‘They were not by me. The title pages were not genuine.’
I had to smile at him then: the curtly dismissive way in which he made such statements had become an almost sure sign that they were not to be believed. Of course he did not smile back, but he evidently felt that I needed reminding of his more serious self.
‘There is some truth in what I have told you. To that extent your question is fair. There was an event in my life analogous to the story I invented.’ He paused, then decided to go on. ‘There had always been a conflict in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued the latter, worshipped the latter as a doctor. As a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and categorize it and vivisect it out of existence, was like trying to remove the air from the atmosphere. In the creating of the vacuum it was the experimenter who died, because he was inside the vacuum.’
‘Was your coming into wealth something like the de Deukans story?’
‘No.’ He added, ‘I was born rich. And not in England.’
‘Then the First World War
‘Pure invention.’
I took a breath; for once he was avoiding my eyes.
‘You must have been born somewhere.’
‘I have long ceased to care what I am, in those terms.’
‘And you must have lived in England.’
He glanced up; searching, unsmiling, yet somewhere beneath there was a hint of irony. ‘Does your appetite for invention never end?’
‘At least I know you have a house in Greece.’
He looked beyond me, and past the sarcasm, into the night. ‘I have always craved for territory. In the technical ornithological sense. A fixed domaine on which no others of my species may trespass without my permission.’
‘Yet you live very little here.’
He hesitated, as if he began to find this interrogation tedious. ‘Life is more complicated for human beings than for birds. And human territory is defined least of all by physical frontiers.’
Maria brought a dish of stewed kid and removed our soup-plates, and there was a little silence. But unexpectedly, when she left, he looked at me. He had something more to say.
‘Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically. For those many years I lived a selfish life. I offered myself every pleasure. I travelled a great deal. I lost some money in the theatre, but I made much more on the stock market. I gained a great many friends, some of whom are now quite famous. But I was never very happy. However, in the end I did discover what some rich people never discover – that we all have a certain capacity for happiness and unhappiness. And that the economic hazards of life do not seriously affect it.’
‘When did you start your theatre here?’
‘Friends used to come. They were bored. Very often they bored me. An amusing person in London or Paris can become insufferable on an Aegean island. We had a little fixed theatre, a stage. Where the Priapus is now. Et voilà.’
‘Have you kept in touch with any of my predecessors?’
He was serving himself a little of the stew. ‘Before the war it was not like this. We acted other men’s plays. Or versions of them. Not our own.’
‘Barba Dimitraki talked about a firework display. He saw it from the sea.’
He gave a little nod. ‘Then without knowing it he saw an important night in my life.’
‘He couldn’t remember when it was.’
‘1938.’ He kept me waiting a moment. ‘I set a match to my theatre. The building. The fireworks were in celebration.’
I remembered that story about burning every novel he owned; and was going to remind him, but suddenly he gestured with his knife.
‘No more. Let us eat.’
He ate very little of the excellent stew and long before I had cleared my own plate he was on his feet.
‘Finish your dinner. I will return.’
He disappeared indoors. Soon after that I heard low voices, Greek voices, upstairs; then silence. Maria brought dessert, then coffee, and I waited, smoking. I still hoped against hope that Julie and her sister would arrive; I badly needed their warmth, normality, Englishness, again. All through the meal, his talking, there had been something sombre and withdrawn about him, as if more than one comedy was over; so many pretences were being dropped – and yet the one that concerned me showed no sign at all of being jettisoned. I had believed him when he said he did not like me. I somehow knew now that he would not keep the girls away from me by force; but a man with such formidable powers of lying … I nursed a tiny terror that he knew I had met Alison in Athens, had somehow got proof for them that I too was a liar, and of a much more banal kind.
He reappeared in the open doors of the music-room, a thin cardboard folder in his hand.
‘I should like us to sit there.’ He pointed towards the drinks table, now cleared by Maria, by the central arch of the front of the colonnade. ‘If you would bring two chairs. And the lamp.’
I carried the chairs over. As I brought the lamp, somebody came round the corner of the colonnade. My heart leapt a fraction of a moment, because I thought it was finally Julie, that we had been waiting for her. But it was the Negro, dressed in black. He carried a long cylinder; went over the gravel in front of us and then, a few yards out, set the cylinder on its tripod end. I realized what it was – a small cinema-screen. There was a harsh ratcheting noise as he unfurled the white square and hooked it up, adjusted its angle. Someone called quietly from above.
‘Entaxi.’ All right. A Greek voice I didn’t recognize.
The Negro went silently back the way he had come, without looking at us. Conchis turned down the lamp to its lowest glimmer, then made me sit beside him, facing the screen. There was a long pause.
