SIMEON PIERTZOVANIS DECIDES TO GET INVOLVED
January 28
Tuesday, 11:55 p.m.
Shortly before midnight I ordered my last drink of the day. 16 was full of people I’d never seen before. Over the last few years the nighttime population had changed and the average age had gone down noticeably. It wasn’t simply a case of natural wastage from sudden death, liver cirrhosis, strokes, and blackened lungs. Without its owners lifting a finger, this tiny bar had become the in place. Glossy magazines ran pieces on this “classic Athenian watering hole” advertising it among the 4×4s and millionaires’ wristwatches, lauding its no-nonsense drinks and its “British atmosphere”; the broadsheets were devoting several column inches of their culture pages informing their readership that 16 would have been the ideal backdrop for the likes of Joyce, Dali, Bukowski, Rimbaud, and Jack Nicholson to sit up till the early hours in heated debate. Only the Athens Academy had yet to define the part 16 should play in the cultural development of the country.
Aristides put down my drink in front of me and squeezed my hand.
“How are you, Simeon?”
“Never better.”
“It’s been a while.”
“I’ve been away.”
He laughed, watching my gaze as I scanned the room, tore off a piece of paper from his wall of photographs of happy, drunken party animals, and handed it to me. I held it at arm’s length, squinting to make out the writing.
Customers used to get together to drink
Nowadays they compete to see,
And be seen. KK
“Tell your poet friend that he needs to work on meter.”
“Oh, we don’t see much of him now. Something’s up with his heart.”
“Serves him right. Bet he’s spent most of his life in love.”
“The morning and afternoon crowds are very different. It’s hard to impress a date in the middle of the day, and besides, there’s a limit to how much you can put back on an empty stomach,” said the gray-haired barman.
He retrieved the piece of paper and pinned it back in its place, where it would sit for the next hundred years, and went back to work. The man sitting next to me, a bald man in a jacket with a loosened tie, a ring on his little finger, and one of those astronaut watches on his wrist, was trashing some poor singer to his friend, because she’d refused to appear on the Mega Channel breakfast show. “Who the hell does the stupid skank think she is anyway, playing the quality TV card when she hasn’t even shifted a thousand units? I bet she’s forgotten all the times she went down on me in her dressing room at that sleazy bar when she wanted me to get her a recording contract. Little slut thinks she’s too good for us now.”
That was too much. I could not stand there and listen to this filth any longer. I grabbed him by the shoulders and pasted my smile all over his face, trying desperately not to breathe in his repellent aftershave.
“The young lady you refer to happens to be my niece. One day soon, I’ll bring her around here for a drink. And when I do, I hope you’ll be here and I’ll stand you an Alexander House specialty. Our barman here sources the sperm himself from the best bank in the country.”
I left the little creep in a state of confusion and my drink untouched. I said goodnight to Aristides, crossed the dimly lit arcade, and went head-to-head with the sly snugness of the cold on Stadiou. In twenty minutes I was inside my apartment, dripping with sweat. The light on the answering machine was flashing away. I tossed my coat onto the sofa, wrapped a towel around my neck, lit a cigarette, found a piece of paper and a pencil, and made a to-do list for the next day.
No alcohol
Laundry
Bath
Shave
Nails
Bank—money
Bills—building charges
Nexium—Lexotanil
Office—Achilleas to arrange funeral
Call Noni
Buy newspaper
STAY DRY TILL I SEE SONIA
I got undressed, swallowed a Lexotanil and went to bed, leaving that little red light on the answering machine to flash. I was not expecting any good news.
*
I stuck to my list religiously, bar the fact that I cut myself shaving and mixed up my woolens with my underwear.
My partner, Achilleas, agreed to deal with the funeral director and volunteered to take on the horrendous church bureaucracy. The funeral was going to be a civil affair, and to get that organized quickly, it was necessary to make a contribution toward a new table for holding candles, to the tune of €500.
