Without any noise, I started to cry, while, there behind the fence, we listened with silent avidity—to The Rite of Spring.
—but by the end of the Ninth, for our several reasons, all of us had been moved:
Jammed together on Cosima’s steps, the physical discomfort and social preposterousness of the situation had made us listen with intense attention. A number of us in that stairwell had been wet-eyed.
We’d said “Goodnight,” and “Thank you,” and “Ciao” to Cosima, quietly. Then, our hands against the narrow stairway walls, some of us, we’d filed down to the street, now and again glancing back to smile. In the doorway at the stairs’ head, holding the album cover, Trevor had stood, raggedy-kneed. Just behind his shoulder, in her long skirt, Cosima had watched us.
Outside, it had rained enough to slick the sidewalk under the corner lamp. Heidi and I had walked back to the bottom of Mnisicleou . . .
Between the standing Athenians, madly clapping, I could see, down on the platform, someone hand Stravinsky another pink and yellow bouquet. In his black tails, with his white tie, bald head, and glasses, he held two in his arms already. Three more lay on the gray wood beside him.
Craft came out again to take Stravinsky’s arm and lead him off. Once he shifted the flowers and waved at the audience.
On the other side of Cosima, the Greek boy closed two buttons on his shirt. With his friends, he turned to leave the fence—the school girls beside me, whispering and worried that they were already late, had hurried off as soon as the applause began.
Applause swelled again. I said, softly, in Cosima’s ear: “There. Now his career as a conductor is finished. It’s over. Like that.”
Her face near the wire, black fur moving in the wind that, with the later hour, had started, Cosima nodded.
V
To construct oneself, to know oneself—are these two distinct acts or not?
—Paul Valéry, Eupalinos, or the Architect
A good number of people were on the platform when I got there. I had my guitar case—and a shopping bag. At the bottom of the bag was Heidi’s Vian. Then my underwear and my balled-up suit. On the top were my novels. Two had actually been published while I was here—though I’d written them before. My wife had sent me a single copy of each, as they came out. I’d figured to reread the newest one on the train—for more typographical mistakes; or for stylistic changes I might want to make. And maybe reread the typescript of her poems. It was as sunny as it had been on the Piraeus docks when I’d seen Heidi off to Aegina. Shabby-coated lottery vendors ambled about. Ticket streamers tentacled their sticks. A cart rolled by, selling milk-pudding and spinach pie and warm Orangata, big wheels grumbling and squeaking. Sailors and soldiers stood in groups, talking together, among the civilian passengers.
When I saw him—the tall one—with four others in their whites, my heart thudded hard enough to hurt my throat. From the surprise, the back of my neck grew wet. I swallowed a few times—and tried to get my breath back. But—no!—I wasn’t going to go up to the other end of the platform. I wasn’t going to let the son of a bitch run me all around the train station. I took a deep breath, turned, and looked toward the empty tracks.
But I hoped the train would hurry up.
Not that he could do anything here, with all these people.
The third time I glanced at him, he was looking at me—smiling. He was smiling!
Another surge of fear; but it wasn’t as big as the terror at my initial recognition.
Next time I caught him looking, I didn’t look away.
So he raised his hand—and waved: that little “go away” gesture that, in Greek, means “come over here.”
When I frowned, he broke from his group to lope toward me.
He came up with a burst of Greek: “Kalimera sas! Ti kanis? Kalla?” (Hello, you! How you doing? All right?)
“Kalimera,” I said, dry as a phrase book.
