Nightspawn

PART THREE

Before I move at last into the real grit and gristle of things, I have a little riddle. Perceive. One word, three syllables. The first is a wager. The second is a fish. The third is one third less than everything, and the whole is my theme. What is it?

Now I may proceed.

For all they tell one, there is really not very much variety in the world. Hills and dales, plains and seas, they are all much like one another; only in what is situated against their backdrops do they differ, and even that difference is not so great as one imagines. I do not speak of that abundance of squirming life which the maniacal scientist, with his pins and poisons, can detect upon two twin stalks of grass. No, I cannot believe in that unreasonable and grotesque underworld. I am talking of scenes and situations, meetings upon mountain paths, the child’s return, again and again, in five different continents, to the same scene of that crime by which he was conceived. On an afternoon full of soft sunlight and the cicada’s song, I climbed another hill toward another white wall, but this time, no music awaited me, none of love’s tuition. And yet …

In the courtyard before the main building, in the centre of that waste of packed brown dust, a single undernourished tree stood trapped in a metal cage or corset. I pulled the bell beside the massive door and heard it jangle afar, then waited with my hands in my pockets and looked at the tree. I could understand why one would come to rest here. The door groaned as it was drawn slowly open, and a little priest, with a full black beard and bright black eyes to match, ushered me into the hall. In the dimness there, the air was cool, traversed by slanting blades of ruby and blue light from a stained-glass window somewhere above me. There was a wide stairway which curved up to an empty landing. A low chair stood below the banisters. Ikons adorned the walls. The place had that androgynous dull atmosphere which marks the total absence of women. I was sent into a long high room, in the centre of which a huge rectangular table squatted. A window looked out through pillars into the unreal brilliance of the sunlight in the courtyard. There was that tree again, looking sad and innocent, as these things will, trying to disclaim the fact that it had scurried around here, cage and all, just to catch again my sentimental gaze.

I turned. Erik stood in the doorway, one hand on the knob, the other lifted hesitantly to his jaw. We said nothing. He tried to smile, but it was a poor effort, and he looked down at his feet. Embarrassment and shame, inexplicable though they were, lay between us. He looked awful, had lost weight, and his shoulders seemed to droop lower than ever, a dirty white shirt hanging from them like something left forgotten overnight on a clothesline. His sunken jaws were coloured a bluish grey, and on his nose, which the retreating flesh had left exposed almost to the roots, three large freckles lay in startling isolation. Behind the ugly spectacles, his eyes seemed smaller and redder than I remembered. I must have gasped, for he glanced at me quickly, and grinned, as if to say that this was nothing, that he could and would look worse. I have always felt that the little genes must have thrown up their hands in despair, and abandoned the job, halfway through Erik’s making. He closed the door and came toward me. His walk too had changed, and the springs which had given it that funny bounce seemed now to have gone slack. He shuffled like an old man. He wore a pair of incongruously gay yellow slippers, with Turkish toes that pointed up at him in something like amused derision. I think I put my fingers to the table to support myself in my shock, as they do in the films. It was some relief to find that Erik was laughing at me silently, walking down the length of one wall and glancing at me now and then from the corner of his eye. But we must have spoken, we must have said something by then.

‘Erik. How are you? You look terrible.’

‘Fine, I am fine.’

‘They said that this was a hospital, that you were in hospital.’

‘It is, a kind of hospital.’

‘But why are you here?’

He lifted an imaginary glass to his lips, emptied it, and smiled his crooked smile. I noticed for the first time that one of his side front teeth was missing. That black rectangular gap among the yellow restored to him for a moment his strained, funny ferocity. He said,

‘I fell through a window at that party. Were you there?’

‘Yes. You jumped through a window.’

He shrugged.

‘I do not remember. Kyd brought me here, unconscious, and now they will not let me free. Will you help me?’

‘Maybe you should stay here for a while. Have you been drinking all that much?’

‘More than that, my friend. Have you not noticed how like a bottle I am beginning to look?’

‘Aye, very like a bottle.’

I smiled, and shook my head, and pulled out a chair from the table, but as I made to sit down, he cried, with false heartiness,

‘Come up to my room, come.’

In the hall, we met another priest, a great brown brute of a man with a thick coat of fur on the backs of his hands. Erik said,

‘Papa, this is my friend, Ben White. Papa Iakavos.’

The priest inclined his square head toward me, and let fall through his large white teeth a stream of Greek which was unintelligible to me. I smiled, and nodded, and he left us. We went up the stairs, and Erik said,

‘Iakavos is a good man, you’ll like him.’

‘Eh?’ He did not pause, but looked down at me with a trace of appeal in his eyes.

‘I thought you might come and stay here for a while? I am told that Mrs Kyd and you …’

‘Now how do you know about that?’

‘I told you before, I know everything.’

A flash of the old Erik. We went on up the steps. It was a slow ascension. There was a long strip of gauze plastered to the back of his neck, in the centre of which lay an awful, dark little spot of blood. I said,

‘I see that window left its mark on you.’

‘Marks,’ he laughed. ‘Marks.’

He turned and peeled back his lip to show me that gap in his teeth.

‘I noticed that,’ I said. ‘Adds a certain something to your face.’

He nodded soberly. Some distressing notion seemed to have struck him. At the top of the stairs, a white stone corridor swallowed us, and halfway down it, Erik pushed open one of the anonymous narrow doors which were so flat and characterless that they seemed to have been painted on the wall. His room was a stark cell, with an iron bed, one chair, a tiny desk. Not a speck of dust disturbed the paranoiac neatness. In such a stifling bareness, the open window drew us to it immediately. Below was the courtyard, with two black priests pacing the dust; there was the high wall, and an open arch framing a view of pines and the sunlit city.

‘They say that wall is four feet thick,’ Erik mused.

‘To keep out the Turks.’

He laughed softly.

‘And the Germans too, perhaps, yes? An irony.’

I pulled up the chair, and Erik sat on the bed. He arranged his hands on his knees with care, watching them as though he were nervous of leaving them to their own devices.

‘What was going on that night?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘At the party, when you jumped through that window? Don’t you remember?’

‘No.’

‘I opened this door, and found Julian ready to beat the shit out of Andreas and your friend the Colonel with a big stick. What was the argument?’

‘I do not know. What did Andreas say?’

‘I didn’t ask him,’ I said.

‘Aristotle is threatening this man Kyd with … I don’t know, something to do with his business interests here in Greece. I don’t know.’

‘I saw him the other day.’

‘Who?’

‘Aristotle. He telephoned me, and told me to come and see him. When I went, he said nothing, but I got the impression that he was passing on a warning. He told me to get out of Greece. I don’t suppose he knows anything, does he?’

‘He knows everything, except that most important little thing.’

I gaped at him.

‘Jesus. How did he find out?’

Erik grinned.

‘I told him. Oh don’t shout at me. Do you never think? Do you never sit down and consider? Why are we still free, after the blunders we made? Someone has to … protect us.’

‘And what does he get in return for his protection?’

‘What do you think he gets in return?’

‘He said he’d kill you, that day on the island.’

‘Did he?’

He put his hands over his face, and gave a great sigh of weariness. I said,

‘Erik, Erik, what are you doing here in this awful place?’

His head jerked up, and he stared at me in genuine surprise. I waved my hands at our surroundings, lost for words. He moved his feet, and made a sucking sound through that gap in his teeth. I was curious to know what had happened to him in the last year, what awful events had brought him to this state where he was nearly broken; but yet, paradoxically, it was an effort for me to inquire.

‘I am happy here, ‘he said, that word not fitting too well in his damaged mouth. ‘When you stop drinking, you become aware of things once more. I find something, a flower, and I am like a … a young girl, pressing it to my cheek. Oh yes, you would be sickened with me now. I have projects. My file, let me show you my file.’

He went to the desk and drew from it a tattered cardboard folder bulging with papers, and laid it on my knees.

‘A file against humanity,’ he said. ‘I have so much time now, I read newspapers, all I can find. I am astonished by the things which are reported. All my life I have dealt with the big issues, and never cared to look at the trivial things. Now … Look here, look. Mother murders … couple torture … children killed by ….’

He was like a child himself, but this toy was spattered with blood and bits of bone, and reeked of the world’s carnage. He pounced upon a choice morsel, a clipping from a German newspaper, and began to translate it for me with frightening gusto. A fine spray of spit descended on my wrist. I put my hands over my ears, and cried,

‘Stop, Erik. Stop.’

He fell immediately silent, and went back to sit on the bed in that lost, piteous attitude. I laid down that bag of blood on the floor beside me, and, as gently as I could, I asked,

‘What are you hiding from, Erik?’

He did not answer. We looked through the window. The distant mountains trembled. The day was dying. We sat for a long time without speaking. Then Erik said,

‘I want …’

His voice faded off into the enormity of an inexpressible longing, and I did not discover what it was that he wanted. I was never to discover it. Strangely, that unfinished statement obsesses me yet. I probe again and again into his file against humanity, which I still have, but it gives me back only death and devilry.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Will you get me out of here, get me out for just one night?’

‘You want to drink?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d be a fool to help you to do that.’

‘Be a fool. I must have one night of freedom, Ben. Do that for me.’

‘Erik.’

‘Jesus Christ, do you want me to beg, on my knees? I will, if that will move you.’

‘All right. What do you want me to do?’

I was to walk ahead of him and make sure that the way was clear; he did not need me to enable him to escape, but I think he needed me to keep his courage intact. I should not have done it. God knows, I should not have done it.

We caught the city in a moment of magnificence, as the violet light of evening crept down from the crown of Mount Hymettus and set a soft, trembling fire among the pure white buildings, the ancient streets. The shoeshine boys were busy, preparing their clients for the night’s strolling, and young girls flitted in waves of excitement across the squares, their eyes flashing, faces flushed with the nameless possibilities surely to be met under the stars. Erik, high on freedom and the evening air, smiled on it all with a sad, gentle smile, on all that he would lose, was already losing. And Athens, like the exquisite whore that she is, laid herself before him with that look, all violet, gold and white, saying, farewell.

We went drinking. I could not keep him from it. I did not try. He was so happy, so deliriously, relievedly, carelessly happy, that I had not the courage to hold him back from all those bottles, in the amber and clear depths of which the last possibilities of his life lay. We moved from bar to bar, at first purposefully, with great big grins on our faces. I had never felt so at ease in his company. We stopped somewhere in the Plaka to consume a fearful mess of eggplant and crushed meat, which Erik said would see us right through the night’s drinking. He was pleased with that phrase. See us right, he kept repeating, chuckling, shaking his head.

