Outline: A Novel

V

In the evening I was meeting an old friend of mine, Paniotis, at a restaurant in the centre of town. He called to give me directions, and also to tell me that someone else — a woman novelist I might have heard of — would probably be joining us. She had been very insistent; he hoped I didn’t mind. She wasn’t a person he cared to offend: I’ve been in Athens too long, he said. He described the route meticulously, twice. He was being kept in a meeting, he said, otherwise he would have come to fetch me himself. He didn’t like leaving me to find my way on my own but he hoped he had made things sufficiently clear. If I counted the traffic lights as he had told me to, turning right between the sixth and the seventh, I would not go wrong.

At evening, with the sun no longer overhead, the air developed a kind of viscosity in which time seemed to stand very still and the labyrinth of the city, no longer bisected by light and shade and unstirred by the afternoon breezes, appeared suspended in a kind of dream, paused in an atmosphere of extraordinary pallor and thickness. At some point darkness fell, but otherwise the evenings were strangely without the sense of progression: it didn’t get cooler, or quieter, or emptier of people; the roar of talk and laughter came unstaunched from the glaring terraces of restaurants, the traffic was a swarming, honking river of lights, small children rode their bicycles along the pavements under the bile-coloured streetlamps. Despite the darkness it was eternal day, the pigeons still scuffling in the neon-lit squares, the kiosks open on street corners, the smell of pastry still hanging in the exhausted air around the bakeries. In Paniotis’s restaurant a fat man in a heavy tweed suit sat alone at a corner table, delicately cutting a slice of pink watermelon into small pieces with his knife and fork and placing them carefully in his mouth. I waited, looking around the dark-panelled interior with its insets of bevelled glass, where the sea of empty tables and chairs was multiply reflected. This was not, Paniotis acknowledged when he arrived, a fashionable place; Angeliki, who intended to join us presently, would certainly be displeased, but at least it was possible to talk here, and one could be sure of not meeting anyone one knew who could interrupt. I probably didn’t share his feelings — he hoped, really, that I didn’t — but he was no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.

He asked me to stand up so that he could embrace me, and when I came out from behind the table he looked closely into my eyes. He had been trying to remember, he said, how long it was since our last encounter — did I know? It must have been more than three years ago, I said, and he nodded his head as I spoke. We had lunch in a restaurant in Earls Court, on a day that had been hot by English standards, and for some reason my children and husband had come too. We were on our way somewhere else: we stopped to meet Paniotis, who was in London for the book fair. I went away from that lunch, he said, feeling that my own life had been a failure. You seemed so happy with your family, so complete, it was an image of how things ought to be.

His body, when we hugged, felt extremely light and fragile. He was wearing a threadbare lilac-coloured shirt, and a pair of jeans that hung from him in folds. He drew back and looked at me closely again. There is something of the cartoon character about Paniotis’s face: everything about it is exaggerated, the cheeks very gaunt, the forehead very high, the eyebrows winging off like exclamation marks, the hair flying out in all directions, so that one has the curious feeling one is looking at an illustration of Paniotis rather than at Paniotis himself. Even when he is relaxed he wears the expression of someone who has just been told something extraordinary, or who has opened a door and been very surprised by what he has found behind it. His eyes, within this rictus-like expression, are very mobile and changeable and often bulge dramatically forward, as though one day they might fly out of his face altogether with astonishment at what they have witnessed.

And now, he said, I can see that something has happened, and I have to say I would not have expected it. I do not understand it at all. That day, he said, in the restaurant, I took a photograph of you with your family — do you remember? Yes, I said, I remembered. I said that I hoped he wasn’t about to show the photograph to me and he looked sombre. If you don’t wish it, he said. But of course I have brought it with me; it’s here in my briefcase. I told him that his taking a photograph was, in fact, the thing that stood out in my mind from that day. I remembered thinking that it was an unusual thing to do, or at least a thing I would not have thought to do myself. It marked some difference between him and me, in that he was observing something while I, evidently, was entirely immersed in being it. It was one of those moments, I said, that in retrospect have come to seem prophetic to me. And indeed, being so immersed, I did not notice that Paniotis went away from our encounter feeling that his life had been a failure, any more than the mountain notices the climber that loses his footing and falls down one of its ravines. Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of. While I spoke Paniotis looked more and more aghast. That is a terrible notion that only a Catholic could have come up with, he said. Though I can’t say there aren’t quite a few people I would like to see punished in so delightfully cruel a fashion. Those are the ones, however, who are certain to remain unenlightened by suffering to the end of their days. They make sure of it, he said, picking up the menu and turning with a lifted finger to the waiter, an immense grey-bearded man clad in a long white apron, who all this time had been entrenched so absolutely motionless in the corner of the almost empty room that I hadn’t noticed him. He came and stood before our table with his powerful arms folded across his chest, nodding his head while Paniotis spoke rapidly to him.

That day in London, Paniotis resumed, turning back to face me, I realised that my little dream of a publishing house was destined to remain just that, a fantasy, and in fact what that realisation caused me to feel was not so much disappointment at the situation as astonishment at the fantasy itself. It seemed incredible to me that at the age of fifty-one I was still capable of producing, in all innocence, a completely unrealisable hope. The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite — and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves? I had thought there was nothing, having lived my whole life in this tragic country, about which I could any longer deceive myself, but as you have so unhappily pointed out, it is the very thing you don’t see, the thing you take for granted, that deceives you. And how can you even know you have taken something for granted until it is no longer there?