I had lunch with Noni at a place in his neighborhood. His team had offered to put up the money for the funerals on condition that he would be available for Sunday’s match. We kept off the subject of Saturday night; he did not want to know the whys and wherefores, did not have the stomach for needless reconstructions, and I wasn’t sure whether I should tell him that someone had murdered his girls. I let him think that the broken heater was responsible for the disaster.
But we did talk about other things. We talked a lot about the past, about his home town, a small place called Giamini, about the first time he was taken to the birthday celebrations of the Prophet at the Kano mosque and how he had cried, about the soil, the rains, and the water which always reached up to your ankles in the streets, and then about the big city, Osogbo, the harsh training regime, the provincial stardom, suffocating Lagos with its noisy markets, the tender-hearted whores at the harbor and his first love, coke-addict managers who sent him to Belgium and from there to Sweden before finally dumping him in Greece, their cuts filling burgeoning wallets as they threw him a few crumbs. I had heard it all before but it was as if I was listening to these stories for the first time. We had never spent any time on our own together, just the two of us alone; the beautiful females we used to take care of were now someone else’s responsibility.
We talked a great deal about the past. The future would have to wait for another occasion.
*
Back home, the little red light on my answering machine was going berserk. Six messages, five of them from young Rania, serial pleas for me to call, each with “I’m worried about you,” appended as an afterthought. The sixth was from Chronis Halkidis. He wanted to see me urgently. I pressed delete, lay down on the sofa, and opened the newspaper.
The full spread front-page headline made me smile: “Fire Spreads to Parliament.” No mention of my fire, of course. Ten or so government MPs had been fired because they had accidentally signed on the correct bottom line so that the money in question ended up exactly where it was intended. The story of the burned house had been relegated to the middle pages. The brief statement made by the fire services pointed the finger at the broken heater and at the negligence of the victims. The injured actress was stable but critical, her mentor’s funeral was taking place tomorrow; the devastated Nigerian goalkeeper did not wish to make any statement regarding the deaths of his sister and niece. There was also a photograph of Sonia on the arts pages, with a statement from the Actors’ Union beneath, expressing the sense of loss felt by her colleagues. Next to that was a comment by some smartarse, explaining that this was a sublime instance of tragic irony because several years ago Sonia had done Beckett’s Embers for the radio and, desperate to show off his refined cynicism, concluded with a cliché about self-destructive impulses and the curse of the artist. I tossed the paper to the floor and closed my eyes. The tape with Sonia’s youthful voice recorded on it was sitting very close to me, but I could not see any reason to play it. Why should I recall the night when she spoke to me with borrowed phrases to disguise her despair? How were those tired old words going to help me, the broken lines, the hypnotized voices, the fear of the end, the hope that I would ever hear the poor woman’s voice again?
That sound you hear is the sea . . . I say that sound you hear is the sea . . . I mention it because the sound is so strange, so unlike the sound of the sea . . . I used not to need anyone . . . There before the fire. Before the fire with all the shutters . . . no hangings, hangings, all the hangings drawn and the light, no light, only the light of the fire . . . looking out, white world, great trouble, not a sound, only the embers, sound of dying, dying glow . . . Stories, stories, years and years of stories, till the need came on me, for someone, to be with me, anyone . . . to be with me, imagine he hears me, what I am, now. Did you hear them? . . . Galloping? . . . You laughed so charmingly once, I think that’s what first attracted me to you. That and your smile . . . I thought I might try and get as far as the water’s edge . . . Are you afraid we might touch? Calm yourself . . . The hole is still there . . . The earth is full of holes . . . The time comes when one cannot speak to you anymore . . . You will be quite alone with your voice, there will be no other voice in the world but yours. I can try and go on a little if you wish . . . No? . . . Then I think I’ll be getting back.
The phone rang, catching my free fall into the past just in time. The machine swallowed yet another message from Halkidis.
“Simeon—pick up. We’ve got to talk. Please.”
