Days Like Today (19 page)

Vultures,
he thought; even at the graveside, hustling for money to keep them in business. And now their miserable island was going to be on the map: a genuine tourist attraction with a legend to go with it.

The newspaper accounts didn’t mention the fact that one of Stratis’s relatives had come from the island. The surname was different, but the old man’s name – even in the shortened, more easily pronounceable form he had adopted on arrival in America – would have been recognized by an islander. And the priest had sat down to dinner at the house. Had nobody admitted that there was a family connection with the place of the icon’s church? Apparently not. Nor did anyone in the family remark on the peculiar circumstances of Stratis’s death. The icon was never mentioned at all, although they knew that there was one in the house. They might even have realized that that one was now gone. Perhaps they simply weren’t curious, or possibly the fact of death had taken away their interest in peripheral matters.

Maybe they believed, as Stratis had, that his grandfather had stolen the painting when young. Perhaps they didn’t want to investigate what they saw as a crime of long ago that had finally been put right.

The funeral was attended by all the relatives and some friends. A girl no one in the family knew – probably the one
who had caused all the trouble – was there. She was pretty enough, but unremarkable, looking serious and rather melancholy. She came with an ugly friend, who cried a lot.

The old man didn’t cry. He exerted all his strength to stay standing, with the help of his cane. And after that, he went to bed.

The young were natural betrayers, of course – particularly young men: that was a fact of life. They were always moving forward too fast to keep up with old ties. They had to find their place in the world and not simply copy the ways of older generations. You made them the inheritors of your future self and then they threw it away.

But Stratis had had a good heart. How could he have failed to stop and think about what he was doing? How could he have so misbelieved and misunderstood?

It must have been the girl: the utterly unsuitable, superficially attractive girl who was just like thousands of others he could have found any day – all of whom would have fallen at his feet as long as he didn’t allow them to imagine that they were more important than the next woman.

Stratis had been too impatient. He’d continued to want something he couldn’t have. He hadn’t been content to wait. He would certainly have found another girl, better and more to his liking, and one who loved him back.

He too had suffered early disappointment and betrayal in love. That was when the painting had come to him, at the moment when he’d made the decision to step out of one life
and into another, taking nothing with him – except, as it turned out, that one thing.

A week before leaving Athens for good, he’d seen an icon for sale. He’d spotted it from the street outside; it was right at the back of the shop. He’d gone in. And he was inspecting the painting closely, thinking how much it reminded him of the one on his island, when the owner had come up to him, saying, ‘You like it?’

‘I like it,’ he’d replied, ‘although it’s a copy.’ He hadn’t known that for sure, but he’d assumed it. Nearly all art for sale was a copy if it purported to be old. You were safe only if you bought new painting; sometimes not even then.

‘A copy, naturally,’ the owner had agreed. ‘But a good one.’ And then he’d said that he couldn’t hold it; he’d already had a very attractive offer for it.

Of course he had. From someone who was going to try to resell it as the real thing. Or perhaps from a richer man, who had never seen the original and would be buying it in the hope that it would turn out to be genuine. The owner was slick enough to absolve himself from the responsibility of guaranteeing the genuineness of his wares. Copyists were so skillful nowadays – well, they always had been and always would be. It was a good idea, when purchasing a work of art, never to hope for an investment but, rather, to buy what you liked and wanted to live with: like choosing a friend or a partner in marriage.

He said that he’d think about it.

The day after that, he’d seen another icon in a junk shop, as he was passing through a less fashionable part of town.
The picture was approximately the same size – perhaps a little smaller but even more appealing than the first one. He’d bought it after enough conversation and haggling to please the owner. He’d been sure at the time that it was a bargain and that the half-blind old shopkeeper, possibly without the knowledge of his younger relatives, had sold him an authentic work by mistake. He’d intended to have it valued. But the day before he was due to take it in to the dealers, the famous Icon of Miracles was stolen from the church on his island and, looking at the reproduction of it in his newspaper, he saw how like – how almost identical – it was to the one he’d bought. He remembered too that undoubtedly, whatever else he’d felt at the time, that resemblance had played a part in the purchase and in the joy of possession.
Crafty old man,
he thought: to pretend ignorance in order to get a higher price for something that was an imitation. It made sense that when someone was planning to steal a painting, the market should be flooded with reproductions beforehand, so that detection of the original would be more difficult.

