The Man Who Was Left Behind (11 page)

“Good.”

“Only it’s a little hot right in the sun.”

“We can move over to the entrance there.”

He helped her down off the wall and they started to cross the square.

“Oh, John, I’ve got to go to the bathroom again.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I mean it.”

“We’ll miss the group.”

“That doesn’t matter.” She looked from one side to the other.

“Down that other street. There’s a café.”

“All right,” he said.

She marched off quickly down the street. The café was crowded with working men sitting out at the tables. Without hesitating, she stepped through the open doorway, through the hanging plastic strips for keeping flies out, and went inside. There were a few more tables, but most of the men were standing up at the counter. They all looked at her. He felt like a man in a cartoon, his head turned away while his dog strains on the leash to get at a lamp post. She went straight up to the counter, said hello in Greek, and then asked in clear American French,
“S’il vous plaît,
lavatoire.”
The man serving didn’t understand. She repeated it. John stepped up beside her and reeled off
sotto
voce
all the various cognates for toilet he knew. Finally, hoping that it wasn’t an indecent gesture, he made motions of washing his hands, and that seemed to get across. The man called into the back room and a boy in an apron came out. He explained something to the boy in Greek, and
Amy bustled forward and out into the back room. Then there was silence. John ordered a coffee and felt uncomfortable. Gradually people began to talk again, but not much. The coffee was very hot and sweet. He had finished it long before she came out again.

She was still looking happy, and did not seem to mind the fact that everyone was looking at her, although she was normally so self-conscious. She said thank you in Greek to the man behind the counter, which seemed to gain her the approval of everyone, and they left.

“I was beginning to wonder what had happened to you,” he said. “I had visions of you waking up in Rio de Janeiro, doped to the eyeballs and forced to lead the rest of your life as a white slave.”

“Ha!” she said. “It was just miles away and like a real old farm privy. I’m dying to wash my hands. They have a little garden out back there, full of flowers.”

“Did it have a half moon on it?”

“No,” she said, and laughed.

There was no one to be seen in the square. They went through the entranceway of the building across the square from the wall and couldn’t see anyone there, either. Then they found a guard and asked where the museum was. He walked back with them and pointed up the street to what looked like another part of the fortifications.

“This must be it,” John said.

“I can hear them inside.”

The guard at the door tried to sell them tickets and John pointed ahead, saying, “Group” until he let them in.

It was a small museum, cool inside, with several lovely busts and funeral reliefs and a small kneeling Aphrodite, which was famous. There was also a bust of Alexander the Great as a youth, hair down to his shoulders and the nose knocked away. John looked closely at this, liking it very much, and decided that portraits of Alexander never looked ruined if
they had been damaged, because somehow you had the feeling that it had happened in battle. He was still thinking about the idea and looking from a three-quarter view at the bust, when Amy from the other side of the room announced in a loud, isolated voice, “There aren’t any postcards in here.”

His head went around fast, and he saw her turning from side to side and glaring. People were beginning to bunch around her as he reached her side.

“Where are the postcards?” she demanded. In an even louder voice, imperious, she called again for the postcards.

He moved her away by the arm.

“They’re outside, honey. This way,” he said. He wanted to go through the floor.

“I don’t see any at all,” she said, still loudly, but not shouting.

“Right out here. I’ll show you.”

Behind them the Germans were making comments. They passed the man of the couple who had sat at their table for lunch. He had a pair of sunglasses folded in one hand and his cameras around his neck, and was standing up like a boiled slab of meat with his eyes turned coldly on Amy.
Oh God,
John thought,
oh God, oh God.
He got her out into the hallway with the desk and its racks of postcards, and the belligerence left her immediately.

“Oh good,” she said, “they have lots. And pictures of the town, too.”

She started to thumb through the cards, smiling.

“I don’t want that one,” she said, lifting out a picture of the Aphrodite.

“Why not?”

“Well, I couldn’t send Mother a picture of a naked woman, could I?”

“Why not? It’s a work of art.”

“It’s a naked woman. Look. They’d never let it go through the mail.”

“Sure they would, Amy. It’s a postcard.”

“Well, it isn’t right. And Mother wouldn’t like it anyway. It isn’t the kind of thing you’d want to send your mother. Specially if she’s sick.”

She put the card back, and chose seven others.

“That’s enough, now,” he said. She still looked peaceful and composed.

“Where can we sit down? I want to get them off right away.”

He led her out of the room and over near the entrance to a place where the wall jutted out into a shelf. They sat down and she put the cards beside her and opened her purse. He picked up the postcards and took away two and put them in his pocket, not in the same pocket the others were in, since she might notice. She put stamps on the five he had left her and began to write.

