The Colossus of Maroussi (26 page)

Back in town, seated in a suffocating café of railway station proportions, we were again greeted by a friend, a Greek this time, an official of some sort whom Durrell had known in Patras. He was soon gotten rid of in polite, friendly fashion. No injury was intended, I am certain, for Durrell is if anything un-English in this respect, yet somehow I felt as if we were building a wall of ice around ourselves. If it had been London or New York I would have felt annoyed by the noisy gaiety of the crowd, but being in Sparta I was intensely interested in this Christmas atmosphere. Had I been alone I would undoubtedly have introduced myself to some congenial-looking group and participated in the merriment, however idiotic it may have been. But the English don’t do that; the English look on and suffer because of their inability to let go. My remarks unfortunately give a wholly false picture of Durrell who is normally the most easy-going, amiable, jovial, forthright and outright fellow imaginable. But Christmas is a morbid day for sensitive Anglo-Saxons and driving a dilapidated car over dangerous roads in the rain doesn’t help to put one back on velvet. Myself I have never known what it is to pass a merry Christmas. For the first time in my life I was ready for it—in Sparta. But it was not to be. There was only one thing to do—eat and go to bed. And pray that the rain would let up by morning.

Durrell, whom I could see now was caving in with fatigue, refused to look about for a restaurant. We walked out of the café and down into a smoky cellar which was cold and damp. A radio was going full blast with triple amplifiers, megaphones, cowbells and dinner horns. To add to Durrell’s discomfiture the program was from a German broadcasting station which was bombarding us with melancholy Christmas carols, lying reports of German victories, moth-eaten Viennese waltzes, broken-down Wagnerian arias, snatches of demented yodeling, blessings for Herr Hitler and his wretched gang of murderers, et cetera. To cap it all the food was abominable. But the lights were splendiferous! In fact, the illumination was so brilliant that the food began to look hallucinatingly enticing. To me at least it was really beginning to look like Christmas—that is to say, sour, moth-eaten, bilious, crapulous, worm-eaten, mildewed, imbecilic, pusillanimous and completely gaga. If a drunken Greek had come running in with a cleaver and begun chopping off our hands I would have said “Bravo! Merry Christmas to you, my gay little man!” But the only drunken Greek I saw was a little fellow at the next table who suddenly turned very white and without a word of warning puked up a heaping dishful of bright vomit and then quietly lowered his heavy head into it with a dull splash. Again I could scarcely blame Durrell for being disgusted. By this time his nerves were on edge. Instead of leaving immediately we remained to carry on a foolish discussion about the relative merits of various peoples. Crossing the square with its quaint arcades a little later, in a fine drizzle, Sparta seemed even more appealing to me than at first blush. It seemed very like Sparta, is what I thought—which is a meaningless phrase and yet exactly what I mean. Sparta, when I had thought about it previously, had always appeared in my mind as a very blue and white hamlet tucked away like some forgotten outpost in the midst of a fertile plain. If you think about it at all, Sparta must give rise to an image exactly the contrary of Athens. In fact, the whole Peloponnesus seems inevitably to awaken a suggestion of notness. Against the brilliant, diamond-pointed Attica one posits an obstinate sloth which resists not for any good reason but for the perverted pleasure of resisting. Rightly or wrongly, Sparta stands out in the mind’s eye as an image of cantankerous, bovine righteousness, a foul behemoth of virtue, adding nothing to the world despite its advanced eugenic ideals. This image now comes to rest in the mud, sleepy as a turtle, contented as a cow, useless as a sewing machine in a desert. You can like Sparta now because, after centuries of obsolescence, it is no longer a menace to the world. It is now exactly the quaint, rather ugly, rather shabbily attractive hamlet which you imagined it to be. Being neither disillusioned nor undeceived you can accept it for what it is, glad that it is neither more nor less than it seems. Our own Faulkner could settle down and write a huge book about its negative aspects, its un-thisness and its not-thatness. In the rain, in the morbid gaiety of a Byzantine hangover, I saw the one positive fact about it, that it
is,
that it is Sparta, and being Sparta therefore Greek, which is sufficient in itself to redeem all the antithetical anomalies of the Peloponnesus. Inwardly, I confess, I felt perversely gay about Sparta for it had at last revealed to me the Englishman in Durrell, the least interesting thing about him, to be sure, but an element not to be overlooked. At the same time I was aware that never in my life had I felt so thoroughly American, which is a curious fact and perhaps not devoid of significance. All of which, anyhow, presented itself to the consciousness as a long-forgotten Q.E.D. out of the Euclidian history of the world.