But even the experts could be fooled and he didn’t think it would be a good idea to show his copy to a valuer when the papers were full of the recent theft. The fact that he had a dated receipt wouldn’t stop an investigation; papers were even easier to forge than artworks. His emigration plans might have to be canceled, his mental readiness dispelled.

He never took the picture in to be assessed. As soon as he felt sure that his icon was a forgery, he was almost pleased. That seemed to fit in with his reasons for going: the false
promises and broken faith. And even if it was a reproduction, the copyist was an artist, otherwise the picture wouldn’t have been able to draw from him the kind of emotion he felt for it. It brought him luck too, although he knew that that idea was nonsense: the success of his business life was founded on his own ability. One of the reasons why he was so phenomenally successful was that he understood the nature of fakes and of everyone’s attitude towards them. People could live quite happily with a fake until its fraudulence was pointed out to them. That was what they minded: having it pointed out. And afterwards an effort was required: to come to terms with deception that didn’t pretend to be anything else. That meant keeping certain thoughts in separate compartments.

He missed the icon. It had always reminded him of his mother – not the way she looked, but the way she was. He had photographs of her but they didn’t resemble her so closely as the painting, just as the photograph of his father was not such a good likeness as the boy, Stratis, had been.

The summer passed, and the fall and the long winter months. He saw the next spring, the summer and on into the end of September. Still no one would speak to him about Stratis. If the members of his family had any thoughts about the removal of the icon, they kept quiet about them. If they had known about the theft, they’d probably believe that he was unforgiving. But the truth was the reverse: he’d forgiven Stratis completely. He thought of him as having gone somewhere – again, to
some other country – where he would remain, waiting.

He was ready to go now himself. But the days went by and still he didn’t leave. His visits to the Cape became shorter, like his stays in town. He preferred the house in the country, where Stratis had spent so much time as a child.

He continued to take his daily outdoor exercise, even in wet weather, unless it was raining heavily At the height of the summer he’d stay indoors during the day, venturing out to the golf course in the early evening. When the ground was muddy and slippery, he’d traipse through the upstairs hallways of the house, back and forth, counting the steps to keep himself going when he felt tired or bored. He was frail now, all in the space of a year and a few months. At one stage he’d been fat. His progress then had been like that of an old elephant: a dignified, swaying shuffle. But when the flesh had fallen away, he’d shrunk in height, too. He bowed his head. Sometimes he walked sideways, like a crab. He relied more and more on his stick. And his eyes were no longer good. But the passing of the seasons moved him and he enjoyed his walk, no matter how often he felt like putting it off, or how difficult he found the beginning.

It was necessary, he told himself, to endure. There were people who lost one thing, or one person, and because they had invested so much of themselves in that, the loss destroyed them. There were others who lost everything – every family member, every stone of the house they’d lived in, even their country. They arrived like orphans among strangers, in a place where they couldn’t even speak the
language. And they started again. Out of nothing they made friends, family, work: a full life.

It was important to keep going. He had had it hard at the start, even though he’d never gone through the real immigrant nightmare, as so many in the country had: like the poor young farmers out in the middle west – barely a century ago – who would struggle for twelve years against disease and locusts, crop rot and the weather: losing three sets of children to diphtheria and finally going crazy, committing suicide or ending up in jail after burning the barn down for the insurance money.

He hadn’t had to contend with the land. He’d lived in cities. And he’d been a success.

At the end of September, about sixteen months after the police had called at the house, he woke one morning feeling that something special was going to happen; it was like being a child again, on his birthday. The weather was sunny, the skies clear. He looked forward all day to his walk.

Even in the afternoon, the air was still warm but – as always, now – down by the golf-course clubhouse and the stone bridge the going was slow and painful. He pushed himself, not wanting to stop until he reached one of the places he had designated as a spot where he was allowed to rest. He’d chosen each lookout point carefully. The contemplation of every view added shape to his journey and eased the effort, singling out moments around which he could arrange his thoughts.

This first station on his way was the one that overlooked
the practice green, the grove of trees beyond the bridge and the eighteenth hole with the hills beyond it. He enjoyed standing there, watching the ripe afternoon sun on the trees. In winter you could make out nearly all of the white house up in the woods; now it was almost invisible, concealed by greenery. Sometimes he’d see Dr Jeffries, who would drive down from the clinic to play a few practice shots when he was on call. His sports car would be waiting with the door open and the key in the ignition, the front wheels headed away from the course so that he could make it to any bedside in the clinic in under two minutes, all the while listening to the rescue squad, who would be able to tell him about the condition of the patients they were bringing in.