The waiter loomed beside us carrying several dishes, and Paniotis broke off with a final pantomimed gesture of dismay, leaning back to let him put things on the table. There was a carafe of pale yellow wine, a dish of tiny green olives on their stalks that looked bitter but tasted sweet and delicious, and a plate of cold, delicate mussels in their black shells. To fortify us, Paniotis said, for the arrival of Angeliki. You will find that Angeliki has become very grand, he said, since one of her novels won some prize or another somewhere in Europe and she is now considered — or at least considers herself — to be a literary celebrity. Her sufferings — whatever they were — being over she has elected herself a sort of spokesperson for suffering womanhood generally, not just in Greece but in other territories that have demonstrated an interest in her work. Wherever she is asked to go, she goes. The novel, he said, concerns a woman painter whose artistic life is gradually being stifled by her domestic arrangements: her husband is a diplomat, and the family is always being uprooted and moved to a new place, so that the woman painter comes to feel that her own work is merely decorative, a pastime, while her husband’s is considered not just by him but by the world to be important, to forge events rather than simply provide a commentary on them, and that when there is a conflict between the two — which, this being a novel by Angeliki, there often is — his needs triumph over hers. And eventually her work starts to become mechanical, a pretence; there is no passion, yet her urge to express herself remains. In Berlin, where the family are now living, she meets a young man, a painter, who reignites her passion, for painting and for everything else — but now the problem is that she feels too old for this young man, and also she feels miserably guilty, especially about her children, who have sensed that something is wrong and have started to become upset. Most of all she feels angry with her husband, for putting her in this position, for causing her to lose her passion in the first place and leaving her entirely responsible for the consequences. And the young painter is still making her feel old, with his all-night parties and his recreational drugs and his wonder at the marks experience has left on her woman’s body. There is no one she can talk to, no one she can tell — what a lonely place, smirks Paniotis. That’s the title, by the way: A Lonely Place. My argument with Angeliki, he says, concerns her substitution of painting for writing, as if the two were interchangeable. The book is obviously about herself, he says, and yet she knows nothing at all about painting. In my experience painters are far less conventional than writers. Writers need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in an animal’s fur: the deeper they’re buried the better. I don’t believe in her painter, he says, making the children’s packed lunches in her state-of-the-art German kitchen while fantasising about sex with a young muscled androgyne in a leather jacket.

I asked him what it was, in London, that had caused him to lose faith in his publishing house, which he had only just launched and which indeed shortly afterwards — I had heard — was taken over by a large corporation, so that Paniotis was now a company editor rather than the director of his own enterprise. My reverence for all things English, he said after a silence, his sorrowful eyes brimming and rolling in their sockets, was not reciprocated. This was when things had started to get difficult here, he continued, though no one guessed then how much worse they would become. The publishing house was to be devoted exclusively to translating and printing English-language authors unheard of in Greece, writers the commercial publishers wouldn’t touch, whose work Paniotis deeply admired and was determined to make available for his countrymen. But at a particular moment he was unable to provide the advance payments to these authors, many of whose books he had translated himself to cut costs. In London he found himself excoriated, even by the writers themselves, for non-payment of money that the books, strictly speaking, had not yet actually earned; he was treated with the greatest disdain by everyone, was threatened with legal action, and worst of all came away with the impression that these writers he had worshipped as the artists of our time were in fact cold and unempathetic people devoted to self-promotion and above all else, to money. He had made it quite clear to them that if he was forced to pay, his publishing house would collapse before it had even begun, which indeed is what happened; those same writers are regularly rejected by the company he works for now, who are interested only in turning out best-sellers. And so I learned, he said, that it is impossible to improve things, and that good people are just as responsible for it as bad, and that improvement itself is perhaps a mere personal fantasy, as lonely in its way as Angeliki’s lonely place. We are all addicted to it, he said, removing a single mussel from its shell with his trembling fingers and putting it in his mouth, the story of improvement, to the extent that it has commandeered our deepest sense of reality. It has even infected the novel, though perhaps now the novel is infecting us back again, so that we expect of our lives what we’ve come to expect of our books; but this sense of life as a progression is something I want no more of.

In his marriage, he now realised, the principle of progress was always at work, in the acquiring of houses, possessions, cars, the drive towards higher social status, more travel, a wider circle of friends, even the production of children felt like an obligatory calling-point on the mad journey; and it was inevitable, he now saw, that once there were no more things to add or improve on, no more goals to achieve or stages to pass through, the journey would seem to have run its course, and he and his wife would be beset by a great sense of futility and by the feeling of some malady, which was really only the feeling of stillness after a life of too much motion, such as sailors experience when they walk on dry land after too long at sea, but which to both of them signified that they were no longer in love. If only we had had the sense, he said, to make our peace with one another then, to start from the honest proposition that we were two people not in love who nonetheless meant one another no harm; well, he said, his eyes brimming again, if that had been the case I believe we might have learned truly to love one another and to love ourselves. But instead we saw it as another opportunity for progress, saw the journey unfolding once more, only this time it was a journey through destruction and war, for which both of us demonstrated just as much energy and aptitude as always.