From the Plaka, we crawled down to Syntagma Square, descended steps in a crevice behind a hoarding, and in the low Aladdin’s cave which we found there, we came at last to rest. It was an odd dive. The woman behind the bar turned out to be a man, or, to put it another way, the man behind the bar was turned out to be a woman. Its name was Fatima, and it stood with one stout, faintly furred arm laid upon the gleaming counter, turning its powdered head this way and that, like some great friendly awkward bird, flinging lewd remarks at the habitués, and squawking at new arrivals. As to the customers, it would take a textbook to cover the variety. I wondered how they could talk and talk and talk, exhaustively, sincerely, about nothing, for such long unbroken periods. The lights were dim, so dim that they hardly deserved their name. I remember mirrors, countless mirrors, and a million tiny crystals of glass which bent and twisted the glow from the bulbs, and laid down a ceaseless undertone of tinkling music beneath the high-pitched chatter. It was a pretty place. I liked it, god forgive me. Erik and I sat face to face across a little table, grinning at each other and chewing the rims of our glasses in that fatuous, inane attitude which marks the emergence from the far side of total drunkenness into a state where trivia impinge on the brain like explosions of supernatural grace. I must have been very far gone, for at one point, late in the evening, I found that, unnoticed by me, we had been joined by a third party: Colonel Sesosteris sat motionless between us, a billious Buddha, staring at his hands, which lay lightly folded in the centre of the table, as though he were wondering to whom they might belong.

‘Hello,’ I cried. ‘The marines have arrived.’

The old man turned his gloomy gaze toward me, but it missed, somehow, and settled on a piece of wall beside my ear.

‘Marines?’ he said.

‘In a manner of speaking. Tell me, sir, how are you doing, I mean really, how are you doing?’

His lips twitched (it might have been a smile) and he turned to Erik and asked,

‘How did you get out?’

Erik grinned, and gestured with his empty glass at me.

‘My friend tore up his shirt, tied it into a rope and lowered me down the wall. How do you think I got out? I walked through the gate.’

Aristotle ordered another round of whatever poison it was that we were drinking.

‘Mr White,’ he said, fumbling with his money, while the gay waiter waited, tapping a burnished fingernail against his tray. ‘When are you leaving?’

‘I’m not.’

The waiter went away. Aristotle took a sip from his glass, then laid it down and, licking his lips, he considered me for a time. Then he laughed. He did, really.

‘Soon you may have to leave,’ he said softly.

‘Ah, balls, you don’t frighten me.’

‘But I do.’

‘But you don’t.’

He seemed hurt, and snapped irritably,

‘Well I soon shall.’

‘Fuck off.’

Scintillating stuff, this. Erik, we found, was not attending to us. He sat turned away from the table, an arm laid languidly across the back of his chair. Two sailors had come down the steps, and were making their way toward the bar, with that look of sullen concentration which was meant to suggest that they were just two lads looking for a drink, too innocent and too thirsty to notice their surroundings. Later on, I knew, they would have that same look, expressing another desire, not for drink.

‘The marines,’ Aristotle murmured, and glanced at me with sour satisfaction. ‘The real marines, Mr White.’

The sailors ordered their drinks, and, catching each other’s eye in the dim mirror behind the bar, they suddenly sniggered, and then lapsed into solemnity again, ruefully. Their gazes crept about the room. Erik smiled at them, in a way that I had never seen him smile before. There was almost tenderness in his face. The sailors strolled across to our table, circumnavigating the room, and stood there behind Aristotle, shuffling their feet and gaping at the ceiling with a great show of interest in the muddy mosaic up there. They were two squat, powerfully built creatures with cropped hair and muscles that bulged like chancres against their tight woollen vests. Aristotle did not look at them; he leaned across the table and put his hand on Erik’s arm.

‘Erik, don’t,’ he said, but Erik drew his arm away, and throwing back his head, he cried,

‘My friends, join us, please.’

They joined us. Their names were Bill and Mick, and they were off a British warship, docked in the Piraeus. They were coarse and frightening creatures. Erik talked to them, asking about their families, England, their captain (a certain lewdness crept in there), asked them about the sea. They did not answer at any great length, but kept glancing at each other uncertainly. Perhaps they felt in some coil of their little brains that everything was not quite as it should be — as, indeed, it was not. Aristotle had begun to drink heavily, and now and then a horrible fit of coughing would shake him from tip to toe. Erik was punishing him, and Erik knew it. Bill looked at Mick, and Mick looked at Bill. It is extraordinary how alike they were; perhaps my memory has mislaid one of them, and duplicated the other, in that fumbling way which memory has of trying to cover up for its mistakes. Erik stood up.

‘Come, we shall go somewhere else,’ he said. ‘This place bores me.’

He turned and strode away. Bill and Mick, after the initial surprise, leapt up, boots clattering, and rushed after him, almost elbowing each other in their haste. I could never discover the root of Erik’s magnetism, but it was very real. Aristotle and I followed slowly. The old man kept a hand pressed to his paunch.

‘Take it easy,’ I said, not knowing what I might mean.

Outside, the night was cold, the square empty. I stood beside the old man and listened to the tinkling music which followed us up the steps. We walked to the corner, and turned down into Monasteraki. The air worked its chemistry in my blood, throttling those little bubbles of alcohol. Aristotle’s face was grey in the light from the street lamps. A shout, followed by a peal of raucous laughter, rushed out at us from an alleyway. Down there, Erik was wrestling playfully with those two lumbering blue bears. Aristotle said,

‘Erik.’

The German looked over his shoulder at us, and the sailors fell back against the wall, panting and laughing. Erik and the old man watched each other, and the rest of us watched them. The sailors grew still, and their eyes narrowed.

‘Erik,’ the old man said. ‘What are you trying to do to me, what?’

Erik snarled. Aristotle stepped toward him, and halted when Erik drew back his fist.

‘Would you strike me, Erik?’

Aristotle spoke in the smallest, most lost of voices. He turned his head this way and that in sharp little jerks, like an inquisitive blackbird. The whole thing was ludicrous. Erik let fall his fist. Then the sailors moved. They trundled forward and stood before Aristotle, their thumbs in their waistbands. He looked at them as though they were transparent. Erik wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and investigated the smear. Bill jabbed a blunt finger into Aristotle’s left lapel, and said,

‘You old git. Why don’t you crawl off somewhere and die.’

‘Yeh, why don’t you?’ Mick agreed.

Something was dawning in Erik’s face. He shook his head dumbly, and laid a hand on Mick’s shoulder. That was a mistake. The sailor’s thick fist shot out and buried itself in Aristotle’s stomach. The old man seemed to coil around the blow, his knees jerking up to meet his chin as it came down. Erik gave a squeal, sunk his fingers into Mick’s throat, and flung him aside. Bill, in a lazy kind of way, began to kick Aristotle where he lay on his side on the ground.

‘Stop,’ Erik cried. ‘Stop.’

Bill stopped, and grinned sheepishly. Good old Bill, he was not the worst of them. I fancy for him, old Bill, a death, far from doctors and drugs, from a virulent and peculiarly malign syphilis.

Aristotle coughed feebly. I knelt beside him. His face was foul with blood and vomit. The sailors took an arm each of Erik, and set off down the alleyway. He tore himself away from them, turned back and fixed his mad eyes on me. I tried not to look at him.

‘What do you want?’ I snarled.

He held out his hands. He was almost kneeling, a little smile on his face.

‘Help me,’ he pleaded softly.

‘Go to hell.’

Bill and Mick exchanged some more looks, their eyebrows raised. One of them called to Erik, but he ignored the call. He began to tremble.

‘Help me.’

The very walls seemed to retreat in horror from his scream. Aristotle moaned. I stood up, shaking my head. We faced each other across the old man’s fallen form.

‘I can’t help you, Erik,’ I said, with tears sticking needles into my eyes. ‘I can’t help anyone. I can’t even help myself. You’ve got to find your own ways.’

An echo, an echo. Erik hung his head, and gave a strange little sigh; there was almost amusement in it. He turned, and with his two new friends, he disappeared into the darkness. A laugh bounced off the walls.

I dragged Aristotle to his feet and propped him up in a doorway, then went out to the street and spent an anxious ten minutes before I found a taxi. The driver, a cheerful fat man in a reefer jacket and a battered cap, helped me to bundle the Colonel into the back seat, where he subsided like a bundle of old wet clothes and blew a large red bubble.

‘These drunks,’ the driver said, and shook his head.

I gave him some money, and the address. The car roared away. A little rubber monkey bobbed up and down on a string in the rear window.

I was cold, I was exhausted. I walked down toward the Plaka. The water lorries were out, raising a delicious odour from the wet pavements strewn with rancid garbage. The dawn was not far off. The spotlights on the Acropolis were doused, and the Parthenon vanished aburptly, leaving a black hole in the sky. Birds were coming awake all over the city, their frantic music touching the darkness with inviolable beauty. I was never to see Erik again.

I stayed in bed for the rest of the day, not sleeping, not really, but sliding between sleep and waking with such nauseating ease that eventually I could not distinguish between the two. I felt as though I were aloft in a grey and terrifying sky, dropping and spinning, wheeling and plummeting, pierced by foul freezing winds. The beasts had a field day.

At last, toward evening, I crawled from between the sheets, a damp acrid odour coming up from my skin. I made coffee, and sat by the table, nibbling at a husk of bread, lost in an extravaganza of self pity. There was a noise outside in the corridor, and I turned to the door. A slip of paper appeared beneath it. That little white scrap advanced hesitantly, scratching and scraping, and I had the eerie feeling, watching it sniff at my floor, that I was glimpsing one small corner of an enormous terror which was pressing its swollen, white cold flesh against the door. By the time my wits had marshalled their forces, and I got that door open, the corridor was smugly empty. I shut out all that silence, and fearlessly picked up the note. It was from Erik. His handwriting, which I had never seen before, surprised me with its neatness and docility, its deference, almost, to the reader’s eye. The tall letters demurely bowed their heads, the others were fat and fulsome. It was written in violet ink. That German was full of little surprises (of which, by the way, this was not one, for it was not he who had written the note). I crumpled it up and threw it away into a corner of the room, put on a jacket, and left.

I pulled the front door as it was being pushed. The pusher and I did a polite little dance, and then I jumped back. It was Andreas. There was a wild light in his eye, and his hair, usually so smooth and gleaming, stood on end. I thought at first that he was drunk.

‘What do you want?’ I snapped.

He propped his hunch against the doorjamb, and smiled at me.

‘Have you seen Erik?’

His voice was peculiar, tense as a spring, as though he were stifling a laugh or a howl, perhaps both.

‘I was with him last night,’ I said.

Had something happened to him? Throat slit by Bill or Mick? Picked up by the police? I did not want to know. I made an effort to push past the cripple. He was surprisingly tenacious.

‘Have you seen him today?’ he asked, forcing me carelessly back into the hall with a twist of his shoulder.

‘Look,’ I cried. ‘What is this?’

He laughed, grinding his teeth at the same time. I started to make another effort to get past him, but gave it up.

‘I’ve had a note from him,’ I said. ‘He asked me to meet him tonight.’

‘Where?’

‘That’s for me to know, and you to find out.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You are going to give it to him?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so. What’s going on? Is something moving?’

He gaped at me in disbelief.

‘You don’t know?’

‘No.’

‘You are a fool. Goodbye.’

He turned, and lurched away into the gathering dusk. I cried,

‘Listen, wait …’

But he was gone. I followed his shuffling figure for a while, but he was leading me away from my destination, and soon I gave up the chase.

I crossed the Plaka, through the little streets. Monasteraki was closing its bazaars and stalls. There was a sense of pleasant weariness in the air, after the day’s work, and flat voices, accounting, complaining, singing, were everywhere in the furry darkness. The oil lamps were extinguished in the stalls, one by one, two together, a little flurry of lights failing, like stars dying. I am assailed always by the beauty of that city, am led astray. Give me a moment.

