkle. I shouldn’t complain: he works hard; he doesn’t spill food or make mistakes over the bills; he pulls corks out of bottles as if he’s plucking feathers. And I’m the one who, over the years, has learnt to provide charm. In the evening I’m all smiles. I joke with my customers; I put a sprig of herbs behind my ear — so I can imagine them saying about me: That Kosta in the restaurant, he’s a character. And even though I lie in bed in the afternoon, in my yellowed vest, like a great lump of dough, yet, come opening time, I never fail to play my part and give a twinkle to my eyes. We Greeks are like that: We come alive, we perform, like drooping flowers splashed with water.

Anna is coming up the stairs. The stair-case creaks. She is heavier even than me. She’ll take her lie-down. But Adoni won’t lie down. He’ll sit in the restaurant with his feet up on one of the chairs, smoke a cigarette and read the newspaper or one of his books from the library—Mysteries of the Past, The Secret of Mind-Power—slowly and methodically. Though he’s slow, he likes asking questions, that boy. And he finds out the answers. Oh yes. Give him time, he’ll find out about everything.

Anna waddles into the bedroom. I pretend that I’m asleep, though I watch her with one half-closed eye. She kicks off her shoes, then her fat arms grope to undo her dress. It falls off her without her having to help it, like a monument being unveiled. In her slip she is like a huge pale blancmange inside a white, diaphanous wrapping. She shuffles around to her side of the bed, winds and sets the alarm-clock. She always does this in case we oversleep. But I’ve never known a time when she wasn’t awake and heaving herself onto her feet without the alarm having to remind her. She’s like that: She does what has to be done. That vast body of hers is built for sweating in the kitchen and scrubbing pans. We men, we like our fancies, our bit of hot spice in a skirt, but where would we be without these great work-horses to pull us through?

She settles down next to me and she sees that I’m not really asleep. I open my eyes. “It doesn’t matter, Kostaki,” she says. “It doesn’t matter. Who are we anyway?”

Her body smells of warm grease and scouring powder. How can it be that that womb of hers — which can now produce nothing — would have once produced not men but deformities? How can it be that she has grown into this vast flesh-mountain? And yet once — it doesn’t seem possible — in the scrubby bushes on Hymettos, when I was a dolt of eighteen, she said, “Ela pethí mou,” and pulled my hand between her legs.

Sometimes I wonder what Adoni thinks of women. I swear, at twenty-five he’d never touched one. I used to say to him, every other night, “You take the evening off, Adoni, Anna and I can manage,” so as to give him the opportunity; but he’d shrug, shake his head and carry on skewering kebabs. Then we started to hire waitresses. It’s a good idea, if you can afford it, to hire pretty waitresses. It attracts customers, apart from easing the load. But my real reason for hiring waitresses was to encourage Adoni. I’m an immoral old man. First there was Carol, then Diane, then Christine, but Christine was the best. After we closed at night I used to get Anna to go to bed early. I’d go with her, and leave Adoni and the waitress to clear up. I’d lie in bed with one ear cocked, thinking: “It’s all right, Adoni, don’t have any qualms. Take your chance. Live up to your name. Don’t you want that little Christine? Doesn’t she make your blood hot? Take her up to your room and screw her for your Mama’s and Father’s sake — we won’t mind.” But nothing ever happened. And to make matters worse, I couldn’t resist, after a time, clapping my hand, more than once, on that Christine’s bottom, and poking my finger down the front of her blouse. And though no one else ever knew about it, she gave her notice, and the next waitress we got — perhaps it was just as well — was a mousy thing with a perpetual sniff.

Adoni approached his thirtieth birthday. I began to be ashamed of him. This son of mine — he wasn’t a man, he wasn’t a Greek; he wasn’t anything. But there I go again: “this son of mine.” What right did I have to that sort of shame? What right did I have to the fatherly luxury of wanting my own son to have a little more pleasure in his youth than I’d had in those miserable, famished years in Athens? The truth is I wanted a real son, the son I’d been tricked out of, not this wooden substitute. But Anna was menopausal. I was menopausal too. Sometimes I wept.

And then I began to think: It’s a punishment. It’s because we never told Adoni in the first place. If we’d told him, perhaps he’d have developed in a normal way, because at least he’d have known who he was. But there’s no hiding a fraud when it’s a matter of blood. I started to think: Perhaps he knows, perhaps he’s worked it out by some sort of sixth sense and it’s he who’s punishing us. Because we’re not a true mother and father to him, he’s behaving as if he’s nothing to us. I said to myself: Any moment he’s going to come out with it: “Anna, Kosta, I can’t call you Mother and Father any more.” And how could I have forestalled him? By saying to him, “Adoni, you’re thirty-three now — it’s time you were told something”? I began to look for signs of suspicion, of rebellion in him. He only had to show the slightest coolness to Anna — if he was slow to answer her when she spoke, for example — and I’d fly into a towering rage.

