I blamed her for the miscarriage. I thought, quite without reason, that this was an extreme and unfair means of revenge. But this was only on the surface. I blamed my wife because I knew that, having suffered herself without reason, she wanted to be blamed for it. This is something I understand. And I blamed my wife because I myself felt to blame for what had happened and if I blamed my wife, unjustly, she could then accuse me, and I would feel guilty, as you should when you are to blame. Also I felt that by wronging my wife, by hurting her when she had been hurt already, I would be driven by my remorse to do exactly what was needed in the circumstances: to love her. It was at this time that I realised that my wife’s eyebrows had the same attractions as Arabic calligraphy. The truth was we were both crushed by our misfortune, and by hurting each other, shifting the real pain, we protected each other. So I blamed my wife in order to make myself feel bound towards her. Men want power over women in order to be able to let women take this power from them.
This was seven years ago. I do not know if these reactions have ever ceased. Because we could have no children we made up for it in other ways. We began to take frequent and expensive holidays. We would say as we planned them, to convince ourselves: “We need a break, we need to get away.” We went out a lot, to restaurants, concerts, cinemas, theatres. We were keen on the arts. We would go to all the new things, but we would seldom discuss, after seeing a play for instance, what we had watched. Because we had no children we could afford this; but if we had had children we could still have afforded it; since as my career advanced my job brought in more.
This became our story: our loss and its recompense. We felt we had justifications, an account of ourselves. As a result we lived on quite neutral terms with each other. For long periods, especially during those weeks before we took a holiday, we seldom made love—or when we did we would do so as if in fact we were not making love at all. We would lie in our bed, close but not touching, like two continents, each with its own customs and history, between which there is no bridge. We turned our backs towards each other as if we were both waiting our moment, hiding a dagger in our hands. But in order for the dagger thrust to be made, history must first stop, the gap between continents must be crossed. So we would lie, unmoving. And the only stroke, the only wound either of us inflicted was when one would turn and touch the other with empty, gentle hands, as though to say, “See, I have no dagger.”
It seemed we went on holiday in order to make love, to stimulate passion (I dreamt, perhaps, long before we actually travelled there, and even though my wife’s milky body lay beside me, of the sensuous, uninhibited East). But although our holidays seldom had this effect and were only a kind of make-believe, we did not admit this to each other. We were not like real people. We were like characters in a detective novel. The mystery to be solved in our novel was who killed our baby. But as soon as the murderer was discovered he would kill his discoverer. So the discovery was always avoided. Yet the story had to go on. And this, like all stories, kept us from pain as well as boredom.
“It was the boy—I mean the porter. You know, the one who works on this floor.”
My wife has stopped crying. She is lying on the bed. She wears a dark skirt; her legs are creamy. I know who she is talking about, have half guessed it before she spoke. I have seen him, in a white jacket, collecting laundry and doing jobs in the corridor: one of those thick-faced, crop-haired, rather melancholy-looking young Turks with whom Istanbul abounds and who seem either to have just left or to be about to be conscripted into the army.
“He knocked and came in. He’d come to repair the heater. You know, we complained it was cold at night. He had tools. I went out onto the balcony. When he finished he called out something and I came in. Then he came up to me—and touched me.”
“Touched you? What do you mean—touched you?” I know my wife will not like my inquisitorial tone. I wonder whether she is wondering if in some way I suspect her behaviour.
“Oh, you know,” she says exasperatedly.
“No. It’s important I know exactly what happened, if we’re—”
“If what?”
She looks at me, her eyebrows wavering.
I realise again that though I am demanding an explanation I really don’t want to know what actually happened or, on the other hand, to accept a story. Whether, for example, the Turk touched my wife at all; whether if he did touch her, he only touched her or actually assaulted her in some way, whether my wife evaded, resisted or even encouraged his advances. All these things seem possible. But I do not want to know them. That is why I pretend to want to know them. I see too that my wife does not want to tell me either what really happened or a story. I realise that for eight years, night after night, we have been telling each other the story of our love.
