After the War, page 20
Guy seduced women. Ghent was a cloth town. Peasant girls came from the country to work in the shops and mills. Some were lovely, and they came to the Vieux Gand at night to sit at the edges of the crowd. Since they had no money, they had to barter themselves to young men like Guy. He looked like a young Apollo, and in the tavern where light poured down on his head, he drew women as if he promised the gift of eternal youth and grace.
Sometimes three or four young women sat with us, and Guy entertained them all. Often he would depart with one, leaving me to amuse the others as best I could. I was tempted by their eyes, the softness of their skin, their scents of soap, of cheap perfume, their wet young mouths, their eagerness, the breasts their clothing revealed and hid. My mother’s image came to me in those moments, a stern and reproachful vision that made me withdraw and become even more tedious than usual. Guy sometimes returned to our room in the first light of dawn. He wanted to tell me about how he had slipped his hands into their dresses, their ritual protests, their halfhearted resistance, their panting, the relentless progress of his fingers to the tops of their legs, and how slowly, inevitably they parted their thighs and yielded to him with gasps of passion, his sense of victory at that, their arms around his neck, their hesitation overcome by desire, and how he undressed them while they clung to him, and what they whispered in his ears as he pumped away at their responding bodies.
In his view, he came to them briefly from their most romantic dreams. For one night or for two or three or for a week, he was substantial and real, in their arms and in them. They came to him with their eyes, their arms, their moist thighs all open, knowing he would put them aside but that until then they would have pleasure and excitement, and afterwards memories that would warm them when they were old and forgotten.
A few days after I came back to Belgium, Greece went to war with the Ottoman Empire. I was troubled. Should I go home and enlist in the battle against the Turk? Stephanos telegraphed me at once to stay in Belgium. “We are in no danger,” he said. “The war is being fought in the north. If you come home, you may be killed, and the family depends on you to get an education. Do not come home. I repeat. Do not come home.”
My mother wrote me long letters. They came punctually every two weeks, despite the war, fat in their pale-blue envelopes, their regular appearance testimony to the orderly way she conducted her life. She wrote every other Sunday night, apparently setting aside the entire evening for her task, for me, telling me the things people were talking about, reciting the unimportant details of the house. She reassured me about the war. It was not coming to much. People in Greece were not suffering.
She wrote pages of advice, especially about women. Do not let women deceive you. Keep your body pure. Indecent women lurk everywhere, waiting to lead a clean boy astray. Pray to the Virgin Mary; she will protect you from foul women. Pray to St. John the Baptist; he will wash you in the pure water of life. Combat the desire that Satan implants in the heart of a boy your age.
My mother had always been devout. Now her intensity embarrassed me, and I hid her letters lest Guy read them. Still, they brought Greece back to me, and always I stood for a moment holding them to my mouth and nose as if the crisp paper could somehow convey to me all the smells and tastes of home.
The letters were carried to the post office in Piraeus early on Monday morning. The thick pale-blue envelope, bearing her neat and familiar hand, was on the shelf outside the concierge’s window at the Institute by the following Friday afternoon.
The terrible letter arrived on a Wednesday in early December. I had received the customary formal epistle with my monthly bank draft the previous Friday. This was a thin missive, containing only one folded sheet of pale-blue writing paper. I opened it impatiently and saw my mother’s familiar hand, as firm as a copper engraving. I stared at the single terse sentence like a man struck in the head suddenly, not knowing what struck him, hardly knowing that he has been struck. Stephanos had killed himself.
How? She did not say. I stood in the open and read it again and again, seeking to squeeze some larger knowledge from the naked words. The air was chill. Low, dark clouds scudded overhead. The cobblestones glistened with the damp. Within the courtyard of the school, tall windows, going up four floors, looked blankly down on me. Life on the street beyond the great portal went on. Boys came and went and spoke to me. I heard the rattle of crockery and pans in the kitchen across the courtyard. I could hear in the distance the murmur of the town. And Stephanos was dead.
I supposed he had shot himself. I wept at the thought of what the bullet did to his beautiful head. I went up to my room without replying to Madame Conrad, who rushed after me, asking me for the stamps, which she sold. I heard her muttering indignantly when I went away without speaking. I pulled the shutters over the windows and sat all afternoon in the dark. I thought of the bouzouki Stephanos had given me, thought of it rotting down in the sea, and I wept bitterly. Finally I could not weep anymore. I sat. The iron radiator popped and gargled. It gave little heat. I did not feel the cold.
Guy came in at six, turned on the light, and jumped when he saw me sitting there.
“What is wrong with you? What …?”
“My uncle has killed himself.”
“Your uncle? The one in …? What was his name?”
“Stephanos,” I said.
“Well, I never can remember names. Killed? Well, I don’t … Terrible, my dear friend. Simply terrible.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I am desolate,” Guy said, using the conventional French politeness. “I do—”
“You did not know him,” I said.
“Well, I am devastated nevertheless. Truly I am.”
“Please go away and leave me alone. I beg you, Guy. Go away.”
