Greek Fire (11 page)

“You were in Athens at the end?”

“Yes, and I didn't like that either.”

She shrugged. “ Perhaps my father was lucky to be shot by a firing squad. At least he was luckier than my mother and some of the others.”

For a while they had met on neutral ground. He had tried deliberately to slacken the tautness between them and had succeded better than he'd hoped. They reached Levadia soon after eleven and here swung off the main road on to the loose and uneven surface of the mountain road. A few clouds had blown up, but through them the snow-headed peaks watched them as they passed.

“That's Parnassus,” Anya said.

Gene stared ahead.

“I used not to think it existed in fact. I thought it was part of a legend, like Zeus and Aphrodite.”

“Nobody knows now what is legend and what is history,” she said. “Perhaps there is not all that difference.”

“Have you ever been to the summit?”

“No. August is the time.”

“It doesn't look difficult. How high?”

“Oh—three thousand metres perhaps. The snow's treacherous of course.”

“Next time we come, let's arrange to go.”

“Are you very sure of yourself? Or very unsure? Deep down. I'd like to know.”

“Physically I'm sure,” he said. “ The way a rat's sure. Once you've lived in holes, you come to know your own muscles, your own teeth, your own sense of smell. Being wanted by a few tired policemen doesn't worry me. But about you I was never more unsure in my life. Anything you detect to the contrary is purely coincidental.”

“It's bad to be on the run,” she said, after the minute she had taken to digest what he said. “Even from a few—tired policemen. Bad for something inside oneself. It is like driving on one's brakes too much. I know—though I had it for only a few weeks.”

They began to climb by hairpin bends. At one point three ragged children stood by the way offering to sell them bunches of anemones. When Gene did not stop they leapt across the rough moorland like goats and were waiting patiently at the next corner above. When he still went on they got to the third corner before the car, and here Anya made him stop and buy the flowers. Afterwards they went on again between walls of rock and skirting dark and tangled forests. Arakhova was reached clinging uncertainly to the side of the gorge. Then the mountains drew right in upon the pass, they skirted the face of the precipice and began to fall gently into Delphi, which came in view with the clustered tiles and huddled streets of the modern village standing athwart the road and the white skeletal remains of the sacred shrines climbing in tiers to the foot of the great Phocian wall.

Gene found Michael Miehaelis's house just short of the village, and the poet, white moustache gleaming like a scar on his old brown face, limped down the steps to meet them.

They had lunch out of doors on the terrace behind the house, while eagles swooped and circled overhead. Everything here was dwarfed by the great precipice behind them, which both protected and threatened from three sides. But on the fourth the ground fell away in an avalanche of forest and olive groves stretching five miles and dropping two thousand feet to the shining rim of the sea.

Over luncheon Michaelis was talkative, Gene as conversational as was necessary, Anya silent. But it was not a bored or a disdainful silence. For all her assumptions of arrogance Gene saw perfectly well that she would look with the same contempt upon herself as upon anyone else who pretended to knowledge they didn't have. The old man wore an embroidered smock like an artist's coat, with buttons to the neck and a white linen collar. On his head was a little black cap shaped like a beret and worn on the slant. He had no family and his wife had been dead some years, but the three small children of his housekeeper kept popping on and off the verandah like puppies for tit-bits that he took from his own plate to give them.

He said: “I never go down into Athens. The skies of the mind so quickly become overcast. Here in Delphi I think perhaps we can still see.…

“Of course I am not a poet. I write songs. They are songs which I hope people sing, and some day may even dance to. Because they deal with elemental things it does not make them great; only truth is great—and for that one digs for ever in one‘s own soul. Perhaps enlightenment comes in death—the supreme moment of all-knowing—or is there just a blank end and candles burning and the thud of a spade? More grapes, Aristide! Man's mind works always to conceive a unity, and enlightenment would complete it, but that alas does not prove the epiphenomenalists wrong.…

“How beautiful you are, Miss Stonaris. Beauty I think is so much more than skin deep: on that most poets are wrong, deriving from a puritan tradition which fortunately never rooted deep in Greece; beauty's an outward expression of an inner grace. I think of Apuleius's description of Isis: ‘her nod governs the shining heights of Heaven, the wholesome sea-breezes, the lamentable silences of the world below.' It is pleasant to be an old man because one can express oneself without fear of misunderstanding.…

“Yes, from 600
B
.
C
. and before, the pilgrims used to come here, by sea chiefly, disembarking down there in Itea and making the long climb up to the Oracle. The people of Delphi had a bad reputation in those days—they lived off the pilgrims and often robbed them. They murdered Aesop, you know
.”

“I didn't know,” said Gene. “More names.”

“Well, yes, we are full of them. Croesus sent money for rebuilding the temple when it was destroyed by an earthquake. Nero robbed it. Domitian restored it. Plutarch was a priest here. So it goes on.”

“So it no longer goes on.”

“No.… Nowadays our temporary Hitlers call and stare but learn nothing from their visits.”

After lunch Gene had a few minutes' business talk with Michaelis and then they took their leave and walked up to explore the ruins.

“Well?” Gene said.

She stopped to finger a stone out of the side of her shoe. “I think he understands women.”

They were climbing towards the temple of Apollo, and for a few steps they went on in silence. He said: “If I can believe my own eyes, you were as impressed by him as I was.”

“Well, so if I was impressed by him? What then?”

“Oh, nothing.”

She said: “Perhaps I would rather marry Michaelis than any man I have ever met. Does that satisfy you?”

“At sixty-nine?”

She shrugged. “It would solve some problems. Life would be less complex.”

“If one could live and think like Michaelis, life might be less complex any way up.”

They climbed into the temple.