These days, he said, I live very simply. In the mornings, at sunrise, I drive to a place I know twenty minutes outside Athens and I swim all the way across the bay and all the way back again. In the evenings I sit on my balcony and I write. He closed his eyes briefly and smiled. I asked him what it was he was writing, and his smile widened. He said, I am writing about my childhood. I was so happy as a child, he continued, and I realised a little while ago that there was nothing I wanted so much as to recall it piece by piece, with every possible detail. The world that happiness existed in has completely disappeared, not just in my own life but in Greece as a whole, for whether it knows it or not Greece is a country that is on its knees and dying a slow and agonising death. In my own case, I sometimes wonder whether it was the very happiness of my childhood that has meant I have had to be taught how to suffer. I seem to have been exceptionally slow to understand where pain comes from, and how it comes. It has taken me a long time to learn to avoid it. I read in the newspaper the other day, he said, about a boy with a curious mental disorder which compels him to seek physical risk and therefore injury wherever possible. This boy is forever putting his hand in the fire, and throwing himself off walls, and climbing trees in order to fall out of them; he has broken nearly every bone in his body, and of course is covered in cuts and bruises, and the newspaper asked his poor parents for their comment on the situation. The problem is, they said, he has no fear. But it seems to me that exactly the reverse is true: he has too much fear, so much that he is driven to enact the thing of which he is afraid, lest it should happen of its own accord. I think that if I had known, as a child, what was possible in terms of pain, I might have had much the same response. You might remember in the Odyssey, he said, the character of Elpenor, Odysseus’s crewmate who falls off the roof of Circe’s house because he is so happy he forgets he has to use a ladder to come down. Odysseus encounters him in Hades later on, and he asks him why on earth he died in such a foolish manner. Paniotis smiled. I always found that a charming detail, he said.

A woman who was certain to be Angeliki — since there were no other diners, and no one else had entered the restaurant in all this time — had come in and was interrogating the waiter quite energetically; a conversation of inexplicable length ensued, in the course of which the two of them went outside and shortly after came back again, whereupon it continued more energetically than ever, the woman’s tawny well-cut hair swishing with the rapid movements of her head and her lovely grey dress — made of a flimsy silk material — swirling as she shifted from one foot to another, impatient as a stamping pony. She wore striking high-heeled sandals of silver leather and carried a matching bag, and would have been the picture of elegance had she not, when she turned around to look in the direction of the waiter’s pointing arm — and seen at the end of it our table — disclosed a face so extraordinarily anxious that anyone looking at it could only feel anxious too on her behalf. As Paniotis had predicted, Angeliki was chagrinned by his choice of restaurant; she had only come in here in the first place, she said, to ask for directions to the venue Paniotis had chosen, not realising that this was it, and the waiter had had to take her outside and show her the sign to convince her; and even then she felt sure that a more suitable place must be trading under the same name nearby. But I chose it specially for you, Paniotis said, his eyes bulging. The chef is from your home town, Angeliki; all your favourite Baltic dishes are on the menu. Please excuse him, Angeliki said, placing a manicured hand on my arm. She then remonstrated rapidly with Paniotis in Greek, a tirade that ended with him excusing himself from the table and disappearing off towards the toilets.

I’m so sorry I couldn’t be here earlier, Angeliki continued breathlessly. I had to attend a reception, and then return home to put my son to bed — I haven’t seen all that much of him lately, as I’ve been on tour with my book. It was a tour of Poland, she added before I could ask, mainly in Warsaw but I visited other cities too. She asked whether I had ever been to Poland and when I said that I had not, she nodded her head a little sadly. The publishers there can’t afford to invite many writers to come, she said, and it is a pity, because they need writers there in a way that people here do not. In the past year, she said, I have visited many places for the first time, or for the first time in my own right, but Poland was the tour that affected me the most, because it made me see my books not just as entertainments for the middle classes but as something vital, a lifeline in many cases, for people — largely women, it has to be admitted — who feel very much alone in their daily lives.

Angeliki picked up the carafe and melancholically poured herself a teaspoon of wine, before filling my glass almost to the brim.

‘My husband is a diplomat,’ she said, ‘so we have travelled a lot, evidently, for his work. But it feels completely different to be travelling for my work, and to be travelling independently. I admit that I have sometimes felt afraid, even in places I’m quite familiar with. And in Poland I was very nervous, because there was very little there — including the language — that I recognised. But some of it, at first, was down to the plain fact that I was unused to being by myself. For instance,’ she continued, ‘we lived in Berlin for six years, but even going there alone, as a writer, it seemed somehow alien. Partly it was because I was seeing a new aspect of the city — the literary culture, which I was absolutely outside of before — and partly because being there without my husband caused me to feel, in an entirely new way, what I actually am.’

I replied that I wasn’t sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a ‘real’ self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist. My mother once admitted, I said, that she used to be desperate for us to leave the house for school, but that once we’d gone she had no idea what to do with herself and wished that we would come back. And she still, even now that her children were adults, would conclude our visits quite forcefully and usher us all off to our own homes, as though something terrible would have happened if we had stayed. Yet I was quite sure that she experienced that same sense of loss after we’d gone, and wondered what she was looking for and why she had driven us away in order to look for it. Angeliki began to rummage in her elegant silver bag and presently pulled out a notepad and pencil.

