I went to my room and crawled into the narrow bed, feeling like a very sick little old man. The sky lowered and pressed against the window with soft blunt insistence. Strange evening light was about me. I fell into a hot and horrible sleep as the thunder began to bellow.
In herds.
Epataphios, procession of death, wound snake-like through the streets, with little bells, and voices weeping in the dying light. First came the cross grotesquely leaping in the acolyte’s small hands, Christ recrucified in gold, ringed round by candle blades, and after that the bier, draped in a purple pall. Petals of flowers fell like snow among the wreaths of roses, the yellow lemon blossom. Came the shy girls and widows, the wives, old men and boys, the priests in robes of stately red and purple. Incense and wax, sweat, death, fire and flower, all these were brought together into the image of a tiny angelic child in white, singing plaintively, mourning with unconscious splendour the little lost hopes of men. I turned away, troubled by things which I dared not investigate, and took to the lanes and deserted back streets of the village, a three-legged dog at my heels. The storm had washed the air, and now a drenched limpid tenderness was abroad on the evening. Darkness drifted slowly down, like soft black glass, from out of a pale sky. With my hands in my pockets I wandered aimlessly, musing on the passage of time, death, the mystery of art. At least, if those were not my thoughts, they should have been, on such an evening.
I met Erik. He came stalking out of the darkness like some strange armorial beast, his lips drawn back from his teeth: a cemetery gate open in the moonlight. He was washed, and even shaved, and the deeper wrinkles had been shaken from his tubular suit. His huge boots banged on the cobbles. It took him a moment to remember me, to place me in the context of his awful morning. He halted uncertainly.
‘Hello Erik,’ I said.
He smiled, nodding ruefully, and jabbed a finger at me.
‘White, my friend, how are you?’
‘Fine.’
We set off down the alleyway. Erik clasped his hands behind his back, and pursed his lips. I suspect he was trying to think of something to say. Who knows what depths of groundless malice gave to my voice its careless inflexion when I said,
‘You heard about the murder, I suppose? It was our friend Black. I’m afraid you won’t be able to meet him now.’
Sea-sickness and drink had dulled the edge of his perception. It took him the space of two or three steps to realize the significance of what I had told him. He came to a standstill and looked at me like an inquisitive crow.
‘Black?’ he murmured.
I nodded.
‘Yes indeed. Hadn’t you heard?’
‘But they have not yet identified the body. How could you know?’
‘I was there.’
‘I see.’
I became bored with the game. He was too calm. Had he been better material, I would have kept him dancing for a good ten minutes more, shooting tiny fragments of tantalizing information at his toes like bullets. But Erik was a professional survivor, had seen more disasters than I could imagine, and he was too calm. Besides, he knew the rules of my game. I told him what I had seen, what I had done. I was proud of myself and my handling of the situation, I admit it, I was pleased as I could be. What did it matter if terror had for a moment made a gibbering imbecile of me? There was no need to mention that. Erik was silent for a long while, scratching his jaw, then he clicked his teeth, and said,
‘Fang.’
‘What do you mean, Fang?’
He stared at me as though he had forgotten, yet again, who I was.
‘Well?’ I cried.
He grinned. This would not do, by god, this was mutiny, now he was playing with me. He patted my arm.
‘Everything is fine,’ he said. ‘Fine. Come along, we must have a drink to mourn the dead.’
I turned on my heel and strode away from him. Soft laughter rattled the darkness at my back.
After a search, we found a taverna that was open in that penitential season, a gloomy place with some chairs, a table or two, and an oil lamp swinging under the blackened ceiling. We peered into the shadows, and something spoke.
‘What you want?’
From a corner a single eye regarded us malevolently.
‘Retsina,’ I said, in my very best Greek. ‘Retsina parakalo.’
The eye came forward, and the lamplight set beside it a dirty black patch, a head around it, a twisted trunk below with one sleeve of a jacket hanging empty. Another mutilated relic of forgotten wars.
‘What you want?’ the moist mouth barked again.
‘Wine, some wine for my friend and me. Retsina, yes?’
‘No retsina, no wine.’
‘Oh for the love of Jesus.’
Erik was already sitting at a table near the door, chewing his nails abstractedly and looking at the street. I joined him. After a time the cripple brought a carafe and a pair of greasy glasses. He banged them down on the table with a grunt, and shuffled back into his corner. I filled a measure of wine for Erik and myself. I said,
‘Andreas doesn’t trust me. He called me a coward.’
Erik softly sniggered.
‘Andreas trusts no one,’ he said.
‘Not even himself?’
‘Himself least of all.’
He shrugged, and frowned, and it came to me that Andreas was not the only cripple in that strange pair, for Erik also seemed to be wounded in some deep-lying fibre, though what that wound was, or what that fibre, I could not yet say. It took me a long time to realize that Erik … but no matter, no matter, everything in its place. He sat half turned away from me, his untidy profile cut against the last faint light in the doorway. I had a crimson glimpse of blood and screams.
‘Do you really think all this is necessary here in Greece now?’ I asked.
He did not look at me, but pursed his lips, and lifted his four fingers to let them fall one by one in rapid succession, a little tune on the scale of hopelessness. I clacked my teeth irritably, and his little grey eyes swivelled round and glanced at me quizzically.
‘Why do you do that?’ he asked, with real interest.
I cast about for the root of what had angered me, and could see it but dimly.
‘This whole revolution thing,’ I cried, waving my arms.
‘What about it?’
‘Ah, I don’t know. It’s not real.’
‘Then why are you —’
‘Because I’m bored.’
The answer surprised us both, and we fell silent. It was true, and I was sorry I had said it. Accidie was my greatest fear. I tried to retrieve something.
‘He was shot in the neck, there, it blew a hole that size. I mean, you didn’t see it. I don’t know. Deaths, murders … I just want to write a little book, that’s all.’
I took a drink and watched the darkness deepen in the street. Nightheat lay heavy about us. Suddenly Erik cackled. His laughter, if it could be called that, died as abruptly as it had begun. He took off his spectacles and folded them carefully on the table before him, then with a thumb and forefinger he massaged the bridge of his nose.