Enemy and Brother (16 page)

“The widow, like the nation in this parable, bit off the wart that tortured her, swallowed and digested it, healed the wound with her own tongue, and went on working. Hail, Mother Hellas!”

I have tried to convey the pattern of his tale. In Greek it was more poetic, more idiomatic.

The old lady appeared in the doorway, but reluctantly, her head half-turned and gesturing with her hands that it was all nonsense. Vasso stood, her arms folded, her eyes warm on all present. I became aware then that other people had come, men and women, among them the gleaners I remembered plucking the bad seed from the good and calling them blind men’s eyes. They all wanted to hear more. Paul had filled his mouth with chicken. His face was flushed, his eyelids blinking. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and started again. The stories went on, half-humor, half-sadness, turning always on a nationalistic theme. As I remembered my own grandmother saying once—my father’s mother who had come from Ireland—he could melt the heart of a wheelbarrow. Whenever he paused to eat of the abundance Vasso set before him, the murmur ran round the room of the Paul they all remembered, the scholar, the hero, the martyr.

He washed down the food with a great draft of wine. I was reminded of one of Franz Hals’ laughing boys, possibly the mad one.

He began to beat a rhythm with his hands on the table, vigorous, martial.

“The
Klephtikos
, the
Klephtikos
!” several voices urged.

Someone started to sing, Paul joined and soon everyone was singing. The butcher reached across the table and plucked the handkerchief from the pocket of my shirt, saying please and thank you at the same time. He shook it out and moved to the middle of the room, the villagers falling away to make space for him. He waved the handkerchief over his shoulder and others followed him into the dance. He had the grace so many fat men do on the dance floor and, having drawn a circle of dancers in, he detached himself from them and improvised a series of lunges, sword feints, the dance of the Klephts, the mountain warriors. The room shook with his leaps. I leaned over to Stephanou and shouted, “Falstaff!”

He nodded, grinning, and kept on pounding the rhythm, the silver and glassware tingling.

Falstaff tried to pass the handkerchief on, the sweat streaming down his face, but someone shouted, “
Hassapikos
(the dance of the Butchers)!” and he was pushed to the center again.

He accepted the challenge as though his honor was at stake, pausing only long enough to mop his face in my handkerchief. It is a dance with much pounding of feet. The men circled him, hands on each other’s shoulders, bent their knees, straightened and stretched, pounding their feet in the rhythm, and repeated the motion. Watching, one felt the room to be undulating as on the waves of the sea. Inside the circle the butcher danced, the same forms but counter-clockwise. On and on it went, with such tantalizing pace, the accented beat, the sway and retreat of the dancers who gradually accelerated until it seemed a test of balance and motion. The butcher at last flicked the handkerchief. I thought it a white flag, and Constable Rigi, the officer with the bored expression, took it up.

He was anything but bored now. He took off his uniform jacket as he danced and flung it aside. The dance changed—I think to the
Kalamantianos
, for the women formed a circle within the men’s, and inside the policeman spiraled and leaped like a dervish, while the slow, swaying grace prevailed among the group.

“The boy scout,” Modenis said of Rigi, and made the gesture of spitting. He was no lover of the constabulary.

The dancing went on, others coming, and there was a moment when I thought Paul about to join it. I’m sure he could have, his arms linked to those of the others. But instead he simply pushed his chair back from the table and beat the rhythms with his cane on the floor.

When at last the circles broke, Vasso offered wine. Many politely chose water. Old Spyro came up and snatched his cap from his head. He pointedly dropped a couple of drachmas in it and held it out to me. I dropped in a twenty drachma piece. Kanakis matched it and round the room Spyro skipped from one to another he knew to have change in their pockets. Everyone with a thirst drank wine and toasted a true homecoming.

Suddenly then, while the wine was passing, Vasso stood apart in an uncrowded place. She raised her hands over her head and began to snap her fingers rhythmically. She wore the flared red skirt and a full-sleeved cotton blouse that showed her fine neck and breastbone and the soft swell of flesh where her bosom began. The first words she sang made the women cry, “Ah!” and “
Neh, neh
!” Yes! Yes!