‘Please excuse me,’ she said. ‘I just need to write that down.’ She sat writing for a moment and then glanced up and said, ‘Could you just repeat the second part?’

I noticed that her notepad was very orderly, like the rest of her appearance, the pages neatly written in straight lines. Her pencil was made of silver too, with a retractable lead which she screwed firmly back into its casing. When she had finished she said: ‘I have to admit that I was astonished by the response in Poland, really very surprised. You know, I presume, that the women of Poland are highly politicised: my audiences were ninety per cent women,’ she said, ‘and they were very vocal. Of course, Greek women are vocal too —’

‘But they are better dressed,’ said Paniotis, who had by now returned. To my surprise, Angeliki took this interjection seriously.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the women in Greece like to be beautiful. But in Poland I felt this to be a disadvantage. The women there are so pale and serious: they have wide, flat, cool faces, though their skin is often bad, presumably because of the weather and their diet, which is appalling. And their teeth,’ she added with a little grimace, ‘are not good. But they have a seriousness I envied, as though they had not been distracted, were never distracted from the reality of their own lives. I spent a lot of time in Warsaw with a woman journalist,’ she went on, ‘a person of about my own age and also a mother, who was so thin and flat and hard I found it difficult to believe she was a woman at all. She had straight mouse-coloured hair that went all the way down her back, and a face as white and bony as a glacier, and she wore big workman’s jeans and big clumsy shoes, and she was as clear and sharp and beautiful as an icicle. She and her husband alternated strictly every six months, one working and the other looking after the children. Sometimes he complained, but so far he had accepted the arrangement. But she admitted to me, proudly, that when she went away for work, which she often did, the children would sleep with her photograph beneath their pillows. I laughed,’ Angeliki said, ‘and told her I felt sure my son would die rather than be caught sleeping with a photograph of me beneath his pillow. And Olga gave me such a look that I suddenly wondered whether even our children were infected with the cynicism of our gender politics.’

Angeliki’s face had a softness, almost a mistiness, that was attractive while also being the reason for its careworn appearance. It seemed that anything could leave an impression in that softness. She had the small, neat features of a child, yet her skin was creased as though by worry, which gave her a look of frowning innocence, like a pretty little girl that has not got her way.

‘Talking to this journalist,’ she continued, ‘whose name as I have mentioned was Olga, I wondered whether my whole existence — even my feminism — had been a compromise. I felt it had lacked seriousness. Even my writing has been treated as a kind of hobby. I wondered whether I would have had the courage to be like her, for there seemed to be so little pleasure in her life, so little beauty — the sheer physical ugliness of that part of the world is astonishing — that I wasn’t sure, under similar circumstances, whether I would have had the energy to care. That was why I was surprised by the numbers of women who attended my readings — it almost seemed as though my work was more important to them than it is to me!’

The waiter came to take our order, which was a lengthy process, as Angeliki appeared to be discussing each item on the menu in turn, asking numerous questions as she moved down the list which the waiter answered gravely and sometimes lengthily, never becoming the slightest bit impatient. Paniotis sat beside her, rolling his eyes and occasionally remonstrating with the pair of them, which only served to make the process even longer. Finally it seemed to be concluded and the waiter moved heavily and slowly away, but then Angeliki summoned him back with a little intake of breath and a lifting of her finger, having had, apparently, a few afterthoughts. Her doctor had put her on a special diet, she said to me once he had departed for the second time and vanished through the mahogany louvred doors at the far end of the restaurant, since she had become unwell on her return to Greece from Berlin. She had found herself overwhelmed by the most extraordinary lethargy and — it didn’t trouble her to admit it — by sadness, which she had supposed to be a sort of cumulative physical and emotional exhaustion from so many years abroad, and had spent six months more or less incapacitated in bed; months in which she had discovered, she said, that her husband and son could manage without her far better than she might have imagined, so that when she got up again and returned to normal life she found that her role in the household had diminished. Her husband and son had become used to doing much of what had been her work around the house — or to having it left undone, she said — and in fact had evolved new habits of their own, many of which she disliked; but she recognised, at that moment, that she was being given a choice, and that if she wanted to escape her old identity then this was her opportunity. For some women, she said, it would be the realisation of their greatest fear, to discover that they were not needed, but for her it had had the opposite effect. She found, too, that illness had enabled her to view her life, and the people in it, with greater objectivity. She realised that she was not so bound up with them as she had thought, particularly with her son, on whose account she had always, from the moment of his birth, suffered an immense preoccupation, seeing him as uniquely sensitive and vulnerable, to the extent that she was unable — she now realised — to leave him alone even for a minute. Returning to the world after her illness, her son seemed if not quite a stranger to her then less painfully connected to her by every filament. She still loved him, of course, but she no longer saw him and his life as something she needed to resolve into perfection.