I erased it, made a cup of coffee, and sipped it slowly. I emptied the washing machine and hung the clothes out on the balcony, staring at a group of students sitting on the steps of the block of apartments across the street drinking funny-colored fizzy drinks. I put on my jacket, wound a scarf around my neck, and stepped onto the street, wonderful Eressou, exchanging wishes for good health with the peripatetic Albanian accordion player as I tossed him the loose change from my pocket. The three Makrydimitris brothers, the irrepressible owners of the shop on the corner of Arachovis and Zoodochou Pigis streets, gave me some sesame seed bars to chew on, after which I hailed a taxi, jumped in and crashed out along the back seat, my hands stuffed deep in my pockets so that the driver would not see how much they were shaking from too much coffee and too little alcohol. I decided that from tomorrow, I would go back to the tried and tested recipe of green tea with a few drops of brandy in it.
The waiting room at intensive care presented the selfsame picture as it had the day before. The same stationary figures, the same empty looks, the same stolen glances at the clock in the corridor. I sat down between an elderly man from out of town in a drill jacket and woolly hat and a young man with a shaven head and an earring. The latter smelled of aftershave; the former of mold.
“Hey, lad, can you come with us a moment—go in there like, help me get me bags up on me knees, seeing as I can’t bend, what with the arthritis and all,” said the old man, shoving his gnarled fingers in my face by way of illustration.
“Of course. Whatever you want.”
“There’s a good lad. Got the old lady in there with pneumonia, don’t we?”
I gave him a sympathetic look, which only encouraged him.
“You know what drives me mad, lad? I got three big strapping lads of my own, and all three of them’s up and left the village and gone to the city and got their selves sorted. Two of them with the phone company, and the youngest fits car lights. Sent me up to Athens to get their mom sorted. Can’t take a day off work, can they?”
“I wouldn’t worry about it. The doctors will take care of everything here.”
He looked at me, seeming not to understand what I was talking about. And then he lowered his gaze.
“I’m a broken man, lad, all worn out. And I don’t understand what them doctors tell me. Not one word of it. If the old girl’s gone and got herself pneumonia, why have they got her tucked up in just a sheet? Doesn’t pneumonia need the warmth? I brought in a blanket the day before yesterday, from the hotel, but they wouldn’t let me give it to her.”
“They know what they’re doing. Don’t you go worrying yourself.”
“Only the good Lord can know, only He knows,” mumbled the old man, clutching a cloth bag on his knees.
Our conversation was interrupted by a nurse calling out names from the door to intensive care. I got up and went in with the old boy, helped him into his green robe, slipped the plastic coverings over his shoes and watched as he dragged himself across to his wife’s bed. I put on my own hospital issue and went in to see Sonia. She was asleep. I slipped my hand under the sheet and found hers. I stroked it gently, taking care not to dislodge her tubes.
“You can talk to her, you know,” whispered a nurse who had appeared silently next to me.
“Can she hear me?”
“Who knows?” she said, smiled sweetly and walked off.
I did not follow her advice. In times of stress, Sonia always preferred physical contact to words.
The head of intensive care was poring over a thick, leather-bound book. He was in his early sixties, with a bony face and stark white hair. Long-sighted, he raised his glasses to look at me.
“Simeon Piertzovanis. Here to see Miss Varika.”
“Take a seat. Have you spoken to me about Miss Varika before?”
“Not you personally. I spoke to a colleague of yours yesterday.”
“I see. And how are you and Miss Varika related?”
“Used to be married.”
He shook his head and slammed the book shut.
“Is there any news?”
“Her situation is critical, but her chances remain fairly good. As you can appreciate, we can only speak in terms of odds. The patient has suffered forty-three percent third-degree burns. The statistics in these cases are both with us and against us. They’re calculated on the basis of the age of the patient and the extent of the burns; in this case that comes to fifty percent. They put her on a drip inside the ambulance and that probably saved her life. Fortunately there was no poisoning.”
“Meaning?”
“No carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“So what’s the main danger at this stage?”
“Her body’s in shock. It’s in a state of confusion. We’re trying to encourage it to regain equilibrium, but as always, there’s a concern about possible complications. But we’re prepared for that.”
He must have noticed something about the expression on my face and smiled reassuringly.
“You’re a smoker, I see. I can tell from your breathing. Much as I’d like to, I cannot allow you to smoke in here.”
“Don’t worry. You were saying something about possible complications.”