“Do you think she can understand all the things you’re writing?”

“Sure. The nurse can read them out.”

That hadn’t been what he had meant.

“And she can look at the pictures,” Amy said. She wrote quickly, putting the cards down one by one as she finished. He picked one up and read it through. It was perfectly lucid. Then he looked at the date at the top. He picked up the other cards. On all of them it was the same day and December, 1963; the day they were married.

“Do you mind if I just add my regards?”

“Go ahead. That would be nice.”

She was working on the fourth card and beneath her hair her face looked full of sweetness, and serene. He took his ballpoint pen out of his pocket and changed the dates on the cards, inking out the date she had written. He did the same for the last two, and quickly read through her messages. She had described every chink in the walls, every corner of the hotel they were staying at and the hotel where
they had had lunch, and what they had eaten, and what they had seen, not to mention the historical parts.

“Well,” he said. “All we need now is a mailbox.” He kept the cards in his hand and she packed up her handbag and they stood up. When they came out into the sunlight the change of temperature was a shock. They walked hand in hand.

“I see one,” she said. “Isn’t that lucky?”

They came up to the mailbox and he said, “Do you want to put them in, or can I this time?” He didn’t want her to see the dates.

“Oh, you can.”

He pushed them in.

“Aren’t you being nice to me today?” she said, smiling up at him brilliantly. “Mailing my postcards and everything. Aren’t you nice to me.”

“My pleasure, Miss Amy,” he said.

She hugged him, and he smiled at her and hugged her back.
It’s going to be all right,
he was thinking.
It’s got to
be all right. This is Amy, her face and eyes and mouth and
hair and the way she looks and all the things about herself
that she thinks are ugly which I love so much, and she’s the
only person who’s ever understood me and it’s just got to be
all right.

They walked down the street with their arms around each other. They passed the café where she had had to go to the bathroom. She took his other hand in her free one and squeezed it and held on to it, and they kept walking slowly, a bit like drunks tied to each other. Her hand was much smaller than his and damp, and still clung the way a tree animal clings to a branch. He began to sweat.

“It’s hotter in the sun,” he said, and took a handkerchief from his pocket. He hugged her shoulder to him as he took away his hand.

“But it’s nice,” she said. “I like this place.”

He wiped his forehead and his upper lip, and put the handkerchief back in his pocket.

“So do I,” he said.

They turned a corner and passed four more tourists coming up the street. They passed by a man selling honey and almond cakes, and turned in to a narrow street where there was shade, and saw a donkey carrying a load of sacks, and walked under a hanging wall of bougainvillea flowers. He began to sweat again.

After dinner we decided to have coffee in the town and to walk around for a while. It was still light outside, although the sun was gone. Dusk was just beginning to accumulate, making the distances look different. And sounds, especially footsteps, were altered and had an echo as they do early in the morning. My wife buttoned her cardigan at the neck, but didn’t put her arms in the sleeves.

We walked around the little garden plot outside the hotel and after we had gone by I remembered that I had meant to take a closer look at the statue in its centre. We passed the old graveyard where some of the tombstones were crowned by turbans and the grass was growing wild. Then we came to a place where it looked as though a new villa was about to go up.

“You don’t think it could be an excavation of some kind, do you?” she said.

“I don’t think so, but you can never tell around here. Might be.”

We turned the corner and came to the building whose function I hadn’t been able to guess. It was stucco and had arches cut into the sides, which lent it a South-of-the-border look. I still couldn’t determine whether it was the post office or the jail. In any case, no one was on duty.

We came out into view of the harbour. Two large tourist cruise boats were tied up at the quay. There were people strolling around between the beds of hibiscus flowers, and
three taxicabs still parked to the side of the café, with about a dozen men standing near them and talking.

I stopped, and tried to figure out the view we had had from the beach that morning. If you had your back to the sea, you could look towards the harbour and see a mass of houses and other buildings. That was what we had seen when we stood up to leave the beach before lunch, and then we had watched a large schooner, white as a swan, come sailing in from the ocean towards the buildings. It had looked just as though it was going to crash into them, but as we watched, it went straight through the middle and you could see that there must be water between the houses. It was one of the most extraordinary tricks of eyesight I had ever experienced. From where we stood we had seen the white sails riding serenely forward above the rooftops. It was as if I had been on the way to my job in the middle of the city and seen a few streets off a boat sailing past the office where I worked. Just to see such a phenomenon, to have had the ability to see it, convinced me for a moment that I had participated in the workings of the supernatural. It had made me feel transported, as though I had seen into another dimension, or been granted a special freedom or a miraculous talent not normally available to mankind. But my sense of perspective had altered now, and I doubted the fact that we had been able to see the thing happen.