It rained all night and in the morning, when we came down to the breakfast table, it was still pouring. Durrell, still feeling somewhat English, insisted on having a couple of boiled eggs for breakfast. We sat in a little nook overlooking the square. Nancy and I had almost finished our tea and toast when the eggs arrived. Durrell turned the egg cup upside down and gently chipped the first egg. It was hardly boiled and already quite cool, he complained aloud, ringing for the waitress who happened to be the proprietor’s wife. “Please boil it a little longer,” he said—“the two of them.” We waited ten or fifteen minutes. The same performance and the same result. Only this time the egg was too badly chipped to be sent back again. However, determined to have his eggs, Durrell rang again. He explained elaborately, with ill-suppressed rage, that he wanted his eggs medium boiled. “Don’t bother with that one,” he said, “just have this one done a little more—and quickly, please, I can’t sit here all morning.” The woman left, promising to do her best. Again we waited, this time longer than before. Nancy and I had ordered more tea and toast. We smoked a couple of cigarettes. Finally I got up to look out of the window, hearing some strange noise below, and as I was gazing out I espied the woman crossing the square with an umbrella over her head and carrying the egg in her hand. “Here it comes,” I said. “Here comes what?” said Durrell, “Why the egg! She’s carrying it in her hand.”

“What’s the meaning of all this?” Durrell demanded, taking the cool egg and smashing the shell. “We have no stove,” said the woman. “I had to take it to the baker’s to have it boiled. Is it hard enough now?”

Durrell was at once apologetic. “It’s just right,” he said, cracking it vigorously with the back of his spoon. And as he smiled gratefully up at her he added in English—“The damned idiot, couldn’t she have told us that in the first place? It’s as hard as a rock, b’Jesus.”

We started back in the rain, stopping here and there on the edge of a precipice to take snapshots. The car was working badly, gasping and wheezing as if on its last legs. About three miles outside of Tripolis, in the midst of a veritable cloudburst accompanied by hail and thunder and lightning, the road flooded like a rice field, the car suddenly gave a violent shudder and stopped dead. We might as well have been fifty miles away; there was absolutely no traffic and no way of getting assistance. To step out of the car was to wade in up to one’s knees. I was to get the train for Athens at Tripolis and there was only one train to get. If I were to miss it I would miss the boat which was due to leave the next day. It was so obvious that the car had given its last spark of life that we sat there laughing and joking about our plight without thinking to make the slightest effort to start her again. After ten or fifteen minutes of it the laughter died away. It looked as if we were doomed to sit there all afternoon, maybe all night. “Why don’t you try to do something?” said Nancy. Durrell was saying, as he usually did when Nancy proffered her advice—“Why don’t you shut up?”—but instinctively he had made a few automatic motions. To our amazement we heard the thing spitting. “The bloody thing’s going,” he said, and sure enough, as he stepped on the gas she jumped like a kangaroo and was off. We art wed at the door of the hotel at top speed and were greeted by a porter with a huge umbrella. The car looked as if it were going to be carried away in the flood and deposited on top of Mt. Ararat.

The train was due to leave at four o’clock, so we had time for a last meal together. Durrell did his best to persuade me to stay overnight, convinced that the boat would not leave on schedule. “Nothing goes according to schedule in this bloody country,” he assured me. In my heart I was hoping that some convenient accident would detain me. If I were to miss the boat I might not get another for a month and in that time Italy might declare war on Greece and thus shut me off in the Mediterranean, a most delightful prospect. Nevertheless I went through the motions of leaving. It was up to Fate now, I thought to myself. Durrell and Nancy were going to Epidaurus and then to Olympia. I would be going back to jail.