She said: “All right. Most of us are children fumbling with the keys of a piano and producing only discords—talking with Michaelis is suddenly finding a harmony. But what of it? As soon as Michaelis is gone the child fumbles again. Bang, bang go the discords. So what of it? What good will it do to burst into tears because we cannot play?”

He put a hand on one of the great ruined pillars and looked down over the torrent of rocks and ruins and trees.

He said: “Whatever else, the old men had a superb sense of fitness for the places they chose to live their epics. Nowhere could be better than Mycenae for Agamemnon to ride out of with his chariots of war to the sack of Troy. Here it's as if they have climbed half-way to heaven to build their holy place.”

She came to stand beside him, but she didn't speak.

He added: “I wasn't brought up credulous but I could believe one or two things here. Maybe it's the influence of that man, maybe of the place.”

Her great dark eyes slid over him coolly, assessingly, and then went past him to stare again at the scene. “ These gods didn't ask much. ‘Know Thyself.' ‘Do Nothing in Excess.' You saw the inscriptions.”

“I saw them.”

“That's about all.”

“It's too much for today,” he said. “Most people would prefer: ‘Know Excess' and ‘ Do Nothing for Thyself.' ”

She burst out suddenly laughing.

“What's so funny?” he asked.

“I don't know. It just seems to me very witty.”

He hadn't seen her laugh like this before. After a while they went on up to the theatre, and then higher still to the flower-grown stadium where the Pythic Games had been held. They sat on one of the moss-grown stone benches and smoked a reflective cigarette and stared out again over the gulf.

He said: “ D'you know what I'd like to do now?”

“No?”

“Climb Parnassus.”

Her lips parted as if to smile, and then she didn't.

“When do we start?”

“Any time you say.”

“Why not now?”

“Better to stop at one of the hotels and go off first thing in the morning.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You're not serious?”

“Why not?”

“How do you suggest we should go—by air?”

“No, the normal way.”

“Wonderful.”

“Well, it can't be more than five or six thousand feet from here and I don't suppose there's snow below the top thousand.”

“I've always wanted to climb a mountain in suede shoes.”

“That's a difficulty, I admit. But maybe we could hire some.”

“In Delphi? But of course. One of the big departmental stores.”

“Well, it was an idea.”

“You stay on and go up tomorrow.”

They sat for a while in silence. The air was like wine, sun glinted on the grass and on all bright things: her wrist-watch, the clasp in her hair.

He said: “ I suppose it
is
too much to ask of you. When one lives all one's life in a city, in a constant round of cocktail-parties and fashion shows … Aside from anything else, it's a question of not having the stamina.”

She said quietly: “I will climb as far as you when I please; but only when I please. Let us go back to Delphi.”

They picked their way over the boulder-strewn path and began to descend. As they got down a guide was moving with two other people across the theatre; Anya went across to him. He knew her and greeted her effusively and they talked for a couple of minutes while Gene walked slowly round the amphitheatre. When she came back to Gene it was with a flicker in her eyes.

“A friend?” he said.

“A friend. He has a brother called Menelaus. Menelaus is a good climber. If you are staying tomorrow he would know the practical difficulties.”

“And what are they?”

“He advised against it, said the snow was treacherous at this time of year. But for your future information the best place to start from is Arakhova. From there it takes about seven hours. But he said never to go alone because of the dogs.”

“The dogs?”

“The sheep-dogs. They are very fierce.”

They went on down. Gene said: “Menelaus would be a good guide?”

“The best.”

“I'll engage him next time I come.”

“You'll not stay?”

“No, I may have business in Athens tomorrow too.”

“To do with your publishing firm?”

“To do with something that might be published.”

“Isn't that the same thing?”

“Not quite.”

They skirted the temple ruins and began to come in sight of the road.

Gene said: “ Can it be done in one day?”

“Not really at this time of the year.” She stopped and peered down at a piece of inscribed stone. “The best way is to spend a night in a hut about fifteen hundred feet from the summit. Then you start out the next morning before daybreak and watch the dawn from the summit.”

“My God,” he said.

“So it will be something to look forward to if you are here in the summer.”

He stopped, and after a couple of paces she stopped and turned and looked up at him from a lower step. “Anya,”

She shook her head. “Oh, no.”

“There must be women in this village. Some may have suitable boots.”

“Women here don't climb. They toil in the fields all day.”

“Are you afraid of trying it?”

“I've told you. I could climb just as far as you—and as fast——”

“It would be a new experience.”

Her eyes were fronded as they looked into the sun. “ I don't care to be away from Athens two nights.”

“Nor do I. But you don't need to be. It could be done tonight. The new moon's up. We could be back in Athens by noon tomorrow.”

“If we have not fallen into a crevasse or been eaten by dogs or caught pneumonia sitting in the hut or altogether worn our feet away in other men's shoes. Yes, that way we should be in Athens tomorrow. But I prefer to be in Athens tonight.”

He said: “ What were those lines Michaelis quoted? ‘Her nod governs the shining heights of Heaven … The lamentable silences of the world below.' Why Athens tonight? An appointment for a manicure?”

She thought about that for a minute. “I am waiting to see how offensive you can really be.”

“I'm sorry.… You know the old saying. All's fair in war.”

Her expression was hidden from him now; he didn't know if he was gaining ground or losing it.

He said: “I'll make a bargain with you. If you come up the mountain I'll tell you why I came to Greece and why George Lascou considers me his enemy—that's if you don't know already. I'll tell you why the Spaniard came to be killed. And also perhaps what he came hereto do.”

“First it was sarcasm and now it is bribery. And all so very unsubtle: that's the most depressing thing. Have you no threats?”

He said: “I only want you to come. I think it is important, for us both. It seems to me that it's more than the summit of a mountain.”

She said: “Ah, symbolism, I hadn't thought of that. I'm always a little allergic to symbolism. It is like false money at the best of times.”