Andreas called me a fool, and I would not dare to disagree with his judgement, but I must say here, in fairness to myself, even though I do not deserve it, that things were not so obvious as I have made them appear in these pages. The process of artistic selection sometimes eliminates the nuances which mislead. I have tried to retain a few of them, but they have a fishy smell. Anyway, I think that it should be … look, what am I excusing? What do I care? I am the boss around here, of course I am, and I shall do as I like, so put that in your column and criticize it.

The shop was locked and dark. I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered in through the window. There was nothing to be seen but the vague shapes of shelves and books, the counter, the step-ladder leaning drunkenly, and my stool, the worn bowl of the seat holding a pool of yellow light from the street lamp above me. I tried the door again. It insisted on being locked. I gave it a kick, and the little bell inside tinkled faintly.

I waited for an hour, standing by the window. Then I went to the café opposite, and sat over a coffee for another hour, watching the street. When I was ready to give up, Andreas arrived. I put a hand to my forehead, to cover my face, and watched him through the web of my fingers. It was as though my own movements had been filmed, and were now being reproduced on a black crystal screen. He tried the door, and, finding it locked, stepped back and surveyed the place, with his hands on his hips. He peered through the window, tried the door again, and, yes, gave it a kick. The film ended. He walked slowly away up the street, with many a backward glance, and disappeared into the darkness like an awkward black spider. I went home.

Aye, and found the door of my home standing ajar. Through that inch-wide opening came nothing but darkness. I stood and listened, and heard a silence. I put a fingertip to the knob. The door creaked, that band of darkness expanded, and then, all was as before. I waited. A lavatory flushed somewhere below, with a satisfied gulp. This was ridiculous. I pushed open the door and went into the room. The bulb in the hall sent a spearhead of light across the floor, illuminating the leg of a chair, a crumpled ball of paper, and a stain on the dirty linoleum. I closed the door behind me.

‘Erik?’ I said.

My voice shattered some vital component of the silence, and I was sorry that I had spoken. I stood and listened, convinced that there had been another sound, parallel to my own, as though the room had been waiting for me to give it a chance, like a man at a party seeking a propitiously noisy moment to let fall a fart. I took a couple of steps across the floor, and then, in a flash of blinding white light, something hard fell on the back of my head, behind my ear, and I was falling, down, down into total darkn— wait now, wait, I am getting carried away with all this thriller stuff. Backspace, a bit. I took a couple of steps across the floor, and halted.

‘Erik,’ I snapped, sounding as petulant as an old lady.

Nothing. There was no one there, no one, such foolishness, I heaved a sigh of relief, tramped across to the wall and began fumbling for the lightswitch. I found it, yes, but found also that a warm, soft, very live finger had reached it before me. Ow. I froze. There was not a sound. An hallucination, nothing more. I reached for the switch again, smiling at my foolishness, and —

‘Mr White?’

I screamed, the light came on. There was someone there, dressed in black. I was blinded momentarily, and in that moment, I had a picture of a moth with its wings broken, plastered on a burning bulb. I detached myself from the wall, expecting to hear a sucking sound as I did so, and fluttered my dusty wings.

Well now, who have we here? Charles, the white knight, in his rusty armour, Charlie, my friend. He stood with his back to the door, one hand behind him pressed to the panels.

‘Don’t move,’ he cried, in an hilariously squeaky little voice. It was difficult to know which of us was the more frightened. His round baby eyes, magnified, by my distance, through the lenses of his spectacles, pulsed like strange twin fishes looking out of an aquarium. For the first time, I noticed his hair. It was the colour of weathered cement, and flat and dull as the fringe of a rug. Perhaps it was a wig? The thought was enough to make me grin. He pressed himself harder against the door and blinked rapidly a couple of times. I had scandalized him. This was no time for levity. He held, in his right hand, a huge, ludicrous pistol.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘what are you doing with that thing?’

‘What?’

‘That gun.’

He looked at the machine which rested so awkwardly in his paw. He giggled. I think that describes the bubbly sound he made.

‘I’ll be honest, Mr White. I’ve never used one of these things before.’

‘Well you’d better be careful.’

‘Oh, I will of course.’

‘Isn’t there a safety catch on those things?’

He frowned. This was not proceeding as it should. Obviously, he had rehearsed this moment.

‘Yes, there is,’ he snapped. ‘And it’s off. Look, I wish you’d stop worrying.’

‘Well I mean …’

‘I know it’s a bit awkward, this situation, but I’m going to explain, if you give me a chance.’

‘Can I sit down?’

‘Of course you can sit down.’

I sat down, on a chair by the table, and looked at a crust of bread with teethmarks in it. The room had been searched, very expertly, to be sure, but if one’s existence has dragged on for a year in a space measuring sixteen by ten, then there are few variations in the furniture which will not be immediately noticed. I noticed them (the drawer that stuck, unless one knew the way to close it, the papers that were rearranged too neatly) but not with any great surprise. I knew what it was for which Charlie had been searching, and knew that he could not have found it, because it was not there. He moved away from the door, two faltering steps, paused, touched a tongue tip to the point of his upper lip, and looked about him worriedly. He seemed to be wondering what to do next.

‘Do you want a drink?’ I asked.

He considered the offer, and said,

‘If you have one.’

‘In there.’

He opened the wardrobe and peered into it, the gun drooping, drew out a bottle and held it aloft.

‘Empty,’ he said, with a sad grin.

‘Sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Pavlov would have been entranced with us. Charlie, with the gun in one hand, the bottle in the other, stood and looked at me lugubriously. Then he dropped the bottle on the bed. My steely grey eyes flickered, measuring the distance from my chair to the bed and that potential weapon, for which, at an opportune moment, I would leap, grasp by the neck, and whirl about, while Charlie made one of those accommodating delayed-action film turns, and … my eyes are neither steely or grey. Charlie sat down on the other side of the table.

‘What do you want here?’ I asked.

That was a laugh, that question. Still, one must, I suppose, go through the formalities.

‘You were supposed to meet the German tonight, weren’t you?’ he said.

‘Erik?’

‘Yes.’

‘What business is that of yours?’

He sighed, and touched his forehead with his fingertips.

‘You should trust me, Mr White,’ he said softly, sadly.

‘Why?’

‘I think that’s obvious.’

‘It’s not.’

‘They got the German. They can get you.’

‘They what?’

He looked at me closely, and frowned.

‘You didn’t know?’

‘What?’ I cried.

‘They arrested him tonight. I thought you … Mr White, are you all right? I’m sorry, I thought you knew. He was in a shop just across the way there, by the station. They came and arrested him and —’

‘Look, Charlie, that gun, you don’t have to keep pointing it at me.’

He looked down, and seemed startled to find the weapon still in his hand. A nerve was having a fit in my eyelid. He laid the gun on the table and said,

‘The thing is, I don’t think I’d be able to shoot you, even if I had to. I don’t like admitting that, but I may as well be honest. Of course, neither of us is sure that I couldn’t blow your head off, so the gun is really just something to give me a bit of an advantage. Do you see?’

I nodded.

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

He smiled.

‘Good, good.’

We were a jolly pair; in a moment, we would be telling each other what nice fellows we were. I said,

‘Can I light a cigarette?’

He would not answer, but only gave me a reproachful look. I had hurt his feelings, just when he thought that we were getting along so well. I lit the fag, blew some smoke, and picked a thread of tobacco from my lip. We watched each other. I was suddenly, horribly bored.

‘For Christ’s sake, Charlie, what is all this about?’

He tapped his fingers absent-mindedly on the gun barrel, licked his lips, clasped his hands, and said,

‘I came over here six … yes, it’s six years ago now. I started up a business with a friend of mine, a chap called Black, Arthur Black. Rings a bell?’

‘No.’

He wagged a roguish ringer at me, and grinned.

‘Come now, Mr White, come now.’

I shrugged, and looked at a corner of the ceiling. Charlie recollected the seriousness of the occasion, and wiped the grin from his pale jaws.

‘To continue,’ he intoned. ‘Arthur and I had a nice little business here, a kind of PR agency, public relations, you know? We did a bit of liaison work between London and Athens. Things were going nicely. Then, one day, Arthur turns up with this document.’

He paused, cleared his throat, and took off his spectacles. What tiny eyes he had. They seemed to be situated somewhere near the back of his skull. Without the goggles, he bore an extraordinary resemblance to a rat. He breathed on the lenses (his pursed mouth making a sound, to wit: whoo) and polished them with his sleeve. Then he put the spectacles back on his nose, and, ah, old owl again, he said,

‘I can tell you, Mr White, that little scrap of paper fairly floored us. We didn’t understand the full significance of it, of course, but we knew that it was big, really big.’

His eyes grew bigger in the glass, and a big tongue came out and licked his lips. He nodded solemnly.

‘It concerned the army, some kind of a secret directive … well, there’s no need to tell you that, is there? Anyway, Arthur was all for finding a buyer, and, obviously, he thought the army was his best bet. I didn’t like it, Mr White, I didn’t like it. I contacted your people, your head man, told him what I had to offer, named a nominal figure, and agreed to sell. Arthur was furious, but there was nothing he could do. I was the boss. I sent him off to the island, to deliver it to the German, and … you know the rest.’

He stood up, clasping and unclasping his hands, and began to walk toward the bed. What I did then, I think I did just for the hell of it. I caught the table in both hands, slewed it round, aimed, and flung it at him. It was a light affair, and flew out of my hands with a high hop. The corner of it caught him in the small of the back. He threw up his arms and let out a roar of pain, fell headlong, and went skidding under the bed. Yes, under the bed, from where his legs protruded, kicking up and down. I could hardly believe that I had caused so much thunder and violence, and decided that he was exaggerating. Already he was struggling to his knees, coughing and groaning, and the mattress grew a hump in its centre. I sprang into action. Sprang, ah yes. I ran in a circle around the room. The floor was littered with papers, cigarette ash, bits of bread, and no gun. The bed, of course. He was backing out, his arse wagging, toes thumping the floor. The snout of the pistol appeared before his own did. I took a leap, and landed, on one foot, on his wrist. There was a howl, the gun jumped away from us, and Charlie scurried once more under the bed.

I stood by the door, the gun in my hand, my teeth chattering, Jesus, Jesus, I was frightened. Two bright eyes peered at me from the darkness between the rear legs of the bed.

‘Come out,’ I cried.

There was no reply. The eyes blinked.

‘I’ll blow your fucking head off if you don’t come out of there.’

I waited. At last he asked,

‘Are you going to kill me?’

I lowered the gun to my side.

‘For Christ’s sake, Charlie, will you come out of there and stop this nonsense.’

He crawled forth, hesitantly, on his belly, paused, on the ground, like a sick alligator, and then got to his feet. His sober black suit was decorated with tufts of fluff, and there was dust in his hair. He watched me warily, and extracted a piece of damp wool from his mouth.

‘All right‚’ I sighed. ‘Sit down.’

He sat down, on the bed. I pulled up a chair, and straddled it. It was an effort to hold the gun upright. Charlie put a hand to his back, and grimaced in pain.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he muttered mournfully. ‘There was no need to do that.’

‘Shut up and listen to me,’ I said.