Ach! Did I say I was menopausal? Did I say I was paranoid?

And then — what happens? Adoni asks for time off. He starts to go out at night, and in the afternoons too. “Of course,” I say. “Take a whole day off — have a good time.” And I start to breathe more easily. I don’t say anything more, but I look for signs. Is he using a lot of after-shave? Is he slicking his hair? Is he trying to lose some of that premature fat and learn some modern dance steps? And I think: When the moment is ripe I’ll say to him, Here, come and sit down with me, have a brandy. Now tell me, who is this nightingale? But I don’t smell any after-shave; and though Adoni goes out at night he doesn’t come home late; there are no stars in his eyes; and I see him, sometimes, reading these big books, the kind you blow the dust off.

“Adonaki,” I say, “what do you do when you go out?”

“I go to the library.”

“What the hell do you go to the library for?”

“To read books, Baba.”

“But you come in at ten and eleven. The libraries don’t stay open till then.”

He lowers his eyes, and I smile. “Come on, Adoni mou, you can tell me.”

And I’m surprised by what he says.

“I go to the Neo Elleniko, Baba.”

I’ve heard of the Neo Elleniko. It is a club in Camden for so-called expatriate Greeks. It is full of old men who tell tall, repetitious stories and like to believe they are melancholy, worldly-wise exiles. They are all trellí. What is more, two thirds of them aren’t Greeks at all. They are crazy Cypriots. I’ve no time for the Neo Elleniko.

“What do you want with all those old madmen?”

“I talk to them, Baba. I ask them questions.”

Now it’s my turn to drop my eyes. So Adoni really is playing the detective. He wants to have answers. Is there a gleam in his eye? Maybe some of those old fogies at the Neo Elleniko were around in our neighbourhood in Nea Ionia during the war, or maybe they know people who were. He’s trying to get at the truth.

“They won’t tell you anything but vlakíes.” Spittle comes to my lips.

“Why are you angry, Baba?”

“I’m not angry. Don’t call me ‘Baba.’ You’re not a kid.”

He shrugs. And suddenly his round, waxy, somehow far-off face seems the face of just another man, a man who could be my age — someone you meet over some minor transaction, shake hands with, then forget.

“All right. If you like the company of old men — if there aren’t any better things to do — you go to the Neo Elleniko. Don’t ask me to come too.”

This was in the spring. I tell myself: It’s only a matter of time. I feel like a guilty criminal. What are we going to tell all those people we’ve told Adoni is our son? Anna says, “Don’t worry, glikó mou. Nothing will happen. It’s all in the past. It’s too late for anything to change.”

And then, some time in July, he says: “Father, I want to take a holiday this summer. You don’t mind? All these years I haven’t taken a holiday.”

I look in his eyes for any extra meaning.

“Okay — if you want to take a holiday, take a holiday. Where are you going?” But I know the answer to this one.

“I want to go to Greece, Baba.”

And so he buys his air tickets and a suitcase and lightweight clothes. He can afford all this, with all the money he hasn’t spent on women. And what can I do to stop him? I even envy him — stepping off the plane at Glyfada into that syrupy heat.

His holiday is fixed for a fortnight in September. I become resigned. Let him go. He’s thirty-five. It’s fated. Like King Oedipus he’s got to ask these fool questions. He’s got to find out where he came from.

And Anna says: “Why do you look so miserable, Kostaki? Our little Adoni — so serious, so sovaró—he’s going to take a holiday. He wants a little sunshine.”

The alarm goes. Anna is already up, buttoning her dress. I haven’t slept a wink. I raise myself and scratch my belly. Soon, we shall have to go through it all again, the old nightly ritual. Anna’s fat hands will garnish salads. Adoni will lollop round the tables. And I will have to pretend once again I’m Zorba the Greek.

Outside it’s raining. Anna hoists up her sleeves like a workman. In England now it’s already autumn. But in Athens the nights are still like ovens and the pavements smell like hot biscuits.

So I get up at four to meet him at the airport, my heart beating, like a man in a cell awaiting his trial. I see him come out of Customs, and I can tell at once — there’s something about the way he walks — that he knows. I can’t kid myself any more he’s a son of mine. But I hug him and clap him on the shoulder just like a father should, and I think of all those scenes in which fathers meet sons who have been away a long time, in far-off lands, at sea, at war, and I don’t look straight at Adoni in case he sees the wet glint in my eyes.