‘For many women,’ she said, ‘having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,’ she said, ‘the mother’s sacrifice of herself is absolute, which mine never could have been, and which no woman’s ought to be these days. My own mother lived through me in a way that was completely uncritical,’ she said, ‘and the consequence was that I came into adulthood unprepared for life, because nobody saw me as important in the way she did, which was the way I was used to being seen. And then you meet a man who thinks you’re important enough to marry you, so it seems right that you should say yes. But it is when you have a baby that the feeling of importance really returns,’ she said, with growing passion, ‘except that one day you realise that all this — the house, the husband, the child — isn’t importance after all, in fact it is the exact opposite: you have become a slave, obliterated!’ She paused dramatically, her face lifted, her hands flat on the table top amidst the silverware. ‘The only hope,’ she continued more quietly, ‘is to make your child and your husband so important in your own mind that your ego has enough sustenance to stay alive. But in fact,’ she said, ‘as Simone de Beauvoir observes, such a woman is nothing but a parasite, a parasite on her husband, a parasite on her child.’

‘In Berlin,’ she continued after a while, ‘my son attended an expensive private college, paid for by the embassy, where we met a great number of rich and well-connected people. The women were of a kind I had never known before in my life: nearly all of them worked in a profession — doctors, lawyers, accountants — and most of them had a large number of children, five or six apiece, whose lives they supervised with amazing diligence and energy, running their families like successful corporations on top of the demanding careers most of them already had. Not only that, these women were as well groomed and well turned out as could be: they went to the gym every day, ran marathons for charity, were as thin and wiry as greyhounds and always wore the most expensive, elegant clothes, though their sinewy muscular bodies were often curiously sexless. They went to church, baked the cakes for the school fete, chaired the debating society, held dinner parties at which six courses were served, read all the latest novels, attended concerts, played tennis and volleyball at the weekends. One such woman would have been enough,’ she said, ‘but in Berlin I met quantities of them. And the funny thing was, I could never remember their names, or their husbands’ names either: in fact,’ she said, ‘I don’t recall a single one of their faces, or the faces of any of their families, except for the face of one child, a boy of about my son’s age, who was terribly disabled and went around in a kind of motorised cart which had a shelf for his chin to rest on, so that his head — which otherwise I suppose would have fallen forward on to his chest — was always propped up.’ She paused, troubled, as though seeing the boy’s face before her once more. ‘I don’t remember his mother’, she continued, ‘ever complaining about her lot: on the contrary, she was a tireless fundraiser for charities supporting his condition, on top of all the other things she had to do.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I almost wonder whether the exhaustion I felt when we returned from Berlin was in fact the collective exhaustion of these women, which they refused to feel themselves and so had passed on to me. One always seemed to see them running: they ran everywhere, to work and back again, to the supermarket, in groups around the park — talking together as easily as if they were standing still — and if they had to stop for a traffic light they would keep running on the spot in their enormous white shoes until it changed and they could progress again. The rest of the time they wore flat shoes with rubber soles, supremely practical and supremely ugly. Their shoes were the only inelegant thing about them,’ she said, ‘yet I felt they were the key to the whole mystery of their nature, for they were the shoes of a woman without vanity.

‘I myself,’ she continued, extending her silvered foot out from beneath the table, ‘developed a weakness for delicate shoes when we returned to Greece. Perhaps it was because I had begun to see the virtues of standing still. And for the character in my novel, shoes like these represent something forbidden. They are the sort of thing she would never wear. Moreover, when she does see women wearing such shoes, it makes her feel sad. She has believed, until now, that this was because she found such women pitiful, but in fact when she thinks about it honestly it is because she feels excluded or disbarred from the concept of womanhood the shoes represent. She feels, almost, as if she isn’t a woman at all. But if she isn’t a woman, what is she? She is experiencing a crisis of femininity that is also a creative crisis, yet she has always sought to separate the two things in the belief that they were mutually exclusive, that the one disqualified the other. She looks out of the window of her apartment at the women running in the park, always running, and she asks herself whether they are running towards something or away from it. If she looks long enough she sees that they are simply running around in circles.’

Bearing an enormous silver tray the waiter approached. He unloaded the dishes one after the other and placed them on the table. Having taken such trouble with the ordering of the food, Angeliki served herself only minuscule amounts, her forehead furrowed with frowns as she prodded her spoon into each one. Paniotis arranged a selection of things on my plate, explaining to me what they were. He said that he had last come to this restaurant on the eve of his daughter’s departure to America, when likewise he had not wished to be interrupted by acquaintances, of which, at this point, he had far too many in Athens. Sharing the food, they had reminisced about a holiday they once took along the coast north of Thessaloniki, from where many of these dishes originated. He held up the spoon and asked Angeliki whether she wouldn’t take a little more, but she half closed her eyes and inclined her head in reply, like a saint patiently refusing temptation. And you, he said to me, you have very little also. I explained that I had eaten souvlaki for lunch. Paniotis grimaced, and Angeliki wrinkled her nose.

‘Souvlaki is very greasy,’ she said. ‘Along with their indolence,’ she added, ‘it is the reason why the Greeks are so fat.’

I asked Paniotis how long ago it was that he had travelled north with his daughter, and he said that it was very shortly after he and his wife had divorced. In fact it was the first time he had taken his children anywhere on his own. He remembered that in the car, driving out of Athens and into the hills, he had kept glancing at them on the back seat in the rearview mirror, feeling as wrongful as if he were kidnapping them. He expected them, at any minute, to discover his crime and demand their immediate return to Athens and their mother, but they did not: in fact, they made no comment on the situation at all, not during all the long hours of a journey in which Paniotis felt himself to be getting further and further away from everything trusted and known, everything familiar, and most of all from the whole security of the home he had made with his wife, which of course no longer even existed. Yet moving geographically away from this scene of loss felt unbearable, just as sometimes, said Paniotis, people cannot bear to go away from the place where a loved one has died.

