“Adonaki,” I tell him, “try to use a little charm — you know, charm.” But it’s no use trying to make that pudding face sparkle. I shouldn’t complain: he works hard; he doesn’t spill food or make mistakes over the bills; he pulls corks out of bottles as if he’s plucking feathers. And I’m the one who, over the years, has learnt to provide charm. In the evening I’m all smiles. I joke with my customers; I put a sprig of herbs behind my ear — so I can imagine them saying about me: That Kosta in the restaurant, he’s a character. And even though I lie in bed in the afternoon, in my yellowed vest, like a great lump of dough, yet, come opening time, I never fail to play my part and give a twinkle to my eyes. We Greeks are like that: We come alive, we perform, like drooping flowers splashed with water.
Anna is coming up the stairs. The stair-case creaks. She is heavier even than me. She’ll take her lie-down. But Adoni won’t lie down. He’ll sit in the restaurant with his feet up on one of the chairs, smoke a cigarette and read the newspaper or one of his books from the library—Mysteries of the Past, The Secret of Mind-Power—slowly and methodically. Though he’s slow, he likes asking questions, that boy. And he finds out the answers. Oh yes. Give him time, he’ll find out about everything.
Anna waddles into the bedroom. I pretend that I’m asleep, though I watch her with one half-closed eye. She kicks off her shoes, then her fat arms grope to undo her dress. It falls off her without her having to help it, like a monument being unveiled. In her slip she is like a huge pale blancmange inside a white, diaphanous wrapping. She shuffles around to her side of the bed, winds and sets the alarm-clock. She always does this in case we oversleep. But I’ve never known a time when she wasn’t awake and heaving herself onto her feet without the alarm having to remind her. She’s like that: She does what has to be done. That vast body of hers is built for sweating in the kitchen and scrubbing pans. We men, we like our fancies, our bit of hot spice in a skirt, but where would we be without these great work-horses to pull us through?
She settles down next to me and she sees that I’m not really asleep. I open my eyes. “It doesn’t matter, Kostaki,” she says. “It doesn’t matter. Who are we anyway?”
Her body smells of warm grease and scouring powder. How can it be that that womb of hers — which can now produce nothing — would have once produced not men but deformities? How can it be that she has grown into this vast flesh-mountain? And yet once — it doesn’t seem possible — in the scrubby bushes on Hymettos, when I was a dolt of eighteen, she said, “Ela pethí mou,” and pulled my hand between her legs.
Sometimes I wonder what Adoni thinks of women. I swear, at twenty-five he’d never touched one. I used to say to him, every other night, “You take the evening off, Adoni, Anna and I can manage,” so as to give him the opportunity; but he’d shrug, shake his head and carry on skewering kebabs. Then we started to hire waitresses. It’s a good idea, if you can afford it, to hire pretty waitresses. It attracts customers, apart from easing the load. But my real reason for hiring waitresses was to encourage Adoni. I’m an immoral old man. First there was Carol, then Diane, then Christine, but Christine was the best. After we closed at night I used to get Anna to go to bed early. I’d go with her, and leave Adoni and the waitress to clear up. I’d lie in bed with one ear cocked, thinking: “It’s all right, Adoni, don’t have any qualms. Take your chance. Live up to your name. Don’t you want that little Christine? Doesn’t she make your blood hot? Take her up to your room and screw her for your Mama’s and Father’s sake — we won’t mind.” But nothing ever happened. And to make matters worse, I couldn’t resist, after a time, clapping my hand, more than once, on that Christine’s bottom, and poking my finger down the front of her blouse. And though no one else ever knew about it, she gave her notice, and the next waitress we got — perhaps it was just as well — was a mousy thing with a perpetual sniff.
Adoni approached his thirtieth birthday. I began to be ashamed of him. This son of mine — he wasn’t a man, he wasn’t a Greek; he wasn’t anything. But there I go again: “this son of mine.” What right did I have to that sort of shame? What right did I have to the fatherly luxury of wanting my own son to have a little more pleasure in his youth than I’d had in those miserable, famished years in Athens? The truth is I wanted a real son, the son I’d been tricked out of, not this wooden substitute. But Anna was menopausal. I was menopausal too. Sometimes I wept.
And then I began to think: It’s a punishment. It’s because we never told Adoni in the first place. If we’d told him, perhaps he’d have developed in a normal way, because at least he’d have known who he was. But there’s no hiding a fraud when it’s a matter of blood. I started to think: Perhaps he knows, perhaps he’s worked it out by some sort of sixth sense and it’s he who’s punishing us. Because we’re not a true mother and father to him, he’s behaving as if he’s nothing to us. I said to myself: Any moment he’s going to come out with it: “Anna, Kosta, I can’t call you Mother and Father any more.” And how could I have forestalled him? By saying to him, “Adoni, you’re thirty-three now — it’s time you were told something”? I began to look for signs of suspicion, of rebellion in him. He only had to show the slightest coolness to Anna — if he was slow to answer her when she spoke, for example — and I’d fly into a towering rage.
Ach! Did I say I was menopausal? Did I say I was paranoid?
And then — what happens? Adoni asks for time off. He starts to go out at night, and in the afternoons too. “Of course,” I say. “Take a whole day off — have a good time.” And I start to breathe more easily. I don’t say anything more, but I look for signs. Is he using a lot of after-shave? Is he slicking his hair? Is he trying to lose some of that premature fat and learn some modern dance steps? And I think: When the moment is ripe I’ll say to him, Here, come and sit down with me, have a brandy. Now tell me, who is this nightingale? But I don’t smell any after-shave; and though Adoni goes out at night he doesn’t come home late; there are no stars in his eyes; and I see him, sometimes, reading these big books, the kind you blow the dust off.
“Adonaki,” I say, “what do you do when you go out?”
“I go to the library.”
“What the hell do you go to the library for?”
“To read books, Baba.”
“But you come in at ten and eleven. The libraries don’t stay open till then.”
He lowers his eyes, and I smile. “Come on, Adoni mou, you can tell me.”
And I’m surprised by what he says.
“I go to the Neo Elleniko, Baba.”
I’ve heard of the Neo Elleniko. It is a club in Camden for so-called expatriate Greeks. It is full of old men who tell tall, repetitious stories and like to believe they are melancholy, worldly-wise exiles. They are all trellí. What is more, two thirds of them aren’t Greeks at all. They are crazy Cypriots. I’ve no time for the Neo Elleniko.
“What do you want with all those old madmen?”
“I talk to them, Baba. I ask them questions.”
Now it’s my turn to drop my eyes. So Adoni really is playing the detective. He wants to have answers. Is there a gleam in his eye? Maybe some of those old fogies at the Neo Elleniko were around in our neighbourhood in Nea Ionia during the war, or maybe they know people who were. He’s trying to get at the truth.