It was a little vicious man inside me who had spoken. Until now, I had been unaware of his existence. The discovery was not without comfort. I grinned, and let the little man have his way. I shall call him Al, for the connotations that are in it.

‘All right,’ said Al. ‘Now I’ve got the gun, and that gives me the advantage, okay?’

Charlie nodded mutely, and hung his head. Al pushed his hat to the back of his head, and stuck a cheroot between his teeth.

‘I want the truth,’ he said. ‘And don’t give me any more of that bull about sending Black to the island. Now, talk.’

Charlie sniffed, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He said something, which neither Al nor I caught, and Al roared,

‘Louder.’

Charlie cringed, and glanced at me apprehensively.

‘It’s no good to you,’ he said sullenly. ‘You wouldn’t know what to do with it, how to use it. Do you know what to do with —’

‘I ask the questions.’

‘The German would have known, but he’s gone. You’re alone now, Mr White, and you haven’t much time. You’ll have to let me help you.’

‘Have to, have to?’ cried Al. ‘Don’t give me that. Now look, come on, I want to hear the truth about all this. What was your connection with it?’

Charlie lifted his hands helplessly.

‘I’ve told you —’

‘How would you like to have your foot shot off?’

‘All right, all right, be careful with that gun. Everything I said was true, everything, the agency, Arthur and me, all that. Except, it was Arthur who wanted to give it to your crowd, and not me. I was against it. I knew what would happen if we got mixed up in that kind of thing. But he took it, and went off to the island. I told him not to go. Arthur, I said, you must be mad. But he didn’t listen, and he went off, and that Colonel whateverhisnameis had him shot, like a dog in the street.’

He sniffed again, and wiped his nose again, on his sleeve, again. Al deserted me. Charlie seemed to sense his departure, for he threw back his shoulders and met my gaze with a new bold fearlessness.

‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘the Colonel didn’t get his hands on the document anyway, did he? No, he didn’t, because we both know who got to it first, who picked up that little bottle where poor Arthur used to keep it, we know, don’t we, Mr White?’

‘Do we?’

He sighed hopelessly. In spite of the gun, he left the bed and went to the window. I looked at the gun. I looked at Charlie. The gun looked at him. He looked into the street. He said,

‘I’m forty-two, and starting to go bald. I never did anything in my life that I can be proud of. Buying and selling other people’s secrets is a dirty job. I’m no saint, I don’t say that, but just once, once in my life I want to do something that … I don’t know. They shot him as if he was nothing better than an animal. I don’t forgive them for that. With that document, I could spike their guns.’

He flung himself away from the window, in a fit of passion, and came and sat down on the bed again, with his hands held imploringly toward me.

‘Give me a chance, Mr White. Trust me. You’ve got nothing to lose, the thing is no good to you. What do you say?’

I looked at him, and saw a seal’s bright eyes.

‘Get out,’ I said.

He brushed ineffectually at the fluff on his suit, and went to the door. There he paused, and leaned toward me, opening his mouth to say a last word. I whirled on him, and aimed the gun at his forehead.

‘Get out,’ I roared.

He got out. I walked around the room, picking up bits of bread and paper, sighing, swearing. I opened the wardrobe, and threw the gun down among a pile of dirty laundry. I was alone. Erik arrested, Andreas drunk, or, worse, gone insane. There was a smell of blood in the air. There was no one. Good god.

‘Charlie, wait, Charlie. Charlie. Char—’

I reached the front door, and pulled it open. The street was empty. Two of my fellow-sojourners in the rooming house opened their doors and shouted down abuse at me. I slammed the door, and set off on my quest.

I did not know where to begin searching for him, but that did not deter me, only it gave to my journey a scope, a formlessness, which pleased my formless, and by now, let us admit it, rapidly decaying mind. I revisited some of the places where Erik had brought me the night before, not in any real hope of finding the knight, but just for old time’s sake. I searched in bars and cafés, in workmen’s tavernas; I even found my way into a brothel in the Piraeus, where the fat madam (why are they always fat?) welcomed me with a wide smile and a flood of incoherent, though entertaining English. I declined to have her fit me in, as she so aptly put it, and told her that I was searching for someone. Her smile died abruptly, and she swept away to call her husband, a wiry little man with a bald burnished skull, who, in silence, and with an expression of distaste, flung me out on the pavement with professional grace. I caught the last train back to Monasteraki, and walked slowly homeward.

Charlie sat in the corridor outside my room. He opened his drowsy eyes at my approach, and scrambled to his feet, ready with another persuasive argument. I did not want to hear it.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ I asked. ‘I’ve searched for you for hours.’

He blinked, and closed his mouth, and said,

‘Eh?’

‘Oh stop goggling at me. Here.’

I took the little silver box from my pocket, and clicked it open. I lifted the … wait, this is too mundane. The occasion deserves something. How about a roll on the drums, a blast of sennets and tuckets, and a few bars from the massed choir? Oh well. I lifted the piece of paper out of the box, marvelling yet again that such a small thing could cause so much agony and death, and gave it to him. It was so easy, I almost fainted.

‘Take it,’ I snarled.

Charlie hesitated, unwilling to believe that such luck as this could come his way without a bolt of lightning to strike off his hand. He took it at last, with his lip clamped in his teeth. His jowls trembled.

‘I won’t let you down,’ he muttered, an intensity of feeling causing his voice to shake.

‘I don’t give a curse what you do,’ I said. ‘Just take it, and go.’

He looked at the document, he looked at me. He looked at me, he looked at the document. He smiled. He smiled. He smiled. He smiled. He smiled. He …

I could not sleep, floating, as I was, a foot above the bed. I thought that I had cast off my burden as easily as if it had been but a scrap of paper, and I felt as light as a feather, as thistledown; I felt as a leaf in the forest must feel when that weight of rain falls from it, and it springs up, up into the summer air. There were voices in my head, telling me all manner of strange things, that I could do anything now, go anywhere; that I was free. What a joke.

I got up, and wandered out into the sleeping city. There was a shower of rain, with great drops that fell straight down like nails, and then, when the rain stopped, the sun came up and tore the clouds to shreds. I had never seen anything so utterly new as that drenched dawn, drab and watery though it was. I sat on the balcony of an all-night café, alone among spring flowers that grew in boxes. The air was like polished glass, and the first sounds of the city’s day, coming up to me, had the far clear ring of bone about them. And I, I was the morning’s flaw. Something dark and soft, and somehow sticky, was pressing against my mind, growing ever more insistent as the city unfolded below me, and, wearily, warily, like one abroad on a road at night who looks at last over his shoulder at that frightening thing which slouches behind, I set free my mind. It was a long black road down which I gazed. I saw a hillside enfolded in an island’s darkness, and a smiling face speaking. There was a word. I had carried it for so long now, like a worm coiled beneath my flesh, gnawing at the bone; the extraction was agony. I stared at the balcony-rail before me. The dawn abruptly disappeared, and I was enveloped in darkness. A dog’s head rushed at me, with ravenous teeth, and blood in its throat, and I saw that word. I had recognized it for what it was, the moment I had heard it. Now, it was too late.

I sighed. The sunshine of the new day seemed to make me cold. I stood up, and left the café, hearing laughter rattle the morning air.

White pawn to black king one. Look at this.

The gates were open, and inside, on the drive, the great car sat and looked at me malevolently, its bonnet lifted like a jaw. A pigskin suitcase clung, incongruously, like a parasite, to the gleaming roof. There was no one in sight. I walked under the archway, and through the tunnel into the courtyard. The water had been switched off in the fountain. The gravel was wet with dew, and squeaked under my feet. I went through the french windows, and across that empty blue room. All these places, recently so familiar, were now, somehow, strange and alien to me. A matter of days had been enough to make me an intruder here. An early-morning smell, like old smoke, hung in the air, and there was silence everywhere. I wandered down corridors and halls, and stood outside doorways, holding my breath, listening. Once, by a window which afforded a crooked view of the garden, and a rear wheel of the car, I became convinced that I was being watched, and when I turned, suddenly, I saw, or imagined that I saw, a shadow slide away like grey water around a corner of the corridor.

I found evidence that a departure was planned. Two leather trunks (a shock of recognition when I saw them, unpleasant and unsettling, like meeting, heartily alive, a pair of acquaintances whom one had thought were dead) lay in the hall, bound, and labelled to London. There were bare spaces on the walls, where pictures and tapestries had been removed. In a bathroom, where I went to answer a sudden message from my innards, I noticed that the toothbrushes, those last links with a home, had been taken away. A dry sliver of soap and a broken tin of talcum powder were all that remained.

I climbed the stairs, watching another me, hand to banister, coming down to meet me, not without apprehension, through the ornate mirror. On the landing, I stopped and looked around me, wondering where I should go next. A door was flung open, and Julian came out, speaking, as he came, over his shoulder to someone inside the room. He closed the door and strode past me without a glance, went down three steps of the stairs, and halted. He stood motionless, with his head bowed; then, as though he had come to a decision, he patted the banister with his palm, and turned around slowly and looked at me.

‘My god,’ he said, ‘I thought you were an hallucination.’

‘I am.’

Now that was a strange thing to say. He chose to consider it a joke, and, laughing, came back up the stairs. We looked at each other. From that smile of Julian’s, something riotous must have been going on behind me. I said,

‘Where is it?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Nothing.’

His hands went into his pockets, and jingled the coins which they found there. He looked down at his plus-fours, and laughed.

‘Things are in such a mess,’ he said.

‘Are you leaving?’ I asked.

‘Eh? No no. We were, yes, but we changed our minds. Something came up. Are you here to say goodbye? Sorry to disappoint you.’

‘I’m not disappointed.’

‘No? Jolly good. A friend of yours was here last night. In the small hours of the morning, actually. Woke us all up.’

‘Who?’

‘That crippled chap, what’s his name?’

‘Andreas.’

‘That’s it. Strange man. He left in a hurry. Which reminds me, I must get along and unpack some of this stuff.’

And, before I could stop him, he hurried away down the stairs. I waited for a moment or two, trying to think, but my mind was filled with a horrible, wet, white fog. I regretted not having a gun. Something heavy was dropped somewhere in the house, and the floor quaked under my feet. I followed him.

In that room where the huge wall of glass looked down across the hill, I found him, whisking dust sheets from the furniture and stacking them, folded, in a corner. I stood in the doorway without speaking, and watched him. When he caught sight of me, he turned, in some surprise, and put his hands on his hips.

‘Come to help?’ he asked pleasantly.

‘No.’

He smiled.

‘Wise fellow. Tedious, this kind of thing.’

He pulled the sheet from the piano, folded it neatly, and laid it in the corner with its mates. He surveyed the room.

‘That’s better,’ he murmured.

This was absurd. I would not stand for this.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I want to talk to you.’

‘To me? O dear. I’m very busy just at the moment. Can’t it wait?’

‘No.’

‘All right then. What is it?’

I did not know where to begin, and, reviewing all that I wished to say, I was overwhelmed, and could not speak. He peered at me closely, and frowned.

‘Benjamin, I really think —’

‘Stop,’ I shouted, feeling my lips slap back into a snarl.

His eyebrows twitched, and he scratched his jaw.

‘Stop what?’