‘I kept waiting for the children to ask to go home,’ he said, ‘but in fact it was I who wanted to go home: I began to realise, in the car, that as far as they were concerned they were home, at least partly, because they were with me.’

That, he said, was the loneliest of realisations; and it was not helped by their arrival at the hotel where they were due to break their journey for the night, which was a most terrible place in a scruffy, windswept seaside town where a giant apartment complex had been half built and then abandoned, so that everywhere there were huge piles of sand and cement and great stacks of breeze blocks, as well as large pieces of machinery that appeared to have been simply left there mid-job, diggers with shovels of earth half raised, forklift trucks with pallets still suspended on their outstretched prongs, all frozen in situ like prehistoric monsters drowned in silt, while the building itself, an aborted embryo in a still-fresh swirl of tarmac, stood in all its spectral madness, staring with its glassless windows out to sea. Their hotel was filthy and full of mosquitoes, and there was cement grit between the sheets, and it amazed him to see his children bouncing and laughing on the ugly metal beds with their garish nylon covers, for up until now — sometimes by arrangement but often by mere chance — he and his wife had only ever taken them to places of beauty and comfort, and as well as being filled with the dreadful conviction that his life from here on was going to be as luckless as the previous life had been fortunate, he felt the most terrible pity for the children themselves. He had booked one room for the three of them and eventually he got them to bed, but lay awake for many hours himself, sandwiched between them: ‘never,’ Paniotis said, ‘have I found a night as hard to get through as that one. And in the morning, however it came, we saw that the weather was bad, as it can sometimes be along that coast at Easter. It was already raining very hard, and was so windy on the shore, where the hotel looked out, that the spume was lifted from the water and blew away in great desolate sweeps that looked like phantoms crossing the sky. We should have stayed where we were, but I was so determined to get away that I put the children back in the car and started to drive with the rain hammering on the roof, hardly able to see where I was going. At points the road had been turned literally to mud, and as we climbed back up into the hills above the coast I saw there was an actual danger it might be washed away. On top of that, the children had been bitten very badly by mosquitoes during the night and had scratched the bites, some of which looked like they might become infected. So I needed to find a pharmacy, but in all the drama of the rain I must have taken a wrong turning, because instead of joining the motorway the road became steeper and steeper and narrower and narrower and the hills more and more desolate, until I saw that we were in a veritable mountain range, with enormous dizzying drops to each side and great wads of cloud around the peaks. The storm had caused herds of goats and mountain pigs to run madly over the mountainsides, and sometimes they came swarming across the road right in front of the car; and then, a little further on, the road was deluged from above by a river that had burst its banks and the children screamed as the water poured through one of the windows that had been left slightly open. The sky was so black by now that even though it was only late morning it was as if night had fallen; but up ahead, through the rain, I suddenly saw a building where there were lights. Amazingly enough, it was a mountain inn, just beside the road, and we pulled over straight away, jumping out of the car and running across to the entrance of the low stone building with our jackets over our heads and flinging open the door. It was a nice enough place, in fact, and we must have looked quite extraordinary to the people inside, the children covered in bleeding bites, all three of us unkempt and soaking wet. The main room was full of girl scouts, at least thirty of them, all wearing a uniform that consisted of a navy skirt and blouse, a navy beret and a knotted yellow tie. They were singing all together, a song in French, with one or two of them accompanying on small musical instruments. This bizarre scene seemed quite acceptable to me, after the awful seaside town and the storm and the mad goats; and in fact one of the things that happened to me on that holiday, and that I believe has not changed since, was that I began to feel for the first time that I was seeing what was really there, without asking myself whether or not I was expecting to see it. When I think back to the time before, and especially to the years of my marriage, it seems to me as though my wife and I looked at the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion. We never, I think, discovered the true nature of the things we saw, any more than we were ever in danger of being affected by them; we peered at them, at people and places, like people on a ship peer at the passing mainland, and should we have seen them in any kind of trouble, or they us, there would have been nothing whatever either one of us could have done about it.

‘It may have been to say something of this sort that I suddenly felt an overpowering need to talk to my wife, and I asked the owner of the inn if she had a telephone I could use. The girl scouts — who were part of a religious organisation of a kind I believe is quite common in France, and who told us they were on a walking tour of the area — had meanwhile made room on the benches around the large wooden table at which they sat and had cheerfully resumed their singing while the rain came down in torrents outside. The woman showed me the telephone, and asked if I would like her to make some hot chocolate for the children. She also produced, in her kindness, a tube of disinfectant cream for their bites. In the telephone booth I dialled the number of my wife’s new apartment in Athens, and was surprised to hear a man answer the phone. When eventually I got Chrysta on the line I told her everything about our predicament, said that we were lost somewhere in the mountains, that there was a terrible storm, that the children were frightened and covered in mosquito bites and that I doubted my ability to cope in such a crisis. But instead of responding with sympathy and concern, she was absolutely silent. The silence was only a few seconds long, but in that period, while she failed to come in on time and to take up, as it were, her part in our lifelong duet, I understood, completely and definitively, that Chrysta and I were no longer married, and that the war we were embroiled in was not merely a bitterer version of the same lifelong engagement, but was something far more evil, something that had destruction, annihilation, non-existence as its ambition. Most of all it wanted silence: and this, I realised, was what my conversations with Chrysta were all leading towards, a silence that would in the end remain unbroken, though on this occasion she did break it. I’m sure you’ll manage somehow, was what she said. And shortly after, the conversation concluded.

