“They won’t tell you anything but vlakíes.” Spittle comes to my lips.
“Why are you angry, Baba?”
“I’m not angry. Don’t call me ‘Baba.’ You’re not a kid.”
He shrugs. And suddenly his round, waxy, somehow far-off face seems the face of just another man, a man who could be my age — someone you meet over some minor transaction, shake hands with, then forget.
“All right. If you like the company of old men — if there aren’t any better things to do — you go to the Neo Elleniko. Don’t ask me to come too.”
This was in the spring. I tell myself: It’s only a matter of time. I feel like a guilty criminal. What are we going to tell all those people we’ve told Adoni is our son? Anna says, “Don’t worry, glikó mou. Nothing will happen. It’s all in the past. It’s too late for anything to change.”
And then, some time in July, he says: “Father, I want to take a holiday this summer. You don’t mind? All these years I haven’t taken a holiday.”
I look in his eyes for any extra meaning.
“Okay — if you want to take a holiday, take a holiday. Where are you going?” But I know the answer to this one.
“I want to go to Greece, Baba.”
And so he buys his air tickets and a suitcase and lightweight clothes. He can afford all this, with all the money he hasn’t spent on women. And what can I do to stop him? I even envy him — stepping off the plane at Glyfada into that syrupy heat.
His holiday is fixed for a fortnight in September. I become resigned. Let him go. He’s thirty-five. It’s fated. Like King Oedipus he’s got to ask these fool questions. He’s got to find out where he came from.
And Anna says: “Why do you look so miserable, Kostaki? Our little Adoni — so serious, so sovaró—he’s going to take a holiday. He wants a little sunshine.”
The alarm goes. Anna is already up, buttoning her dress. I haven’t slept a wink. I raise myself and scratch my belly. Soon, we shall have to go through it all again, the old nightly ritual. Anna’s fat hands will garnish salads. Adoni will lollop round the tables. And I will have to pretend once again I’m Zorba the Greek.
Outside it’s raining. Anna hoists up her sleeves like a workman. In England now it’s already autumn. But in Athens the nights are still like ovens and the pavements smell like hot biscuits.
So I get up at four to meet him at the airport, my heart beating, like a man in a cell awaiting his trial. I see him come out of Customs, and I can tell at once — there’s something about the way he walks — that he knows. I can’t kid myself any more he’s a son of mine. But I hug him and clap him on the shoulder just like a father should, and I think of all those scenes in which fathers meet sons who have been away a long time, in far-off lands, at sea, at war, and I don’t look straight at Adoni in case he sees the wet glint in my eyes.
“Eh, Adonaki — you look well. Did you have a good time? Tell me what’s it like. Did you go to Vouliagmeni? Sounio? Did you get the boat to Idra? Eh, tell me, Adoni mou, the Athenian girls, are they still—” I raise my hand, fingers and thumb together “—phrouta?”
“My suitcase, Baba—” he blinks as if he never meant to say that word, and he slips free of me to go to the luggage escalator.
In the car I’m waiting for him to spit it out. I can see it’s there nudging at his lips. Okay, so you’ve been nosing around in Nea Ionia, you’ve been asking questions. You haven’t been on holiday at all. Say it. Get it over with, for God’s sake. But he doesn’t say it. Maybe he’s scared, too, to speak. Instead, he tells me about Athens. There are these tourists everywhere, and nowhere to get a decent meal in the centre of town. Vouliagmeni? Yes. It crawls with close-packed bodies and you have to pay to get on a clean piece of beach. Idra? It’s full of Germans, clicking their cameras.
And I realise the delapidated but companionable Greece I knew — and which Adoni knew, via my memory — isn’t there any more.
“And the girls, Adonaki?”
Later that same day he gets back into his waiter’s outfit, starts slicing the bread and pulling the corks, just as if he’d never been away. I’m still waiting for him to pluck up the courage. We keep eyeing each other as we pass each other with plates, and Anna looks at me anxiously in the kitchen.
But it’s not until we’ve closed for the night that the moment comes. For I wasn’t mistaken: I knew it had to come. We’re sitting in the empty restaurant, sipping coffee, asking Adoni about Athens. And suddenly something Adoni says sets Anna going. Her eyes glaze. She starts remembering Nea Ionia before the war: the old balconied houses, the families along her street, the Vassilious, the Kostopoulous, the one-eyed fig-seller, Trianda-philos. I look at her ferociously. She must know this is like a cue. But perhaps she means it as a cue.
“As to! Koutamares! Go and make some more coffee!”
Anna shuffles off, and I know the time has come — and I know Anna will be waiting, ears pricked as she stands by the stove, until it’s passed.
He lights a cigarette.
“Do you know? — I went to see if I could find Kassaveti Street. It’s still there, though all the building’s new. And — do you know? — I even found one of the Vassilious — Kitsos Vassiliou, he’d be a little older than me. And he told me where I could find old Elias Tsobanidis. Do you remember him?”
Yes, I remember. He seemed about seventy when I was only a boy. I’m staggered he’s still alive.
He toys with his coffee cup. There’s a silence like a huge weight tilting.
“You know what I am going to say, don’t you?” Suddenly his face seems no longer puddingy and soft but made of something like stone.
“Yes, yes. Say it. Say it! Say it!”
“Elias Tsobanidis told me — or he said things so that I could work it out — that my real name isn’t Alexopoulos — it’s Melianos. My mother died when I was born and my father died in the war.”
“It’s true, it’s true. It’s the truth!” I wish I could blubber like a sinful old man.
“Forgive me, Adonaki.”
But he looks at me with that hard, determined face — where has he acquired that from? He draws on his cigarette. His big fingers are leathery and blunt. And suddenly it seems not just that he’s a grown man but that he’s old, he’s lost the youth he never had.
He puts down his cigarette, leans forward across the table, and then he says, cool as ice:
“Elias told me something else too. You know that what Elias says must be the truth, don’t you? He said your name is not Alexopoulos either. The Alexopouloses were neighbours of your parents in Smyrna — they were in the tobacco business — and they were the ones who got you onto the refugee ship. Your mother and father were killed when the Turks burnt the city.”
I look at him as if he is a ghost. I notice that Anna is standing in the doorway. She too looks like a ghost and she is looking at me as if I am a ghost.
We’re all ghosts. But at the same time I know, I see it as plain as anything — we’re all going to carry on just as before, performing our rituals in the restaurant as if nothing has changed, pretending we’re people we’re not.
“Elias Tsobanidis is an old liar!” I start to yell, to this “son” I’ve lied to all my life. “An old liar! An old liar!”
Tell me, who are we? What’s important, what isn’t? Is it better to live in ignorance? All my life I’ve felt guilty because I chopped off my mother’s fingers, and now I learn it wasn’t my mother at all. Ach! And two of those heads the Turks lopped off in Smyrna, two of them belonged to my father and mother.