On the evening of the seventeenth, a party. At the house of a young professor of literature at the university, more Roxanne’s friend than his, but he was happy enough to go. Roxanne had a huge appetite for parties; Zannis went along, smiled, talked, looked covertly at his watch. This particular party was nothing new-Salonika’s high bohemian caste gathered for wine and retsina, seductions physical and social-but it was apparently one of the more important parties that autumn, because Elias showed up. Elias, the king of the city’s poets, and of sufficient stature and self-esteem to call himself by one name only, perhaps his first, perhaps his last, perhaps neither-maybe chosen for mellifluous sonority, who knew. Elias certainly looked like the king of the poets, with snow-white prophet’s beard and Einstein hair. “He doesn’t own a comb,” went the local witticism. “He just unscrews the bulb and sticks his finger in a lamp.” Discovering Zannis-they’d met several times-hiding in a corner, Elias rocked back on his heels and squinted his eyes, like a zoologist encountering an interesting animal. “Ah Zannis, you’re here.”
“Nice to see you, Elias.”
“So, how goes life with the bullyboys?”
“Myself, I avoid them.”
“Really? So do I.”
“Are you hard at work, these days?”
“I am, yes I am. Perhaps a new book next year.”
“I look forward to reading it.”
“Do you have the others?”
“I’ve given a couple of them as gifts, and I have one of my own. Dawn-um …”
“Dawn of the Goddess.”
“That’s it.”
“Maybe not my best. Early work.”
“I liked it,” Zannis said. “The one about the owl.”
Elias thought for a time. “‘Night in the Field’?”
“Could be. I don’t exactly remember.”
“‘In the late night, the huntress wakes to hunt’? That one?”
“Right. That one.”
“Zannis, it isn’t about an owl. It’s about-well, a woman, a woman I knew.”
You knew a woman who ate mice? Skata! “Elias,” he said, “I’m just a policeman.” He didn’t say, “just a simple policeman,” but even so Elias heard the simple, which meant that Zannis had pushed the proper button, because the word made him a worker, a worker of the world who would, in some misty future, unite.
“Well, maybe you have a point,” Elias said, his voice not unkind. “If you take it literally.”
Zannis sensed that Elias was preparing to escape, but Zannis wasn’t ready to let him go. “Tell me, Elias, do you ever go up into the mountains? See old friends?” It was said of Elias, and Zannis believed it to be true, that as a young man he’d gone to the mountains and fought alongside the klephts. This was the name given to the men from the mountain villages who’d fought the Turks-essentially resistance fighters-and who were sometimes shepherds and sometimes bandits, as well as guerrillas.
Elias changed; his party-guest hauteur vanished. “No,” he said ruefully, now the Elias of a former life. “No, I don’t. I don’t see them. I do go up there, especially in the spring, because it is so beautiful, but what you’re talking about, no, that was a long time ago.”
“True, many years ago. But I’d guess your old friends are still around. The ones who survived.”
Elias had the last sip of his wine. “Are you asking as a policeman?”
Zannis didn’t care for the question. “No, not at all. Those days are long gone, and people in my family did the same thing, against the Turks. I was only curious and, if you really want to know, I was wondering if you’d ever write about it.”
Elias shook his head. “Not me, not ever. Up there, secrecy is a religion, and even though it was long ago you keep faith with it. Not that I’d mind seeing them again; when you fight alongside people, their life is in your hands, yours in theirs; it’s beyond anything else-family, love, anything. And they aren’t like people down here. To them, freedom is everything. You know how they refer to themselves, as adespotoi. Masterless.”
“Yes, I know the word. They aren’t the only ones.”
“Well, maybe not, we’ll see.”
“We’ll see?”
“The war.”
“You think it will come here?”
“The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, yes, all of it, and there will be cowardice and bravery.” Elias paused for a moment, then said, “Of course I hope I’m wrong. The Turkish gendarmerie was bad enough, believe me, but these people …” He looked down at his glass and said, “It appears I’m going to need some more of this.”
“I’m glad we had a chance to talk,” Zannis said.
Maybe Elias wasn’t so glad. His expression, as he nodded a brusque farewell and went off to refill his glass, was vaguely troubled. But not for long. As he reached the middle of the room, he cried out, “Helena! My heart’s desire! Where’ve you been hiding?”
People arrived, nobody left, the room grew warmer, the party got louder, somebody put on a rembetika record, a woman closed her eyes and danced without moving her feet. Zannis talked to a lawyer’s wife, to an actor-“It’s like Sophocles, only modern”-to the professor host, to the cultural attache from the German embassy in Athens-“We are madly Hellenophile; you know, we have a great passion for Greece”-and was happily engaged with a woman painter when Roxanne appeared and towed him away. “Somebody you must meet,” she said.
A tall fellow leaning against a doorframe smiled expectantly as Roxanne led Zannis toward him. Zannis knew immediately that he was English: sand-colored hair swept across a handsome forehead, lines of early middle age graven in a youthful face that made him look like an old boy.
“This is Francis Escovil,” Roxanne said. She gave the name some extra flavor, as though Zannis was expected to know who he was. “The travel writer,” she added.
“Hello,” Escovil said, smiling as he shook hands. He wore his shirt with collar open and one button undone, had an old tweed jacket draped over his shoulders, and was drinking beer from a bottle.
“Please, to meet you,” Zannis said, in his shaky English.
“I hope you’ll be patient with my Greek,” Escovil said, in Greek.
“Francis did classics at Cambridge,” Roxanne said.
“Ancient Greek,” Escovil said, apologetic. “I’m trying to learn the demotic. You’ll have to forgive me if I say odd things.”
“We all say odd things. In all sorts of languages.”
Escovil found the remark amusing. “I see why Roxanne likes you.”
“You’re writing about Salonika?”
“I believe I will. Will try.”
Zannis was puzzled. “You didn’t come here from Britain, did you?”
Escovil laughed. “Now there’s an idea! ‘Despite the war’”-with a dramatic shading of his voice he implied quotation marks-“‘I was off to old Salonika. On the merry battleship-umm, Valorious!’ No, no, when we declared war in ‘thirty-nine I happened to be in Alexandria, so I took a job with the local English newspaper. Not much of a job-it barely pays, you know-but they allow me to do the occasional travel piece.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Zannis could see that Roxanne had the glow of a woman whose two attractive male friends are getting along well. He nodded, now I understand, then said, “Still, it must be hard to find places to write about, with a war going on.”