Atlantis: Three Tales

I

“All Greek men are barbarians!” Heidi jerked the leash.

Pharaoh’s claws dragged the concrete.

I laughed, and Pharaoh looked around and up, eyes like little phonograph records.

“Heidi,” I said, “you just can’t talk about an entire population that way.”

It was too bright to look at the sky directly — even away from the sun. The harbor was blue, not green. And if I stared into the air anyway, it was as though I were watching the water reflected in some dazzling metal, brighter than, but equally liquid as, the sea.

“Half a population,” Heidi said. “I like the women. They don’t have any style. But I like them.” She wore her black and white poncho — which, only after I’d been living with her in her Mnisicleou Street room two weeks, I realized was because she thought she was fat.

“Barbarians — hoi barbami — ” I pronounced it the way my classics professor back at City College would have, rather than with what had been the surprising (for me) Italianate endings, despite spelling, of modern Greek: “It’s already a Greek word — the Greeks gave it to us — for people who aren’t Greek, who spoke some other language — ba-ba-ba-ba-ba! — like you and me… Germans, Americans — ”

“They also wrote Greek tragedies.” The green ferry sign’s painted wood was bolted to the two-tiered dock rail. “From the way they behave today, though, I don’t think they still have it.” HYDRA, SPETZA, and AEGINA were painted in white Roman capitals. Below, the same names were printed in smaller upper-/lowercase Greek. Heidi shrugged her broad shoulders as we strolled by.

Once, when I’d commented on how strong she was, Heidi told me that, six years before, when she was nineteen, she’d been women’s swimming champion of Bavaria. She also told me she’d recently graduated from Munich University with a degree in philosophy and a minor in contemporary Hebrew literature: she’d arranged to study for the year in Tel Aviv, with special papers and letters of introduction. But because she was German Protestant, in Israel they wouldn’t let her off the boat. She’d ended up in Athens. Then, when we’d had some odd argument, tearfully she’d explained — while I showered in the pink tiled stall in the room’s corner — that she suffered from a fatal blood disease, not leukemia, but like it, that left no sign on her muscular, tanned torso, arms, or legs. But that was why she’d left the American artist she’d been living with in Florence to come to Athens in the first place: likely it would kill her within three years.

That last one kind of threw me. At first. And I wrote my wife about it — who wrote about it in a poem I read later.

At various times I believed all of Heidi’s assertions. But not all three at once.

“I don’t know whether to kiss David or never to speak to him again for getting me this job — baby-sitting for the children of rich Greeks is just not that wonderful.”

“The parents want them to learn German. And French.”

“And English!” she declared. “Believe me, that’s the important one for them. Are you still mad at John — ” who was this English electrical engineer — “for taking that job away from you at the Language Institute?” Heidi’s French, Italian, and English were about perfect; her Greek was better than mine. And one evening I’d sat with her through an hour conversation in Arabic with the students we met at one in the morning in the coffee shop in Omoinoia.

“I was never mad at him,” I told her. “He thought it was as silly as I did. His Cockney twang is thick enough to drown in, and he can’t say an ‘h’ to save himself. But they wanted ‘a native English speaker’; as far as they were concerned, I was just another American who says ‘Ya’ll come’ or ‘Toidy-toid Street’. John would be the first one to tell you I speak English better than he does.”

“And you’ve written all those beautiful books in it, too. He said he’d read one.”

“Did he? English John? He never told me.” We were halfway along the pier.

“I really don’t know which is worse. Rich Greek children, or that museum stuff I was doing…” Suddenly she closed her eyes, stopped, and shuddered. Pharaoh sat and looked up, slathering. “Yes I do. I hate German tourists. I hate them more than anything in the world — with their awful, awful guidebooks. All they do is look at the books. Never at the paintings. I used to be so thankful for the Americans. ‘Well, that’s reeeal perty, Maggie!’ ” Heidi’s attempted drawl on top of the Germanic feathering of her consonants produced an accent that, I knew she knew, belonged to no geography at all. But we both laughed. “Even if they didn’t know what they were looking at, they looked at the paintings. The Germans never did. If I’d been there another week, I was going to play a trick — I swear it. I was going to take my dutiful Germans to the wrong painting, and give them my little talk about an entirely different picture — just to see if any of them noticed. You know: in front of a Fifteenth-century Spanish Assumption of the Virgin, I’d begin, with a perfectly straight face: ‘And here we have a 1930 industrial landscape painted in the socialist realism style that grew up in reaction to Italian Futurismo…’ ” She started walking again, as though the humor of her own joke had rather run out. “Rich Greek children it will be.”

“Heidi,” I said, “I think I’ve spotted a German national trait: you Germans always talk about everybody, even yourselves, in terms of ‘national characteristics’. Well, it got you in trouble in that war we had with you when you and I were kids. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up getting you in trouble again.”

Heidi took my arm. “It isn’t a German trait, dear. It’s a European trait — and you Americans, who are always fighting so hard against generalizing about anyone, look terribly naive to the rest of us because of it. I’d think you American Negroes especially, with your history of oppression from white people, ought to realize, of all Americans, just how suicidally — no, genocidally, there’s the nasty word — naive that is. If you pretend you can’t know anything about a group, how can you protect yourself from that group — when they’re coming to burn crosses in your yard; or to put you in the boxcars.” She seemed suddenly very unhappy — as if that were just not what she wanted to talk about.

