The best way to leave Istanbul must be by ship. So you can lean at the stern and watch that fabulous skyline slowly recede, become merely two-dimensional; that Arabian Nights mirage which when you get close to it turns into a labyrinth. Glinting under the sun of Asia, silhouetted by the sun of Europe. The view from the air in a Turkish Airlines Boeing, when you have had to cancel your flight and book another at short notice, is less fantastic but still memorable. I look out of the porthole. I am somehow in love with this beautiful city in which you do not feel safe. My wife does not look; she opens a magazine. She is wearing a pale-coloured suit. Other people in the plane glance at her.
All stories are told, like this one, looking back at painful places which have become silhouettes, or looking forward, before you arrive, at scintillating façades which have yet to reveal their dagger thrusts, their hands in hotel bedrooms. They buy the reprieve, or the stay of execution, of distance. London looked inviting from the air, spread out under clear spring sunshine; and one understood the pleasures of tourists staying in hotels in Mayfair, walking in the morning with their cameras and guide-books, past monuments and statues, under plane trees, to see the soldiers at the Palace. One wants the moment of the story to go on for ever, the poise of parting or arriving to be everlasting. So one doesn’t have to cross to the other continent, doesn’t have to know what really happened, doesn’t have to meet the waiting blade.
The Son
IT’S TRUE: EVERYTHING CHANGES. WHAT you think you know, you don’t know. What’s good or bad at one time isn’t good or bad at another. Once I cut off the fingers of my own mother. You don’t believe me? It was during the war in Athens. She was dead. She was dead because there was nothing to eat. And we younger ones were too conscious of our own empty bellies to waste time grieving. There were three fat rings on Mama’s fingers — rings to barter for food. But Mama’s knuckles were swollen and you couldn’t get the rings off by pulling. So, because I was the oldest and expected to make decisions, I got hold of the bread knife …
Thirty-five years ago I chopped off the fingers of my own mother. And now I chop onions in a restaurant. I don’t like the way the world’s going. Thirty-five years ago the Germans killed Greeks for no reason at all, cut off their hands and put out their eyes. And now, every summer, they flock to Greece in the thousands, take snap-shots of the white houses and the smiling men on donkeys and suffer from sun-burn.
But it’s Adoni who tells me about the Germans and their cameras. How should I know about Greece? I haven’t been there for thirty years.
What do you do when your country is in ruins, when a war’s robbed you of a father, then a mother, and of a nice future all lined up for you in the family business? You do what any Greek does. You find a wife who’ll go halves with you; you get on a boat to New York or England, where you’re going to open a restaurant. In five or ten years, you say, when you’ve made your pile, you’ll go back to Greece. Twenty years later, when you’ve only just saved enough money to open that restaurant, and you know there’s no money in restaurants anyway, you wake up to the fact that you’re never going to go back. Even if you were offered the chance you wouldn’t take it.
Yes, I want sunshine. I’m a Greek. What am I doing in the Caledonian Road? I should be sitting in one of the big, noisy cafés on Stadiou or Ermou, clicking my beads and reading To Vima. But that’s how it is: You’re made for one soil, but you put down roots in another and then you can’t budge.
And why do I say “Greek”? There are Greeks and Greeks. I was born in Smyrna in Asia Minor. When I was a tiny baby, only a few months old, I was bundled with my parents onto a French ship, because another bunch of butchers, not the Germans this time but the Turks, were burning Greek houses and lopping off the heads of any Greeks they could catch.
Yes, that’s the way it is: We’re born in confusion and that’s how we live.
I can hear Anna clattering in the kitchen below. She’s talking to Adoni just as if nothing has happened, everything’s the same. It’s funny how women can make changes; it’s men who are obstinate. “Go and lie down, Kostaki mou,” she says. “You’re tired. Leave the clearing up to Adoni and me.” And so I climb the stairs, take off my shoes, my trousers and shirt and lie down in the cramped bedroom from which we can never quite get rid of the smell of food — just as I do every day for a half hour or so between when we shut after lunch and when we open again in the evening. But, today, a little longer.
Tired. Why shouldn’t I be tired? Yesterday — what a day! — I had to get up early to meet Adoni at the airport. Then we didn’t get to bed till nearly three in the morning. And then, these last two weeks, I’ve had to work extra hard because Adoni suddenly takes it into head to have a holiday. In Greece. After thirty-five years, he wants to have a holiday.
Adoni, Adoni. Who could have given him that name that sounds so preposterous in English? Adonis. It wasn’t us who gave it him. Though Adoni was none the wiser. Adonis Alexopoulos, son of Kosta and Anna; born, Athens, 1944; and carried away by his parents — just as I was carried away from Smyrna — to a new land. How was he to know that his real father was in some mass grave in Poland and his mother had died bringing him into the world? He was taken in by Anna’s family, who lived only a block away from us in Kasseveti Street and just a stone’s throw from where Adoni’s real parents — whose name was Melianos — had lived. Anna said when we got married we’d adopt Adoni as our own son. I wasn’t sure if what she meant was: If you want me, then you’ll have to take Adoni too. But I agreed. I thought: All right, Anna can have Adoni and sooner or later I’ll get a real son of my own. But what Anna never told me was that she couldn’t have babies. She was an only daughter and all four of her would-be brothers had been still-born monsters.
What a shameful thing for a man to live thirty-five years not knowing that his parents are not his parents at all. But what a worse shame for a man to have to be told. We always said: When he is old enough we will tell him. But “old enough” always seemed to be just a little bit older. What you put off starts to become impossible. We even began to kid ourselves: He really is ours; he isn’t anybody else’s.
Perhaps there’s a curse on adopted children. Perhaps the fact that they don’t have any real parents comes out, not consciously, but in the sort of stunted way they grow up. What did he become, this Adonis of ours? Slow at school, bashful with the other kids; silent; secretive. Every year we waited for him to bloom like a little flower. We said to ourselves: One day he will start chasing the girls; one day he will stay out at night and not come home till late; one day he will stand up and row with his father and say, I want nothing to do with this crazy idea of opening a restaurant, and slam the door on us. I actually wanted these things to happen, because that’s how real sons behave with their fathers.
But none of it happened. At eighteen, when we buy the restaurant, and when he’s still as chaste and sober as a monk, he puts on a waiter’s jacket without so much as a murmur. He learns to cook dolmades and soudsoukakia. He gets up early every morning to clean up from the night before and to go and order meat and vegetables, and when he does this he doesn’t swop jokes with the traders, he simply sticks out a big, podgy finger at what he wants. In the evenings, he doesn’t prance and scurry like a waiter should; he lumbers between the tables like a great bear. For even in appearance this Adonis is a rebel to his name. His flesh is pale and pasty; at thirty-five he has the thick build of a man twenty years older. When I make introductions to some of my more enthusiastic customers, when I say, like a proud Greek restaurant owner should, “This is my wife Anna, and this is my son Adonis” (for I’ve told that lie to half of Camden), I see a snigger cross their faces because the name is so absurd.