But with his big (nervous? Probably, but I didn’t catch it then) smile, he rattled on. In front of me, the creaseless white of his uniform was as blinding as a tombstone at noon; he towered over me by a head and a half. Now, with a scowl, he explained: “. . . Dthen eine philos mou . . . Dthen eine kalos, to peidi . . .” He isn’t a friend of mine . . . he’s no good, that fellow . . . Where’re you going? It’s beautiful today . . . Yes? (“Orea simera . . . Ne?”) You all right? He’s crazy, that guy. He just gets everybody in trouble. Me, I don’t do things like that. I don’t like him. I go out with him, I always get in trouble—like with you and your friend, up there, that night. That wasn’t any good. You’re taking the train today? Where’re you going? You’re Negro, aren’t you? (“Mavros, esis?”) You like it here, in Greece? It’s a beautiful country, isn’t it? You had a good time? How long have you been here?
I didn’t want to tell him where I was going; so I mimed ignorance at half his questions, wondering just what part he thought he’d played in the night before last.
I was surprised, though, I wasn’t scared anymore. At all. Or, really, even that angry. Suddenly, for a demonic joke, I began to ask him lots of questions, fast: What was his name? (“Petros, ego.” Peter, that’s me.) Where was he going? (“Sto ’Saloniki.” To Thessalonika.) Where was he from? (Some little mountain town I’d never heard of before.) Did he like the Navy? (With wavering hand, “Etsi-getsi.” So-so.) He answered them all quite seriously, the grin gone and—I guess—a slightly bewildered look, hanging above me, in its place.
Finally, though, he dropped a hand on my shoulder and bent to me. He’d come over to me, he explained, because he had something to show me. No, no—it’s all right. Let me show it to you. Here. He went digging in his back pocket—for a moment I thought he was going to pull out his wallet to show me pictures. But when his hand came back around, he was holding a knife. No, don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid—I just want to show you something. I pulled back, but, by the shoulder, he forced me forward—still smiling. Here, he said. Here—go on. You take it. Go ahead. Take it. Hold it. While he held the knife in his amazingly large hand, I saw the nails on his big fingers were clean, evenly clipped, with ivory scimitars over the crowns—under clear polish.
Like many Greek men, he wore his little nail half an inch or more long.
I hadn’t noticed any of that, the night at DeLys’s.
I took the closed knife from him and thought: Greek sailors don’t usually have manicures. Briefly I wondered if he was queer himself.
He said: “Orea, eine . . . ?” (Beautiful, isn’t it . . . ?) He didn’t make any other gesture to touch it but, with motions of two fingers together and the odd word, told me to open it up. It isn’t very expensive. It’s cheap—but it’s a pretty knife. Good. Strong. You like it? It’s nice, yes? Come on, open it up. A good knife. That button there—you push it up. To open it. Yes. Come on.
I pushed the button up, and the blade jumped out, a sliver of light, of metal, of sky.
Here! He laughed. It’s a good knife, yes?
I nodded—that is, moved my head to the side, the Greek gesture for Yes. “Ne,” I said. “Kallos to eine.” (Yes. It’s a good one.)
He said in Greek: You want this knife? You like it? Go on, take it. For you. You keep it. You like it, yes? I give it to you. For a present. Maybe you need it, sometimes. It’s a good knife.
“Yati . . . ?” I asked. Why are you giving this to me?
You take it. He gave a sideways nod, then added a chuckle. Go on. Take it. Yes?
“No,” I said. I shook my head (or rather, raised it in negation). “Ochi,” I told him. I pressed the button. But it didn’t close.
He took it from me now. There was another pressure point you had to thumb to make the blade slip in. With his big, manicured fingers, he thumbed it. The metal flicked into the silver and tortoiseshell handle. Like that. You sure? You don’t want it?
I said, “Ochi—efharisto. Ochi.” (No—thank you. No.)
He put it in his back pocket again and regarded me a little stran
gely, blinking his green-gray eyes in the sun. Then he said: “Philli, akomi—emis?” (We’re friends, now—us?)
“Okay,” I said, in English. “Just forget it.”
“Esis. Ego. O-kay!” he repeated. You. Me. “O-kay. You like . . . I like . . .” With a flipped finger, he indicated him and me. “O-kay. Friend: me, you.” He laughed once more, clapped me on the shoulder, then turned to go back to the others. As he walked away, knife and wallet were outlined on one white buttock.
