Learning to Swim: And Other Stories
She settles down next to me and she sees that I’m not really asleep. I open my eyes. “It doesn’t matter, Kostaki,” she says. “It doesn’t matter. Who are we anyway?”
Her body smells of warm grease and scouring powder. How can it be that that womb of hers—which can now produce nothing—would have once produced not men but deformities? How can it be that she has grown into this vast flesh-mountain? And yet once—it doesn’t seem possible—in the scrubby bushes on Hymettos, when I was a dolt of eighteen, she said, “Ela pethí mou,” and pulled my hand between her legs.
Sometimes I wonder what Adoni thinks of women. I swear, at twenty-five he’d never touched one. I used to say to him, every other night, “You take the evening off, Adoni, Anna and I can manage,” so as to give him the opportunity; but he’d shrug, shake his head and carry on skewering kebabs. Then we started to hire waitresses. It’s a good idea, if you can afford it, to hire pretty waitresses. It attracts customers, apart from easing the load. But my real reason for hiring waitresses was to encourage Adoni. I’m an immoral old man. First there was Carol, then Diane, then Christine, but Christine was the best. After we closed at night I used to get Anna to go to bed early. I’d go with her, and leave Adoni and the waitress to clear up. I’d lie in bed with one ear cocked, thinking: “It’s all right, Adoni, don’t have any qualms. Take your chance. Live up to your name. Don’t you want that little Christine? Doesn’t she make your blood hot? Take her up to your room and screw her for your Mama’s and Father’s sake—we won’t mind.” But nothing ever happened. And to make matters worse, I couldn’t resist, after a time, clapping my hand, more than once, on that Christine’s bottom, and poking my finger down the front of her blouse. And though no one else ever knew about it, she gave her notice, and the next waitress we got—perhaps it was just as well—was a mousy thing with a perpetual sniff.
Adoni approached his thirtieth birthday. I began to be ashamed of him. This son of mine—he wasn’t a man, he wasn’t a Greek; he wasn’t anything. But there I go again: “this son of mine.” What right did I have to that sort of shame? What right did I have to the fatherly luxury of wanting my own son to have a little more pleasure in his youth than I’d had in those miserable, famished years in Athens? The truth is I wanted a real son, the son I’d been tricked out of, not this wooden substitute. But Anna was menopausal. I was menopausal too. Sometimes I wept.
And then I began to think: It’s a punishment. It’s because we never told Adoni in the first place. If we’d told him, perhaps he’d have developed in a normal way, because at least he’d have known who he was. But there’s no hiding a fraud when it’s a matter of blood. I started to think: Perhaps he knows, perhaps he’s worked it out by some sort of sixth sense and it’s he who’s punishing us. Because we’re not a true mother and father to him, he’s behaving as if he’s nothing to us. I said to myself: Any moment he’s going to come out with it: “Anna, Kosta, I can’t call you Mother and Father any more.” And how could I have forestalled him? By saying to him, “Adoni, you’re thirty-three now—it’s time you were told something”? I began to look for signs of suspicion, of rebellion in him. He only had to show the slightest coolness to Anna—if he was slow to answer her when she spoke, for example—and I’d fly into a towering rage.
Ach! Did I say I was menopausal? Did I say I was paranoid?
And then—what happens? Adoni asks for time off. He starts to go out at night, and in the afternoons too. “Of course,” I say. “Take a whole day off—have a good time.” And I start to breathe more easily. I don’t say anything more, but I look for signs. Is he using a lot of after-shave? Is he slicking his hair? Is he trying to lose some of that premature fat and learn some modern dance steps? And I think: When the moment is ripe I’ll say to him, Here, come and sit down with me, have a brandy. Now tell me, who is this nightingale? But I don’t smell any after-shave; and though Adoni goes out at night he doesn’t come home late; there are no stars in his eyes; and I see him, sometimes, reading these big books, the kind you blow the dust off.
“Adonaki,” I say, “what do you do when you go out?”
“I go to the library.”
“What the hell do you go to the library for?”
“To read books, Baba.”
“But you come in at ten and eleven. The libraries don’t stay open till then.”
