Enemy and Brother (11 page)

I watched while getting a bottle of brandy from the shelf.

“Who is your father, Michael?” the blind man asked.

“You are, sir.”

Stephanou’s head shot up at the words. “How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“Fourteen,” he repeated, and I think murmured, “I had forgotten.” The sound was gentle. “And what do they call you besides Michael, Vasso’s son?”

“Michael Panyotis.” It was Vasso’s maiden name.

“It is a better name than Stephanou,” Paul said. “You may go, Michael. You shiver like a young colt being put to saddle. Run out and be free.” He listened to the sound of the boy’s retreat until the door closed on it. “Only the young are free—and the dead released to their graves. Uncle, are you free, yoked to a blind man?” Modenis started to speak, but Stephanou, having found his voice and liking the sound of it, spoke on. “Is Vasso free who must tell her bastard I am his father?”

“Only the fool wants to be free entirely,” I said, a true pedant. And I was as fluent in self-pity as was he.

“Ach. I had forgotten my host,” he said. “So there are Americans now even in Kaléa?”

“Only one,” Modenis said.

I added quickly, “Last year there were others—archeologists.”

“Proving that the future of Greece lies in her past,” he said.

“With countries as with men,” I said.

“Why do you say that to me, sir?”

I answered evenly: “Psychiatry has become a great American necessity and that, I should say loosely, is one of its precepts.”

Silence. I stood with the bottle in my hand. Modenis was fumbling his pocket for his beads, the little clacking of them the only sound. The reflex of blinking quickened in Stephanou’s closed eyelids.

“You may speak to me in English,” he said. “I once knew the language well.”

“Is my Greek so poor?”

“It is not precise and I can tell that you think it is.”

I was impressed by the subtlety of this observation. “Did you think in English when you spoke it?”

He blinked, his face now toward me. “I am not sure I
thought
in any language then—but I
felt…
in all languages.”

So did I, I thought. So did I when we were very young. Which was not true, I realized at once: the best I could do then was to wish for such a feeling, clinging the while to my rigid nativism.

“During the war?” I asked.

He did not answer me. Turning his head he said, “Uncle, are you here?”

“I am not yet a ghost,” the old man answered.

I returned to the shelf for glasses.

Stephanou put his hand to the desk, groping for his cane, but it came first to an open book. “What book is this?”

“A history of the Siege at Missolonghi,” I said.

He turned it over and felt the embossments on the cover. “The priest who used to be here had such a book.”

“It belongs to Father Lappas. He loaned it to me.”

“It is a terrible book. It is not history. It is melodrama.”

“It is propaganda,” I said. “Will you have a glass of brandy with me?”

“You wish to have me carried into the house as well as out of it?”

The grandmother, having seen me get the bottle, brought a pitcher of water.

“There is a chair to your left, Stephanou,” I said.

He found it and seated himself at the side of the desk. His hands explored the desk for other articles, my pens, a folder of papers, more books.

The old woman whispered something to Modenis. He raised his hand as though to ward her off, but skittering back she grinned at him and beckoned.

“I will have a drink,” Modenis said. “Then, by the kind hospitality of the widow Panyotis, I will take a bath before her hearth.”

“Do, Uncle. You stink. Worse than the priest.”

Again my mind had spun back in time to another place, another priest. I wondered if his association could be the same as mine, the chaplain at the Ioannina jail.

“If you say so then it must be true,” the old man said dryly.

I poured the drinks and gave a glass to Modenis. Stephanou’s I held before him and guided his hand to it with my own. His lips tightened over his teeth, the conquering of pride.

“To your book, Professor,” Modenis said, but the words were meant for Paul. It was his deep hope to reach the blind man through the youth he had been.

I said, “Thank you, Modenis. I drink to the health of all of us, and to greater understanding among men.”

Stephanou thought about it. “Health,” he said, and emptied the glass at one tilt.

M
ODENIS, FORTIFIED BY BRANDY
and badgered by the old woman, went to the bath she had prepared for him. We could hear great splashes of water presently, and the old lady’s scolding, Modenis’ howls, part mockery, part righteous indignation, his voice spiraling up into falsetto. They had been children together, the pair of them, in this same village.