How, I wondered, were we supposed to be friends?
The other sailors were laughing—I’m sure about something else.
I watched them, trying to see some effeminacy in any of their movements—queer sailors, camping it up on the station platform? Him . . . maybe. But not the others.
Just once more he caught me looking and grinned again—before the train came.
When we pulled from the station, his group was still talking out on the platform—so he wasn’t on my train. I was glad about that.
That night, in my couchette, while we hurtled between Switzerland and Italy, in the dark compartment I thought about the two sailors; and when my body told me what I was about to do, I had some troubled minutes, when it was too easy to imagine the armchair psychiatrists, over their morning yogurt and rolls at the white metal tables in front of American Express, explaining to me (in three languages) how, on some level, I had liked it, that—somehow—I must have wanted it.
While I masturbated, I thought about the thick, rough hands on the squat one, but grown now to the size of the tall one’s; and the tall one’s hazel eyes and smile—but deprived of the Sen-sen scent; and about sucking the squat one’s cock, with all its black hair—except that, for the alcoholic sweat and cologne, I substituted the slight work-salt of a stocky good-humored housepainter I’d had on the first day I’d got to Athens.
Once I tried to use the knife blade, as he’d held it, full of sky: nothing happened with it.
At all.
But I used my waking up with the sailor beside me, his leg against my arm, his hand between his legs. I did it first with fear, then with a committed anger, determined to take something from them, to retrieve some pleasure from what, otherwise, had been just painful, just ugly.
But if I hadn’t—I realized, once I’d finished, drifting in the rumbling, rocking train—then, alone with it, unable to talk of it, even with John or Heidi, I simply would have found it too bleak. I’d have been defeated by it—and, more, would have remained defeated. That had been the only way to reseize my imagination, let go of the stinging fear, and use what I could of both to heal.
VI
Unknown and alone, I have returned to wander through my native country, which lies about me like a vast graveyard . . .
—Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion
In London one night beside a neon-striped eating place, I’d stood outside plate glass, a triangle of blue sliding down at my eye, listening to a record on the jukebox inside, by a group that sang, in the most astonishing antiphony, about “Monday, Monday . . .”—as rich with pop possibilities as new music could be.
In France, for a day, I’d hitched north toward the Luxembourg airport through a stony landscape—sided with crumbling white walls, shuttered windows and planked-up doors that recalled so many of that country’s warnings, from so many of its writers, about the meanness and a-sensuality of its strict, strict provinces.
And, in New York, three weeks later, I was sitting at the foot of my bed, when, after some argument that had to do with neither money nor sex, my wife walked in and slapped me, about as hard as I’d ever been hit, across the face—the only time either one of us ever struck the other. A week later, with her poems and the red clay casserole, she moved into another apartment, down on Henry Street. Which left me nothing but to plunge into the ending of the novel I’d been working on last fall and spring, full of Greece—but with no Heidi or Pharaoh, no Cosima or DeLys, no Trevor or Costas, no Jerry or [Turkish] John.
Two weeks after that I got a letter from Heidi—which surprised me: I hadn’t written her at all. I sat on the bed in the back of my empty Lower East Side flat to read its more-than-dozen pages. The light through the window-gate made lozenges over the rumpled linen.
The return address on Heidi’s letter was Munich, which was where her family lived. Its many beige sheets explained how she was with them now, how glad she’d been to see her mother once she’d arrived—and how the problems she’d sometimes cried to me about having with her father seemed, briefly, in abeyance. Had I gotten to the Deutsches Museum? (I had. And it had been quite as wonderful as she’d told me. But she seemed to think I’d probably missed it.) She hoped things were going well between me and my wife.