“Well, I like the Greeks, myself. There’s a generalization. Is that okay for you? Did I ever tell you that story about David and me, when I first got back from the islands? You know how David is, every time he spots a new international: coming over to say hello and have a glass of tea. Then, somehow, he was going to show me where something was, and the two of us ended up walking together down Stadiou Street, him in his jeans and t-shirt, and that blond beard of his. And me, right next to him with my beard.”

“A cute little beard it is, too.” Heidi leaned over to ruffle my chin fuzz with her knuckles.

With one arm, I hugged her shoulders. “Cut it out, now. Anyway, I didn’t know how the Greeks felt about beards back then — that the only people who wore them — here — were the Greek orthodox priests — ”

“Yes, I know,” Heidi said. “David’s told me — they all think that bearded foreigners are making fun of their priests, which is why they get so hostile. Frankly I don’t believe it for a minute. Greece is only two days by car away from the rest of the civilized world. And there’ve been foreigners coming through here — with beards — for the last hundred years. If you’d have cut yours off just for that, I’d have been very angry at you. Remember, dear: David is English — and the English love to make up explanations about people they think of as foreigners that are much too simple; and you Americans eat them up. The Greeks are just angry at foreigners, beards or no. And a good deal of that anger is rational — while much of the rest of it isn’t. I’d think you were a lot cleverer if you believed that, rather than some silly over-complicated English anthropological explanation!”

“Well, that’s why I was going to tell you this story,” I said. “About the Greeks. We were walking down Stadiou Street, see — David and me — when I noticed this Greek couple more or less walking beside us. He was a middle-aged man, in a suit and tie. She was a proper, middle-aged Greek wife, all in black, walking with him. And she was saying to him, in Greek (I could just about follow it), all the while glancing over at us: ‘Look at those dirty foreigners — with their dirty beards. They mess up the city, them with their filthy beards. Somebody should take them to the barber, and make them shave. It’s disgusting the way they come here, with their dirty beards, dirtying up our city!’ Well, even though I knew what she was saying, there was nothing I could do. But suddenly David — who’s been here forever and speaks Greek like a native — looked over and yelled out, ‘Ya, Kyria — ehete to idio, alla ligo pio kato!’ Hey, lady — you have one too, only a little further down! Well, I thought I was going to melt into the sidewalk. Or have a fight. But the man turned to us, with the most astonished look on his face: ‘Ah!” he cried. ‘Alla milete helenika!’ Ah! But you speak Greek! The next thing I knew, he had his arms around David’s and my shoulder, and they took us off to a cafe and bought us brandy till I didn’t think we could stand up, both of them asking us questions, about where we were from and what we were doing here, and how did we like their country. You know ‘barbarian’ isn’t the only word the Greeks gave us. So is ‘hospitality’.”

“No,” Heidi said. “You never did tell me that story. But I’ve heard you tell it at at least two parties, when you didn’t think I was listening — for fear I’d be offended. It’s a rather dreadful story, I think. But it’s what I mean — about the Greek women having no style. If someone had yelled that to me in the street, I would have cursed him out till — how might you say it? — his balls hoisted up inside his belly to cower like frightened puppies.” She bent down to rub Pharaoh’s head and under his chin. “Then — ” she stood again — “maybe I’d have asked him to go for a brandy. Ah, my poor Pharaoh.”

Heidi pronounced “Pharaoh” as three syllables — Pha-ra-oh — so that, for the next twenty-five years, I really didn’t know what his name was, even after I saw her write it out in a letter; only then, one day (twenty-five years on), looking at the written word for the Egyptian archon, suddenly I realized what she’d meant to call him. But because we were in Greece, and because in general her faintly accented English was so good, I always thought “Pha-ra-oh” was some declension I didn’t quite catch of pharos — lighthouse.

“Here in Greece,” she said, “you really do lead a dog’s life — don’t you, dog?” She pulled the black leather leash up short again. The collar buckle was gleaming chrome — from some belt she’d found in the Mon-asteraiki flea market; she’d put it together herself on the black leather line. It was unusual looking and quite handsome. Under the poncho she wore black tights and black shoes, with single white buttons on the front. “I take him for a walk in the city — they run up on the street and kick him! You’ve seen them. Don’t say you haven’t. And he’s so beautiful — ” She grinned down at him, slipping into a kind of baby talk — “with his beautiful eyes. It was your beautiful eyes, Pharaoh, that made me take you in in the first place, when you were a puppy and I found you limping about and so sick in the back of that old lot. Ah,” she crooned down at him, “you really are so beautiful!”

“The Greeks just don’t keep pets here, Heidi. At least not house pets.”

“I know,” she said. “Costas told me: you have a dog on a rope in the city. They think you’re probably taking him off somewhere to kill him. They run up and kick him, they throw a stone or a bottle at him — and think it’s great fun! They give him meat they’ve spent twenty minutes carefully sticking full of broken glass! I take him on the subway, and the police say I have to put a muzzle on him!” She made a disgusted sound. “You see somebody with a dog on a leash like this — you would have to be stupid not to realize it’s a pet! They don’t like foreigners; they don’t like dogs. It’s just their way of getting back at both. And even so, on the underground out here this morning, you saw how everyone cowered back from him — they think my little dog is a terrible and vicious beast! I had to put that awful muzzle on him. And he was so good about it. Well, you don’t have it on now — my darling Pharaoh!”