“Infections are one concern. All of the vital organs could theoretically present problems, from the kidneys to the heart. As I said, we’re prepared. It’s the liver that worries me. Did your wife drink?”
“Yes.”
“I see. That explains why her liver isn’t too healthy.”
“So what will happen if . . . I mean, what can we do about it?”
“Don’t panic. Do you believe in God?”
“No.”
“Pity. If you did, I would recommend prayer. It would save me the more pedestrian option, where I explain to you that the human body is a machine, with a highly complex mechanism that we barely understand, but a machine nonetheless. A machine that carries out its own repairs, and as you know, production plants vary in standards, as do technicians. Of course, time is a factor too. Do forgive me if I come across as a vulgar materialist, but so far the only ones I’ve seen performing miracles and saving lives have been doctors and nurses. God has never once put in an appearance, not even to stitch up a simple eyebrow.”
“He’s been replaced by the medical professionals, has he?”
“How can something that does not exist in the first place be replaced, Mr. . . . er?”
“Piertzovanis.”
“What do you do for a living, Mr. Piertzovanis?”
“I’m a lawyer.”
“A man of few words. Most unusual for a lawyer.”
“It’s the production plant that counts, as you pointed out, doctor.”
He smiled.
“One last question, doctor. Is she in pain?”
“Is she able to think?”
“Only she can answer that.”
“When can she speak to me?”
“When she’s ready.”
I thanked him, stood up and opened the door. His voice was friendly.
“I thought she was unmarried. That’s what the TV was saying.”
“We married in secret.” I thanked him again.
In the small lobby outside the office, the old man was still standing up, clutching his cloth bag. He was probably too embarrassed to sit down on the brown sofa, no doubt the most luxurious piece of furniture he had ever seen.
“Go right in. The doctor’s inside,” I said, encouragingly.
“She looked better today, our Golfo. Opened her eyes and looked me for a long time.”
“Is your wife called Golfo?”
“No! Her name’s Antonia. I call her Golfo for a laugh. For a bit of fun, you know. We had some laughs we did, till her health failed, that is.”
“Ah, yes!” I said, enjoying the literary joke. “So I suppose she calls you Tassos, does she?”
“Tassos? Why would she go calling us Tassos when the name’s Giorgos? Hatzopoulos, Giorgos. Seventy-eight years old. That’s what it says.” He tapped an imaginary nametag on his lapel with pride. “If you ever come to be passing through Dyrrachion in Arcadia, be sure to come find us in the kafeneion.”
Winding my scarf around my neck, I walked out of the main building and made my way to the hospital gates. As soon as I found a low wall, I sat down and lit up. The doctor’s words were reeling inside my head: Shock, infection, complications, kidneys, liver.
I have no idea how long Halkidis had been standing there watching me in his gloves and woolly hat, just a few meters away. I was on my second cigarette before I noticed him.
“I’m surprised you haven’t frozen to death, Mr. Piertzovanis.”
“I was about to leave.”
“Your taxi’s waiting,” he said, nodding across at his Golf. We got in and set off.
“Did you get my messages?”
“What exactly do you want, Officer?”
“What the consultant told you will do for starters.”
I told him everything I had been told, down to the last detail. He would pipe up with the occasional question I was unable to answer. When I finished, he lit up and drove on for a while in silence, giving me the chance to study the face of a small boy glued onto a tiny magnet bearing the warning, SLOW DOWN, DADDY! When we got to the Psychico interchange, he turned right into the Kifissias slip road and parked behind a fleet of diplomatic license plates. He switched off the engine and turned to me, his arm around the back of my seat. There was a strange glint in his eye.
“What’s going on?”
“I hardly slept last night.”
I pointed to the magnet with the little boy’s face on it.
“Does your little boy worry about you?”
“He’s sixteen. He lives with his mother.”
He removed his arm from the passenger seat and intertwined its fingers with the fingers on his other hand, which was beating out a rhythm on the steering wheel. My patience was wearing thin and I told him as much.