‘This, this ridiculous performance.’

‘Performance?’

‘And stop repeating what I say.’

‘Repeating?’

‘Christ.’

‘Benjamin, you seem upset. Has something happened?’

‘Oh no, no, nothing at all.’

‘Good. Well then …’

A sob escaped from my throat. It surprised me. Julian said,

‘I think you need a drink. Wait here, I’ll fix you one.’

He went quickly past me, and closed the door behind him. Did I hear a muffled snigger in the hall?

I sat on the couch and closed my eyes. Frightening things stirred in that darkness, so I opened them again, and looked to the light in the great window. To my surprise, I found tears on my face. I brushed them impatiently away, stood up, and prowled about the room. The piano lid was open. I put my fingers to the keys, but when I pressed them, nothing was produced but a kind of modulation of the silence. A dead withered brown flower, the colour of old blood, hung over the rim of a vase. I went to the glass wall and looked down into the garden. Julian, in a balloon-like boiler suit, was on his knees at the rear of the car, poking at its underbelly. He got to his feet, wiping his hands on a piece of rag, turned, looked up at me, and winked. I flung open the door, tripped over a suitcase which stood on the threshold, and went skidding along the hall on my chin, up, and galloped down the stairs, taking them two, four, five at a time, through the french windows, the courtyard, gravel flying, down the drive, to the car, Julian … was gone. I swore, and punched a fist into my palm, then turned, and saw, up in that window, Julian standing, smiling down at me. I went back into the house.

He met me in the courtyard, stopping in false surprise when he saw me, and said,

‘Didn’t you want to talk to me?’

I did not answer, but stalked into the house and sat down on a chair in the dining-room with my arms folded. He strolled in after me, and leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets, the stick dangling from his arm. He had that grin, with one eyebrow raised, thick lips curving up around his downward-curving nose, which always seemed to me to express best his particular brand of wicked, mischievous jocularity.

‘You like your jokes, don’t you?’ I snarled.

He lowered his head modestly.

‘Some of them,’ he muttered, shuffling his feet. ‘But sometimes I cheat, and then the joke turns sour.’

He went to the sideboard, and drew out, from behind it, a small easel and blackboard, and set them up on the floor before me. Next he produced a stick of chalk, blew on it, blew on his fingers, coughed, and, with a flourish, wrote upon the blackboard:

JOKES

He turned to me, a fat finger resting on the lower curve of the S, and said,

‘Now. The successful joke, or practical joke, if you like

JOKES (PRACTICAL)

‘The successful practical joke is that one in which a certain personality or personalities, which are known intimately, are taken in a given situation or situations, and nudged into one cohesive, final situation, whereby laughter is produced. The nature of this laughter will be discussed presently. So; let P equal personality, S equal situation, and L equal laughter.’

The chalk squealed and scratched. Julian held his face close to the board, his tongue between his lips, his brow furrowed.

P + S =

He turned to me suddenly.

‘Equals what? Well, come on, come on, what does it equal? I’ve just told you.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘My god. Does it equal laughter?’

‘Yes.’

He stamped his foot.

‘It does not. You forget the unknown factor, which we shall call V. Hence:’

P+S+V = L

He laid down the chalk, brushed his hands, and stepped back to view the equation. Then he whirled about, glowering at me from under his eyebrows, and barked,

‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

He nodded, shoved his hands into his pockets, and strolled to the window, where he stood and looked pensively across the garden. I blew my nose.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Let us discuss it. It should be obvious, of course, that one doesn’t do all this work to produce a mere laugh; nothing so vulgar as that. It is a matter of vision, which is why I have called the unknown factor V; look there, look at it on the board. The product is, though I would hesitate to say this to an artist, the product is a matter of art. Laughter is not merely that ridiculous sound which a crowd makes when a comedian’s trousers fall off. Laughter is art. The perfect joke has the economy, the … the precision of a poem. It is ephemeral, in a sense, but so is great art, if one ignores the time factor.’

He glanced at me, and asked kindly,

‘Do you follow me?’

‘Yes.’

He pushed his chin down on his breast, and walked back to the table, where he perched precariously on one buttock, with one leg swinging free.

‘It is often asked, why do people perpetrate practical jokes? And, indeed, I myself would ask why people bother with those ungainly buckets-over-the-door affairs. But the real, true practical joke, the artistic joke, where no conditions are manufactured, but the complete thing is conjured out of the air, as it were; well, do I ask a writer why he writes books? These things cannot be explained. You write a book, do you not, because there is a certain set of situations, or ideas, if you like, suspended somewhere beyond the reach of other mortals, without cohesion, without direction, which you must pluck from space, arrange, direct, and give to them a voice? Is it not so? You call it art. Why should not I say that my jokes are art? You don’t believe, do you, that your books will save souls, cause deaths —?’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said, pointedly.

He paused, and frowned, and nodded quickly.

‘I see what you mean,’ he murmured, sniffed loudly, and left the room. His head came back immediately around the door. ‘But I’ve never felt responsible for anyone’s death, you know,’ he said, grinned, and was gone. I followed him. The hall was empty.

I climbed the stairs again, and, looking up, saw him, in the mirror, walking four or five steps behind me, on tip-toe, with a hand pressed over his mouth, and his blue eyes popping with glee. The red and black squares of his skin-tight suit shook where they were stretched over his big belly, and his knees wobbled from the effort of suppressing his laughter. The bell, dangling from his cap, tinkled derisively. I ignored him, and crossed the landing, and went into that room from whence I had first seen him emerge. It was his study. He sat in an armchair, with a book open on his knees, an enormous cigar in his fingers, and a glass of brandy beside him on a low table.

‘Ah, there you are,’ he said, brushing away the webs of pale blue fragrant smoke, and laying his book down on the floor. ‘Care for a drink? Cigar? Damn fine smokes, these.’

I pressed my back against the door, shaking my head from side to side. I could not speak.

‘Come along, sit,’ he roared jovially, motioning me to a chair.

I sat down opposite him, and placed my hands on my knees. He cast a sidelong look at me, and grinned slyly.

‘This is my hideout,’ he whispered, with a ponderous wink. I come up here for a bit of peace and quiet. The old girl doesn’t like me to smell up the house with smoke. Sure you won’t have a drop of brandy, boy? Last of the stock, this bottle.’

He picked up the glass, and held it to the light.

‘Grand stuff,’ he said.

‘Julian.’

‘Well?’

‘Will you stop this?’

‘Eh?’

‘I said, will you stop this. I deserve at least an explanation.’

He began to cough, and thumped himself on the chest with the paw which held the cigar. Grey ash tumbled down his waistcoat.

‘What do you mean — humph humph — eh — humph — explanation? Explanation? Let me tell you, if I had spoken to my elders like that when I was your age, I’d have had a good trouncing. You young fellers today, you’ve got no respect, none. Going around in your cissy clothes and your long hair. Where’s your respect, eh, ha, where? Hum.’

He puffed at the cigar, wheezing, and swilled the brandy, and stared at me malevolently, blowing and grunting, an old grampus.

‘What you need is work. Yes, work. Do you good, a bit of honest work. Why, when I came to this country, I had the clothes on my back and nothing else. I got a job as an office boy, ten hours a day for three drachmas an hour. I saved what I could, kept my ears open, invested, made a bit of profit, and started my own office. I met a good woman, and married her. We had no soft life in those first years, but by god we were happy. And look at me today. I’m not a proud man, but I think I can say that I used my time, and used it well. And don’t think that my fighting days are over. That damn army crowd have been threatening to nationalize my industries, the first chance they get. Ha. I’ll show them nationalize. I have them where I want them now, Oh ho yes, I spiked their guns. They won’t cross me now. Listen —’

He bent forward, and beckoned me closer.

‘If it was in my interests, which it’s not, but if it was, I could scotch their plans today. I could. I have something that would … but enough, I’ve said enough.’

Another wink, a quick grin, and then he waved his hand, commanding a general silence on that topic.

‘So that’s it,’ I said.

That was it. So simple. He stood up, and put a hand on my shoulder.

‘Now boy, not a word, not another word.’

‘He brushed the ash from his waistcoat, and shuffled out of the room. I downed the half inch of brandy which he had left in his glass, and went out on the landing. He stood at the bottom of the stairs, clad in hunting red, slapping a riding crop against his gleaming boots. Catching sight of me, he threw back his shoulders and roared,

‘Tally hooo.’

He went riding out through the blue room, into the courtyard. There was the sound of him prancing around on the gravel. He came thundering in again, waved his stick at me, did a circle of the hall, and galloped away. I went into the courtyard and sank down beside the parapet of the fountain, with my knees against my chest, and my arms wrapped tightly around my legs. I pressed myself against the cool stonework, and closed my eyes. The fog inside my head had begun to pulse, as though something lay panting at the heart of it. There were footsteps in the gravel. Julian came slowly toward me, his head bowed, his fingers to his chin. He stopped beside me and asked,

Tell me, what date is this?’

‘The twenty-first of April.’

‘Is it? Dear me, how time does fly. I’ve been thinking about poor Nana.’

He glanced at me, and smiled, and sat down on a cane chair near me.

‘But of course,’ he said sadly, and put his hands into the shallow pockets of his cardigan, ‘You never knew her, did you? An exquisite woman. I can’t express how much I miss her, even yet, after all these years.’

He sighed, and shook his head. ‘But you know, it doesn’t seem such a long time to me. Oh I know, the years are there, you can quote figures to me. And there’s Helena, a grown woman, and the boy, growing up so quickly I can’t keep track of him. But I remember Nana as if she had … passed away only yesterday. That time in Cannes, our last visit, when she wore those flowers in her hair, why, she was the prettiest little thing I’d ever seen. The whole resort was raving about her. And I was proud, my, how proud I was. And now she’s gone from me forever.’

He covered his eyes with a hairy hand, and a little sob escaped through his fingers. Cicadas were singing. There was a black bird gliding through slow, swooning circles high in the sky, and I marvelled that any creature at play would execute movements of such perfection, loneliness and grace. I was tired. It surprised me, how tired I was. Now and then, a tiny black shadow, like that of a fly, would flit across the extreme edge of my vision.

‘Does she know?’ I asked, and swung my head around, trying vainly to catch that shadow.

‘What?’ he sobbed. He had not taken his hand from his eyes.

‘That she’s your daughter?’

Then he did look at me.

‘Of course she does,’ he cried. ‘What are you suggesting? How dare you. I won’t take this kind of insinuation from the likes of you. I’m a warm-blooded man, what did you expect, that I would take a vow of chastity? My god, this is disgraceful, coming in here, to my house, and making such grotesque suggestions.’

He jumped up from the chair, and glared at me, his fist clenched and trembling at his sides.

‘I must ask you to leave,’ he said stiffly.

He stalked away. I looked up at the sky again. How blue it was, like their eyes, blue as blue, O god. From an open window above me, a voice came clearly down.

‘Now, boy, since your tutor has deserted you, I think I shall have to take a hand in your education. Today we’re going to talk about word games and puzzles, conundrums, anagrams, that kind of thing. First, anagrams. An anagram is a transposition of letters of a word or phrase to make a new word or phrase. Dog and god is a simple one; then there’s James H. Twinbein, another simple one, a bit amateurish really, but it served its purpose, I suppose. Now —’

‘I’m going to kill you, Julian Kyd,’ I screamed.