Pharaoh wasn’t a big dog. But he wasn’t a little one either. He was a broad-chested coffee-colored mutt with some white patches as though a house painter had picked him up and maybe shaken one of his forepaws before washing his hands. Heidi’d had him about six months — which was twice as long as she’d known me. One of his ears and the half-mask around his left eye were black.

“They’re just not used to dogs, and he makes them uncomfortable.”

“They’re uncomfortable with him because he’s a dog. They’re uncomfortable with you because you’re a Negro — ”

“They’re uncomfortable with you because you’re German.”

She smiled at that. “Well, that’s barbaric! When I go to David’s silly baby-sitting job, are you going to be all right?”

“I told you, DeLys said I could stay at her place up in Anaphiotika, while she’s away. I’ll be off to England the day after tomorrow. And then back home to New York.”

“That odd old Englishman, John, from Turkey, is staying at DeLys’s too, isn’t he?”

“He’s not that odd. When I was in Istanbul, DeLys gave me his address so I could look him up. After Jerry and I hitchhiked there, I hadn’t had a shower in a week and was a total mess — he was just as nice to me as he could be. He fed me all one afternoon, till I was so full I could hardly walk. He told me all about places to see in the city, the Dolma Bocce and the Flower Passage. And what Turkish baths to go to.”

“Did he feed Jerry too?”

“No. Jerry was scared of him because he knew John liked guys. DeLys had told Jerry about him before we left. So Jerry wouldn’t go see him.”

“You like guys. You like Jerry, I think.”

Which was true. “But Jerry,” I said, “and I are the same age. And we were already friends. I told Jerry I thought he was acting silly. But he’s a southerner, and he’s stubborn.”

“That was a lovely letter Jerry wrote you.” She quoted: “ ‘Don’t step on any low flying birds.’ I always thought he was just another stupid American, too tall, and too awkward, with nothing very interesting to say — even though you liked him. But when you read me his letter, I really began to wish I’d gotten to know him better while he was here. You’re very sensitive to people, in ways I know I’m not. But sometimes, I suppose, we just miss out. Because, as you Americans say, of our prejudices.

“But he is odd,” she went on, suddenly. “Turkish John, I mean — isn’t that a funny name, for an Englishman? Cosima says he gives her the creeps.”

“He’s a little effeminate — he’s a queer,” I said. “But so am I, I suppose.” Though I didn’t really think I was — effeminate, that is.

“I wonder why so many women like you.” Pharaoh went around behind her and, when she jerked him, came back between us, drawing black and white felt one way and another across her shoulder. “DeLys, Cosima, me… Even Kyria Kokinou likes you.” (Kyria Kokinou was the landlady Heidi had decided not to risk angering by having me stay in the room while she was away with her Greek children.) “Do you think there’s any particular reason for that?”

“Probably because I’m queer,” I said. Then: “I wonder why we didn’t have more sex, you and I?”

Now she leaned away with an ironic sneer, backed by her big, German smile. “I was certainly ready!” Heidi and I had slept in the same bed for two weeks; but we’d only made love twice. “I think you were just trying to prove a point,” she said. “That you were.. . ‘queer’, as you say.” Suddenly she straightened. “I’m really not looking forward to this trip. The ferry will have to go out by the paper mill; and it’s going to stink. And I won’t ever see you again, will I? Look, if you can stop for a day in Munich, you must visit the Deutsches Museum. I used to go there when I was little. It’s a science museum. And they have almost an entire real mine in the basement, that you can walk around in and watch it work — that was my favorite part, when I was a little girl. And wonderful mechanical toys from the Eighteenth Century — you can see actually functioning. I know you’ll love it. You like science, I know it. From your lovely books — that you write so carefully. I’d love to know I shared that little piece of my childhood with you. So go there — if you possibly can.” She looked around at the ferryboat. “Well, you have a wonderful trip home. And write me. You’ll go home — you’ll see your wife again. And everything will work out between you. I bet that’ll be so. It’s been an awful lot of fun. I hope you and your wife get back together — or something good happens there, anyway.” She leaned forward and gave me a kiss. I gave her a hug back, and she came up blinking. And grinned once more. Then she turned and went up the plank onto the deck, Pharaoh dashing first ahead, then suddenly back as if he’d forgotten something, so that, with a few embarrassed smiles at me, she had to drag him on board.

At the gangplank’s top a man in a gray suit and an open-collared shirt, lounging against the rail like a passenger, suddenly stood up, swung about, and became very official, pointing at Heidi, at Pharaoh: an altercation started between them, full of “… Dthen thello ton skyllon edtho…!” (I don’t want the dog here) and much arm-waving on his part, with many drawn-out and cajoling “Pa-ra-ka-looo!” ’s and “Kallo to sky-laiki!”’s from Heidi. (Pleeease! and, He’s a good puppy!) It didn’t resolve until she went into her black leather reticule under her poncho to pull out first the John O’Hara paperback she was reading (it ended on the deck, splayed and spine up, by the rail post), some tissues, a pencil, and finally Pharaoh’s muzzle, waving the leather straps at the boat official, then stooping to adjust them over patient Pharaoh’s mouth and ears — while the other passengers stood close around, curious.

