Up The Line

29.

She was beautiful, the way the girls on the Minoan murals are beautiful. Dark, very dark, with black hair, olive skin, dark eyes. Peasant strength to her. She didn’t expose her breasts the way the fashionable mustachioed receptionist had done, but her thin blouse wasn’t very concealing. They were high and round. Her hips were broad. She was lush, fertile, abundant. I suppose she was about twenty-three years old, perhaps twenty-four.

It was lust at first sight. Her beauty, her simplicity, her warmth, captivated me instantly. I felt a familiar tickling in the scrotum and a familiar tightening of the glutei. I longed to rip away her clothing and sink myself deep into her hot tangled black shrubbery.

This was not a Metaxian incestuous wish. It was an innocent and purely animal reaction.

In that onrushing tide of yearning I didn’t even think of her as my grandmother. I thought of her only as a young and fantastically desirable woman. A couple of ticks later I realized on an emotional level who she was, and I went limp at once.

She was Grandma Passilidis. And I remembered Grandma Passilidis.

I used to visit her at the senior citizens’ camp near Tampa. She died when I was fourteen, in ’49, and though she was only in her seventies then, she had always seemed terribly old and decrepit to me, a withered, shrunken, palsied little woman who wore black clothing all the time. Only her eyes — my God, her dark, liquid, warm, shining eyes! — had ever given any hint that she might once have been a healthy and vital human being.

Grandma Passilidis had had all kinds of diseases, feminine things — prolapses of the uterus or whatever it is they get — and then kidney breakdowns and the rest. She had been through a dozen or more organ transplants, but nothing had helped, and all through my childhood she had inexorably declined. I was always hearing of some new crisis on her road to the grave, the poor old lady!

Here was the same poor old lady, miraculously relieved of her burden of years. And here was I, mentally snuggling between the thighs of my mother’s mother. O vile impiety, that man should travel backward through time and think such thoughts!

Young Mrs. Passilidis’ reaction to me was equally potent, although not at all lustful. For her, sex began and ended with the mayoral pecker. She stared at me not in desire but in astonishment and blurted finally, “Konstantin, he looks just like you!”

“Indeed?” said Mayor Passilidis. He hadn’t noticed it before.

His wife propelled us both toward the living-room mirror, giggling and excited. The soft masses of her bosom jostled up against me and I began to sweat. “Look!” she cried. “Look there? Like brothers you are!”

“Amazing,” said Mayor Passilidis.

“An incredible coincidence,” I said. “Your hair is thicker, and I’m a little taller, but—”

“Yes! Yes!” The mayor clapped his hands. “Can it be that we are related?”

“Impossible,” I said solemnly. “My family’s from Boston. Old New England stock. Nevertheless it is amazing. You’re sure you didn’t have ancestors on the Mayflower, Mr. Passilidis?”

“Not unless there was a Greek steward on board.”

“I doubt that.”

“So do I. I am pure Greek on both sides for many generations,” he said.

“I’d like to talk about that with you a little if I could,” I said casually. “For example, I’d like to know—”

Just then a sleepy and completely naked five-year-old girl came out of one of the bedrooms. She planted herself shamelessly before me and asked me who I was. How sweet, I thought. That saucy little rump, that pink little slit — how clean little girls always look when they’re naked. Before puberty messes them up.

Passilidis said proudly, “This is my daughter Diana.”

A voice of thunder said in my brain, “THE NAKEDNESS OF THY MOTHER SHALT THOU NOT UNCOVER.”

I looked away, shattered, and covered my confusion with a coughing fit. Little Diana’s fleeceless labia blazed in my soul. As though sensing that I saw something improper about the child’s bareness, Katina Passilidis hustled a pair of panties onto her.

I was still shaking. Passilidis, puzzled, uncorked some retsina. We sat on the balcony in the bright midday light. Below, some schoolchildren waved and shouted greetings to the mayor. Little Diana toddled out to be played with, and I tousled her fluffy hair and pressed the tip of her nose and felt very, very strange about all of this.