“The women of Souli to live must be free….”

I had never heard her sing before but I would have imagined her voice as it was, a deep, vibrant contralto. Soon Paul, everyone joined in singing the “Ballad of the Zalongo” which tells of the Souli women who, their men massacred by the Turks, put on their festival costumes, flung their children from the cliff and one by one, dancing, leaped to their deaths.

It was George Kanakis himself who took the lead in the dance. He was not a dancer. Not every Greek is. But Vasso’s eyes, I thought, had summoned him. He bowed to her and then to Stephanou, and a murmur of—approval, assent, I didn’t know just what—ran through the room. Several men followed him.

Paul demanded, “Who is dancing?”

“Kanakis,” I said.

He seemed to freeze—just for a second—his smile, his cane mid-air, his very breathing. I glanced at Modenis, scowling, watching Paul with apprehension; at Vasso, on whose face at that instant was an expression of the utmost abject petition. Then Paul let out a sound the ring of which to me meant triumph. He beat out the rhythm of the dance more fiercely. More time has been spent in the telling than in the incident itself, but from that moment both Paul and I knew what many others here already knew: that Kanakis was Michael’s father.

The dance quickened. One dancer after another leaped from the circle until Kanakis was alone. He did not attempt the final dramatic leap. He merely stopped dancing. The singing stopped and finally the pounding of Paul’s cane. A hush was on the room.

“Vasso, come to me,” Paul said.

She came with a rush and threw herself at his feet. I moved away from them. Kanakis was gone. The others were pressing in as I strove to get out. Old Spyro, standing on tiptoe, shivered like a wet dog. I looked back and saw Paul lifting her face and playing his fingers softly over it. I had had as much as I could take. The very air reeked of humanity beyond my tolerance of it.

At the door I met Father Lappas and his wife. The priest and I did one of those little dances trying to get around one another and all but colliding. He was beside himself to see what he had been missing. I stood aside and said as though it were the truth, “They’ve been waiting for you, Father.”

I heard Paul call out to me, but I did not go back. Kanakis and I, I thought. I went home and wondered how long Vasso’s cottage would be my home in Kaléa. Because I could concentrate on nothing, I turned to the newspaper. I have never been a newspaper reader though I had subscribed to many, watching always for some reference to the Webb case or to the history of that time. I had read once that Markos was living in the Soviet Union, again that he was in an asylum in Poland. I had studied the Greek Civil War in terms of what subsequently happened in Yugoslavia, Tito’s breakaway from the Soviets. Markos had been replaced after that, and some members of the press, who liked to see history tidied up, I had always thought, connected Webb’s death with the split in the Soviet bloc and the subsequent downgrading of Markos among the Greek Communists. Had I been questioned instead of kangarooed in those dark days in Ioannina, I could have told that Webb anticipated an early end to the rebellion when we went north, but he had already written that in his dispatches. Did he document it for Markos that night?

These thoughts ran through my mind while, almost by rote, I read the affairs of the day’s paper. I put it aside and took up the clipping I had trimmed to save for Paul. I read again the list of distinguished guests he had asked me to repeat. I should not have thought Miss Kondylis belonged there. At the wedding, perhaps, but to have been singled out…. Of course she was appearing at the Epirus festival. That was it probably. Colonel Alexis Frontis: I had seen the name before—or was it in the first reading of this same article? I went back to the paper and found the name also in the front page story. The present government crisis had arisen out of the purge of leftist elements in the army. Colonel Frontis was apparently responsible for the removal of the officers, and, by way of the chain of ministerial authority, he had been sustained by the King himself.

I
WOKE TO THE
clanging of the church bell after a miserable night. I would rather have slept on a bed of nails than where I supposed Vasso would be bringing at last her true lover. I threw open the shutters. The grandmother turned from where she was gossiping at the gate with the butcher’s daughter and the priest’s wife and I don’t know whom else, a cluster of women that broke up when the old woman came running to me.