He lowers his eyes, and I smile. “Come on, Adoni mou, you can tell me.”
And I’m surprised by what he says.
“I go to the Neo Elleniko, Baba.”
I’ve heard of the Neo Elleniko. It is a club in Camden for so-called expatriate Greeks. It is full of old men who tell tall, repetitious stories and like to believe they are melancholy, worldly-wise exiles. They are all trellí. What is more, two thirds of them aren’t Greeks at all. They are crazy Cypriots. I’ve no time for the Neo Elleniko.
“What do you want with all those old madmen?”
“I talk to them, Baba. I ask them questions.”
Now it’s my turn to drop my eyes. So Adoni really is playing the detective. He wants to have answers. Is there a gleam in his eye? Maybe some of those old fogies at the Neo Elleniko were around in our neighbourhood in Nea Ionia during the war, or maybe they know people who were. He’s trying to get at the truth.
“They won’t tell you anything but vlakíes.” Spittle comes to my lips.
“Why are you angry, Baba?”
“I’m not angry. Don’t call me ‘Baba.’ You’re not a kid.”
He shrugs. And suddenly his round, waxy, somehow far-off face seems the face of just another man, a man who could be my age—someone you meet over some minor transaction, shake hands with, then forget.
“All right. If you like the company of old men—if there aren’t any better things to do—you go to the Neo Elleniko. Don’t ask me to come too.”
This was in the spring. I tell myself: It’s only a matter of time. I feel like a guilty criminal. What are we going to tell all those people we’ve told Adoni is our son? Anna says, “Don’t worry, glikó mou. Nothing will happen. It’s all in the past. It’s too late for anything to change.”
And then, some time in July, he says: “Father, I want to take a holiday this summer. You don’t mind? All these years I haven’t taken a holiday.”
I look in his eyes for any extra meaning.
“Okay—if you want to take a holiday, take a holiday. Where are you going?” But I know the answer to this one.
“I want to go to Greece, Baba.”
And so he buys his air tickets and a suitcase and lightweight clothes. He can afford all this, with all the money he hasn’t spent on women. And what can I do to stop him? I even envy him—stepping off the plane at Glyfada into that syrupy heat.
His holiday is fixed for a fortnight in September. I become resigned. Let him go. He’s thirty-five. It’s fated. Like King Oedipus he’s got to ask these fool questions. He’s got to find out where he came from.
And Anna says: “Why do you look so miserable, Kostaki? Our little Adoni—so serious, so sovaró—he’s going to take a holiday. He wants a little sunshine.”
The alarm goes. Anna is already up, buttoning her dress. I haven’t slept a wink. I raise myself and scratch my belly. Soon, we shall have to go through it all again, the old nightly ritual. Anna’s fat hands will garnish salads. Adoni will lollop round the tables. And I will have to pretend once again I’m Zorba the Greek.
Outside it’s raining. Anna hoists up her sleeves like a workman. In England now it’s already autumn. But in Athens the nights are still like ovens and the pavements smell like hot biscuits.
So I get up at four to meet him at the airport, my heart beating, like a man in a cell awaiting his trial. I see him come out of Customs, and I can tell at once—there’s something about the way he walks—that he knows. I can’t kid myself any more he’s a son of mine. But I hug him and clap him on the shoulder just like a father should, and I think of all those scenes in which fathers meet sons who have b
een away a long time, in far-off lands, at sea, at war, and I don’t look straight at Adoni in case he sees the wet glint in my eyes.
“Eh, Adonaki—you look well. Did you have a good time? Tell me what’s it like. Did you go to Vouliagmeni? Sounio? Did you get the boat to Idra? Eh, tell me, Adoni mou, the Athenian girls, are they still—” I raise my hand, fingers and thumb together “—phrouta?”
“My suitcase, Baba—” he blinks as if he never meant to say that word, and he slips free of me to go to the luggage escalator.