A resounding silence answered me. I lay down on the gravel, and wept. Tears brought no comfort. I picked myself up, and crawled into the house, and up the stairs. I found them in Yacinth’s room, sitting by the desk. The boy was bent over a paper, writing swiftly, smiling, with that smile, so perfect, so absorbed, a thing which seemed to exist, like himself, like music, without reference to anything else in the world. I stopped behind him, trying to hold my breath. Julian sat sideways at the desk, with his legs crossed, smoking the butt end of his cigar. Yacinth glanced over his shoulder, and the smile faded. He set down his pen, left the chair, and walked silently out of the room. I watched him go. Julian chuckled softly, eyeing me with amusement.

‘You pig,’ I said.

‘Pardon?’

‘You heard me.’

He jammed a finger into his ear and wagged it vigorously up and down.

‘Going a bit deaf these days,’ he muttered.

‘Pig,’I shouted.

He laughed.

‘Come now, Benjamin. Don’t pretend that you’re so concerned about her. If it doesn’t trouble her, why should it trouble you? Anyway, I’ve heard that your own past is not without its … bizarre moments.’

‘I loved her.’

He turned to the window to hide his smile.

‘Did you? No, I hardly think so. You considered her stupid, isn’t that true? Not that I would disagree for a moment, mind you.’

He drew toward him the paper on which Yacinth had been writing, and read a few lines, his lips moving, his eyebrows raised.

‘I think,’ he murmured, still with his eyes on the page, ‘I think, Benjamin, that we both know who it was that you really wanted. Don’t we?’

There was a distant tinkling of music. He paused, and turned his ear toward it, grinning up at me.

‘It was —’

‘Shut up,’ I cried.

‘Hnn,’ he sighed in delight. ‘A shocking suggestion, you think? But it’s true. Helena was just a … what would I say? … a stand-in. Not a very elegant definition, hut I think it sums up the situation, eh?’

I stared at the floor, at my feet braced on the floor. The fog dispersed in my head, and I saw, down at the end of that long tunnel of the past, a night, and a hillside; trees murmured; the sea was not far; I heard my voice telling a story about myself to a faceless figure, who kept his peace, as he always did, and listened, receiving my secrets in silence. Julian was speaking again.

‘God knows, I would not have cared. I didn’t care about Helena. But you did nothing, made no moves. I wonder why, Benjamin? Not morals, surely, for I don’t think that you have any.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘What are you talking about?’

I grasped the back of the chair, and sat down slowly. Julian tapped his fingers on the desk. I rubbed my eyes, and gathered my poor forces. Jesus, they made one tattered army.

‘Julian, I want that document.’

‘But I paid good money for it,’ he said softly, reasonably, showing me his palms. ‘Friend Knight does not operate for what is known, I believe, as peanuts.’

‘I want it.’

‘Yes, I know you do, but I need it. The army is going to take over today, and they will ruin me unless I can blackmail them. You do see that, don’t you? It’s an impossible situation. If things were not as they are … Benjamin, I know you won’t believe this, but I like you, I’d like to help you. But what can I do?’

‘I hope you rot.’

‘I shall, some day. Look, you have one chance. Come with me.’

He led me swiftly through corridors, down the stairs, and to a room at the back of the house, where a door was open on the garden. At the far side of the lawn, Helena stood, with her back toward us, pruning a little tree with a pair of gleaming secateurs. We stopped in the doorway.

‘The fact is‚’ said Julian, ‘I no longer have the thing. I gave it to Helena, as a present on the anniversary of the day we met you, our benefactor. Yes, it’s a year ago, today, don’t you remember? We’re not without gratitude, Benjamin, and we shall always celebrate that day.’

He paused, and looked at me, with the tip of his tongue wedged into the corner of his mouth.

‘Why are you doing this to me?’ I asked. ‘Haven’t you done enough?’

‘Benjamin, where we live, you pay for everything. There now, I have said something of import, just for you.’

‘Damn you.’

He gave a great laugh.

‘Ah, my boy, original as ever, even in your curses. Off you go now, and whisper a word in her ear. You may not have the chance again for a long time, for we’re leaving today on a little holiday.’

I could not move. My feet would not move. He patted my arm, and began to turn away, stopped, and looked at me, and, not without a certain fondness, he said,

‘You weren’t wicked enough to cope with us, were you? Good luck.’

I nodded dumbly, and stepped down to the garden. And a sprinkler, squatting like a toad at the corner of the lawn, turned round its vicious snout and spat on me.

The rest is hardly worth recounting. Well, an effort, and then on to the last horrors.

She glanced at me calmly over her shoulder, as though she had been expecting me. Calmly, why not? Of course she had expected me. I avoided her eye, and fingered the leaves of the tree. They were thick and dry, and coated with a malodorous green dust. Snap, said the secateurs, snap snap.She stepped back from the tree, and pulled a strand of hair away from her forehead. The old days back again.

‘It is very difficult to make things grow here,’ she murmured. ‘The heat, even in spring, and no rain.’

‘It rained last night.’

‘Did it?’

The old days indeed; or almost, for she had hardly heard what I said. That did not matter. I tried to think of the days we had spent together, and of the nights, when she would drive with me in the great car out to Glyfadha, where we would sit enmeshed in our passion and watch the sky, which seemed to echo that passion, in the cold savagery of its stars and clouds, its black winds; but I could think only of dust, and broken glass, of dead matter, and of the island. I cannot explain.

‘You have something which belongs to me,’ I said.

She frowned.

‘What?’

‘A little thing,’ I said, trying sarcasm, to see if that would raise a spark. It did not. She shrugged, and turned away, as one turns away when accosted by a maniac in the street, shut up, I know how they turn away.

‘Wait.’

She waited, asking,

‘Well?’

‘I want it.’

‘Don’t be foolish.’

‘You’ve got it. Is that foolish?’

‘Yes.’

‘He told me you’ve got it.’

‘You should know better than to believe him.’

‘Should I?’

The cut and thrust of this conversation is really something, even in an abridged form. She bent to pick up from the grass a severed shoot, and, as I looked into the roots of her hair, I realized that it was dyed. Why had I not noticed it before? Perhaps I had, perhaps I had known all along, as I knew everything else, without admitting it. Now I was shocked. How strange.

‘You should recognize his jokes when you see them,’ she said, with the tone of a nasty little girl saying ya, you got hit an I didn’, sucks to you. Sucks, verily, to me. I turned to the tree and gave it a kick. A leaf fell on my head.

‘I can play jokes too, you know,’ I muttered.

‘You’re a fool.’

She always pronounced ‘a’ as ‘ae’. It was very irritating. I was ‘ae’ fool. She picked up some more of those shoots, and held them in the crook of her arm.

‘Helena,’ I said. ‘What do you think?’

‘What?’

I turned away from her, and looked toward the mountains. Thunder raged afar among the far high peaks.

‘About all this, what do you think? Ever since I knew you, you’ve been inventing things to be dramatic about. But there’s your strange life here, and all both he and I have done to it, and yet you —’

She stamped her foot.

‘I could bear anything from you except your insufferable sentimentality,’ she cried. A little white droplet of her spit landed on my eyebrow. I was not daunted.

‘But I’m just asking you what you think, how you feel about all …’

But the bloody stupid woman was not even listening to me. She stared past my shoulder, with her mouth open. I turned. Julian had emerged through the doorway, and now he tottered toward us across the lawn, carrying one of those huge leather trunks. I took a step toward Helena, for protection, but she took a step away from me. Julian veered, matching his course to our new positions. His big round head appeared at the side of the trunk; his face was purple with effort, but he was grinning, grinning in spite of all. He came at me. His knees began to wobble, three paces, a grunt, two paces, one, halt, and he cried,

‘Whup.’

He gave the trunk a heave with his shoulder, and it toppled slowly forward. There was nothing I could do, absolutely nothing, I insist. I caught the great awkward thing in my arms, was pushed backward, my foot caught in something, and I sat down on the grass. The trunk jarred my knees, and then keeled over and lay on its side beside me. Julian brushed his hands together, and glanced at Helena with a proud little smile, stepped forward, and offered to help me up. I looked at Helena. She was laughing. With her hands over her mouth, her knees knocking, one foot resting on top of the other, Helena laughed, at last, laughed, and laughed. And in the doorway, a small figure appeared, pale face and shining curls. Was he also laughing?

Chronology again, all out of whack. Makes not a bit of damn difference now.

I went home. It must have been morning still. Yes, it was morning. I am not sure. Andreas sat in my armchair, by the window, completely motionless but for his eyes, which flickered restlessly from my head to my feet. There were three long parallel red weals down his jaw, from tip of ear to chin, as though some animal had clawed him. I felt light-headed suddenly. The floor swayed, and it seemed that I might faint. I put my hands over my eyes. He is not there, I told myself, he is not there. I stepped across the floor to the sink, filled a saucepan with water, and put it on the little gas stove. There was no coffee. I swore. Half a bottle of yesterday’s milk remained. I took it from the cupboard (mouseshit on the shelves) and sniffed it. Only slightly sour. I emptied the water from the saucepan, poured in the milk, and set it on the flame. While it was heating, I broke bread into a cup, and doused it liberally with sugar. It was a comforting sound, the sound of sugar, soon to be melted, rattling on dry bread, soon to be sodden. There was a hiss. The milk had begun to boil over the edge of the saucepan. I snatched it from the stove, holding the hot handle in my fingertips, and saying ah, ah. The bread subsided, and the sugar, with a sigh, under the scalding white stuff. I mashed the mixture with a fork, stuck a spoon into it, then took the warm cup in my cupped hands and carried it to the bed, where I sat curled against the wall, and shovelled the glop into my face. It was nice. There is nothing so cheering as the preparation of pap. I think I might even have smiled. Andreas said,

‘Where have you been?’

I almost swallowed the spoon. My eyes tried to bulge out of their sockets. He had turned his head toward me, but, apart from that minimal movement, he still sat as I had first seen him, with his legs twisted about each other, his shoulders up around his ears, his hands coiled in his lap.

‘You again‚’ I said, when I could speak. ‘I thought you were an hallucin—’

I did not want to say that. That had already been said. Andreas continued to stare at me.

‘Where have you been?’ he asked again, his voice rising.

I recommenced my collation. What did I care?

‘Been minding my own business,’ I mumbled.

‘It has begun. Did you know that? Is it in your business to know that?’

‘What’s begun?’

‘Don’t play with me,’ he shouted.

I shrugged. It occurred to me that he might really be a beast conjured up by my imagination which seemed, of late, to be going its own way, irrespective of my wishes. Well, what of it? I was past caring, as they say. Humour this doppelgänger. I captured a nice soggy lump of light gold crust, slopped it into my mouth, and asked,

‘Did you know, friend, that Erik was arrested last night? Well, smartarse, did you know that?’

He laughed. It was a nasty sound, nasty in the sense that one applies to a cough, meaning that it hints at something rotten in the lungs. Andreas’s lungs were all right, I suppose, but the heart was not so good.

‘Who told you that?’ he asked.

‘I was told.’

‘And you believed it.’