“If you loved this woman, even just a little, you’ve got to help me. I’ve left you ten messages, but you, not a squeak. What’s the matter? Do you even give a damn or is all this beneath you? Do you think I’m beneath you? Why, when I’ve explained everything to you, when I’ve begged you?”
I opened the door and stepped out into the freezing air. I needed a drink like nothing else on this earth. I leaned against a stone wall for support and looked down at the wonderful avenue beneath, remembering a time when there were only two lanes and very few cars, and those buses with the long snouts and surly conductors, the low buildings lining both sides. And then I remembered yet another time, more recent but much more remote.
“Do you like that hum, my love?”
“The traffic never lets up on Kifissias.”
“I prefer Alexandras; it’s friendlier, more accepting.”
“One night I’ll take you to the cinema down the road, the Astron. It’s the only cinema I know with the balcony under the stalls. And the only one that has an outside balcony. The balcony doors are always open, and you stand there looking down at the avenue and it seems so far down, yet right next to you at the same time. You know, the cinema in Cinema Paradiso had a balcony like that too.”
“No, it didn’t.”
“It did.”
“No. It was just a very large window. Like this one here.”
“Whatever you say, Sir. But may I humbly request permission to stick with Alexandras. And Ippokratous as well. Ippokratous more.”
“Ippokratous is a street, not an avenue.”
“Yes, you’re right. But what about Stadiou? Where do you stand on Stadiou?”
“Stadiou, yes. That’s an avenue.”
“Marvelous. So you’ll put me to bed one night in that old hotel at the beginning of it?”
“The President? Isn’t that a bit of a come-down for a diva like you?”
“What—that dump is called the President?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh, no, I don’t like that. I’d feel as if I were in Tokyo. Too many tourists taking photographs.”
“You should see an analyst. That’s the only way you’ll ever be free of your irrational fear of cameras.”
“Whatever you say, doctor. But afterward you’ll put me to bed in the Grande Bretagne, won’t you?’
“Of course.”
“It’s cold. I’ll go and say goodnight to the competition and turn in.”
“I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“Goodnight, wonderful Kifissias.”
“I like it more now,” I said to the policeman standing next to me.
“Like what more?”
“Kifissias. I like the noise, the colors, the traffic. One of my worst nightmares is finding myself walking down a deserted avenue.”
“You have nightmares?”
“I don’t know,” he said, walking over to the car.
I stopped him, calling after him with his first name for the first time ever. He swung around.
“I need a drink. Have to have a drink. Then we’ll talk. I’d prefer somewhere closer to home. Is your passport valid in Exarcheia?”
He got into the Golf and started it up. It’s just a matter of time before the exhaust gives out on him, I thought.
*
I chose a quiet place on the paved part of Themistokleous. Halkidis ordered a juice, I asked for whiskey and a bowl of ice. Out of respect for my damaged esophagus, I was frequently forced to water down my poison. We spent the first few minutes of this tender tête-à-tête smoking and listening to a peculiar mix of Tibetan monks chanting through the speakers against the noise of builders frantically working on installations in time for the Olympics. The waitress set our drinks down on the table and cheerfully agreed to turn the racket down. Apart from us, there was only one other customer—a middle-aged man buried inside a horse-racing magazine—and a fat cat fast asleep on the deep red bar. Halkidis tasted the juice and then pulled two pieces of paper from his pocket.
“Read it. Take your time,” he said, getting up and making his way to the toilet.
It looked like some kind of report, written in quite bizarre Greek, describing in disturbing detail the destruction of the house, and reaching the conclusion that the fire was the result of arson. Halkidis came back, took two sips of his drink and started rubbing his nose nervously.
“Must have caught a cold,” he said.
I folded up the report and pushed it across the table to him. He put it back in his pocket, started to say something, deliberately avoiding eye contact with me. Very drawn with bloodshot eyes, the man clearly had not slept for days. For the few seconds that he let his cigarette rest and burn away in the ashtray, he fiddled with the cocktail stirrer in his juice. It did not take much to convince me that there was something very suspect behind this arson attack. The evidence that the report had amassed was overwhelming. Despite his obvious agitation, he was precise in his choice of words and his explanations were remarkably lucid. Here was a rational policeman, an experienced policeman, an intelligent policeman. What he failed to conceal were the cracks in which something was festering, something dangerous for whoever might come face-to-face with it. It was the way that he almost spat out some of the words he used: murderers, bastards, that shithead of a chief of police, three innocent victims, I won’t rest until . . . In the end, he did not ask very much of me, nothing more than the day before.