‘What I am now about to tell you may help you understand why I am bringing your visits here to an end tomorrow. And for once it is a true story.’ I said nothing, though he left a little pause as if he expected me to object. ‘I should like you also to reflect that its events could have taken place only in a world where man considers himself superior to woman. In what the Americans call “a man’s world”. That is, a world governed by brute force, humourless arrogance, illusory prestige and primeval stupidity.’ He stared at the screen. ‘Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women – and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.’
He paused. His mask-face looked as concentrated, as inward, as I could remember having seen it. Then he said, ‘I will begin.’
Eëåõèåñéá
53
‘When the Italians invaded Greece in 1940, I had already decided that I would not run away. I cannot tell you why. Perhaps it was curiosity, perhaps it was guilt, perhaps it was indifference. And here, on a remote corner of a remote island, it did not require great courage. The Germans took over from the Italians on April 6th, 1941. By April 27th they were in Athens. In June they started the invasion of Crete and for a time we were in the thick of the war. Transport aeroplanes passed over all day long, German landing-craft filled the harbours. But after that peace soon alighted back on the island. It had no strategic value, either to the Axis or to the Resistance. The garrison here was very small. Forty Austrians – the Nazis gave the Austrians and the Italians all the easy Occupation posts – commanded by a lieutenant who had been wounded during the invasion of France.
‘Already, durin
g the invasion of Crete, I had been ordered out of Bourani. A permanent lookout section was posted here, and the maintenance of this observation point was the real reason we had a garrison at all. Fortunately I had the house in the village. The Germans were not unpleasant. They carried all my portable possessions over there for me; and even paid me a small billeting rent for Bourani. Then just when things were settling down, it happened that the proedros, the mayor of the village that year, had a fatal thrombosis. Two days later I was summoned to meet the newly arrived commandant of the island. He and his men were installed in your school, which had been closed since Christmas.
‘I was expecting to meet some promoted quartermaster type of officer. Instead I found myself with a very handsome young man of twenty-seven or eight, who said, in excellent French, that he understood I could speak the language fluently. He was extremely polite, more than a little apologetic, and inasmuch as one can in such circumstances we took to each other. He soon came to the point. He wanted me to be the new mayor of the village. I refused at once; I wanted no involvement in the war. He then sent out for two or three of the leading villagers. When they came he left me alone with them, and I discovered that it was they who had proposed my name. Of course the fact was that none of them wanted the job, the odium of collaboration, and I was the ideal bouc émissaire. They put the matter to me in highly moral and complimentary terms, and I still refused. Then they were frank – promised their tacit support … in short, in the end I said, very well, I will do it.
‘My new but dubious glory meant that I came into frequent contact with Lieutenant Kluber. Five or six weeks after our first meeting he said one evening that he would like me to call him Anton when we were alone. That will tell you that we often were alone; and that we had confirmed our liking of each other. Our first link was through music. He had a fine tenor voice. Like many really gifted amateurs, he sang Schubert and Wolf better – in some way more feelingly – than any but the very greatest professional lieder singers. That is, to my ear. On his very first visit to my house he saw my harpsichord. And rather maliciously I played him the Goldberg Variations. If one wishes to reduce a sensitive German to tears there is no surer lachrymatory. I must not suggest that Anton was a hard subject to conquer. He was more than disposed to be ashamed of his role and to find a convenient anti-Nazi figure to worship. The next time I visited the school he begged me to accompany him at the school piano, which he had had moved to his quarters. Then it was my turn to be sentimentally impressed. Not to tears, of course. But he sang very well. And I have always had a softness for Schubert.
‘One of the first things I wanted to know was why Anton, with his excellent French, was not in Occupied France. It seemed “certain compatriots” considered him not sufficiently “German” in his attitude to the French. No doubt he had spoken once too often in the mess in defence of Gallic culture. And that was why he had been relegated to this backwater. I forgot to say he had been shot in the kneecap during the 1940 invasion and had a limp, unfitting him for active military duties. He was German, not Austrian. His family was rich, and he had spent a year before the war studying at the Sorbonne. Finally he had decided that he would become an architect. But of course his training was interrupted by the war.’
He stopped and turned up the lamp; then opening the file, unfolded a large plan. Two or three sketches – perspectives and elevations, all glass and glittering concrete.
‘He was very rude about this house. And he promised he would come back after the war and build me something new. After the best Bauhaus principles.’
All the notes were written in French; not a word of German anywhere. The plan was signed: Anton Kluber, le sept juin, l’an 4 de la Grande Folie. He let me look a few moments longer, then he turned down the lamp again.