“Well?” I insist.
My wife sits up on the bed. She holds one hand, closed, to her throat. She has this way of seeming to draw in, chastely, the collar of her blouse, even when she is not wearing a blouse or her neck is bare. It started when we lost our baby. It is a way of signalling that she has certain inviolable zones that mustn’t be trespassed on. She gets up and walks around the room. She seems overwhelmed and avoids looking out of the window.
“He is probably still out there, lurking in the corridor,” she says as if under siege.
She looks at me expectantly, but cautiously. She is not interested in facts but reactions. I should be angry at the Turk, or she should be angry at me for not being angry at the Turk. The truth is we are trying to make each other angry with each other. We are using the incident to show that we have lost patience with each other.
“Then we must get the manager,” I repeat.
Her expression becomes scornful, as if I am evading the issue.
“You know what will happen if we tell the manager,” she says. “He will smile and shrug his shoulders.”
I somehow find this quite credible and for this reason want to scoff at it harshly. The manager is a bulky, balding man, with stylish cuff-links and a long, aquiline nose with sensitive nostrils. Every time trips have been arranged for us which have gone wrong or information been given which has proved faulty he has smiled at our complaints and shrugged. He introduces himself to foreign guests as Mehmet, but this is not significant since every second Turk is a Mehmet or Ahmet. I have a picture of him listening to this fresh grievance and raising his hands, palms exposed, as if to show he has no dagger.
My wife stares at me. I feel I am in her power. I know she is right; that this is not a matter for the authorities. I look out of the window. The sun is glinting on the Bosphorus from behind dark soot-falls of approaching rain. I think of what you read in the guide-books, the Arabian Nights. I should go out and murder this Turk who is hiding in the linen cupboard.
“It’s the manager’s responsibility,” I say.
She jerks her head aside at this.
“There’d be no point in seeing the manager,” she says.
I turn from the window.
“So actually nothing happened?”
She looks at me as if I have assaulted her.
We both pace about the room. She clasps her arms as if she is cold. Outside the sky is dark. We seem to be entering a labyrinth.
“I want to get away,” she says, crossing her arms so her hands are on her shoulders. “This place”—she gestures towards the window. “I want to go home.”
Her skin seems thin and luminous in the fading light.
I am trying to gauge my wife. I am somehow afraid she is in real danger. All right, if you feel that bad, I think. But I say, with almost deliberate casualness: “That would spoil the holiday, wouldn’t it?” What I really think is that my wife should go and I should remain, in this unreal world where, if I had the right sort of dagger, I would use it on myself.
“But we’ll go if you feel that bad,” I say.
Outside a heavy shower has begun to fall.
“I’m glad I got those photos then,” I say. I go to the window w
here I have put the guide-books on the sill. A curtain of rain veils Asia from Europe. I feel I am to blame for the weather. I explain from the guide-book the places we have not yet visited. Exotic names. I feel the radiator under the window ledge. It is distinctly warmer.
My wife sits down on the bed. She leans forward so that her hair covers her face. She is holding her stomach like someone who has been wounded.
The best way to leave Istanbul must be by ship. So you can lean at the stern and watch that fabulous skyline slowly recede, become merely two-dimensional; that Arabian Nights mirage which when you get close to it turns into a labyrinth. Glinting under the sun of Asia, silhouetted by the sun of Europe. The view from the air in a Turkish Airlines Boeing, when you have had to cancel your flight and book another at short notice, is less fantastic but still memorable. I look out of the porthole. I am somehow in love with this beautiful city in which you do not feel safe. My wife does not look; she opens a magazine. She is wearing a pale-coloured suit. Other people in the plane glance at her.
All stories are told, like this one, looking back at painful places which have become silhouettes, or looking forward, before you arrive, at scintillating façades which have yet to reveal their dagger thrusts, their hands in hotel bedrooms. They buy the reprieve, or the stay of execution, of distance. London looked inviting from the air, spread out under clear spring sunshine; and one understood the pleasures of tourists staying in hotels in Mayfair, walking in the morning with their cameras and guide-books, past monuments and statues, under plane trees, to see the soldiers at the Palace. One wants the moment of the story to go on for ever, the poise of parting or arriving to be everlasting. So one doesn’t have to cross to the other continent, doesn’t have to know what really happened, doesn’t have to meet the waiting blade.