At last she stood up to blow me a kiss.

I waved back and called, “Get your book!”

She looked down and saw the upended, thick black paperback, laughed, and stooped for it.

“Ciao!” she called. “Bye!”

“Ciao!”

I walked back through the Piraeus market, under the iron roofs with their dirty glass panes above tomato and sea-urchin stalls, eggplant and octopus counters, through the red-light district (where, for a week, on my first return from the islands, I’d stayed with Ron and Bill and John), past blue and white doors and small wooden porches, to the subway that would return me to Athens.

II

“I may be bringing someone home with me,” [Turkish] John said. “A man, I mean.” John had a long nose. “You won’t mind, will you? We’ll use the bed in the kitchen; I promise we won’t bother you. But…” John’s blond hair was half gray; his skin was faintly wrinkled and very dry — “it probably isn’t a good idea to mention it to DeLys.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I promise. By the time she’s back, I’ll be gone anyway.”

“I meant in a letter, or something. But believe me,” he said, “I only pick up nice men. Or boys. There won’t be any trouble.”

And later, on the cot bed in the front room of the tiny two-room Anaphiotika house, set into the mountain behind the Acropolis, I went to sleep.

In ’Stamboul, just off Istiqlal, John had had a sumptuous third-floor apartment, full of copper coffee tables, towering plants, rich rugs and hangings. When I’d been staying at the Youth Hostel, one afternoon he’d fed me a wonderful high tea at his place that had kept me going for two days. A pocketful of the leftovers, in a cloth napkin, had — an hour later — even made dinner for timid, towering Jerry.

I woke to whispered Greek, the lock, and two more Greek voices. One laughed as though he were coughing. Shhhing them, John herded two sailors, in their whites, through the room. The squat one halted in the door to the kitchen (in which was DeLys’s bed that John used), to paw the hanging back. He had a beer bottle in one hand. He laughed hoarsely once more. Then the tall one, towering him by almost two heads, shoved past, with John right after.

I turned over — then turned back. Frowning, I reached down and pulled my wallet out of the pocket of my jeans where I’d dropped them over the neck of my guitar case sticking from under the bed; it was also my suitcase. I sat, slipped the wallet behind the books on the shelf beside me. Then I lay back down.

John came back through the hanging. All he wore now was a blue shirt with yellow flowers. He squatted beside me, knees jackknifed up, to whisper: “There’re two of them, I’m afraid. So if you wanted to entertain one — just to keep him busy, while I did the other one — really, I wouldn’t mind. Actually, it would be a sort of favor.”

“I’m sorry, John,” I said. “Thanks. But I’m awfully tired.”

“All right.” He patted my forearm, where it was bent under my cheek. He smelled drunk. “But you can’t say I didn’t ask. And I certainly don’t mind sharing — if you change your mind.” Then he said: “I haven’t spoken Demotiki with anyone in more than a year. I’m surprised I’m doing as well as I am.” Chuckling, he was up and back into the kitchen, thin buttocks grinding below blue and yellow shirttails. He disappeared around the hanging, into the lighted kitchen, Greek, and laughter.

I drifted off — despite the noise…

Something bumped my arm. I opened my eyes. The little lamp in the corner was on. The squat sailor stood by my bed, leg pressed against my arm. Looking down at me, with one hand he joggled his crotch. Then he said, questioningly, “Poosty-poosty…?”

I looked up. “Huh…?”

“Poosty-poosty!” He rubbed with broad, Gypsy-dark fingers. A gold ring hugged deep into the middle one’s flesh. Pointing at my face with his other hand, he began to thumb open the buttons around his lap-flap. Once he reached over to squeeze my backside. Hard, too.

“Aw, hey…!” I pushed up. “No… No…!” I made dismissive gestures. “I don’t want to. Dthen thello. Phevge! Phevge!” (I don’t want to! Go away! Go away!)

“Ne!” Then he repeated, “Poosty-poosty,” emphatically.

The flap fell from black groin hair, that, I swear, went halfway up his belly. His penis swung up, two-thirds the length of mine, but half again as thick. His nails were worn short from labor, and you could tell his palms and the insides of his fingers were rock rough.

“Hey, come on!” I pulled back and tried to sit up. “Cut it out, will you? Dthen thello na kanomeparea!” (I don’t want to mess around with you!)

But he grabbed the back of my head to pull my face toward his groin — hard enough to hurt my neck. For a moment, I figured maybe I should go along, so he wouldn’t hurt me more. I opened my mouth to take him — and he pushed in. I tasted the bitter sharpness of the cologne he’d doused himself with — and cologne on a dick is my least favorite taste in the world. Under it was the sweat of someone who’d been drinking steadily at least two days. While he clawed into the back of my neck, I thought: This is stupid. I tried to pry my head from under his hand and push him out with my tongue. And thought I’d done it; but he’d just moved, fast — across the bed, on one knee.

It was a hot night. I hadn’t been sleeping with any covers.

He grabbed my underpants and, when I tried to dodge away, ripped them down my legs.