“Try to remember. Just that. Rack your brains and try to remember what might be the motive. I’ve got a mental block and I haven’t got much at all to go on at the moment. I can’t even go and see Sonia. They’re watching the hospitals. My hands are tied. I want you to visit her every day; she might come around and talk.”
It was not an unreasonable request. Visiting Sonia was something I would have done anyway. My problem was something entirely different, but I did not think it was the right moment to explain.
“Alright, Officer.”
“Call me Chronis, for fuck’s sake.”
“All in good time. I’ll go to the hospital every day and try to remember anything that might have a bearing on the case. I cannot promise any miracles; I’ve got a memory like a sieve and don’t forget I’ve been away for the past few months and haven’t had anything to do with anybody for a while.”
“Away? You never mentioned that to me.”
“You never asked. After Easter I left for Marseilles. Don’t ask what I was doing there—suffice it to say I wasn’t there to take delivery of a heroin shipment. I was back in Greece at the beginning of January. I didn’t go and see Sonia as I wasn’t feeling my best and I didn’t want to upset her. I didn’t even call.”
“I see. Noni would have seen her regularly, wouldn’t he?”
“Absolutely. I’ll have a word with him tomorrow, after the funeral.”
“Good.”
“Have you considered the possibility that the fire was started by some wacko racist because there were immigrants living in the house?”
“It has occurred to me.”
“And?”
“Do you really suppose that the prime minister’s adviser and the chiefs of the security services would go to all this trouble to cover the backside of some random psycho?”
He was right. We sat there in silence for a while. I ordered another drink and lost myself staring at the horse-racing fan stroking the cat.
“Why don’t you want to tell me what you were doing in Marseilles?” he said in a low voice.
“Because we’re not exactly best buddies yet, are we?”
“True.”
“But you’re dying to know, aren’t you? Because you’re a detective, and a good one at that, as far as I can tell. And you’re thinking, something’s going on here; the man’s out of the country for eight months and the minute he’s back, his house gets burned down. Am I right, Colonel?”
“You’re a natural.”
“Funny thing is I can’t stand crime fiction.”
“Oh, I love it. Always take a good one to bed with me.”
It was as if he had suddenly relented. He reached for his lighter, unaware that he already had one cigarette lit. He stubbed it out quietly as I smiled at him. The second whiskey and the anticipation of a third confirmed my passage to Lethe.
“I’ll tell you about Marseilles on one condition.”
“Go on.”
“That you tell me the truth about you and Sonia.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“I can’t believe that you’d put so much on the line for the sake of your professional good conscience alone.”
He relaxed back into the chair, scrutinizing my face as though he were trying to impress every last wrinkle on his memory.
“Okay, sharp lawyer, you’re on.”
I took a solid slug of whiskey and began telling the story of the last few months of my life. It took all of sixty seconds.
“Nine years ago I fell in love with a woman. A good woman. Seventeen days; that’s all the time we had together. Not together, exactly. Just the one night and a few other occasions. Then she left, because she had to go into hiding, mourn two men, and raise her little girl when she was not much more than a girl herself. Last April I got a letter from her asking if I wanted to come live with her in Marseilles. Her daughter was now twenty-one and in college somewhere else. She believed that we owed it to each other, and should at least give it a go. That’s how the letter ended. So I went. And we tried. We had a glass of red wine in the evenings, went on trips, read, cooked, swam, laughed. We tried everything, tentatively, tenderly. It failed. So I came home. If you want to see if my story checks out, her name’s Daphne Kyprianidis, and the address is rue Jean-Claude Izzo, number 7.”
Halkidis was coughing. He ordered a bottle of mineral water from the waitress, poured himself a glass, and downed it in one, put the glass on the table, filled it again to the halfway mark, and cupped it in his hand.