‘Why not? I believe what I’m told these days. I have no choice.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know.’

I did not know. Or care. I finished the pap, and put the cup and spoon on the table, came back to the bed, and lit a cigarette. I grinned at the cripple.

‘Well Andy? You look a bit upset.’

But Andy was not listening to me. So few people seemed to listen to me now. He kneaded his hands. The joints cracked. He stared at the door, grinding his teeth. Suddenly he burst out,

‘He was a traitor, I always knew it.’

‘What —?’

‘I always suspected, when he told me so often how we needed Sesosteris. I could forgive him his betrayal, because I believed him. But it’s true, what you said. He wanted the coup. “Keep it,” he said. “Not yet,” he said. “White will hide it forever if we ask him, and I shall decide the moment to bring it out.” The liar. He was scheming and lying, laughing behind my back.’

There he paused, and touched, indeed, with a fingertip, that back of his. Yes, it was still there. I yawned. He slipped from the chair and sat beside me on the bed, so close to me that I could smell his breath, and he caught my arm in his claw.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘He told me once, long ago, that if we could win here, we could take the world. Latin America, Asia … doh, the pig. But listen, listen, don’t move away from me, you must listen to this.’

He fell silent.

‘Well?’ I asked.

He shook his head, and flung himself away from me, and went lurching about the room, blundering against the furniture, as flies do, in the first frost at the end of autumn, as now, as they are doing, here, now, in this place, the flies … what? Andreas. He blundered. About the room. I cannot go on. I watched him. On, on, you cunt.

‘What did you do?’ I asked.

I asked him nothing. Yes I did. I asked him,

‘Where is he?’

He stopped by the table, and picked up the spoon which I had used, and clutched its warmth in his palm.

‘I shot him,’ he murmured. ‘He betrayed me, us, everything. He sold the document.’

I said,

‘He didn’t. I gave it away.’

He nodded his head up and down, up and down, his eyes closed.

‘I know. I know you did. I knew.’

‘Then why …?’

I did not ask such a stupid question. He stood and gaped at me, his shoulders drooping, hands shaking, his mouth mutely working.

‘I loved him,’ he whispered.

Erik? Arrested? No? Shot? Dead? Dead?

‘Is he dead?’

His head was still nodding. He had begun to sway from side to side, crooning softly to himself.

‘Ah,’ he sang. ‘Ahhh.’

‘The lying cunt,’ I said.

But it was not Knight, writer of false notes, who was the object of my rising rage. No. I went scrabbling across the floor, on all fours, to the wardrobe. I tore open the door. A long thin dribble of spit slipped from my lips. It was there. I took it up. It would not fit into any pocket. There was a paper bag. It sufficed. I slipped the death-dealer into it, and bounced out of the room, across the Plaka, through the square, toward that hill, off to deal out death.

The tanks were rolling into Syntagma Square. Believe it or not, I was surprised to see them.

There was an army lorry parked by the roadside at the bottom of the hill. Two soldiers sat smoking on the running-board, with rifles slung across their knees. I took to the shrubbery, and made my way past them, crawling on my stomach, and feeling extremely foolish, with an idiotic grin fixed on my face. The murmur of the soldiers’ voices came to me. I caught sight of the white wall rising ahead, and I had to stop, confused and puzzled, to wonder where it was that I was going. My mind would not work very well; my thoughts were fragmented and dispersed, and I had a vertiginous sensation of planes of awareness slipping and sliding uncontrollably, running into each other and locking, like loose, shuffled pages of a book. One of the soldiers laughed. It was a dry, distant sound, like the voice of a bird across water. The paper bag and its bun was pressed against my chest. I clenched the package in my fingers and set off again.

I took to the road, having rounded a bend, away from the sight of the soldiers. Now I was nearer to the house than I had thought I should be. The gates were open, and the car stood outside, with all its doors open, and its boot. Suitcases and bags were stacked on a rack on the roof. I lay down on the pavement and slipped the gun from the bag. Slipped? The dorsal sight kept sticking, and, at last, in rage, I tore the bag to bits. I looked around, and wondered why I was lying full-length like that. I got to my feet and crossed to the white wall. It was warm, with the sun on it, and I pressed my ear to it, and closed my eyes, and listened to strange muffled thunder, to the words of the world rumbling in the stone. There were voices. Helena, Julian, and Charlie Knight came out through the gate and stopped before the car, pushing and pinching, giggling and shrieking. At last they were in line. They put their arms around each other’s waists and danced out into the road, doing a wild can-can, wagging their arses, kicking their legs, first to the left, then to the right, swaying and laughing. Helena threw up a hand and waved it high above her head. They sang,

O James H. Twinbein

The darling of the chorus line

Didn’t make the deadline

James H. Twinbein

Yeaaah.

Away they went, through the gate, into the garden, gone. There was silence. Heat was coming off the wall in ripples, and, as I looked along it, I saw figures, elongated, black, rippling by the gate, appearing and disappearing; they would not be still, would not be individual, but merged and flowed through each other, like amoeba. I clawed at my eyes, and shook my head. Why do I do such things? They never work. There was a deafening roar somewhere near me, and I opened my eyes to see the front left tyre of the car collapse. The gun I held had fired. Had I pressed the trigger? The car listed to one side, and settled into its new position with a disgruntled flop. The undulating figures moved out into the middle of the footpath. I lifted the gun. A trickle of white smoke drifted from the barrel. Someone shouted. I aimed at Julian’s broad back. He began to turn. Helen’s face came at me, with teeth bared and blood in its throat, grinning, spectacles glittering. I pressed the trigger and pressed it, while thunder roared around me. I gave up, and flung the gun away. On the pavement, Julian, Helena and Knight lay snapping and kicking, clawing at each other in agony, wallowing in blood. They faded. Something was wrong with this farce. A wing collapsed. No creatures writhed on the ground, but Yacinth stood there, with his head thrown back, and one hand lifted near his face, for a long moment, and then he drooped languidly to the ground, his forehead a shattered crimson mess. Someone was howling. It was me. I began to run. Julian stepped out from the gateway, with a rifle raised to his shoulder. He fired, and I halted. Feeling departed from my right arm, as though the nerves had recoiled in horror from some terrible intrusion into their world. Julian retreated, and the gates slammed. The boy’s eyelids were fluttering, and I could see the whites of his eyes, disappearing under the blood. Get away, get away from this, I cannot …

Yacinth, my Hyacinth.

Escape, as I choose to call it, was absurdly easy. I walked down the hill, skirted again the place where the soldiers should have been (though they had left) and, with the lucidity and calm which only a maniac can achieve, I found a taxi. Yes, a taxi. The army was everywhere, in tanks, in jeeps, in lorries, on foot, but through it all, the battered yellow cab came nosing, its windows wide, and the car radio blaring martial music, appropriately enough, filling the streets with the strains of war. I stepped boldly from the bushes. The driver, a wiry man with a pencil moustache and jet black eyebrows, looked at me dubiously as I climbed in behind him. He was chewing gum, and, as I settled down in the back seat, he turned, laid an elbow on the headrest beside him, and blew a huge pink bubble.

‘The arm,’ he said. ‘Don’t let it bleed over the upholstery.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘English?’

‘No, yes.’

‘That’s a bullet wound?’

‘No, I … a fall.’

‘A fall.’

‘Yes. Will you take me to this address? It’s written here, you see.’

We roared away from the kerb, and headed swiftly north. Apart from the army, there were few vehicles on the road. Those little eyes watched me in the driving mirror. I tried to move out of range, but it was impossible.

‘Great things happening today,’ he said, over his shoulder.

‘Yes.’

‘I knew it was coming.’

‘Ah Jesus,’ I sighed.

Those nerves were creeping forward to investigate the torn flesh. I was bleeding on the upholstery. The driver turned up the volume of the radio, and tapped out the rhythm on the steering wheel. I knew that none of this was real, but I closed my eyes, and savoured the dream.

‘English. English, you’re here.’

I opened my eyes to find another bubble being blown in my face. The taxi was parked in the dusty courtyard, near the caged tree. The driver grinned.

‘You’re here,’ he said again.

‘Ah.’

‘You want me to get someone?’

‘Iakavos.’

‘Who?’

‘Papa Iakavos.’

The great door was drawn open, and the little priest with the black beard peered out. He came to the window of the cab, looked in at me, and scuttled away. The driver went around and opened my door, threw a look at the pool of blood on the seat, and shook his head. Iakavos appeared, and gaped at me in astonishment and concern. I lifted my hand in a greeting, and smiled.

‘Take me, Papa, for I die.’

I stayed in the monastery for a long time. I lost count of the days, of the weeks, eventually. They gave me Erik’s old room, overlooking the courtyard. His belongings were still there. That was, in a way, comforting. I thought a great deal about him. One day, when I could at last move around, I found, in the wardrobe, his file against humanity. I sat with it on the balcony all day, going through it, as though it were a dossier on his life, trying to discover what had killed him; for Erik, I felt, had died long before Andreas’s bullet reached his heart. I found, on a blank page near the end, these words written:

What the heart desires, the world is incapable of giving.

B.W.

I could but barely remember having said it. Again and again, I read those words, striving toward some deeper meaning which Erik must have perceived, and at last, after some days, I came to realize that his ruin had come about, not through lack in himself, but through a lack in the world.

Papa Iakavos was a good man. He asked me no questions. Once, in an effort to relieve my torture, I tried to tell him what I had done, what had happened. He sat opposite me in his black robes, smiling and nodding, not understanding one word that I spoke. Perhaps I did not make sense. How could I? There is no sense in any of it.

A doctor was brought to me, a tiny, gentle jew with the round face of a cherub. He ignored the wounded arm which I waved at him, which Iakavos was tending expertly. I realized that this doctor was a psychiatrist. I tried to talk to him, as I had talked to Iakavos, but I could not. I told him lies, clever lies, perhaps, over which he frowned, seemingly baffled. Eventually, he went away, to make arrangements for me to go into a clinic. But he had no sooner left than I packed what things I thought I might need, and walked down the stairs, and through the gate, and escaped, as Erik had once done, so long ago, now.

The city seemed disturbingly normal. I had expected … I do not know what I had expected; martial law, perhaps, and manacled political prisoners being herded through the streets. A few more soldiers than usual were in evidence, and that was all. The evening papers were shouting about a dangerous madman on the loose in the city, and for a long time, before I found the nerve to buy one, I thought they were talking about me; they were not. I sat in a café, in the warm sun, and searched the pages for some mention of Hyacinth’s death. There was none, not a word. Perhaps it never happened.

I went to my bank, stood at the counter, and spoke my name clearly and loudly, expecting the combined might of the police, army and secret service, led by Helena screaming for blood, to come bearing down on me. Nothing happened. The clerk was polite. He closed my account, and paid me my cash. Some royalties had come in; I was richer than I had expected. I took the train to the Piraeus, and bought a boat ticket. I sailed to the island. No one was interested in me. It was, I can admit now, it was disappointing. What a strange cold creature I am.