“Hey — !” I squirmed around, trying to pull them back up.

But he pushed me, hard, down on the bed. With a knee on one buttock and leaning full on my shoulders, he shouted into the other room — while I managed to lift myself (and him) up first on one elbow, then on the other.

I was about to try and twist him off, so I didn’t see the tall one come through; but suddenly he loomed, to grab my arms and yank both, by my wrists, forward. I went off my elbows and down. The sailor on top began to finger between my buttocks. “Ow!” I said. “Ow — stop!… Pauete!” That made the sailor holding my arms laugh — because it was both formal and plural; and it probably struck him as a funny time for me to be asking him formally to stop.

The tall one let go one wrist and made as if to sock me in the face. He had immense hands. And when he did it, his knuckles looked like they were coming at me hard. I jerked my head aside, squeezed my eyes, and said, “Ahhh…!”

But nothing connected — it was only a feint. Still, I hit my jaw on the bed’s iron rim.

When I opened my eyes, the tall one grinned and said: “Ha-ha!“— then shook one finger, in a slow warning. Still holding my wrist with one hand, he moved to the right, grabbed my leg just above the knee, and yanked it aside.

The one on top got himself in, then. Holding both my shoulders, he pushed, mumbling in Greek.

The tall one moved back to take my free wrist again and squatted there, his face very close. He kind of smiled, curious. His breath smelled like Sen-sen. Or chewing gum. He had very black hair (his white cap was still on), hazel eyes, and tawny skin. (By his knee, the other’s cap had fallen on the rug.) Cajolingly, he began to say, now in Greek, now in English: “You like…! You like…! Su aresi…! Good boy…! Su aresi…! You like…!”

I grunted. “I don’t like! It hurts, you asshole…!”

This pharmacologist, who’d first fucked me, told me that if I pushed out as if I were taking a shit, it wouldn’t sting.

But not this time.

The one on me bit my shouder and, panting, came. The one kneeling glanced up at him, then sighed too, let go, stood, and grunted down at me, as if to say, “See, it wasn’t that bad…?”

The one behind got off the bed and stood, pushing himself back into his uniform. Once he said to me, in English: “Good! See? You like!” like the tall one had. He picked up his cap from the floor — and (he’d missed two buttons on his lap) pulled it carefully over his head, then pushed one side back up to get the right angle.

I sucked my teeth at him and tried to look disgusted. Frankly, though, I was scared to death.

In Greek the squat one said: You want him now? I’ll hold him for you —

The tall one said: You jerk-off! Let’s just get out of here!

The squat one bent down again, picked up my jeans, and began to finger through the pockets.

Then the tall one drew back his hand with the same feint he’d used on me: Come on! Forget that, jerk-off! Let’s get out of here, I told you!

The squat one threw my jeans back down, and they went through the kitchen hanging. There was a back door, but I don’t remember if I heard it or not.

I lay on the bed a minute, without moving, propped up on one elbow. Then I reached back between my buttocks. When I looked at my fingers, there were little pads of blood on two fingertips. I got up and went to the stall toilet in the corner —

Urine covered the stone floor. On DeLys’s blue rug, it had darkened an area three times the size of someone’s head. John must have sent one of them in to use the toilet while I was still sleeping — before the first guy woke me.

I reached inside, holding the jamb with one hand, and got some paper from the almost empty roll. Still standing, I wiped myself, but with a blotting motion. It hurt too much to rub. When I looked at the yellow paper, there was a red smear, with some drops running from it, and slime on one side. My rectum stung like hell.

I felt like I had to take a crap in the worst way; but the other thing the pharmacologist had said was to wait at least half an hour before you did that.

When I went back to the bed, I saw the light in the kitchen had been turned out. As I sat down, gingerly, on the edge, on one cheek more than the other, from the dark behind the hanging, John asked: “Are you all right in there?” He sounded plaintive. For a moment I wondered if he was tied up or something.

I called back: “I think so.” Then: “Yeah, I’m okay.”

A moment later: “Did they take anything from you?”

I pulled my jeans back across the floor toward the bed with my foot. Then I looked at the bookshelf. Between fat volumes by Mann and Michener was a much read Dell paperback of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, a quarto hardcover of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visitors, a chapbook of poems by Joyce Johnson, and Heidi’s copy of L’Ecume de jour, which every few hours I’d taken out to struggle through another paragraph of Vian’s playful French.

“No,” I said. “My wallet’s safe.”

At the very end were the paperbacks of my own few novels — and the typewritten sheaf of my wife’s poems, sticking up between two of them. Wherever I stayed, I’d always put them on a shelf so I could see them, to make me feel better. They were the books I’d stuck my wallet behind.

“Good,” John said. Twenty seconds later, he said: “I don’t think they’ll come back.” And, a few seconds on: “Goodnight.”

After a minute, I got up again, went to the kitchen door, and switched off the lamp. I didn’t look behind the hanging. (The big light, still out, you had to stand in the middle of the room to reach up and turn on.) But John wasn’t asking for help. So I went back and lay down.