“What is it: half full or half empty?”
He threw his hands up.
“Science throws its hands up at that one too,” I said, combining this gesture with a nod to the waitress, because virtually the only thing that had been of any interest to me these last thirty years was making sure that my glass was always full. “Your turn.”
“Yeah, sure,” he muttered and fixed his gaze on the glass. All the time he was looking at it as though he were willing the level to rise.
After a good half hour of telegraphese, significant-sounding dates, towns that he never wanted to visit again, conversations with Sonia he recalled almost word for word, sketchy descriptions of happy moments and empty days, Police Colonel Chronis Halkidis made me realize that only two kinds of men are of interest: those who are destroyed because they love too much and those who are destroyed because they are loved too much. Halkidis was the classic example of the latter. Sonia loved him deeply, so much so that in order for him both to bear it and to go along with her, he had to cut off all ties with his own world, the real world. Her uncompromising “all or nothing” was incomprehensible to him. He took fright and made his escape. He was still young, not yet forty, and believed that by leaving her he would escape her. But like everyone who has fought hard to make something of their lives, he refused to be dragged into her sweet defeat. I was convinced that every night for the last five years he had been kicking himself over this decision, but he had not dared do anything to reverse it. He could not bring himself to screw up that little plastic flag into a ball, the one representing all his beliefs and principles, which he summed up in his last sentence.
“I watched her going under and knew that if I stayed with her, she would take me down with her. Life is a gift, Simeon. We don’t have the right to toss it on to the rubbish heap.”
The waitress filled my glass and replaced the ashtrays. Halkidis wiped away the sweat on his brow with the back of his hand.
“Have you got a temperature?”
“Maybe.”
“Get her to make you a hot drink.”
He stood up, said something to the waitress and disappeared behind the door to the men’s room, leaving me to down my whiskey and take stock of the jealousy raging inside me. He had left her; she had not left him as she had left me. I knew that it hardly mattered anymore, but I was jealous, encouraged perhaps by the first stages of drunkenness. But I could neither overcome this grievance nor banish images of them together from my mind. The first girl I was involved with left because she was scared of having to spend the rest of her life living with the guilt of the suicide of a friend of ours who we had betrayed; the second one left me because she did not have the nerve to follow through at the right time, and Sonia left me because she had chosen to die alone. I was wondering whether I drank because I wanted to feel like the hero of some kind of popular melodrama—the perfect excuse to drink—when Halkidis came back and sat down again.
“What’s on your mind?”
His hair was wet; he’d probably just stuck his head under the tap. He pushed two schnapps glasses containing some kind of pink liquid in my direction.
“What’s this?”
“On the house. Have mine too; I don’t want it.”
“Just pour them onto that plant next to you. Discreetly.”
“You surprise me.”
“It must have been early in 2000 when I managed to persuade Sonia to have her liver looked at. The tests were not encouraging. I remember the doctor telling her, ‘Miss Varika, you must stop drinking. Completely. Not a drop of alcohol—not even communion wine, Miss Varika.’ She promised me she would take care of herself. Then one evening she asked me to go to a taverna with her. She was meeting someone in the theater business and two young actors about a job and she wanted a lawyer with her because she was usually taken for a ride in these deals. She was drinking soda, the others had wine and I had ordered beer. We ate, chatted, and she promised them she would get back to them in a few days. When the desserts came, the restaurant brought us gum mastic liqueurs on the house. Nobody touched theirs apart from me. When we got outside Sonia pretended she had left her gloves inside, and went back in to get them. I watched her go inside. She drained all the schnapps glasses and whatever was left in the wine glasses into my beer glass and drank it. Down in one. I said nothing, and I’ve never touched schnapps since. You can understand why.”
“Yes.”
“Good. Can we pay?”
“I already have.”
“Shall we go?”
“In a minute. Tell me something.”
“What?”
“Why won’t you admit it?”
“Admit what?”
“Your affair.”
“Comrade Chronis, alcoholics don’t have affairs. They just find excuses to drink.”