My grandmother provided a handsome lunch of boiled lamb and pastitsio. We went through a bottle and a half of retsina. I finished pumping the mayor about politics and shifted to the topic of his ancestors. “Have your people always lived in Sparta?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he said. “My grandfather’s people came here a century ago from Cyprus. That is, on my father’s side. On my mother’s side I am Athenian, for many generations back.”

“That’s the Markezinis family?” I said.

He gave me a queer look. “Why, yes! How did you—”

“Something I came across while I was reading up on you,” I said hurriedly.

Passilidis let the point pass. Now that he was on the subject of his family he grew expansive — maybe it was the wine — and favored me with the genealogical details. “My father’s people were on Cyprus for at least a thousand years,” he said. “There was a Passilidis there when the Crusaders came. On the other hand, my mother’s ancestors came to Athens only in the nineteenth century, after the defeat of the Turks. Before that they lived in Shqiperi.”

“Shqiperi?”

“Albania. They settled there in the thirteenth century when the Latins seized Constantinople. And then they remained, through the Serbians, through the Turks, through the time of Skanderbeg the rebel, always retaining their Greek heritage against all difficulties.”

My ears prickled. “You mentioned Constantinople? You can trace your ancestry there?”

Passilidis smiled. “Do you know Byzantine history?”

“Slightly,” I said.

“Perhaps you know that in the year 1204 the Crusaders seized Constantinople and ruled it for a while as a Latin kingdom. The Byzantine nobility fled, and several new Byzantine splinter states formed — one in Asia Minor, one on the Black Sea, and one in the west, in Albania. My ancestors followed Michael Angelus Comnenus into Albania, rather than submit to the rule of the Crusaders.”

“I see.” I was trembling again. “And the family name? It was Markezinis even back then?”

“Oh, no, Markezinis is a late Greek name! In Byzantium we were of the Ducas family.”

“You were?” I gasped. It was as if he had been a German claiming Hohenzollern blood, or an Englishman laying claim to Plantagenet genes. “Ducas! Really?”

I had seen the gleaming palaces of the Ducas family. I had watched forty proud Ducases march clad in cloth of gold through the streets of Constantinople, to celebrate the rise of their cousin Constantine to the imperial throne. If Passilidis was a Ducas, I was a Ducas.

“Of course,” he said, “the family was very large, and I believe we were of a minor branch. Still, it is something to take pride in, descent from such a family.”

“It certainly is. Could you give me the names of any of your Byzantine ancestors, maybe? The first names?”

I must have sounded as though I planned to look them up the next time I was in Byzantium. Which I did, but Passilidis wasn’t supposed to suspect that, because time-travel hadn’t been invented yet.

He frowned and said, “Do you need this for the article you are writing?”

“No, not really. I’m just curious.”

“You seem to know more than a little about Byzantium.” It worried him that an American barbarian would recognize the name of a famous Byzantine family.

I said, “Just casual knowledge. I studied it in school.”

“Sadly, I can give you no names. This information has not come down to us. But perhaps some day, when I have retired from politics, I will search the old records—”

My grandmother poured us more wine, and I stole a quick, guilty peek at her full, swaying breasts. My mother climbed on my knee and made little trilling noises. My grandfather shook his head and said, “It is very surprising, the way you resemble me. Can I take your photograph?”

I wondered if it went against Time Patrol regulations. I decided that it probably did. But also I saw no polite way to refuse such a trifling request.

My grandmother produced a camera. Passilidis and I stood side by side and she took a picture of us for him, and then one for me. She pulled them from the camera when they were developed and we studied them intently.

“Like brothers,” she said over and over. “Like brothers!”

I destroyed my print as soon as I was out of the apartment. But I suppose that somewhere in my mother’s papers there is an old and faded flattie photograph showing her father as a young man, standing beside a somewhat younger man who looks very much like him, and whom my mother probably assumed was some forgotten uncle of hers. Perhaps the photograph still exists. I’d be afraid to look.