The Snug: A Blog

 Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

          White, blue; blue, white. Like her flag and the original cover of Ulysses. The prism-sharp light of Greece. Blindingly white, from the dark and increasingly fetid shelter of my train compartment, were the boxy houses, porcelain-blue the sky. Intimidated by the sudden foreignness of everything, exhausted from three days on the Yugoslav horror express, and homesick for our overgrown garden, old Stinko II, and Pete Toy, I lugged my steamer trunk across the vast Levantine city of Athens that was redolent with strange sights and exotic scents, as well as the familiar stink of diesel fumes and charcoal smoke, and settled in at a youth hostel near Syntagma Square, where I signed in and climbed onto my bunk and read, of all (escapist) things, Tales of Gunner Asch by Hans Helmut Kirst (that finest of anti-Nazi German authors) and tried to come to terms with loneliness, distance, and solitude. This last was something I’d have to get used to, for in my attempts to socialize my tendency was to move laterally, with peerless awkwardness, toward a perceived friendliness; then suddenly, crab-like, reverse course, finding refuge in haughty withdrawal. Or I’d gun down a fledgling friendship with weird comments ("Hey! What d'you think of the taillights of the new Peugeot 405?"). Things have improved  since then, but not much. Suffice it to say, however, that I made no friends in my first days in Athens. Anyway, youth hostels are usually full of Antipodean and Nordic hearties or wiry sixty-year-old evangelists with neither conversation nor time for introspection. And at that particular youth hostel, thanks to the haute cuisine on offer, I came down with food poisoning on the day I’d arranged to move in with the Greek family. The next two days were a febrile delirium of projectile vomiting, diarrhoea and yellow eye-discharge. It was in this seductive condition that I arrived, sprawled in the back seat of a taxi, at the Kouzouradis apartment on Roumelis Street, on the day Charles De Gaulle died; I saw his kepi’d newspaper photograph in a swimming fever in the midst of which I still managed to puzzle out the Greek headline referring to “Nte Nkoll” before passing out again.

     When I’d recovered sufficiently to introduce myself, the death of Le Grand Charles provided a subject of small talk to plaster over the awkward gaps, of which there were many, as the lady and man of the house, Irena and Stavros, had little English, and I less Greek. However, Stavros managed to assemble small scraps of mostly-useless German left over from the Nazi occupation (“Haben sie ihren papieren?”; “Warte! Moment mal!” etc.) but his brother, known as Uncle Odysseus, volunteered to serve as interpreter. He spoke English, having allegedly worked at one time in a shipyard in New Jersey. After I’d settled in, he and I took coffee together once or twice a week. It was congenial, at first. I was lonely as a cloud, of course, and it was a relief for me to speak my native tongue after long rambles through the hot alien streets of Athens with their oleander bushes and olive trees and rushing gray taxis and Greek signs and the blue Attic sky above... I was, after all, 20, and fancy-free, and on my own in an exotic and fragrant corner of the Eastern Mediterranean, halfway to Asia Minor. Romance and hormones combined to such a degree that I was afraid it might turn me into a cackling back-alley voyeur with the eyeballs of a Lorre.  But my efforts at social life met with little success. With the guys I was gruff and unapproachable, strong and silent and infinitely superior to the hoi polloi. This guaranteed indifference from one and all, and I made no buddies. With girls I was the same, except with those I fancied, and with them I was ham-fisted, knock-kneed, and tone-deaf to what I was saying, unless drunk, when I was merely incoherent, with that hint of Lorre around the eyes. Even running into Patricia Hedges, my light o’ love from fifteen years earlier on board the R.M.S. Queen Elizabeth…yes, there she was, in the front row in Introductory Archeology 1. Even this incredible coincidence failed to ignite my skills as a suitor. I went off the rails when she mentioned, in the course of one of my introductory set-pieces (“Hi! I’m Irish, I mean Swiss. Actually, I’m from the States, but I live in Switzerland, so I’m kind of Swiss, but not really, being Irish...so anyway, how long have you been over here?”) that she’d sailed over on the old Queen Elizabeth in ‘56. So did I, I exclaimed; then: “God, you aren’t…?” She pretended to remember me and accepted an invitation to share a coffee at one of those student places off the winding alleyways of the Plaka, where she told me, I know not in what context, that her father’s name was Benson. Well! The resulting lame parade of puns and word-plays along the lines of “Heavy smoker, is he?” elicited not the coy yielding I’d been hoping for but an abrupt departure disguised as a nose-powdering intermezzo. One minute she was there and the next she wasn’t, and there I was all on me lonesome, surrounded by Greeks. That evening I ended up drinking with U.S. Navy sailors on shore leave from Piraeus. I spilled the beans about Patricia, and the guys brooded and swore and pounded me affectionately on the back and down went the retsina. Somehow I wound up in the Byzantine chapel in the suburb of Dafni, north of Athens, rocking back on my heels as I gazed upward, gobsmacked, at an enormous glittering mosaic Christ on the ceiling who glared down furiously at me, reducing my unearned pride to much-deserved humility. I slept that night in a vineyard, and awoke at dawn soaked with dew but, briefly, cleansed. 

          After that I said not a word to Patricia, and of course she was a hit with the other boys. So the fates had gone to all that trouble over the years plotting and arranging the most unlikely of coincidental reunions, and there I’d gone and dug chance’s grave with the blunt end of my wit. Ah, well. It just goes to show how meaningless all this coincidence business is, in the end.  Still, Greece wasn’t a total wash in the girl department. I met a demure Greek lady at a birthday party at the Kouzouradis.' Her name was Melina, and she was a cousin of Ireni's, with an urgent need for tutoring in English, as she was soon leaving for a job at the consulate in Toronto. At the party there were giant flasks of retsina, and dolmas, and milky ouzo, and moussaka, and great bowls of spicy olives and mushrooms. Bouzoukis roared; there was even a bit of plate-smashing. Hail, Zorba! Irena slapped Stavros for drinking too much and the old boy’s eyes filled with tears. I got drunk on ouzo and went onto the balcony to smoke and gaze down at the rushing traffic on Venizelos Avenue–and Melina joined me for spirited conversation and, some days later, a tour d'horizon of Kolonaki, the Athens upper-class ghetto, and English classes over coffee on the quiet terraces of the square. Six weeks later she was in Toronto, and I heard nothing more. Then, on Crete, there was Jan Whelan, a Tasmanian she-devil, auburn-haired globetrotter with strong Irish antecedents that had bequeathed her a deep thirst for strong drink, a powerful backhand, and a hearty laugh, even at my lame one-liners. I have fond memories of sitting on a hotel balcony with her, gazing at Heraklion’s Oriental rooftops incarnadined in the setting sun. And the two of us atop the windy city wall at Kazantzakis’ tombstone, on which the old wanderer’s epitaph is carved: Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δε φοβάμαι τίποτα. Είμαι λεύτερος. I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.