“What are you looking for?” my wife asked.

“I’m trying to think of where that schooner could have come in this morning.”

She pointed.

“Right over there, I’d guess.”

“But there aren’t many buildings around there. You remember how it looked? It seemed to be going through the centre of a town full of buildings.”

“Maybe it has something to do with the level we were
standing on. Maybe the buildings we saw were farther away, like over there.”

I looked, and she looked, and then I gave it up. We went up the café steps and sat down at one of the tables outside, and ordered coffee. While we were sitting there the café began to fill up fast. The light was still good, but suddenly we saw both tourist boats leap into different shape as the party lights, strung up high over the decks lengthwise and crossways, came to life.

“Want to stay here, or walk around?” I said.

“Let’s walk.”

We set out in the only direction there was to go, back into the town. There were people wandering around everywhere, some even taking photographs in the darkening air. All the shops were still open: copperware, rugs, jewellery. They all had their doors still open and someone standing in the doorway. We turned off on to a side alley, up stone stairs and through several similar streets and didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

“There’s a shop,” my wife pointed out to me.

“Where?”

“Up those steps, where those people are going. Listen.”

There was music coming from inside.

“I think it’s a private party.”

“No, there’s a sign. Let’s go see.”

“Do you want to buy anything?”

“No,” she said, “but we might just take a look.”

We climbed up the stairs. Two people came out of the door as we reached the top, and the rooms inside were loud with voices. There were three rooms full of rather better-quality tourist wares than we had seen so far: icons, bedspreads, blouses, records, ashtrays, cocktail trays, and so on. There was even a collection of marble eggs. The music came from a portable phonograph, and all the talk from the people who had come inside to buy and had either
struck up conversation with each other or with the owner.

The owner was a large man in his fifties, with a moustache and the sort of beard which had had a name given to it in the nineteenth century. Most of the beard was on the chin and the moustache was cut to grow down around the sides of the mouth to meet it, but the cheeks were bare. It suited his face. Sitting down at a table in a corner of the first room was a woman who might have been his wife or a sister, or a more distant relative. She had an account book and pencil beside her on the table and a metal cash box next to them. She nodded to us as we came in.

My wife said good evening in Greek. I said it in English. The woman replied to both of us in English and Jean said, “May we just look around?”

“But of course,” the woman said, and made a graceful gesture with her hand as though she were giving us the whole house. My wife headed for the hand-printed materials in the second room, where the owner was talking to two couples. One of the couples was American, the other was English. The Americans looked married and neat and relaxed. They were both deeply tanned and grey-haired. The English people looked as though they might have been a heavy industry salesman and his secretary on an illegal expense-account holiday. She had incongruously platinum blonde shoulderlength hair held back with a scarf which was tied like an Alice-in-Wonderland headband and she made frequent use of the kind of laugh that let any man within hearing know that she would be a heavy drinker and game for propositions and got a lot of fun out of life. The man was in slacks and a sportsjacket, without a tie, and spoke with one of those English accents that’s only just off around the vowels. He had a moustache, too, but on him it seemed more a matter of habit than adornment, and didn’t do much to tone down his expression of happy lecherousness.

The American woman had forgotten the name of the cruise ship she had arrived on. She asked her husband, who told her the name.

“That’s right. It’s one of the boats in the Epirotiki line. They’re quite good.”

“Epirotiki?” the Englishman exploded, slapping his thigh. “Christ, I don’t believe it! Epirotiki,” he repeated, and grabbed his girl, who broke up, hanging on to his arm.

“That’s what we thought, too,” said the American husband.

“Really,” his wife added. “It’s a real name.”

The owner began to tell them all a story about a woman who had been on a cruise with a line which had given all its boats names like Aphrodite, and Agamemnon, and Homer. Then she went on a tour to Mycenae and when the guide explained to her how Agamemnon had brought his conquering army back from Troy through the Lion Gates, she had said, “Gee, how did they get a big boat like that through such a little place?”

Then he told them a story about a woman who had been in his own shop, looking at the icons. He made a brief digression to discuss the kinds of icons he stocked, and told something of the history of the monasteries from which they came, or in some cases, from which the wood came.

My wife had wandered into the farthest room, but I stayed to admire the owner’s technique. It seemed to be wasted talent in such a small place. On the other hand, the shop looked very prosperous.

“So I was explaining to her, and she picked up one of the icons and wanted to know the date. I told her it was seventeenth century. And she said, ‘Gosh, B.C.?’ ”

The American couple laughed a lot. And the English couple joined in, but they had considered Epirotiki much funnier. I wondered if the owner changed the nationalities of the characters in these stories to fit his hearers, but on
second thought I doubted it. Most good tourist blunder stories are about Americans, and American tourists always enjoy hearing them.