‘Returning to my children after this exchange,’ Paniotis said, ‘I felt the most extraordinary sense of insecurity, almost like vertigo. I remember clutching the wooden edge of the table for what seemed like the longest time, while all around me the girl scouts sang. But then, after a while, I felt a distinct warmth at my back and looked up to see that great yellow beams of sunlight were coming through the leaded windows. The girl scouts rose from their chairs and packed away their instruments. The storm had passed; the innkeeper opened the door to let the sunshine through. And out we all went into the dripping, sparkling world, where I stood with my children beside the car, my whole body shaking, and watched the troop of scouts marching off down the road, whistling, until they disappeared from view. What struck me most about that sight was that they did not, evidently, consider themselves to be lost, and nor did they find anything frightening in the turn the weather had taken or even in the proclivities of the mountains themselves. They did not take any of these things personally. That was the difference between them and me, and at that time it was all the difference in the world.

‘My daughter reminded me,’ he said, ‘on that last evening we spent here, of the walk we took later that day. She did not, in fact, remember the hotel or the storm or even the girl scouts, but she did remember our descent into the Lousios gorge, which we decided to make when we passed a sign on the road pointing down to it. There was a monastery along the gorge I had long wanted to visit, and so she and my son and I left the car by the side of the road and set off down the path. She remembered our walk down there in the sunshine beside plunging waterfalls, and the wild orchids she picked along the way, and the monastery itself, perched on the edge of an extraordinary ravine, where she was asked to put on one of the ugly long skirts made of old curtains they kept in mothballs in a basket by the door before they would permit her to enter. If there was anything traumatic about that day, she told me, it was having to put on that horrible smelly skirt. On the way back up,’ Paniotis said, ‘the sun grew so hot, and our bites began to itch so unbearably, that the three of us tore off our clothes and leaped into one of the deep pools the waterfall had made, despite the fact that it was quite close to the path and that we could have been seen at any minute by passers-by. How cold the water was, and how incredibly deep and refreshing and clear — we drifted around and around, with the sun on our faces and our bodies hanging like three white roots beneath the water. I can see us there still,’ he said, ‘for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story attached to them,’ he said, ‘despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing in our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to our story of who we were. Once Chrysta and I divorced, things did not join up in that way any more, although I tried for years to make it seem as though they did. But there was no sequel to that time in the pool, nor ever will be. And so my daughter has gone to America,’ he said, ‘like her brother before her, both of them getting as far away from their parents as they possibly can. And of course I’m sad,’ he said, ‘but I can’t pretend I don’t think they’ve done the right thing.’

‘Paniotis,’ Angeliki exclaimed, ‘what are you saying? That your children emigrated because their parents got divorced? My friend, I’m afraid you’re mistaken in thinking you’re that important. Children leave or children stay depending on their ambitions: their lives are their own. Somehow we’ve become convinced that if we say even a word out of place we’ve marked them forever, but of course that is ridiculous, and in any case, why should their lives be perfect? It is our own idea of perfection that plagues us, and it is rooted in our own desires. For instance my mother thinks that the greatest misfortune is to be an only child. She simply cannot accept that my son will not have brothers and sisters, and I’m afraid I’ve given her the impression that this situation has not come about by choice, as a way of avoiding talking to her about it all the time. But she’s always telling me about this doctor or that doctor she’s just heard of, who can work miracles; the other day she sent me a newspaper clipping about a Greek woman who had a baby at the age of fifty-three, with a note telling me not to give up hope. Yet for my husband it is completely normal that our son should grow up alone, because he was an only child himself. And for me, of course, it would be disastrous to have more children: I would be completely submerged, as so many women are. I ask myself why it is my mother wishes to see me submerged in my turn, when I have important work to do, when it would not be in my best interests and would be, as I say, tantamount to disaster, and the answer is that her desire is not about me but about herself. I’m sure she wouldn’t wish me to consider myself a failure for not being the mother of six children, yet that is precisely what her behaviour could cause me to feel.