The horse and carriage were at the door waiting for me. Durrell and Nancy stood on the steps waving good-bye. The sleigh bells began to ring, the flaps came down over my eyes and we started off in a teeming mist which was made of rain and tears. “Where will we meet again?” I asked myself. Not in America, not in England, not in Greece, thought I. If anywhere it will be in India or Tibet. And we are going to meet haphazardly—on the road—as Durrell and his friend had met on the way to Mystras. The war will not only change the map of the world but it will affect the destiny of everyone I care about. Already, even before the war had broken out, we were scattered to the four winds, those of us who had lived and worked together and who had no thought to do anything but what we were doing. My friend X, who used to be terrified at the very mention of war, had volunteered for service in the British Army; my friend Y, who was utterly indifferent and who used to say that he would go right on working at the Bibliothèque Nationale war or no war, joined the Foreign Legion; my friend Z, who was an out-and-out pacifist, volunteered for ambulance service and has never been heard of since; some are in concentration camps in France and Germany, one is rotting away in Siberia, another is in China, another in Mexico, another in Australia. When we meet again some will be blind, some legless, some old and white-haired, some demented, some bitter and cynical. Maybe the world will be a better place to live in, maybe it’ll be just the same, maybe it’ll be worse than it is now—who knows? The strangest thing of all is that in a universal crisis of this sort one instinctively knows that certain ones are doomed and that others will be spared. With some, usually the shining, heroic figures, one can see death written in their faces; they glow with the knowledge of their own death. Others, whom one would normally think of as worthless, in the military sense, you feel nevertheless will become hardened veterans, will go through hell’s fire unscathed and emerge grinning, perhaps to settle down in the old routine and amount to nothing. I saw the effect of the last war on some of my friends in America; I can see the effect which this one will produce even more clearly. One thing is certain, I thought to myself—the chaos and confusion which this war is engendering will never be remedied in our lifetime. There will be no resuming where we left off. The world we knew is dead and gone. The next time we meet, any of us, it will be on the ashes of all that we once cherished.

The scene at the railway station was one of utter confusion. Word had just been received that the train would be an hour or two late—there had been a washout up the line somewhere, nobody knew exactly where. The rain came down relentlessly and unceasingly, as if all the cocks in the celestial plumbing system had been opened and the monkey wrench thrown away. I sat down on a bench outside and prepared myself for a long siege. In a few minutes a man approached me and said “Hello, what you doing here? You an American?” I nodded and smiled. “Helluva country this, eh?” he said. “Too poor, that’s what’s the matter. Where you come from—Chicago?”

He sat down beside me and began to chew my ear off about the wonderful efficiency of the American railways. A Greek, naturally, who had lived in Detroit. “Why I come back to this country I don’t know,” he went on. “Everybody poor here—you can’t make no money here. Soon we go to war. I was a damn fool to leave America. What you think of Greece—you like it? How long you stay here? You think America go to war?”

I decided to get out of his clutches as soon as possible. “Try to find out when the train will arrive,” I said, dispatching him to the telegraph office. He didn’t budge. “What’s the use,” he said, “nobody knows when the train will come. Maybe to-morrow morning.” He began to talk about automobiles, what a wonderful car the Ford was, for instance.

“I don’t know anything about cars,” I said.

“That’s funny,” he said, “and you an American.”

“I don’t like cars.”

“But just the same, when you want to get somewhere….”

“I don’t want to get anywhere.”

“That’s funny,” he said. “You like the train better maybe, yes?”

“I like the donkey better than the train. I like to walk too.”

“My brother just like that,” he said. “My brother say, ‘Why you want a car?’ My brother, he never been in a car in his life. He stay here in Greece. He live in the mountains—very poor, but he say he don’t care just so long as he have enough to eat.”

“He sounds like an intelligent man,” I said.

“Who, my brother? No, he know nothing. He can’t read or write; he can’t even sign his own name.”

“That’s fine,” I said, “then he must he a happy man.”

“My brother? No, he’s very sad. He lose his wife and three children. I want him to go to America with me, but he say ‘What I go to America for?’ I tell him he make lots of money there. He say he don’t want to make money. He just want to eat every day, that’s all. Nobody got ambition here. America everybody want to be a success. Maybe some day your son be President of the United States, yes?”