I joined my wife in the third room, and the others began to move off to see the icons. She was looking at cocktail trays.

“Well,” she said, “they’re all nice, but there are just as nice ones at home, and I don’t know how I’d ever get it back.”

“You could say it was one of your suitcases that got run over by a steamroller.”

“Yes,” she said absently, and fingered a rack of dresses all made in the style I call “hand hewn”. I went back into the second room. Three more people had arrived. One of the men was saying, “But honey, what would you do with it?” I didn’t see what the object under discussion was. I wandered on into the first room. The two couples had gone and been replaced by three white-haired Frenchwomen. The owner had changed the record on the turntable and was speaking French to the women.

I looked at the icons, which ranged in size from one big one as wide as an arm, to a few tiny ones about three inches by four. Most of them were about the size of a large book. The prices were marked in pounds, francs, and dollars as well as drachmas, and ran from three hundred and fifty dollars down to eighteen. I was looking at some of the smaller ones just larger than playing cards, when one of them caught my eye.

It was a picture of St. George slaying the dragon. The saint himself was dark brown, with lighter brown hair, and his horse was pure white. George’s expression wasn’t very interesting, but the attitude of the horse’s raised hoof and flowing mane and the posture of its head, all gave an impression of near-foolish innocence which was rather endearing. What I liked best about the picture, however, was
the dragon underneath. It was shaped vaguely like an alligator, and bright green. Up above, St. George was leaning on his lance, which went straight through the dragon and out the other side, bringing with it a runnel of lovingly painted blood that ended in a pool on the ground. The dragon had his tail curled into loops and his ears laid back like a cat, and the one visible yellow-brown eye shone with a look of furious glee.

The owner came up behind me as I bent over the icon, and began to talk to me about all the different ones that I wasn’t looking at. I admired his technique even more. My wife joined us, and I asked what was the reason for the difference between the prices on the three small ones I had been looking at before, and he gave me a condensed history of the rarity of certain portraits. I didn’t listen very hard. My wife was trying to catch my eye.

“I like the St. George,” I said.

“Yes, yes. An English saint.”

“But the dragon is international.”

He laughed, and picked the icon up in his hand. “Yes,” he said, “it is nice,” and then he put it back on the shelf. This was not a shop where you tried to knock the price down; if you didn’t buy it, somebody else would.

“Will you take a traveller’s cheque?” I asked.

“Yes, certainly. You want to buy it?”

“Yes.”

My wife made a sort of hissing noise, and I glanced at her and smiled. She was looking fed up with me.

The woman at the table told me how to make out the cheques, and I gave her a twenty and a ten, and got the change back, eight dollars in drachmas. There was a pile of other traveller’s cheques under a spring clip attached to the side of one of the compartments of the metal box. She wrapped the icon up in pink tissue paper and put pieces of scotch tape on the corners.

The owner said, “You have had dinner?”

“Yes, at our hotel.”

“There is a good nightclub, if you don’t go back yet. Music and wine, and dancing.”

He handed me a card like a calling card, with the name of the nightclub printed on one side, and a street map on the other. There were five piles of cards and a ballpoint pen on one of the shelves. One card for the shop, one for the nightclub, and the others presumably for restaurants and hotels. Before he handed it to me he had marked it with the pen.

“We are here, you see?”

“I see,” I said. “Well, fine. We might give it a try. Thank you.”

“Not at all. You will like it. Everybody goes there.”

“Does the name mean anything special?”

“It is a Turkish word. It means a—hob-goblin.” He searched with his fingers in the air for another word. “A bogey man. They are night spirits.”

I thanked him again and said good night to him and the woman at the table, and my wife was polite in saying her goodnights, but furious when we got outside.

“Don, those things are all fakes. It was probably painted last week and the varnish has just dried.”

“I know that. I just like the dragon.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

“I’m not interested in whether it’s genuine or not. I think it’s worth it for the picture.”

“It’s a waste.”

“But I like the dragon. Do you want to go to this place?”

“Not specially.”

“We could just look in and see what it’s like.”

“If we ever get out of here. I’m lost.”

The night had gone dark while we were inside the shop,
and there weren’t many lights. I decided that if we kept walking downhill we’d reach the harbour.

“There it is,” my wife said after a while. “I can see the lights on the boats.”

The lights on the tourist boats reminded me of something, but I wasn’t sure what. Not exactly of Christmas trees or of ferris wheels, but of something just as definite which I couldn’t for the moment recall.

We came out two streets to the right of the café, and looking farther to the right I saw the nightclub. The name was written out in electric lights over the door and the painted letters underneath the lights had the bulbous, curlicue shape of circus poster writing.