In the car I’m waiting for him to spit it out. I can see it’s there nudging at his lips. Okay, so you’ve been nosing around in Nea Ionia, you’ve been asking questions. You haven’t been on holiday at all. Say it. Get it over with, for God’s sake. But he doesn’t say it. Maybe he’s scared, too, to speak. Instead, he tells me about Athens. There are these tourists everywhere, and nowhere to get a decent meal in the centre of town. Vouliagmeni? Yes. It crawls with close-packed bodies and you have to pay to get on a clean piece of beach. Idra? It’s full of Germans, clicking their cameras.
And I realise the delapidated but companionable Greece I knew—and which Adoni knew, via my memory—isn’t there any more.
“And the girls, Adonaki?”
Later that same day he gets back into his waiter’s outfit, starts slicing the bread and pulling the corks, just as if he’d never been away. I’m still waiting for him to pluck up the courage. We keep eyeing each other as we pass each other with plates, and Anna looks at me anxiously in the kitchen.
But it’s not until we’ve closed for the night that the moment comes. For I wasn’t mistaken: I knew it had to come. We’re sitting in the empty restaurant, sipping coffee, asking Adoni about Athens. And suddenly something Adoni says sets Anna going. Her eyes glaze. She starts remembering Nea Ionia before the war: the old balconied houses, the families along her street, the Vassilious, the Kostopoulous, the one-eyed fig-seller, Trianda-philos. I look at her ferociously. She must know this is like a cue. But perhaps she means it as a cue.
“As to! Koutamares! Go and make some more coffee!”
Anna shuffles off, and I know the time has come—and I know Anna will be waiting, ears pricked as she stands by the stove, until it’s passed.
He lights a cigarette.
“Do you know?—I went to see if I could find Kassaveti Street. It’s still there, though all the building’s new. And—do you know?—I even found one of the Vassilious—Kitsos Vassiliou, he’d be a little older than me. And he told me where I could find old Elias Tsobanidis. Do you remember him?”
Yes, I remember. He seemed about seventy when I was only a boy. I’m staggered he’s still alive.
He toys with his coffee cup. There’s a silence like a huge weight tilting.
“You know what I am going to say, don’t you?” Suddenly his face seems no longer puddingy and soft but made of something like stone.
“Yes, yes. Say it. Say it! Say it!”
“Elias Tsobanidis told me—or he said things so that I could work it out—that my real name isn’t Alexopoulos—it’s Melianos. My mother died when I was born and my father died in the war.”
“It’s true, it’s true. It’s the truth!” I wish I could blubber like a sinful old man.
“Forgive me, Adonaki.”
But he looks at me with that hard, determined face—where has he acquired that from? He draws on his cigarette. His big fingers are leathery and blunt. And suddenly it seems not just that he’s a grown man but that he’s old, he’s lost the youth he never had.
He puts down his cigarette, leans forward across the table, and then he says, cool as ice:
“Elias told me something else too. You know that what Elias says must be the truth, don’t you? He said your name is not Alexopoulos either. The Alexopouloses were neighbours of your parents in Smyrna—they were in the tobacco business—and they were the ones who got you onto the refugee ship. Your mother and father were killed when the Turks burnt the city.”
I look at him as if he is a ghost. I notice that Anna is standing in the doorway. She too looks like a ghost and she is looking at me as if I am a ghost.
We’re all ghosts. But at the same time I know, I see it as plain as anything—we’re all going to carry on just as before, performing our rituals in the restaurant as if nothing has changed, pretending we’re people we’re not.
“Elias Tsobanidis is an old liar!” I start to yell, to this “son” I’ve lied to all my life. “An old liar! An old liar!”
Tell me, who are we? What’s important, what isn’t? Is it better to live in ignorance? All my life I’ve felt guilty because I chopped off my mother’s fingers, and now I learn it wasn’t my mother at all. Ach! And two of those heads the Turks lopped off in Smyrna, two of them belonged to my father and mother.
Aiee! I don’t like the way the world’s going.