The Son
IT’S TRUE: EVERYTHING CHANGES. WHAT you think you know, you don’t know. What’s good or bad at one time isn’t good or bad at another. Once I cut off the fingers of my own mother. You don’t believe me? It was during the war in Athens. She was dead. She was dead because there was nothing to eat. And we younger ones were too conscious of our own empty bellies to waste time grieving. There were three fat rings on Mama’s fingers—rings to barter for food. But Mama’s knuckles were swollen and you couldn’t get the rings off by pulling. So, because I was the oldest and expected to make decisions, I got hold of the bread knife …
Thirty-five years ago I chopped off the fingers of my own mother. And now I chop onions in a restaurant. I don’t like the way the world’s going. Thirty-five years ago the Germans killed Greeks for no reason at all, cut off their hands and put out their eyes. And now, every summer, they flock to Greece in the thousands, take snap-shots of the white houses and the smiling men on donkeys and suffer from sun-burn.
But it’s Adoni who tells me about the Germans and their cameras. How should I know about Greece? I haven’t been there for thirty years.
What do you do when your country is in ruins, when a war’s robbed you of a father, then a mother, and of a nice future all lined up for you in the family business? You do what any Greek does. You find a wife who’ll go halves with you; you get on a boat to New York or England, where you’re going to open a restaurant. In five or ten years, you say, when you’ve made your pile, you’ll go back to Greece. Twenty years later, when you’ve only just saved enough money to open that restaurant, and you know there’s no money in restaurants anyway, you wake up to the fact that you’re never going to go back. Even if you were offered the chance you wouldn’t take it.
Yes, I want sunshine. I’m a Greek. What am I doing in the Caledonian Road? I should be sitting in one of the big, noisy cafés on Stadiou or Ermou, clicking my beads and reading To Vima. But that’s how it is: You’re made for one soil, but you put down roots in another and then you can’t budge.
And why do I say “Greek”? There are Greeks and Greeks. I was born in Smyrna in Asia Minor. When I was a tiny baby, only a few months old, I was bundled with my parents onto a French ship, because another bunch of butchers, not the Germans this time but the Turks, were burning Greek houses and lopping off the heads of any Greeks they could catch.
Yes, that’s the way it is: We’re born in confusion and that’s how we live.
I can hear Anna clattering in the kitchen below. She’s talking to Adoni just as if nothing has happened, everything’s the same. It’s funny how women can make changes; it’s men who are obstinate. “Go and lie down, Kostaki mou,” she says. “You’re tired. Leave the clearing up to Adoni and me.” And so I climb the stairs, take off my shoes, my trousers and shirt and lie down in the cramped bedroom from which we can never quite get rid of the smell of food—just as I do every day for a half hour or so between when we shut after lunch and when we open again in the evening. But, today, a little longer.
Tired. Why shouldn’t I be tired? Yesterday—what a day!—I had to get up early to meet Adoni at the airport. Then we didn’t get to bed till nearly three in the morning. And then, these last two weeks, I’ve had to work extra hard because Adoni suddenly takes it into head to have a holiday. In Greece. After thirty-five years, he wants to have a holiday.
Adoni, Adoni. Who could have given him that name that sounds so preposterous in English? Adonis. It wasn’t us who gave it him. Though Adoni was none the wiser. Adonis Alexopoulos, son of Kosta and Anna; born, Athens, 1944; and carried away by his parents—just as I was carried away from Smyrna—to a new land. How was he to know that his real father was in some mass grave in Poland and his mother had died bringing him into the world? He was taken in by Anna’s family, who lived only a block away from us in Kasseveti Street and just a stone’s throw from where Adoni’s real parents—whose name was Melianos—had lived. Anna said when we got married we’d adopt Adoni as our own son. I wasn’t sure if what she meant was: If you want me, then you’ll have to take Adoni too. But I agreed. I thought: All right, Anna can have Adoni and sooner or later I’ll get a real son of my own. But what Anna never told me was that she couldn’t have babies. She was an only daughter and all four of her would-be brothers had been still-born monsters.
