The garden was thoroughly disreputable, the windows boarded up. A lottery-ticket seller sitting on a chair under a pepper tree nearby asked what I wanted, but I took no notice of him. I walked to the front door, then round the back. The house was a shell. There had been a fire, evidently some years before, and the flat roof had fallen in. I looked into a garden at the rear. It was as dry and unkempt and deserted as the front. The back door gaped open. There were signs, among the fallen rafters and charred walls, that tramps or Vlach gypsies had lived there; the trace of a more recent fire on an old hearth. I waited for a minute, but I somehow sensed that there was nothing to find. It was a false trail.
I returned to the waiting yellow taxi. The dust from the dry earth rose in little swirls in the day breeze and powdered the already drab leaves of the thin oleanders. Traffic ran up and down Syngrou, the leaves of a palm tree by the gate rustled. The ticket seller was talking to my taxi driver. He turned as I came out.
“Zitas kanenan?” Looking for someone?
“Whose house is that?”
He was an unshaven man in a worn gray suit, a dirty white shirt without a tie; his rosary of amber patience beads in his hand. He raised them, disclaiming knowledge.
“Now. I do not know. Nobody’s.”
I looked at him from behind my dark glasses. Then said one word.
“Conchis?”
Immediately his face cleared, as if he understood all. “Ah. I understand. You are looking for o kyrios Conchis?”
“Yeah.”
He flung open his hands. “He is dead.”
“When?”
“Four, five years.” He held up four fingers; then cut his throat and said “Kaput.” I looked past him to where his long stick of tickets, propped up against the chair, flapped in the wind.
I smiled acidly at him, speaking in English. “Where do you come from? The National Theatre?” But he shook his head, as if he didn’t understand.
“A very rich man.” He looked down at the driver, as if he would understand, even if I didn’t. “He is buried in St. George’s. A fine cemetery.” And there was something so perfect in his typical Greek idler’s smile, in the way he extended such unnecessary information, that I began almost to believe that he was what he seemed.
“Is that all?” I asked.
“Ne, ne. Go and see his grave. A beautiful grave.”
I got into the taxi. He rushed for his stick of tickets, and brandished them through the window.
“You will be lucky. The English are always lucky.” He picked one off, held it to me. “Eh. Just one little ticket.”
I spoke sharply to the driver. He did a U-turn, but after fifty yards I stopped him outside a café. I beckoned to a waiter.
The house back there, did he know who it belonged to?
Yes. To a widow called Ralli, who lived in Corfu.
I looked through the rear window. The ticket seller was walking quickly, much too quickly, in the opposite direction; and as I watched, he turned down a side alley out of sight.
At four o’clock that afternoon, when it was cooler, I caught a bus out to the cemetery. It lay some miles outside Athens, on a wooded slope of Mount Aigaleos. When I asked the old man at the gate I half expected a blank look. But he went painfully inside his lodge, fingered through a large register, and told me I must go up the main alley; then fifth right. I walked past lines of toy Ionic temples and columned busts and fancy steles, a forest of Hellenic bad taste; but pleasantly green and shady.
Fifth left. And there, between two cypresses, shaded by a mournful aspidistra-like plant, lay a simple Pentelic marble slab with, underneath a cross, the words:
Four years dead.
At the foot of the slab was a small green pot in which sat, rising from a cushion of inconspicuous white flowers, a white arum lily and a red rose. I knelt and took them out. The stems were recently cut, probably from only that morning; the water was clear and fresh. I understood; it was his way of telling me what I had already guessed, that detective work would lead me nowhere—to a false grave, to yet another joke, a smile fading into thin air.
I replaced the flowers. One of the humbler background sprigs fell and I picked it up and smelt it; a sweet, honey fragrance. Since there was a rose and a lily, perhaps it had some significance. I put it in my buttonhole, and forgot about it.
At the gate I asked the old man if he knew of any relatives of the deceased Maurice Conchis. He looked in his book again for me, but there was nothing. Did he know who had brought the flowers? No, many people brought flowers. The breeze raised the wispy hairs over his wrinkled forehead. He was an old, tired man.
The sky was very blue. A plane droned down to the airport on the other side of the Attic plain. Other visitors came, and the old man limped away.
The dinner that evening was dreadful, the epitome of English vacuity. Before I went, I had some idea that I might tell them a little about Bourani; I saw a spellbound dinner table. But the idea did not survive the first five minutes of conversation. There were eight of us, five from the Council, an Embassy secretary, and a little middle-aged queer, a critic, who had come to do some lectures. There was a good deal of literary chitchat. The queer waited like a small vulture for names to be produced.
“Has anyone read Murdoch’s latest?” asked the Embassy man.
“Couldn’t stand it.”
“Oh I rather enjoyed it.”
The queer touched his bowtie. “Of course you know what Iris said when she…”
I looked round the other faces, after he had done this for the tenth time, hoping to see a flicker of fellow feeling, someone else who wanted to shout at him that writing was about books, not the trivia of private lives. But they were all the same, each mind set in the same weird armor, like an archosaur’s ruff, like a fringe of icicles. All I heard the whole evening was the tinkle of broken ice needles as people tried timidly and vainly to reach through the stale fence of words, tinkle, tinkle, and then withdrew.
Nobody said what they really wanted, what they really thought. Nobody behaved with breadth, with warmth, with naturalness; and finally it became pathetic. I could see that my host and his wife had a genuine love of Greece, but it lay choked in their throats. The critic made a perceptive little disquisition on Leavis, and then ruined it by a cheap squirt of malice. We were all the same; I said hardly anything, but that made me no more innocent—or less conditioned. The solemn figures of the Old Country, the Queen, the Public School, Oxbridge, the Right Accent, People Like Us, stood around the table like secret police, ready to crush down in an instant on any attempt at an intelligent European humanity.
It was symptomatic that the ubiquitous person of speech was “one”—it was one’s view, one’s friends, one’s servants, one’s favorite writer, one’s traveling in Greece, until the terrible faceless Avenging God of the British, One, was standing like a soot-blackened obelisk over the whole evening.
I walked back to the hotel with the critic, thinking, in a kind of agonized panic, of the light-filled solitudes of Phraxos; of the losses I had suffered.
“Dreadful bores, these Council people,” he said. “But one has to live.” He didn’t come in. He said he would stroll up to the Acropolis. But he strolled towards Zappeion, a park where the more desperate of the starving village boys who flock to Athens sell their thin bodies for the price of a meal.
I went to Zonar’s in Panepistemiou and sat at the bar and had a large brandy. I felt upset, profoundly unable to face the return to England. I was in exile, and forever, whether I lived there or not. The fact of exile I could stand; but the loneliness of exile was intolerable.
It was about half-past twelve when I got back to my room. There was the usual hot airlessness of nocturnal Athens in summer. I had just stripped off my clothes and turned on the shower when the telephone rang by the bed. I went naked to it. I had a grim idea that it would be the critic, unsuccessful at Zappeion and now looking for a target for his endless Christian names.