I tried to think of all the reasons I hadn’t called out. They might have beat me up, or hurt me more than they had. What would neighbors — or the police — have thought, coming in and finding me like that? Or thought of John? I might have gotten DeLys in trouble with Costas, from whom she rented the house. Or I might have gotten Costas in trouble with the police: he was a nice guy — a Greek law student at Harvard, home for spring break, who probably wasn’t supposed to be renting his house out to foreigners anyway. But, lying there, I couldn’t really be sure if any of those thoughts had been in my mind while it had been happening.

Again, I pushed out like I was trying to shit.

The stinging was just as painful. Then a muscle in back of my left thigh cramped sharply enough to make me cry out.

III

At five-thirty, since neither of us was asleep, John got up to make coffee. The sun came sideways through the shutters. Birds chirped. John kept touching a bruise on his cheek with three fingers pressed together. “Now they were not nice boys at all!” In his light blue robe with the navy piping, he shook out yellow papers of grounds, of sugar, into the long-handled pot on the Petrogaz ring. “Why I brought home two, I’ll never know! You’d think I hadn’t done this before. But when I first met them, they were both so sweet.” He turned on the water in the gray stone sink. “One of them hit me.” He turned it off again. From the shelf he took down a jar of marmalade, examined the green and gold label, shook his head, then put it back. Again he touched his cheek. “Scared me to death! Once he hit me, though, I decided I’d just let the two of them do anything they wanted.” He fingered his bruise again. “He took money from me, too,” he said, confidingly. “I don’t like it when a boy takes money from me. I don’t mind giving a boy a few drachma, a few lira, especially if he’s in the army — or the navy. Nobody could be expected to live off what they pay you there. That’s why the entire Greek army hustles.” He touched the bruise again. “You know, you really didn’t have to clean the piss up off the toilet floor this morning.” The near corner of the bed with its ivory crocheted cover, the ancient refrigerator with the circular cooling unit on top, and the blue table with the three blue chairs with flowers decaled on their backs made a kind of crowded triangle on the red tile. “I would have done it myself if you’d left it. That was just rudeness. Believe me, they weren’t that drunk! You know?” Moving about on bony feet, he pulled out first one chair, then the other. “I really thought, because you were colored, they weren’t going to bother you and isn’t that — ” he went on, as though it were the same sentence — “the dumbest thing I could possibly have said this morning! But that’s what I thought. Come, sit down now. And have some coffee.”

I stepped away from the doorway where, just inside the hanging, I’d been leaning against the jamb. I’d put all my clothes on, including my shoes. For all the dawn sunlight, the house was still nippy.

“But when that boy struck me — who’d been just as sweet as he could be, an hour ago — the chunky one…?” Pouring little cups of coffee like liquid night from the brass pot, John took up his apologia again. “A perfectly dreadful child, he turned out to be. The other, I thought — the tall one — was quite nice, though. Basically. I don’t think he would have done anything, if his friend hadn’t put him up to it. But I was as scared as I’ve ever been before in my life! I’m awfully glad somebody else was here. Not that it did much good.”

IV

I got my ticket for London that morning. When the man behind the brass bars said I’d be taking the Orient Express, it was kind of exciting. There’d be no problem, he explained, my stopping off in Munich.

Back up in Anaphiotika, I came in to find an ecstatic John: “Really, I don’t carry on like this when I’m at home. But you know, in ’Stamboul, because, I guess, it’s part of the culture — every father of a teenaged son is busy negotiating which of his wealthiest friends is going to get his boy’s bum — you just don’t find it running around in the street, the way you do here. You’d think, after last night, I wouldn’t be back in business for at least a fortnight. But it’s like getting up on the horse as soon as you fall off: here, it’s not even one o’clock in the afternoon, and I’ve already had three — and three very nice ones, at that!”

I laughed. “Once, about six or seven weeks ago, John, I had three before nine o’clock in the morning.”

“With your looks and at your age — ? I just bet you’ve had a bloody dozen since you left here!”

Actually, it had only been two. But I thought I’d better not say anything to John, in case his own conquests were more imaginary than real — to make him feel better about last night. “Are you doing anything this evening?” I asked. “Some friends of mine and I are going to go out.”

“Out to do what sort of thing?”

“Go to a concert — sort of.”

John shook his head and his hands. “I’m afraid every free moment I have is booked. I’ve got half a dozen moviehouses to explore. I need to make an official inspection of at least eight public loos. There are parts of several parks, here and up town, I haven’t come anywhere near examining. No — I’m afraid my social calendar is filled to overflowing. But it was sweet of you to ask.”

I laughed, relieved. Five minutes before, I’d decided not to invite him. He was so flamboyant, I could see him causing something of a problem with the others.

I’d agreed to meet Trevor at sunset behind the wire-mesh fence along the top of the Theater of Dionysus — the big outdoor theater on the side of the Acropolis hill. Stravinsky was conducting his farewell concert that night. Lots of students and poor foreigners would gather there. You couldn’t see very well, but the famous acoustics of the Greek amphitheater easily lived up to their reputation.

Earlier that month, I’d gone from being twenty-three to twenty-four; which meant Trevor had gone from being a towheaded English guitar player three years younger than I to a towheaded English guitar player four years younger. It seemed to make a difference.

The sky out toward Piraeus was purple, flooded through near the horizon with layered orange. On good days you’re supposed to be able to see the sea from the Acropolis’s rim. But here, half a dozen yards below it, the waters beyond Piraeus were only a pervading memory.