What a shameful thing for a man to live thirty-five years not knowing that his parents are not his parents at all. But what a worse shame for a man to have to be told. We always said: When he is old enough we will tell him. But “old enough” always seemed to be just a little bit older. What you put off starts to become impossible. We even began to kid ourselves: He really is ours; he isn’t anybody else’s.
Perhaps there’s a curse on adopted children. Perhaps the fact that they don’t have any real parents comes out, not consciously, but in the sort of stunted way they grow up. What did he become, this Adonis of ours? Slow at school, bashful with the other kids; silent; secretive. Every year we waited for him to bloom like a little flower. We said to ourselves: One day he will start chasing the girls; one day he will stay out at night and not come home till late; one day he will stand up and row with his father and say, I want nothing to do with this crazy idea of opening a restaurant, and slam the door on us. I actually wanted these things to happen, because that’s how real sons behave with their fathers.
But none of it happened. At eighteen, when we buy the restaurant, and when he’s still as chaste and sober as a monk, he puts on a waiter’s jacket without so much as a murmur. He learns to cook dolmades and soudsoukakia. He gets up early every morning to clean up from the night before and to go and order meat and vegetables, and when he does this he doesn’t swop jokes with the traders, he simply sticks out a big, podgy finger at what he wants. In the evenings, he doesn’t prance and scurry like a waiter should; he lumbers between the tables like a great bear. For even in appearance this Adonis is a rebel to his name. His flesh is pale and pasty; at thirty-five he has the thick build of a man twenty years older. When I make introductions to some of my more enthusiastic customers, when I say, like a proud Greek restaurant owner should, “This is my wife Anna, and this is my son Adonis” (for I’ve
told that lie to half of Camden), I see a snigger cross their faces because the name is so absurd.
“Adonaki,” I tell him, “try to use a little charm—you know, charm.” But it’s no use trying to make that pudding face sparkle. I shouldn’t complain: he works hard; he doesn’t spill food or make mistakes over the bills; he pulls corks out of bottles as if he’s plucking feathers. And I’m the one who, over the years, has learnt to provide charm. In the evening I’m all smiles. I joke with my customers; I put a sprig of herbs behind my ear—so I can imagine them saying about me: That Kosta in the restaurant, he’s a character. And even though I lie in bed in the afternoon, in my yellowed vest, like a great lump of dough, yet, come opening time, I never fail to play my part and give a twinkle to my eyes. We Greeks are like that: We come alive, we perform, like drooping flowers splashed with water.
Anna is coming up the stairs. The stair-case creaks. She is heavier even than me. She’ll take her lie-down. But Adoni won’t lie down. He’ll sit in the restaurant with his feet up on one of the chairs, smoke a cigarette and read the newspaper or one of his books from the library—Mysteries of the Past, The Secret of Mind-Power—slowly and methodically. Though he’s slow, he likes asking questions, that boy. And he finds out the answers. Oh yes. Give him time, he’ll find out about everything.
Anna waddles into the bedroom. I pretend that I’m asleep, though I watch her with one half-closed eye. She kicks off her shoes, then her fat arms grope to undo her dress. It falls off her without her having to help it, like a monument being unveiled. In her slip she is like a huge pale blancmange inside a white, diaphanous wrapping. She shuffles around to her side of the bed, winds and sets the alarm-clock. She always does this in case we oversleep. But I’ve never known a time when she wasn’t awake and heaving herself onto her feet without the alarm having to remind her. She’s like that: She does what has to be done. That vast body of hers is built for sweating in the kitchen and scrubbing pans. We men, we like our fancies, our bit of hot spice in a skirt, but where would we be without these great work-horses to pull us through?