The car was missing today. That meant that if one of the doctor’s patients fell down on the golf course or had a stroke or a heart attack, the ground crew wouldn’t know until the morning. No one had to come out to the fairway to stop the sprinklers, which were connected to a system worked by a central switch.

When Stratis was a child, he used to love taking off his shoes and socks and walking across the putting greens in bare feet. He’d once tried to describe the sensation by saying, ‘It’s like Aunt Lydia’s little purse.’ He’d meant that the grass was as smooth as suede. No one else in the family had such thoughts.

The next lap of the walk went downhill, over the road and across the next tee. From that point it was possible to look back and see the oxygen mist from the mountains: a fog through which the shapes of trees loomed like ships in
a harbor. Today it was hard to tell what color anything was in the distance. The trees, ridges and hills became an indistinguishable gray as they receded.

The last golfers had completed the eighteenth hole and were heading for the clubhouse. Only the old man remained, and the sprinkler systems with their tirelessly wheeling jets of spinning water. Spray surrounded each whirling source with a halo of whiteness that drifted at the edges. In places the finer water beads hung in the air like smoke, to meet the flash of droplets circling around again, repeating the previous sweep. As the metal arms moved, the water arched – dazzling, traveling, shining, falling, vanishing.

All the lawns were fresh and springy. As he started down the hill, he thought that if there were such a thing as Paradise, this would be the perfect time to arrive there: at the end of the late afternoon, when they were watering the grass.

They walked in silence, seeing a corner of the house in the distance, then a larger part and finally enough to hope. Neither of them said anything until they were inside.

It was dark, dirty and squalid. Every corner stank.

‘Well, at least it’s still here,’ his wife said. ‘And they left the roof on.’

Some regions weren’t so lucky: everything had been burned to the ground. He’d already heard that his parents’ house – on the other side of town – was gone; it was like knowing that a friend had died. And now every time he remembered, the loss grieved him. He never wanted to go back: to look at the hole in the ground where the house had stood or, worse still, to see some other building put up to replace it. The old schoolhouse was burned out, too.

The churches remained, although the windows were broken and fires had been lit in the interiors. But it isn’t easy to burn stone. The houses and temples of God are usually built to withstand anything but a direct hit; the house of stone and the heart of stone.

His wife looked everywhere: the walls, floor, ceilings, the staircase and the rooms upstairs. Her eyes moved over the slashed, gouged and cracked surfaces, the smashed steps, the ragged and waterlogged pieces of carpet. All the time
that she was going up or down – moving restlessly past shattered window frames and over filthy floorboards – she kept hold of the baby. At last she returned to the front room downstairs, wrapped the baby in her shawl and put him in a torn cardboard box on the ground. She told one of the older children to stay and keep watch, in case there were rats. Then she walked through the doorway and out.

He didn’t notice at first. He was still circling through the rooms, remembering that this dilapidated, sorry hovel had once been home and telling himself that – like so much else over the past four years – it had died. What particularly distressed him was the little room next to their bedroom. It had been the safe nest where they’d put the first child when she was old enough to sleep alone but within earshot. Obscene words had been carved deep into the walls and the place had the reek of a sewer.

In a daze he turned back to the bedroom and looked out into the paved yard. Once upon a time they had had fruit trees, vegetables and flowers.

He saw his wife, hands free, striding away from the house. He thought that she was finally walking out on them for good.

He reached the front door faster than he could think what he was doing. Later on he’d thank his good instincts that he hadn’t hurt himself going down the uneven, pitted stairs.

‘Where are you going?’ he yelled at her. She disregarded the question. Ever since he’d been discharged from the army with a missing hand, she’d ignored his threats. When he’d shout at her, she wouldn’t respond and she sometimes
didn’t even seem to hear: she’d simply stop listening whenever she felt like it.

‘Go next door on the other side,’ she told him. ‘If anybody’s there, say you’re looking for food and go to the next house. If nobody’s at home, take anything you can find: floorboards, anything metal we can use. Look for where they hid the ax. If there’s only one person left, use your judgment.’