I did not want to go to the restaurant that morning. She brought me bread and fruit and water for Nescafé, and the news that had been many times told already: Vasso had been to the priest with Paul’s consent and they would be married on Sunday a week. Kanakis would take the bride-to-be from her mother’s house to the church. Why not? She had lived by his providence and love when there was none other for her to live by. Needless to say, I have always loathed weddings. More, if possible, than funerals. But this was one I could not escape. I listened to the old woman’s pratings—about the bridal veil and the wedding cake, and then something I had not expected: Modenis’ cottage was being prepared for Paul and his bride. I felt much better. She made me go to the window and see where even now her own bedtick was being aired, the frame sanded down by Vasso and her friends. It was the bed on which the old woman had given birth to three sons and Vasso, her only daughter. Her eyes filled up as she told how she had waited for this day. I hugged her briefly, one arm about her frail shoulders. Once more she had released me from myself.

She pulled back shyly. “You should have a wife also, Mr. Professor, a good Greek woman to take care of you.”

“Are you tired of the job, grandmother?”

“You know I am not, but like all my sons you too will go away. And who will I take care of then? Modenis.”

The way she said the name made me laugh. She had indeed lifted me out of the depths.

Not long afterwards I heard Paul’s stick tapping the stones along Vasso’s walk. He called out and threw open the door. “Professor?”

“Yes, Paul.”

He stood in the doorway, an image of strength, self-confidence. “I want to talk to you.”

“Come. The chair is here. Congratulations. I hear you’ve set the wedding date.”

“The women set it. What could I do?” He caught my hand. “First of all, I want you to stand up for me at the wedding.”

“I am honored, but I am not of your religion.”

“Neither am I. It is for Vasso, and I have decided that if the priest can be a hypocrite I can also.”

“Right you are,” I said.

He shook my hand and released it. “This is the only place safe from the women in the whole of Kaléa. Of all the ceremonies, matrimony is their favorite. Is it so in America?”

“One must suppose so—considering the number of times a woman will go through it.”

“Why have you not married, Professor?”

“I am fond of women, but not of ceremony.” Then: “There were reasons. Someday perhaps I shall tell you.” I drew up the chair that had come into the house on his first visit, and sat near him.

“When will you go to Athens again?”

That he asked indicated his wish for something there. “Within the week,” I said.

“And will you go to the library again—to where the old newspapers are?”

“I can.”

“There is someone I would like to know about…. Perhaps he is not important enough and he would not be in the newspapers….” He hesitated, trying to select the least he needed to tell, I thought. “He was in the prison with me at Averoff and I have wondered what has happened to him.”

“Could I not simply inquire of the prison authorities?”

“No. Look, Professor, I will tell you. It is the man who blinded me. It was a quarrel, yes, but we had been friends. He was in prison for having stolen money, quite a lot of money. It was the payroll for the army barracks…. Afterwards he was most penitent, he said he would give me money… if we were both released from prison.”

Was Stephanou lying to me? I remembered well his capacity for telling a lie and making it seem the reluctant truth. “Has he been released?” I asked.

“I do not know that. He was moved to another prison—to one of the islands after what happened to me. His name is Stavros Varvaressos. He was a blacksmith by trade. I think he came from the Peloponnese, but he always said he would not go back there. He loved Athens—the city.”

“Was the stolen money recovered?”

“Most of it, I think, but there would have been some that was not. Otherwise, how could he have promised me money?”

I thought for a moment. “And if I find him, Paul, what am I to say to him?”

“Nothing. You are not even to speak to him. You must promise me that or I will beg you to forget the whole matter. Afterwards, I will ask you to write a letter to him for me.”

Afterwards: The implication of confidence. Which could either be withheld or given. Oh, yes! my brother had uses for me.

“Do you need money, Paul—that kind of money?”

“I want to know. That is all. Modenis is too old, and he would not go in any case.”

“Paul, if there was money, don’t you think the police would have watched him in the expectation of his leading them to it?”

He twisted his head and grimaced, an agony of impatience. “It is not the money!” he cried out.

“I hadn’t supposed it was,” I said quietly. “It would be better if you told me the truth.”