Stephanou sat silent, listening. I was determined to endure such silence, waiting for him to come to me. His thoughts, it turned out, had run curiously parallel to my own, for he said finally, “Shakespeare’s ages of man—how many were there?”

“Seven—from the infant, mewling and puking, to second childishness.”

“Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste…” he went on, then stopped.

I finished it: “Sans everything.”

“What age are you, Professor?”

“I must think for a moment,” I said. The lines were familiar but I had to run through from the beginning.

“How old?”

I ignored the direct question. “In fair round belly with good capon lined… full of wise saws and modern instances.” I deliberately pushed the image of myself beyond my years.

“I do not think I understand the idiom,” he said.

“Wise saws and modern instances—bromides and newspaper headlines.”

“Bromides?” he repeated.

“That is an odd one,” I said. “Actually, it’s a chemical compound for putting you to sleep. As I used it, it’s slang, with much the same meaning.” I got up. “Let’s see what the dictionary says.”

When I reached past him to the shelf over the desk, he put out his hand and slapped at my waist. “A fair round belly?”

“It comes and goes,” I said. “I try to keep my weight down.” I laughed nervously. I sounded as though I were passing up dessert at a club luncheon.

“My uncle said you were a young man.”

I took down the dictionary. “He told me the same of you.”

Stephanou snorted, temporarily checked.

I found and read aloud the definition of “bromide,” but neither of us any longer cared.

“How did you come to Kaléa, Professor… Eakins? Spell the name for me, please.”

I spelled it, and by his asking two questions at once I had a little moment to prepare.

“And give me the English pronunciation, please.”

I did.

“It is not a Greek name. My uncle said you were Greek.”

“The men of the village thought so. I did not contradict them.” I did not dare to lie to him in small things. For him to catch me in a lie was to put him on his guard. Not that he was trying to catch me, I told myself; his questions were normal for a Greek. “And as for my coming to Kaléa, I wanted to stay for a while somewhere on the way to Delphi. I shall go on in a little while—following Byron’s trail through Greece.”

“Where?” he asked.

“Delphi, Missolonghi, Prevesa…” I watched his face. “Ioannina.” His mouth opened slightly. He seemed to be waiting, taut. “I would go on to Tepalene in Albania, but my passport will not permit it.”

He moistened his lips. “Not to Zitsa, the monastery where he stayed?”

“Do you know it?” I asked.

“I have been there,” he said, controlling his voice by keeping it low. I could see a pulse beat in his neck.

And something happened to you there, I thought, having naught to do with Byron. Zitsa is a few miles northwest of Ioannina. I did not suppose the
AS
camp was very far from there though it had been my impression at the time that we were several miles east and further north.

“Tell me about it,” I said evenly. “Byron thought the view from there one of the loveliest in Greece.”

His tension eased off. “It’s wild,” he said, “and lonely, and some distance above the village. It has not been in use for many years—only the old buildings linked to one another, and the smell of centuries. Or that was what it was like almost twenty years ago. Have things changed in Greece in twenty years? You tell me.”

I froze at the words, wondering if they were a literal challenge. My mouth was dry, but I managed: “I shouldn’t think so to hear the old men talking.”

But he said, “I have been in captivity.”

“I know.”

“What do you know?”

“That you have been in prison, that you were a student, a teacher, Modenis thinks a poet, that you were in the Resistance during the war and afterwards an insurgent.”

He smiled, not altogether cynically, and his face became younger: I could almost see in him the handsome boy he had been. It was strange, but I wanted terribly for him to open his eyes.

“It makes a nice fanfare when you put it together like that,” he said.

“You have been well educated,” I said. The use of the word fanfare seemed extraordinary. “You have not wasted the years in prison.”

“I have asked myself since I am home which would I have preferred: to remain in prison with my sight, or to have paid with my eyes for freedom.”

“Was that the alternative?”

He shrugged.

“Did you write while you were confined?”

“I wrote, yes. But what I wrote was taken from me. I wrote too much.”