Then, in its last pages, she wrote:
“Before I left Greece, I killed my poor Pharaoh—whom I loved more than anything else in the world. Even more than, for that little time, I loved you. But there was no one I could give him to. The Greeks don’t keep pets. And the quarantine laws are impossible—they would have put him in kennel for six months; and that costs lots of money. Besides, he was just a puppy, and after six months more he wouldn’t even have known me. But the day before I did it, I saw a dog—all broken up and bloody, with one leg and one eye entirely gone, and his innards—Oh, I don’t want to describe it to you! But he was alive, though barely, in the garbage behind Kyria Kokinou’s, because of what some boys had done to him. He was going to die. And I knew if I just let Pharaoh go, with the stones and the glass in the meat, and the Greek boys, he would die too. That’s when I cried.
“Since I was leaving Greece in two days, what I did was take my poor, beautiful Pharaoh out in the blue rowboat that David said I could use, with a rope, one end of which I’d already tied around a big rock (about eighteen kilos). I was in my bathing suit—as though we were going for a swim, back on Aegina. And while he looked up at me, with his trusting eyes—which, because you are such a careful writer, you would say was a cliché, but I could really look into those swimming, swirling eyes and see he did trust me, because I fed him good food every day from the market and took him for his walks in the morning and at night so he could make his shits and his pee-pees, and I had protected him all winter and spring from those horrid Greeks. I tied the rope around his neck, the knot very tight, so it wouldn’t come loose. Then we wrestled together in the boat and I hugged him and he licked me, and I threw him over the side. He swam around the boat, as he used to when I’d take him out in the skiff on Aegina, with most of the rope floating in curves, back and forth, snaking to the gunwale, and back over. Once he climbed in again—and got me all wet, shaking. Then he jumped out, to swim some more.
“He just loved to swim. And while he was swimming, sometimes he glanced at me. Or off at a sea bird.
“When he looked away, I threw the rock over.
“The splash wet me to my waist. Over the time of a breath, in and out, while the boat rocked up and down, all the curves in the rope disappeared.
“And still paddling, Pharaoh jerked to the side—and went under.
“There were ripples, moving in to and out from the boat.
“There were the obligatory gulls—one swooped close enough to startle me, making me sit back on the seat. Then it flew away.
“The paper mill squatted in its smelly haze across the harbor.
“But it was over.
“Like that.
“I waited ten minutes.
“I’d thought to sit there perhaps an hour or so, being alone with myself, with the water, with what I’d done—just thinking. But after ten minutes—because of the gull, I think—I realized I’d done it, and I rowed back to the Pasilimani dock.
“Although I cried when I saw the poor dog out behind the house, I didn’t cry with Pharaoh. I’m really surprised about that—about how little I felt. I suppose I didn’t feel worse than any other murderer who has to do things like that daily for a living—a highway bandit; a state executioner. I wonder why that is?
“Cosima thought I was just a terrible person, and kept saying that there must have been something else I could have done.
“But there wasn’t. And I hope she comes to realize that. I hope you realize it too.
“I used to say the Greeks were barbarians, and you would laugh at me and tell me that people’s believing they could deal with the world in such general terms was what made it so awful. And I would laugh at you back. But now I know that I am the barbarian. Not the Greeks who are too hungry to understand why anyone would keep a dog. Not the Germans who managed to kill so many, many Jews with their beautiful languages, Yiddish and Hebrew, and who, still, someday, I hope will let me into their country to study. Not the southern whites like Jerry and DeLys who lynch and burn Negroes like you. Not the Negroes like you who are ignorant and lazy and oversexed and dangerous to white women like me.
“Me—and not the others, at all; not you, not them.
“Me.
“I loved my Pharaoh so much. He’s gone. My memories of him are beautiful, though.
“I hope someday you will write something about him. And about me—even though you have to say terrible things of me for what I did. And because of how little I felt when I did it. But, then, you haven’t written me at all. Maybe you’ll just forget us both.”
That was her only letter.
—Amherst
September 1990
Samuel R. Delany, Atlantis: Three Tales
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