‘For a year during the Occupation everything was tolerable. We were very short of food, but Anton – and his men – shut their eyes to countless irregularities. The idea that the Occupation was all a matter of jackbooted stormtroopers and sullen natives is absurd. Most of the Austrian soldiers were over forty and fathers themselves – easy meat for the village children. One summer dawn, in 1942, an Allied plane came and torpedoed a German supply landing-craft that had anchored in the old harbour on its way to Crete. It sank. Hundreds of crates of food came bobbing to the surface. By then the islanders had had a year of nothing but fish and bad bread. The sight of all this meat, milk, rice and other luxuries was too much. They swarmed out in anything that would float. Somebody told me what was happening and I hurried down to the harbour. The garrison had a machine-gun on the point, it had fired furiously at the Allied plane, and I had terrible visions of a revengeful massacre. But when I got there I saw islanders busily hauling in crates not a hundred yards from where the machine-gun was. Outside the post stood Anton and the duty section. Not a shot was fired.
‘Later that morning Anton summoned me. Of course, I thanked him profusely. He said that he was going to report that several of the crew of the landing-craft had been saved by the prompt action of the villagers who had rowed to their help. He must now have a few crates handed back to show as salvage. I was to see to that. The rest would be considered “sunk and destroyed”. What little hostility that remained against him and his men among the villagers disappeared.
‘I remember one evening, it must have been about a month after that, a group of Austrian soldiers, a little drunk, began to sing down by the harbour. And then suddenly the islanders began to sing as well. In turn. First the Austrians, then the islanders. German and Greek. A Tyrolean carol. Then a kalatnatiano. It was very strange. In the end they were all singing each other’s songs.
‘But that was the zenith of our small golden age. Somewhere among the Austrian soldiers there must have been a spy. About a week after the singing, a section of German troops was added to Anton’s garrison to “stiffen morale”. He came to me one day like an angry child and said, “I have been told I am in danger of becoming a discredit to the Wehrmacht. I must mend my ways.” His troops were forbidden to give food to the islanders, and we saw them far less frequently in the village. In November of that year the Gorgopotamos exploit created a new strain. Fortunately I had been given more credit than I deserved by the villagers for the easiness of the regime, and they accepted the stricter situation as well as could be expected.’
Conchis stopped speaking, then clapped his hands twice.
‘I should like you to see Anton.’
‘I think I’ve seen him already.’
‘No. Anton is dead. You have seen an actor who looks like him. But this is the real Anton. During the war I had a small cine-camera and two reels of film. Which I kept until 1944, when I could get them developed. The quality is very poor.’
I heard the faint whir of a projector. A beam of light came from above, was adjusted, centred on the screen. A blur, hasty focusing.
I saw a handsome young man of about my own age. He was not the one I had seen the week before, though in one feature, the heavy dark eyebrows, they were very similar. But this was unmistakably a wartime officer. He didn’t look particularly soft; but more like a Battle of Britain pilot, stylishly insouciant. He was walking down a path beside a high wall, the wall of Hermes Ambelas’s house, perhaps. Smiling. He struck a sort of heroic tenor attitude, laughed self-consciously; and abruptly the ten-second sequence was over. In the next he was drinking coffee, playing with a cat at his feet; looked sideways up at the camera, a serious, shy look, as if someone had told him not to smile. The film was very fuzzy, jerky, amateurish. Another sequence. A file of men marching round the island harbour; apparently shot from above, out of some upper-storey window.
‘That is Anton in the rear.’
He had a slight limp. And I also knew that I was for a moment watching the unfakable truth. Beyond the men I could see a broad quay, on which there stood the little island customs and coastguard house. I knew it had been built since the war. On this film the quay was bare.
The beam was extinguished. r />
‘There. I took other scenes, but one reel deteriorated. Those were all I could salvage.’ He paused, then went on. ‘The officer responsible for “stiffening morale” in this area of Greece was an S.S. colonel called Wimmel. Dietrich Wimmel. By the time I am now speaking of resistance movements had begun in Greece. Wherever the terrain permitted. Among the islands, of course, only Crete allowed maquis operations. But up in the north and over there in the Peloponnesus elas and the other groups had begun to organize themselves. Arms were dropped to them. Trained saboteurs. Wimmel was brought to Nauplia, late in 1942, from Poland, where he had had a great deal of success. He was responsible for the south-west of Greece, in which we were included. His technique was simple. He had a price-list. For every German wounded, ten hostages were executed; for every German killed, twenty. As you may imagine, it was a system that worked.
‘He had a handpicked company of Teutonic monsters under him, who did the interrogating, torturing, executing, and the rest. They were known, after the badge they wore, as die Raben. The ravens.
‘I met him before his infamies had become widely known. I heard one winter morning that a German motor-launch had unexpectedly brought an important officer to the island. Later that day, Anton sent for me. In his office I was introduced to a small, thin man. My own height, my own age. Immaculately neat. Scrupulously polite. He stood to shake my hand. He spoke some English, enough to know that I spoke it much better than he did. And when I confessed that I had many cultural attachments to England, had been partly educated there, he said, “The great tragedy of our time is that England and Germany should have quarrelled.” Anton explained that he had told the colonel about our musical evenings and that the colonel hoped that I would join them for lunch and afterwards accompany Anton in one or two songs. Of course I had, à titre d’office, to accept.