“About people?”

“It was very funny in a way—when I wrote about Pericles they thought I meant Metaxas, our dictator, you know?”

“Wasn’t it flattering to Metaxas?”

“No. It was critical of Pericles, the war which Athens might have avoided. Oh, I wrote many things—poetry, satire. You would not think I am a humorist, eh? I would lie in the dark and make up the words. My mind was alive with images. I would get up and light the candle. Always I put it out as soon as I wrote something for fear it would burn out too soon. And you know how I got matches? I wrote dirty verses for the guards. And once I wrote a love poem for one of them. He was a pig, but I gave him wings.” He stretched his arms, his neck, turning his head one way then another. I remembered the restlessness of the youth Webb and I traveled north with, one of the things I had blocked out of my mind since, cherishing only recollections that fed my own discontent, my hatred of him… if indeed that was what it was. I remembered him when he discovered that Webb had known the Spanish poet, Lorca, in New York and had seen him in Spain shortly before his death. Stephanou had put his hand on Webb’s and said incredulously, “You shook hands with him?” and I remembered his epithet: “By the maidenhood of Mary, tell me!” And Christ! I had not even known that night who Lorca was.

He was rubbing the stubble of grey beard that had grown since his return to Kaléa.

“Would you allow me to shave you, Stephanou? I should be pleased to do it.”

“You would have to begin with a sickle,” he said, “and that is something I can manage if I wish to. I shall let it grow. It will distract people from my eyes.”

“Do you feel them looking at you?”

“I feel them not looking at me. That’s true, isn’t it? People don’t like to look at a blind man’s face.”

“I suppose it’s so of some people,” I said.

“The boy did not once raise his face to mine.”

“Children are wary of what they don’t know.”

“What do I look like, Professor? Shall I call you Professor?”

“If you like—or Eakins—John—whatever.”

“If you were writing home…” Again he interrupted himself: “Do you have a wife, children?”

“None who acknowledge me,” I said.

He laughed. “And I am acknowledged by someone else’s bastard. Mind, I’m all for bastardy. At best there is one genius in a proper family, at worst a dozen morons. It’s simply that I’m put off in this at having played the Holy Ghost.”

“He’s an interesting little fellow,” I said. “Great solemn eyes that squint sometimes because he reads so much.”

“Does he?” He was pleased to hear it.

“I asked him one day what the book he was reading was about. People, he said, as though I were very stupid to have asked.”

“The proper study of man, eh?”

“You can study a lifetime and know very little. The grandmother Panyotis knows far more about people than I do, and I doubt she has ever read a book.”

This time the smile came in a flash, the strong white teeth gleaming. “So that is why you are in Kaléa!”

“Perhaps it is,” I said. “Quite possibly it is.”

“You were going to tell me, Professor, what I look like to you.”

“Let me say first, it’s quite different now from what it would have been if I’d described you before you came here tonight.”

“I have stayed too long,” he cried, I suspected to try my hospitality.

“You have only arrived,” I said.

“I’m at the mercy of the lame one who I doubt not at this moment is warming his bones in the widow’s bed.”

“She is as old as history,” I said.

“So is bed-warming,” he snapped, and I laughed.

“You are a blind man who sees with his ears, his nose, his hands… and, I should think, with his heart…. A grey beard, hair that is white—but hair, may I remind you—strong white teeth so that when he smiles he looks to be even younger—than what? Forty-five years?”

“Forty-four,” he said.

“A high, pallid forehead, good bone structure, a nose that some day is going to resemble Modenis’ but isn’t too bad just yet… and when you look at him you wish to God—as I did a few minutes ago—that he could open his eyes.”

His chin dropped down on his chest. I had not meant to be that overt, that emotional, I suppose. I was not given to such explicits as I had spurted out since being in Kaléa, since that first moment with the old woman when she caught my hand to her lips. But I had said again something I felt deeply.

“Thank you, my friend,” Stephanou said. He slid his hand along the desk and found his cane. “I would impose on you for a further kindness. Go with me to my uncle’s door. Then I can manage and we shall leave the old one to his pleasure.”