None of this was entirely foreign to Soukiouroglou, but in Bristol it seemed more appealing. Perhaps it was the unbearable wetness of the place, or the solitude, the fact that he never heard Greek being spoken on the street. He even dreamed in English. It wasn’t something he enjoyed — on the contrary, it was a heavy price to pay.
He wrote two articles while he was there and took notes for more, but nothing could make up for the nights he spent shut up in the cell of a room they gave him, his gaze trained on the wall. As was natural, he became even more suspicious in the face of what was commonly known as truth. So many of his fundamental certainties had been shaken. And yet deep down, he knew it was all not much more than intellectual gymnastics. He didn’t see the wisdom in radical skepticism.
On his return to Greece, he was a different person altogether. Fani was the first to notice. Your voice changed, she’d said. It’s deeper, less certain.
That lesson from his days in Bristol was what he wanted to share with Minas, whose paper he had conceived as an exercise in recognizing that there were multiple versions of reality. A simple statement of the various viewpoints on the case wasn’t what Souk had in mind.
Souk’s colleagues couldn’t believe how slippery he was, pretending to be some kind of monk and then suddenly showing up in the society column in a tender tête-a-tête with Fani Dokou. The photograph that got published the morning after the concert showed them leaning in toward one another. Rumors flew, his colleagues jumped to all kinds of conclusions.
But the joking and laughter stopped abruptly when Souk walked into the teachers’ office, silent and obviously exhausted. He had sunglasses on and didn’t bother saying hello to anyone. They observed his entrance, exchanging glances and committing his movements to memory, as fodder for later conversations. Souk opened his locker, got out his things, and made photocopies for class. He still hadn’t said a word to anyone by the time he headed down to morning prayer. He never crossed himself during prayer, a stance that had attracted comments of all sorts during the years he’d been working at the school.
He was in no mood for small talk or smiles. He stood behind the rows of students, alone, entirely alone, with an armful of books shielding his stomach.
He had missed Fani. They tried to keep up on the phone, but sometimes things got in the way: concert tours, travel, resounding silences initiated by one or the other or both. But then at some point they would simply pick up the thread again, start right where they’d left off, in the middle of a sentence, telling stories to fill in the gaps. Fani told him about experiences she’d had, things she’d done and seen, while he mostly talked about what he’d been reading. They never intruded on one another’s lives, perhaps out of discreteness, perhaps out of discomfort. Souk also talked on the phone with her son. Nikolas Dokos didn’t know Souk all that well, but the boy clearly had a soft spot for him. He was intrigued by the unlikely combination of the teacher’s austere, almost ascetic personality and the abrupt flights of his thought — his unconventional mind, his biting irony, the way he toppled the walls of established logic, overturning everything. Souk didn’t pretend to be a revolutionary, like most of the musicians Nikolas had grown up around. He never launched into long diatribes against the system, he didn’t try to one-up others by being the most radical person around. He said what he thought, didn’t hold back with his opinions, and didn’t change them to suit the circumstances. When you asked nothing of him, he gave you everything. But if you put a knife to his throat, he’d dig his heels in like a mule.
Nikolas would accept advice from Souk that he wouldn’t from Fani. Mostly because there was nothing preachy about him: his relentless irony undermined everything. Nikolas told his mother he didn’t find her friend boring, like all the tutors with their fancy degrees whom Fani paid through the nose to teach her child to give the right answers. And while she was happy that Marinos had developed this channel of communication — even at a distance — with her sourpuss of a son, it worried her, too: even she preferred a more conventional approach to the issue of her son’s education.
So when she saw Nikolas hanging on Marinos’s every word that night after the concert, agreeing with whatever the teacher said, she sent him away. Nikolas went off in a huff. For the thousandth time, his mother was spoiling his fun.
Fani leaned toward her friend, whom she hadn’t seen in a long time. He was the one she called with unwashed hair, in pajamas and slippers, when Nikolas was driving her up the wall, but also when she had some important job prospect that she wanted to discuss. She was eternally grateful that she’d never shared a bed with him, as she had with most of her friends, artists with high ambitions and low self-awareness. He wasn’t a very physical person, or at least that’s what she used to think, when she was an undergraduate and would watch him in the lecture hall, the graduate student and teaching assistant for the course. He seemed to be wrapped in barbed wire. The other students didn’t like him, called him a leper, or uptight. They made fun of her for talking to him. But Fani liked how Souk kept his distance. He shunned the crowd. Though in the end he paid for it.
— Why don’t you have a job at the university? she asked abruptly that night after the concert.
He showed no surprise at the question. It was one Fani often returned to. From the moment his advisor, Asteriou, had retired, Fani wouldn’t let it rest.
— I’m not cut out for that kind of institution, Souk replied.
— You’re wasting your life at the school, Fani insisted.
— Who says?
— I do. What on earth are you doing there? I mean, I’m sure you’re doing those brats some good, I see how Nikolas is with you. But you’re made for other things.
— Mmmm, he murmured ironically.
— You’re a fool, Fani said, starting to get mad. A stubborn fool. The king of fools, the fool to end all fools.
— For a bard, your prose isn’t half bad, either, he teased.
Fani tickled him in the ribs. She liked touching him. Sometimes she pinched, or sank her nails into his flesh, or, like now, tested him with a tickle. She liked seeing him pull back in a panic. His body was on alert, it wouldn’t stand for any incursion, even in the form of a caress.
— I’m not cut out for all that, he repeated. Running around to conferences, padding my c.v., making connections. I’m a solitary researcher.
— Okay, Lucky Luke.
Fani clinked her glass against his. After a concert a few drinks helped her relax. But even with alcohol, she could never get to sleep before dawn.
— You don’t understand, Souk insisted. You think things would be better there.
— Yes, I do, Fani answered without hesitation.
He weighed her with his eyes.
— I’m not going back there, even if they burn me alive.
— Well, I can’t argue with that, Fani said, and let the subject rest.
Grandpa Dinopoulos was walking slowly from the olive tree at one end of the veranda to the mallows at the other and back again. Elena helped ease him into the turn. The weather was lovely, the sun caressed his bald spot and eyes, warmed his pajamas. This brief excursion onto the veranda had lifted his mood. So much so that he was considering asking Elena to read him a few pages from the penal code. It might give her some trouble, but she’d manage, she was diligent and compliant, and her Greek wasn’t bad. He was already daydreaming of the moment when he would sink into his armchair and listen.