The white lights down on the stage told me for the first time that the platform there was gray-painted wood. During full daylight, just glancing at it when I’d passed, I’d always assumed it was rock. About ten of the orchestra had come out to take their chairs. Sloping down from the fence, the tiers of stone seats were filling. In silhouette, scattered before me, were hundreds of Athenian heads.

Trevor let go of the hatched wire and glanced back. In its canvas case beside him, his guitar leaned against the metal web. Trevor wore two denim jackets, one over the other — though it was a pleasantly warm evening. In the quarter light, his cornsilk mop made his face look smaller, his gray eyes larger. “Hello,” he said. “It’s his last concert, tonight. I didn’t know that.”

“Whose?” I asked. “Stravinsky’s?”

“That’s right. He’s retiring. I knew he was conducting, but I didn’t know that this was it.”

“I think I read something about it.”

“The Swiss Bitch is supposed to come by, too. I hope she gets here before they start. I mean, you either hear him tonight or you don’t. It’s really quite special.”

The Swiss Bitch was Trevor’s nickname for Cosima; I never saw anything particularly bitchy about her. I don’t think Trevor did either, but something about the euphony had caught him. And the first time he’d referred to her as that, Heidi, who was Cosima’s best friend, had burst out laughing at the kafeneon table, so that it almost sounded as if she approved. Trevor had kept it up. “Cosima told me you were staying up at DeLys’s with some English poofter.”

“John?” I asked. “I don’t know anything for sure about his sexual preferences — but he’s really quite a nice guy.” Although Trevor knew perfectly well I was queer, I liked generating ambiguity about anyone else who came up.

“God,” Trevor said, “almost all DeLys’s friends are faggots! I can’t stand them — most of them — ” which I guess was for my benefit — “myself. I wonder why that is, with some women?”

Then, behind me, Cosima said: “Hello, you lot.”

We moved aside, and Cosima stepped up between us to gaze through the wire. “I think they’re about to start. Is that the whole orchestra? — my, there’re a lot of them tonight.” Cosima was twenty-six and had black hair. She wore a gray jacket with a black fur collar. And a gray skirt. Now she said: “Well, how have you been, Trevor?”

“All right.” He pretended to pay attention to something down on the platform.

A few feet away from us, two Greek boys wore short-sleeved shirts. One, with his fingers hooked in the wire above his head, swung now this way, now that, his shirt wholly open and out of his slacks, blowing back from his stomach.

I had on my once-white wool island jacket — too warm for the evening. But we internationals — like the Paris clochards, in their two and three overcoats even in summer — seemed to wear as much of our clothing as we could tolerate, always ready to be asked over, to stay for a few days, or at least to spend the night. That way, I suppose, we’d have to go back for as few remaining things as possible.

On the other side of us, half a dozen schoolgirls in plaid uniforms kept close together, to giggle and whisper when another arrived.

“This is his last time conducting,” Cosima said.

“So I read and so Trevor told me. Robert Craft is conducting the first half of the concert.”

“Who’s Robert Craft?” Trevor asked.

Cosima shrugged — a large, theatrical shrug. Often that’s how she dealt with Trevor.

“He’s sort of a Stravinsky person,” I said. “He writes a lot about him; and he did a wonderful recording of Anton Webern’s complete works — about five or six years back.”

“Who’s Webern?” Trevor asked.

Cosima laughed. “Have you ever heard him conduct before? Stravinsky, I mean?”

“Yes,” I said. “Once, one summer when I was about fourteen — back in the States. It was at a place called Tanglewood. There’s a big tent there, and the orchestra plays under it. They did two programs that afternoon. Carl Orff had written some new music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream — to replace the old Mendelssohn stuff everybody knows, I guess. They did the whole play. And a comedian I used to see on television a lot named Red Buttons played Puck — even though he was getting pretty old. The orchestra did the music, which was all in unison, with lots of gongs and drums. Then they took the whole stage down. A chorus came out. And Stravinsky conducted the premiere of a piece he’d just written, Cantium Sanctum. It was very atonal. The audience wasn’t very appreciative; when people left the music tent, there was a lot of snickering. But I liked it more than the Orff.” I stood on tip-toe because some of the paying audience just entering — about twelve feet in front of us — hadn’t sat yet. “Tonight Craft is going to conduct The Firebird. Then Stravinsky’s going to do The Rite of Spring. It’s an awfully conservative performance for him to go out on. But…” I shrugged. I’d read the whole concert program two days ago. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t wanted to tell Trevor.

“Mmm,” Cosima said.

Trevor said: “You’re going to be leaving in a couple of days. I bet, after you’ve gone, that English fellow, John, would let me stay up at DeLys’s — if I went there and asked him. Nicely, I mean. He’s supposed to like boys. And, after all, DeLys is my friend, too.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d stay away from him if I were you, Trevor. What are you going to do if he gets after your bum?”

“I’d beat the shit out of him, if he tried anything!” Trevor pulled himself up, to turn from the fence.

“But why would you go up there if you didn’t want him to try?” I asked. “Besides, people will think you wanted him to try. If you went up there, knowing the sort of fellow he is, if something happened, no one would ever believe you hadn’t egged him on to it. I certainly wouldn’t believe it.”