“Eh, Adonaki — you look well. Did you have a good time? Tell me what’s it like. Did you go to Vouliagmeni? Sounio? Did you get the boat to Idra? Eh, tell me, Adoni mou, the Athenian girls, are they still—” I raise my hand, fingers and thumb together “—phrouta?”

“My suitcase, Baba—” he blinks as if he never meant to say that word, and he slips free of me to go to the luggage escalator.

In the car I’m waiting for him to spit it out. I can see it’s there nudging at his lips. Okay, so you’ve been nosing around in Nea Ionia, you’ve been asking questions. You haven’t been on holiday at all. Say it. Get it over with, for God’s sake. But he doesn’t say it. Maybe he’s scared, too, to speak. Instead, he tells me about Athens. There are these tourists everywhere, and nowhere to get a decent meal in the centre of town. Vouliagmeni? Yes. It crawls with close-packed bodies and you have to pay to get on a clean piece of beach. Idra? It’s full of Germans, clicking their cameras.

And I realise the delapidated but companionable Greece I knew — and which Adoni knew, via my memory — isn’t there any more.

“And the girls, Adonaki?”

Later that same day he gets back into his waiter’s outfit, starts slicing the bread and pulling the corks, just as if he’d never been away. I’m still waiting for him to pluck up the courage. We keep eyeing each other as we pass each other with plates, and Anna looks at me anxiously in the kitchen.

But it’s not until we’ve closed for the night that the moment comes. For I wasn’t mistaken: I knew it had to come. We’re sitting in the empty restaurant, sipping coffee, asking Adoni about Athens. And suddenly something Adoni says sets Anna going. Her eyes glaze. She starts remembering Nea Ionia before the war: the old balconied houses, the families along her street, the Vassilious, the Kostopoulous, the one-eyed fig-seller, Trianda-philos. I look at her ferociously. She must know this is like a cue. But perhaps she means it as a cue.

“As to! Koutamares! Go and make some more coffee!”

Anna shuffles off, and I know the time has come — and I know Anna will be waiting, ears pricked as she stands by the stove, until it’s passed.

He lights a cigarette.

“Do you know? — I went to see if I could find Kassaveti Street. It’s still there, though all the building’s new. And — do you know? — I even found one of the Vassilious — Kitsos Vassiliou, he’d be a little older than me. And he told me where I could find old Elias Tsobanidis. Do you remember him?”

Yes, I remember. He seemed about seventy when I was only a boy. I’m staggered he’s still alive.

He toys with his coffee cup. There’s a silence like a huge weight tilting.

“You know what I am going to say, don’t you?” Suddenly his face seems no longer puddingy and soft but made of something like stone.

“Yes, yes. Say it. Say it! Say it!”

“Elias Tsobanidis told me — or he said things so that I could work it out — that my real name isn’t Alexopoulos — it’s Melianos. My mother died when I was born and my father died in the war.”

“It’s true, it’s true. It’s the truth!” I wish I could blubber like a sinful old man.

“Forgive me, Adonaki.”

But he looks at me with that hard, determined face — where has he acquired that from? He draws on his cigarette. His big fingers are leathery and blunt. And suddenly it seems not just that he’s a grown man but that he’s old, he’s lost the youth he never had.

He puts down his cigarette, leans forward across the table, and then he says, cool as ice:

“Elias told me something else too. You know that what Elias says must be the truth, don’t you? He said your name is not Alexopoulos either. The Alexopouloses were neighbours of your parents in Smyrna — they were in the tobacco business — and they were the ones who got you onto the refugee ship. Your mother and father were killed when the Turks burnt the city.”

I look at him as if he is a ghost. I notice that Anna is standing in the doorway. She too looks like a ghost and she is looking at me as if I am a ghost.

We’re all ghosts. But at the same time I know, I see it as plain as anything — we’re all going to carry on just as before, performing our rituals in the restaurant as if nothing has changed, pretending we’re people we’re not.

“Elias Tsobanidis is an old liar!” I start to yell, to this “son” I’ve lied to all my life. “An old liar! An old liar!”

Tell me, who are we? What’s important, what isn’t? Is it better to live in ignorance? All my life I’ve felt guilty because I chopped off my mother’s fingers, and now I learn it wasn’t my mother at all. Ach! And two of those heads the Turks lopped off in Smyrna, two of them belonged to my father and mother.

Aiee! I don’t like the way the world’s going.