‘The parts of life that are suffocating’, Angeliki said, ‘are so often the parts that are the projection of our parents’ own desires. One’s existence as a wife and a mother, for example, is something often walked into without question, as though we are propelled by something outside ourselves; while a woman’s creativity, the thing she doubts and is always sacrificing for the sake of these other things — when she wouldn’t dream, for instance, of sacrificing the interests of her husband or son — has been her own idea, her own inner compulsion. While I was in Poland,’ she said, ‘I vowed to develop a less sentimental view of life, and if there is something I regret in my novel, it is that the material circumstances of the characters are so comfortable. It would be a more serious book, I believe, if that were not the case. Spending time with Olga,’ she said, ‘certain things came to light for me, as objects under water come to light when the water drains away. I realised that our whole sense of life as a romance — even our conception of love itself — was a vision in which material things played far too great a role, and that without those things we might find that certain feelings diminished while others became accentuated. I was very attracted to the hardness of Olga,’ she said, ‘to the hardness of her life. When she spoke about her relationship with her husband it was as though she were speaking about the parts of an engine, explaining how they worked or did not work. There was no romance in it, no place that was covered up and that you weren’t allowed to see. And so I was not jealous of the husband at all, but when she spoke about her children, about the photograph of her they kept beneath their pillows, I realised I felt angry, as I used to feel angry with my sisters and my brother when our mother gave her attention to them. I was jealous of Olga’s children; I didn’t want them to love her in that way, to exert that power over her. I started to feel more sympathetic towards the husband, being treated like a car engine; and then she told me that for a period of time he had left, had left the family, unable to bear this lack of sentimentality any longer, and had gone and lived in a flat on his own. When he returned, they resumed their life as before. Was she not angry with him, I said, for deserting her and leaving her to take care of the children alone? No, on the contrary, she was pleased to see him. We are completely honest with one another, she said, and so I knew when he came back that it was because he had accepted the way things were. I tried to imagine,’ Angeliki said, ‘what this marriage was like, in which nobody had to make promises or apologise, in which you didn’t have to buy flowers for the other person or cook them a special meal or light the candles to make a flattering atmosphere, or book a holiday to help you get over your problems; or rather, in which you were made to do without those things and live together so honestly and nakedly. And still I kept coming back to the children, and to the photograph they kept beneath the pillow, because it suggested that after all Olga was guilty of sentimentality, was capable of romance, only it was a romance of mother and child — and if she was capable of that, then why not everything? I admitted to her that I was jealous of her children, whom I had never even met, and she said to me, it is obvious, Angeliki, that you have never grown up and that this is how you are able to be a writer. Believe me, Olga said, you are very fortunate: I watched my daughter grow up from one day to the next when her father went away. She became, Olga said, in that period, extremely hostile to men: Olga recalled taking her one day around an art gallery in Warsaw, and when they arrived at a religious painting of Salome holding the severed head of John the Baptist, the child had cheered. On another occasion, Olga reprimanded her for some disparaging remark concerning the opposite sex, and her daughter had said that she didn’t see why it was necessary that men exist. There don’t need to be men, she had said, there only need to be mothers and children. Olga conceded that she was partly responsible for her daughter’s perception of things, but the plain truth was that she would never have left the children in the way their father had, though undoubtedly he loved them; but she herself simply wouldn’t have been capable of it, and whether that difference was a biological fact or merely a consequence of conditioning, it still had to be accounted for. You would do the same, Olga said to me, if it ever came to it.’ Angeliki paused. ‘I said that on the contrary, I believed my son belonged more to his father than he did to me. But she refused to accept that that could ever be the case, unless I had an unusual degree of respect for male authority. At that I had to laugh: the idea of me, of all people, nurturing an undue respect for male authority! But I have thought a great deal about that remark since,’ Angeliki said, ‘for obvious reasons. In my novel, the character is compromised by her desire to be free on the one hand and her guilt about her children on the other. All she wishes is for her life to be integrated, to be one thing, rather than an eternal series of oppositions that confound her whichever way she looks. One answer, of course, is that she divert her passion to her children, where it will do no harm; and that is the answer, ultimately, that she chooses. Yet it is not what I feel myself,’ Angeliki said, rearranging the lovely grey tissue of her sleeves.

The waiter loomed beside our table; the restaurant was apparently closing now, and Angeliki rose, looking at her little silver watch and saying that she had enjoyed herself so much she had entirely lost track of the time. She had to be up early in the morning, for a television interview; ‘but it was such a pleasure’, she said, holding out her hand to me, ‘to meet you. I think Paniotis would have preferred to have you to himself, but I’m afraid I insisted, since you were here, on my right to take part. I will treasure our conversation,’ she said, squeezing my fingertips; ‘perhaps we can meet again and continue it, woman to woman, the next time I am in London.’

She opened her bag and took out a little card with her details on, which she handed to me; with a swirl of her dress and a flicker of her silver heels she was gone, and I saw her face passing briefly outside the window, set once more in its striking configuration of frowning lines, which brightened when she caught my eye through the glass and raised her hand in farewell.

‘If I may I will walk with you,’ Paniotis said, ‘as far as your apartment.’

As we set off down the dark, hot pavement towards the main road with its throbbing lights and unceasing sound of traffic, he told me that Angeliki was angry with him, because he was editing an anthology of Greek writing from which her work had been omitted.

‘Vanity’, he said, ‘is the curse of our culture; or perhaps it is simply my own persistent refusal’, he said, ‘to believe that artists are also human beings.’

I said that in fact I had liked Angeliki, though she appeared to have forgotten that we had met before, at a reading I gave several years ago in Athens where she and her husband were among the audience. Paniotis laughed.

‘That was another Angeliki,’ he said, ‘an Angeliki who no longer exists and has been written out of the history books. Angeliki the famous writer, the feminist of international renown, has never met you before in her life.’

When we reached the entrance to my apartment building, Paniotis looked at the larger-than-life figures in the darkness of the café window, the woman still laughing, the man still crinkling his eyes at her in all his handsome false modesty.

‘At least they’re happy,’ he said. He opened his briefcase and took out an envelope and pressed it into my hand. ‘It remains your truth,’ he said, ‘whatever has happened. Don’t be afraid to look at it.’