A couple of times, when we’d hitched to Istanbul together, Jerry’s fear of John and anything else queer (except me) had annoyed me — like the afternoon he’d flatly refused to go up to see John for tea in Turkey. But Trevor’s “I’ll beat you to a pulp if you touch me, but aren’t you supposed to like me anyway because I’m cute?” (and often with a “Can you spare a hundred drachma while you’re at it?”), and all with perfect Dartington manners when he chose to drag them out, actually made me mad. John had had a tough enough time; I wanted to keep Trevor out of his hair.

I waited for Trevor to say something back. But my own position as a self-confessed queer, married, and with an occasional girlfriend, made Trevor, if not most of my friends, not know what to say to me at all. I liked that.

Cosima said, “Oh! They’re starting…!”

Applause swelled as, in his black tails, Craft walked out across the platform in front of the orchestra.

The Firebird, The Rite of Spring — they’re pieces you’ve heard so many times you’d think they couldn’t be interesting anymore. But precisely that music, when it’s done well, is so embarrassingly moving. The Athenians certainly applauded enough.

Listening, however, I remembered when Trevor had gotten a recording of the Ninth Symphony. (Jerry hadn’t yet gone back to Kentucky.) Above the orchestral photograph, the Deutsche Grammophon label was brutal yellow. Cardboard on European albums is thinner than on American albums. And Trevor had held this one in both hands, in front of his jeans. Both the knees were torn. The sun made his hair look like some white plastic fiber pushed back from his soap-white forehead, reddened here and there by a pimple. I stood a step below him on Mnisicleou Street, while he said: “The Swiss Bitch told me all of us could come up to her place tonight and hear it. I hope you and Heidi can make it.”

“All of us” turned out to be: my recent roommates, John (who was from London) and Ron (who was from New Jersey); and [English] John (the Cockney electrical engineer); and Heidi (we’d locked Pharaoh in her room, but he barked enough while we were going down the stairs that, in her wire-rimmed glasses and green apron, Kyria Kokinou came out and started arguing that the dog was not healthy for the children in the apartment upstairs — which, finally, we just had to walk away from; with Kyria Kokinou, sometimes you had to do that); and the tall redheaded English woman (who had been first Ron’s, then John’s, girlfriend); and DeLys (who was from New Orleans and whose gold hair was as striking, in its way, as Trevor’s); and Gay (the American woman who played Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen songs at the ’O kai ’E); and Jane (Gay’s tense, unhappy, mid-Western traveling companion); and Jerry (who, with his slightly stooped shoulders, was about twice as tall as anyone else, and had huge hands and feet like some German Shepherd puppy); and sports-jacketed law-student Costas (DeLys’s landlord, who kept laughing and saying, “Well, we’ll squeeze… I’m sure we can think of something… there’s always a way, now…”); and me.

“Oh, my God…!” Cosima said, at the head of the stairs. “I don’t think we’ll all fit…?”

In a kind of attic tower, Cosima’s single room had a desk and a bed in it, with a couple of travel posters on the walls — one from Israel, one from North Africa. It wasn’t any larger, though, than the chicken-coop arrangement I’d left on the roof of Voltetsiou Street; or, indeed, than Heidi’s at Kyria Kokinou’s, which I’d left it for (though Heidi’s room had a shower). I wondered what Trevor had been thinking when he’d invited us. The phonograph was one someone’s ten-year-old sister might have gotten for her birthday: a square box with a pink cover that swung up from a yellow base with dirty corners, on which the table turned.

“I’m going to put it out here in the hall,” Cosima said, “so as many people can hear as possible.”

We sat on the steps, most of us. DeLys, [English] John, and Heidi rested their heads against the gray, unpainted wall-boards. In his black sneakers and white jeans, all scrunched up on the step above Jane, Jerry took his pink-framed glasses off to listen, his eyes closed, his head to the side. (Probably he was taller than the tall sailor.) At the bottom, hands in his jacket pockets, Costas lounged against the newel. The orange light from Cosima’s open door fell down among us. A window high in the stairwell wall showed a few raindrops outside on the little panes.

We were very quiet.

Cosima started the record.

The opening intervals of the Ninth dropped through the stairwell — from the scratchy speaker. Where I sat, the step above digging into my hip, my back pressed against the wall, I had one hand on Heidi’s knee; she put one hand on mine.

After the first movement, while Cosima turned the record over, DeLys started coughing. Costas pulled out a handkerchief and handed it up to her — but she waved it away.

“Oh, it’s clean,” Costas said, laughing. “Don’t worry.”

“I know it’s clean.” DeLys coughed again, the back of one hand against her mouth, the fingers in a loose fist that grabbed after something with each head-lowering hack. “That’s not it at all and you know it…!” She coughed some more.

Then Cosima played the scherzo and the adagio.

When, after a record change, the choral opening of the “Ode to Joy” finished and the baritone solo began, Heidi squeezed my hand, and I thought of Beethoven, arthritic, deaf, believing his work a failure after he’d finished conducting the Ninth’s premiere, because he’d heard nothing behind him. Then the Soprano stepped down to take him by the arm and turn him to see the standing Viennese, clapping madly —

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

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 strangely, 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

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.