I wish that I had some last scene with the boy to recount, as a way of saying goodbye to him, some last moment of tenderness; but I have not. I can only speak of a day long ago in spring, some time after the party. I was travelling in a bus through the city, going … where? I cannot remember. It was one of those days when the world seems to be offering some consolation for all the times it has disappointed. Each new scene, as I came upon it, presented to me a further step in what would surely be the unlocking of a great secret. Sunlight, glancing from a high window, found a bit of broken white glass in the gutter, and set it ablaze. Trees fell away and showed me a young girl, her hair flying, riding a red bicycle against a sea of blue sky and light. An old man, on a park bench, gazed at a bird, and the bird gazed at him, turning its head this way and that. Above ugly black roofs, like rotten teeth, where, before, there had been only sky, the pillars of the Parthenon, golden, perfect, rose into view. And then, when the bus was parked for a short stop at traffic lights, I looked through the window, across the road, and saw, under a tree, Helena and Yacinth standing, their faces turned away from me, as they looked intently down the street. Her hand rested lightly, forgotten, on the boy’s shoulder; his hands were clasped before him. Light, breaking through the tree, fell into his hair, creating a burning aureole around his head. He seemed hardly human, but, rather, a manifestation of time itself, of continuity, of history; he seemed a promise to hold up in the face of death. I thought, not daring to take my eyes from him, that if I could see what it was that he saw down at the end of that street, where he looked so intently, I would discover the secret, so long hidden from me, the secret of, yes, the secret of art.

It does not matter that I have probably missed the one chance in my life to know real love, the real anguish, torment and joy of love; it does not even matter that he is dead. I am not being cruel or vicious; I cannot explain, only I say it again, it does not matter that he is dead.

So. There are those who can perceive a heartrending beauty in the truth of the Pythagorean theorem; I am not even sure of its truth. I can offer nothing better than flawed and imperfect jewels. I never could offer anything other than an apprehension of the shadows that surround a beam of sunlight, the whisper of unheard music, the smiles of Botticelli’s maidens. Art is, after all, only mimicry.

Some things remain, scraps and bits. I did not stay for long on the island. It had changed. I had lost it somewhere, somehow, in the coils of the year that had passed. Apostolas, Erik’s man, came to see me one night. He was a great hulking inarticulate boy with burns on his hands from hot cordite. I asked him if he was still practising with his dynamite in the hills. He shook his head. He was worried, and asked for my help; he thought that the police were watching him. Imagine, he asked me for help. I told him that I could do nothing for him. He went away. Next day, the police arrested him. By then, it seemed superfluous to add that as another crime to my list. I could not have helped him. I could not help myself.

I returned to the city. I took my old hotel room again, just to tempt the fates, to tempt Papa Dop’s police, that is. They steadfastly refused to be tempted. I went to see Iakavos. He seemed not to remember me at first, but then, when I mentioned Erik, he smiled, and put his arm around my shoulder. He was a mine of information, if one could have deciphered more of his strange language. One surprise which he gave me was the fact that old Rabin had been arrested. He had, it seemed, been Mr Big in the counter-revolution which we had been helping. Helping, ha. I found that hard to believe. But then, why not? Rabin had his secrets.

My arm healed, and I could use it again, but something vital must have been severed in it, for I could but barely move the fingers. I taught myself to type with my left hand only. The departure of dexterity seemed a fitting symbol.

I found, in an old newspaper, a photograph of Erik being carried on a stretcher from the hotel where Andreas had shot him. The picture fascinated me, I cannot say why. It had been taken at the usual crooked angle, and the stretcher, which one of the white-coated orderlies seemed about to drop, stretched from the top left corner of the snap to the bottom right. The thing had the proportions of a carefully posed painting. But as for Erik himself (a twisted face with something dark streaming from the mouth) I could not feel anything. It was not really him, but someone else, a one dimensional creature in an unreal agony. I tore it up, and threw it away. I wish I had not done that.

I went up to the house on the hill, one day, but the place was locked and barred. I rang the bell, but nothing came back to me, only silence. Everything was silent. I scratched, with the toe of my sandal, a message in the dust outside the gate. And then I went away.

One last report, the one which seems to me to sum it all up, in some way which I cannot identify. Here it is, for what it is worth.

One night, very late, well after midnight, there was a knock upon the door of my hotel room. This is it, I thought, with relief, almost. Outside, in the corridor, stood a little man whom I vaguely recognized, but could not place.

‘White?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Come with me. Colonel Sesosteris wants to see you.’

The long limousine, which I recognized, stood outside in the street. Purring, it carried me and the silent driver across the city, to Aristotle’s house. A light burned in an upper window.

‘Listen,’ I said, laying my hand on the driver’s arm. ‘What’s this about?’

He shrugged, and said nothing, and led me into the house. The place was cold, and smelled like a hospital. I went up the stairs, and along a hall. The driver opened a door, and stood back, motioning me inside.

A weak bulb burned over the bed, and through the downward sifting of its light, the scene slowly advanced. In one corner of the room a table stood, draped with a napkin, and bearing instruments of burnished steel. There was a bowl of needles, a syringe and a wicked pair of scissors. The stiff white linen of the napkin fell from the corners of the table in fluted folds, and the folds created shadows. Shadow ascending, and substance falling, produced, together, a false sense of movement at the edge of my vision. Beside the table there was a chair, with slender legs, delicately curved, terminating in carved and polished claws which gripped the vague design of the carpet with inexplicable fierceness. Upon the chair a woman sat, dressed in white, with a white cap precariously perched on her hair. She was reading a novel, and nibbling, with the intensity of the plot, the nail of her little finger. The bed was huge, ornate, and low, and across the headboard a band of nymphs and satyrs pranced, flesh-pink, and forest-green, and the glittering silver of a stream, which knew no flow or flood, appeared through painted leaves. The old man lay motionless under the counterpane, his head turned sideward upon the pillow, his eyes closed. Two thoughts came strangely to me; I remembered such another bed, in another world, and I remembered the taxi driver who had carried me to Papa Iakavos. I advanced into the room. The nurse lifted her head.

‘Sh.’

She folded back an ear of the page, closed the book, and, taking my arm, she marched me firmly from the room. The hall was silent and empty. Two mirrors, one of them cracked, faced each other from opposing alcoves, bearing away a bowl of blown roses through an infinity of images. I stared at what seemed to be the solid version of the flowers, while the nurse, with her hands folded under her breasts, spoke to me.

‘Are you Mr White?’

‘Yes.’

‘He has been calling for you.’

‘Why?’

‘He wants to explain something, I don’t know what. He is very weak, you must understand, and his voice is not strong.’

A question, unspoken, hovered between us. She had a strong kind face, ands her eyebrows needed to be plucked. I said,

‘I didn’t know him very well.’

‘No?’

‘He knew a friend of mine, who’s dead now.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you?’

The nurse put her hands behind her back, and considered her black shoes.

‘I think I do,’ she said.

‘Then I wish you’d explain it to me.’

She smiled. We walked some steps down the corridor. I asked,

‘Is he dying?’

Her mouth tightened, and she said,

‘You must ask the doctor that, in the morning.’

‘But I’m asking you, now.’

We turned back, and stopped between the mirrors. She made some indecisive sounds, and then said,

‘We are hoping for an improvement, so that he can be taken into hospital. It’s always possible that —’

‘He’s dying.’

Her hands fluttered nervously, and fell together like frightened animals. She turned away from me, and opened the door of the room, saying,

‘I am not supposed to leave him.’

I followed her inside, and we sat down on either side of the bed. She made as if to speak to me again, but changed her mind, and picked up the novel. I looked at Aristotle. He had lost most of his hair, and the flesh of his face was stretched tightly over the bone. The grin of the skull was already breaking through. The long hours of darkness crept past. My chin fell to my breast, and I began to doze fitfully. A nerve, quivering in my leg, brought me awake again with a start. The bulb was flickering, and the old man was staring at me with wide, moist eyes. I waved frantically at the nurse. She left her chair, and bent over him, took a glass of water from the table, and, with her hand behind his head, held it to his lips. Another echo. He took the tiniest sip, and turned his head away. His gaze settled on me again. He had a look of intense preoccupation. At last he spoke. The voice was barely audible as it travelled over the black, deserted spaces of his illness.

‘Spiro,’ he said, querulously. ‘Spiro?’

I lifted my hands, and put them away again.

‘Ben White,’ I said, and smiled. ‘Don’t you remember me? You wanted to see me.’

He sighed, and, for a moment, it seemed that he might smile in return. But instead, he frowned, and blinked very slowly.

‘White?’

‘You wanted to see me,’ I murmured.

‘White.’

He struggled with the name, turning it this way and that, striving to fit it into the few thoughts which remained with him, to set it among the pattern. The nurse touched my shoulder.

‘You are tiring him,’ she hissed.

I ignored her. Aristotle stared at the bulb above him. His throat quivered as he swallowed, and he coughed, very faintly.

‘I wanted to … explain,’ he whispered. ‘I wanted …’

His eyes closed. He was asleep. He never did explain. Toward dawn, when the nurse tried to make her routine check on his pulse, she could not find it. A pulse was not to be found. He had died on us, without our noticing. It was, perhaps, the first time in his life that he had succeeded in doing anything silently, successfully, wholly final.

A drawn, grey light had broken over the city. I walked down toward the square. A pale mist was twined among the dripping branches of the trees in the park. I crossed the empty road, and went on to the grass. A bird sang somewhere above me, its song filling the morning with an incongruously gay music. I looked for the creature among the leaves, but could not find it. Now other voices joined it, and soon, all of the square was singing. Why go on? There is nothing more to say. There never was anything to say.

I cannot stop, I cannot stop, cannot face that suffocating void which will engulf me as I set down the last word. Winter is rolling in here, right on schedule. I could abide the seasons, if only they were not so sickeningly predictable. I have read back over these pages. There are so many loose bits and pieces, knots left untied. I cannot supply neatness, I cannot impose neatness. To judge the veracity of the book, take a look at the time sequence. But perhaps it is best to think of it this way: most is truth, the whole is a metaphor. Metaphor for what? Despair, I suppose.

Well, no, not really, not despair. I have spoken all along about this story being mine, mine alone; but of course, it is not. I remember a day on the island, during my last visit, when I was trying to recover from so much. I sat on a hillside, near their empty villa, watching the sun go down over Delos. It was a perfect evening. The sea was so calm, so blue. The sun sank, and a star, one lone pale star, came flickering out. Shadows gathered. I watched the night approach over a far hill, and suddenly I was assailed by a sense of continuity, of unity, of things following, one on the other. I cannot explain, I have not the energy. But I once spoke of it to Erik, had I but known what I meant. The wind lifts the waves, and the waves pound the shore. Whatever I did, or might do, the world went on, with or without me, always, and I was but a small part of an eternal confluence which I could not understand. I am talking about the healing of wounds. I am talking about art.

The beasts are still with me. They will be with me when I am released from here. That is my name for them, the beasts. Perhaps I should be grateful for their loyalty. Sometimes, now, they tell me that there is hope. I cannot believe that. People are too evil, the best of us have too much evil in us. These words could go on and on, until we are all up to our balls in paper, and this same testimony would remain: I love words, and I hate death. Beyond this, nothing.

Come, one more effort to transfix it all, to express it all. Try. I cannot. The world is … Art is … No, no use, I cannot. You must, there must be a conclusion. A word, even. Try. Try now, here. Could I? Try. Chapter one. My story begins at a —