He had no idea what she meant, although it came to him not long afterwards that she was giving him a command to kill whoever might be living or hiding in a neighboring house; as long as it looked as if he could get away with it. His own children would be all right: she would have entrusted a knife to the oldest boy.

At least there wouldn’t be any mines, she said that evening. You could never tell, of course, how stupid men could be. Usually they planted mines only if they were sure they wouldn’t be retracing their steps or coming back another time from a different direction. Mining the landscape was a thing you did to destroy an oncoming enemy in country where you hadn’t grown up and where your friends and relatives wouldn’t be spending the next quarter of a century having their limbs blown off as they tried to work the fields.

There wouldn’t be mines planted near their house because, having taken it once, the enemy had intended to come back and take it again, even though this time they’d lost.

But, as his wife also said, anything was possible.

She talked quite a lot like one of his commanding officers – a good soldier and a decent man but someone who at a
certain depth was unfeeling. It was as if ordinary rules of behavior – and emotions normally considered natural – were kept at the shallower levels of his consciousness: beyond that point you couldn’t find them and he’d operate on purely practical principles, without squeamishness. He was a man who would do what had to be done, no matter what that was. If it could help your survival to kill someone, you did; it would be stupid not to. If you had children to think about, it would be criminal not to.

His wife was now his commanding officer. He didn’t mind. She was good at it.

He’d been a soldier for nearly three years. At first he’d liked the life. And since for a long while he and his friends were seeing everything from a distance and had no casualties in their unit, he wasn’t afraid. They joked. They drank. They had all sorts of luxuries not available to the civilian population. And they despised civilians. They thought of them as sheep who would run this way and that once the gates were open or one of them fell through a gap in the hedge: instantly a whole field of sheep would be pushing and shoving, trying to get through the same opening, do the same thing – to copy, to follow. Soldiers were the ones who told them where to move, how to protect themselves, what to do. Civilians had no personalities; they were simply part of a vast herd: women, children, old people. They were dull and slow beyond belief and helplessness had become a way of life to them. That was why, as long as he was in the army, he felt no pity for anyone who complained of being stolen from, raped or tortured. What did they expect? Nothing that
happened to any of them could be so bad as what might happen to him and his friends. Capture could sometimes be worse than injury. They all knew stories about soldiers who killed themselves with their own weapons rather than risk being imprisoned, beaten, tortured, mutilated: there was nothing people wouldn’t do to each other, given the opportunity. Even without the expediency of war, cruelty could become a habit.

For a while everything had been fine, even in bad weather. It was a schoolboy’s dream of what life could be when you were grown up: you and your friends would go around in a gang all day long, picking up girls when you felt like it and moving on to new places, and new girls.

No civilian had had any meat for months but in his company they had food, alcohol: anything they wanted. And if they didn’t have it, they’d find out where it was and then go and take it. One of the few good things about being in the army was that although you were under orders, in your own outfit there was freedom. You could do what you liked and if anything went wrong, your friends were there to back you up. And there were times when life was fun. He’d laughed a lot.

He’d even sung. To keep themselves from being bored, he and his friends made up a silly song they’d sing to each other whenever they were in a good mood or drunk, or when one of them had managed to invent another addition. The song was about a poor boy – the youngest of three brothers – who was offered a chance to attend the royal celebrations at a king’s palace, where he’d be given as much
food and drink as he wanted and would also take part in a competition: he’d be allowed to kiss the princess and she’d select her husband from among the competitors. She’d choose the one who gave her the kiss of true love. There were many passages in the song of alliteration and polysyllabic words, with whole verses composed of things listed alphabetically; and by tradition certain phrases were always shouted in unison.

One of their company came up with a completely new version one night during an epic spree. It went on for what seemed like hours – stanza after stanza, all rhyming and in a strange combination of the hilarious, the beautiful and the scatalogical. Everyone wanted a copy afterwards, especially since they’d been too drunk to remember more than a couple of consecutive lines. The poet hadn’t had any copies, not even a written one for himself. It was all in his head, he told them. And he was killed the next afternoon. That was their first death.

Their good luck lasted a long while but as soon as it broke, everything went at once. They were in the thick of things day after day, all the time. And he was terrified. He lived with the knowledge that in a split-second he could lose both legs and an arm and his eyesight. He stayed mildly drunk whenever he could: never enough to make him incapable of saving himself but the right amount to blunt his sense of danger and to keep him ready to fight, turning all his fear into rage.