Chemistry
THE POND IN OUR PARK was circular, exposed, perhaps fifty yards across. When the wind blew, little waves travelled across it and slapped the paved edges, like a miniature sea. We would go there, Mother, Grandfather and I, to sail the motor-launch Grandfather and I made out of plywood, balsawood and varnished paper. We would go even in the winter—especially in the winter, because then we would have the pond to ourselves—when the leaves on the two willows turned yellow and dropped and the water froze your hands. Mother would sit on a wooden bench set back from the perimeter; I would prepare the boat for launching. Grandfather, in his black coat and gray scarf, would walk to the far side to receive it. For some reason it was always Grandfather, never I, who went to the far side. When he reached his station I would hear his “Ready!” across the water. A puff of vapor would rise from his lips like the smoke from a muffled pistol. And I would release the launch. It worked by a battery. Its progress was laboured but its course steady. I would watch it head out to the middle while Mother watched behind me. As it moved it seemed that it followed an actual existing line between Grandfather, myself and Mother, as if Grandfather were pulling us towards him on some invisible cord, and that he had to do this to prove we were not beyond his reach. When the boat drew near him he would crouch on his haunches. His hands—which I knew were knotted, veiny and mottled from an accident in one of his chemical experiments—would reach out, grasp it and set it on its return.
The voyages were trouble-free. Grandfather improvised a wire grapnel on the end of a length of fishing line in case of shipwrecks or engine failure, but it was never used. Then one day—it must have been soon after Mother met Ralph—we watched the boat, on its first trip across the pond to Grandfather, suddenly become deeper, and deeper in the water. The motor cut. The launch wallowed, sank. Grandfather made several throws with his grapnel and pulled out clumps of green slime. I remember what he said to me, on this, the first loss in my life that I had witnessed. He said, very gravely: “You must accept it—you can’t get it back—it’s the only way,” as if he were repeating something to himself. And I remember Mother’s face as she got up from the bench to leave. It was very still and very white, as if she had seen something appalling.
It was some months after that that Ralph, who was now a regular guest at weekends, shouted over the table to Grandfather: “Why don’t you leave her alone?!”
I remember it because that same Saturday Grandfather recalled the wreck of my boat, and Ralph said to me, as if pouncing on something: “How about me buying you a new one? How would you like that?” And I said, just to see his face go crestfallen and blank, “No!” several times, fiercely. Then as we ate supper Ralph suddenly barked, as Grandfather was talking to Mother: “Why don’t you leave her alone?!”
Grandfather looked at him. “Leave her alone? What do you know about being left alone?” Then he glanced from Ralph to Mother. And Ralph didn’t answer, but his face went tight and his hands clenched on his knife and fork.
And all this was because Grandfather had said to Mother: “You don’t make curry any more, the way you did for Alex, the way
Vera taught you.”
It was Grandfather’s house we lived in—with Ralph as an ever more permanent lodger. Grandfather and Grandmother had lived in it almost since the day of their marriage. My grandfather had worked for a firm which manufactured gold- and silver-plated articles. My grandmother died suddenly when I was only four; and all I know is that I must have had her looks. My mother said so and so did my father; and Grandfather, without saying anything, would often gaze curiously into my face.
At that time Mother, Father and I lived in a new house some distance from Grandfather’s. Grandfather took his wife’s death very badly. He needed the company of his daughter and my father; but he refused to leave the house in which my grandmother had lived, and my parents refused to leave theirs. There was bitterness all around, which I scarcely appreciated. Grandfather remained alone in his house, which he ceased to maintain, spending more and more time in his garden shed which he had fitted out for his hobbies of model making and amateur chemistry.
The situation was resolved in a dreadful way: by my own father’s death.
He was required now and then to fly to Dublin or Cork in the light aeroplane belonging to the company he worked for, which imported Irish goods. One day, in unexceptional weather conditions, the aircraft disappeared without trace into the Irish Sea. In a state which resembled a kind of trance—as if some outside force were all the time directing her—my Mother sold up our house, put away the money for our joint future, and moved in with Grandfather.
My father’s death was a far less remote event than my grandmother’s, but no more explicable. I was only seven. Mother said, amidst her adult grief: “He has gone to where Grandma’s gone.” I wondered how Grandmother could be at the bottom of the Irish Sea, and at the same time what Father was doing there. I wanted to know when he would return. Perhaps I knew, even as I asked this, that he never would, that my childish assumptions were only a way of allaying my own grief. But if I really believed Father was gone forever—I was wrong.