“Now, why don’t I believe you?”
“Because you’re jealous. Because it drives you crazy when you think that you’ll never be free of your guilt. Maybe, just maybe, if the lady dies, you’ll grow up and get your life together.”
“Want her to die, do you?”
“About as much as I want to die myself.”
“Are you in analysis as well?” he said maliciously, rubbing his nostrils impatiently.
“You do coke, don’t you?” I asked casually.
“Bullshit.”
I drained my glass and took his hand over the table.
“You shouldn’t have left a woman like that,” I whispered, and threw him on the mercy of the cruel night.
*
I found a note stuck on my front door with some chewing gum:
If you don’t call, I’ll cry. R.x
I called. Half an hour and two whiskies later she arrived, threw open the balcony doors, fed me some cheese on toast, chatted to Rina, shaved me carefully, brought in the washing, forced me to brush my teeth, shut the balcony doors again just before I froze to death, and accompanied me to bed.
“Grandpa, I’ll do your ironing and then I’ll get on with some work in your dusty old study. I’ve brought my laptop with me, and I hope that beautiful woman looking down from the wall at me will inspire me. Who is she, by the way?”
“Romy Schneider. She was an actress.”
“Cool. I’m sure that’ll help. I’ve got to unravel the mystery of a note Pavese wrote. What did the poet mean when he wrote in 1941, in the thick of war, ‘I don’t know what to do with other people’s wives’?”
“Make yourself at home,” I said, forcing a smile.
“Thankfully this dump will never be my home. And thankfully you’re never going to fall in love with me, but if you do wake from some horrible dream—you know, cockroaches, reptiles, falling off a skyscraper, that kind of stuff—don’t be shy. I always carry condoms.”
She kissed me on the forehead and ruffled. my hair.
“If you are you, then I am I, which means that I don’t know how to behave. Pavese again. Night night, grandpa.”
She closed the door behind her before I had a chance to tell her that the iron had not worked for years.
January 28
Wednesday, 11:30 p.m.
Closed game of poker, three switches, a pair of jacks leads, the man opposite me has been getting consistently good hands all night. I’ve never seen him before, he could be a pro. He doesn’t seem to recognize me. He has probably got more interesting things to do than go to the theater. I am sure his evenings are more exciting than mine . . . Let’s see—two nines, an eight, jack, queen . . . I’ll hang on to the nines and change the other three—or maybe I should get rid of one of the nines and try to get a run. That man still hasn’t asked for any new cards, he’ll have a flush or something better . . . either that or he’s bluffing . . . the rest of them are thinking. I couldn’t care less about the others. I’m only interested in him.
“What did you say your name was?”
“Simeon.”
He had a good look.
“New cards.”
He has kind eyes. He is standing pat and not holding back on the bets. I admire the run on my hand, the queen. Lucky little Sonia got rid of that nine and got a ten. That’s a nice run on the queen. “Kolofardi Sonia”: kolofardi—wide-assed; what a horrible word to describe a lucky person—vulgar and phallocratic. But it’s the first word that comes into my head. And I, kolofardi little Sonia, am betting everything. It’s not so much that I want to beat him as to kiss him, just like that, as he sits there looking at me and smiling and counting his chips and lighting a Gitane and listening, convinced he is going to win, hearing that the other players are going to pass, the others but not all the others. There’s that Fiat dealer—or MP, or son of an MP—here too, dressed expensively, following the bets carefully and collecting chips shamelessly from the entire table because he’s got three aces, and as everyone knows, three aces beats a run quite spectacularly.
“We lost quite a bit tonight, Mr. Piertzovanis.”
“Never mind. Tomorrow is another day.”
I should not have put my coins out on that strike, I should not have gambled everything that night just because of the man whose smile announced that he hated losing as much as I did; I should not have gone with him to that bar in the arcade, I should have remembered that another man was waiting for me in the warmth of my nest, his deep embrace trembling.
That’s good . . . that’s so good, things are beginning to come back to me. I can remember much more now . . . but I don’t just want to remember . . . I want to live a bit longer too . . . just a tiny bit . . .