As his friends were picked off around him, he retained the ability to laugh. What else could you do? One morning
a man in their outfit woke up speaking sounds without any meaning. They tried to talk to him but he didn’t seem to understand a word – he’d just give an idiotic smile at whatever was said to him. They thought that he must be suffering from some kind of brain damage brought on by the constant firing; or even the result of a stroke. But they didn’t know and they never found out. They had to leave him behind with a rescue team that was blown off the road a week later.

Once, for three days, he thought that he’d gone deaf but his hearing returned; it came back when they pulled out of the action. And then he felt the pain: to hear again suddenly, with such acuteness, was maddening.

His wife and children were out of the fighting at that stage, evacuated to a different sector. When he was given leave, he’d go back to a place that looked normal. The silence was unnerving after the constant, overwhelming noise. He couldn’t sleep.

His wife didn’t want to sleep. She wanted to make love all the time or, rather, she needed to be pregnant.

She was pregnant again and he was back in the unit with his friends when he was in the explosion. He never found out what had caused it: grenade, gunfire, a hit from the air, even a sniper’s lucky shot at the fuel tank. The noise, the light and burning and pain all seemed to come at the same time. If he and the others hadn’t been relaxed and inattentive after their leave, they might have noticed some warning sign. Then again, they might have missed it if things had been the other way around: if their senses had been
dulled and confused by fatigue or boredom – too many months without a break.

He was lying on the ground and twitching uncontrollably. All around there was screaming and a terrible smell. Then they were carrying him. He saw the fire. As they put him into the jeep one of his friends came running up behind the others, reached forward and dropped something into his lap. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘They can do anything nowadays. You never know.’

It was a hand, perfect almost to the wrist and then like something on a butcher’s slab. He looked down at his left arm and the bloody pulp pulled into a bandage at the end of it. He passed out.

He came to in a field hospital where the doctor bent over each man in turn, making a quick decision about the order of operation.

He held out the detached, dead hand.

‘What’s this?’ the doctor asked.

‘They thought you might be able to sew it back.’

‘Me and the lace-makers’ guild,’ the doctor snorted. He took the hand. He said, ‘It isn’t yours. Look. It’s a right hand. That’s the one you’ve still got.’ He started to move away. Over his shoulder he asked, ‘Are you right-handed?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve been lucky,’ the doctor told him, and turned to the next man.

Everything had become a matter of luck over the past few years. And luck was crazy. Being caught behind the fighting could sometimes be as dangerous as being sent
into action. When the lines moved, everything else changed, too.

First came the bombardment. Everyone ran away. People died or got lost on the run. They couldn’t find anywhere to stay because the ones in front of them were running, too. Finally they reached the city, where some were taken in and others were put into camps. The fear was that as soon as the enemy was near enough, all the people in the camps would force their way into the city, would have to be accommodated and then, in the ensuing siege, would ensure that everyone starved.

But while he was still recovering, the tide reversed. A third force joined the soldiers behind the fleeing civilians. Together they turned around and routed the enemy, taking back the land that had been lost.

He was discharged to go and live with his family. At that time his wife was housed in a place where she shared with three other families. Humanitarian aid societies doled out a bread portion to all of them. She was about to give birth. One of the children was sick and running a high fever. The authorities wanted to take the child – a baby girl – to an isolation ward. His wife wouldn’t hear of it. She nursed the girl herself until all at once it became clear that there was no hope. Then she put the child in a corner and told everybody to stay away from that part of the room. She sent him to find a doctor. Everyone he asked said the same thing: he was on a futile search. No one with any medical knowledge could be found outside the hospitals, where the staff stayed and worked as if condemned. The hospitals had become the
end and the beginning: childbirth, medicines, narcotics, the black market, the dying.

His wife gave birth in their quarter of a single, crowded room, where she was seen by a male aid worker the next day; he took her temperature and pronounced her fit. From its corner in the room the body of the sick child, now dead, was removed. They were given a receipt. Within a few days they received notice to collect the remains. His wife tore up the paper as soon as it arrived.

‘How are we going to find her now?’ he asked. ‘All the reference numbers were on that.’

‘Leave it,’ she ordered. ‘They make you pay to reclaim anything.’

‘We can’t just leave her. Our own daughter?’

‘It isn’t going to do her any good, is it?’ she snapped. ‘We need everything we can save. For food and medicine. Suppose the baby gets sick – what would you do?’