He left, and I turned out the light. In a few minutes I could hear the boys singing grace downstairs in the long refectory, where they were sitting down for supper. The sound seemed to come from a great distance, muffled and somehow grand and harmonious because of the distance, rising and falling in hearty waves. The words were indistinct, but I knew them by heart.
Toi qui dispose
De toute chose
Et nous les donne chaque jour,
Reçois, O Père,
Notre prière
De reconnaissance et d’amour.
The sound made me ache inside, and I wept again. Then I was empty and could cry no more.
Father Medulous rushed into the room after supper. “My dear boy!” he said. “Guy has told me. What a terrible, terrible thing.” Father Medulous sat down on the edge of the hard bed and took me clumsily in his arms. He smelled vaguely of onions and old sweat. My face pressed into his rough cassock. I was as still as death. When I looked up, Guy was standing in the door, doing his best to look compassionate.
Two days later Father Medulous said a mass for the soul of Stephanos. It was a kind gesture—strictly against the church doctrine. Suicide was a mortal sin, worse than murder because the sinner could not confess and gain absolution. Stephanos was in hell. Hell was a place of black fire, and it went on for eternity. A mass said for souls in hell accomplished no good. It might be blasphemy, like praying for the salvation of the devil.
“We cannot know what went through your poor uncle’s mind in his last moments,” Father Medulous told me. My ignorance about how Stephanos had died allowed Father Medulous to speculate. “Perhaps he took some sort of drug, something that put him to sleep. At the last instant, when he had no strength to move or cry out or save himself, he regretted what he had done and prayed one final prayer for forgiveness. That is all it would take to get him safely into purgatory—one prayer at the moment of his death. No matter how low he is in purgatory, no matter how many thousands of years of pain he must suffer, it is enough to put him within reach of the mass and the help that the Holy Catholic Church on earth can give him.”
The mass was sung at dawn, and nearly every boy in the school came and sat in unusual stillness and silence. Father Medulous sang the ancient rites in his rough, strong voice. The pale light of a new, cold day brightened outside, making the stately figure of the serene Virgin glow hot in the stained-glass window over the altar.
I sat in front next to Guy. I heard the litany and thought of Stephanos, remembering the little perfumed Turkish cigarettes, and remembering, too, the sound of his voice, so familiar, feeling a quiet and unreal astonishment at the finality of death, which took familiar things away forever.
On my other side that morning sat Bernal Díaz y Aguela, newly arrived that year, veteran of other universities, native of Argentina, fabulously wealthy, inordinately devout, occasionally drunk and dissipated. He greeted me with profound sadness after the requiem. I saw with a start that his sadness was genuine. He held my hand for a moment, looking at me with his steady brown eyes, and I believed that he felt my grief more than anyone else in that place felt it. It was the first time that we spoke, and we did not immediately become friends, for he quickly withdrew into the aloofness and silence that kept him isolated from the rest of us. But that was the beginning.
36
I PASSED INTO a period when I could think of nothing but death. Sometimes at night when Guy was with a woman, I lay insomniac and thought of the infinitesimal point that is the present, and the thought would strike me that at some present moment, a moment that would be as present as this one, I would die. Often I lay listening to the bells toll the hours. Every bell had a different tone. I knew them all and lay waiting for them to come one after another. When Guy came in, making his clumsy efforts not to waken me, I pretended to be asleep. Soon his deep, regular breathing indicated that he slept, untroubled and thoughtless, dreaming happy dreams. I lay still and miserable, waiting for dawn, listening to the bells.
My evenings at the Vieux Gand became more and more rare. I could not bear company. I sat at one of the big tables looking at happy people, and I could not understand them. They were going to die. Did they not know that they were going to die? Why were they so happy? I walked alone hour after hour on some nights, sometimes into the countryside by empty fields, bundling myself against the dank chill of the Belgian winter, walking, walking, feeling no sense of fatigue or drowsiness, impervious to the cold that crept into my clothes, returning at last at first light to sleep fitfully for an hour or so before rising for the Holy Eucharist which comforted my soul.
Guy took me home with him for the three weeks of Christmas vacation. Dinant was covered with snow. He and and I tramped around together, and under the continual force of his bantering goodwill, some of my gloom dissipated.
“If a man wants to kill himself, what are we to do?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders and lifting his eyes towards heaven in an imploring gesture meant to call on God to witness his innocence and helplessness before events.
“It is a sovereign right, one we all possess. Now, my friend, suppose you come to me, and suppose you say, ‘My dear friend Guy, I am going to shoot myself.’ What should I do? I should of course attempt to persuade you that you are following a course of action that could lead to no progressive result. I would point out that suicide is contrary to the optimistic spirit of the age. I should declare that suicide leads one to a fate of great uncertainty and that on the whole, uncertainty is to be avoided by the prudent. I would tell you that suicide would distress and inconvenience your friends, of whom—without meaning to presume—I count myself chief. I should express my sincere conviction that we would all miss you extremely.
“But now suppose that after due deliberation you remained resolved to put an end to your life no matter what I said or did. At a certain moment I should recognize your sovereign right to make the proper decisions about your own life—or in this example, your own death. I should bid you a most fond farewell. I should embrace you as a brother. Then I should politely leave the room, assuming that you had procured for yourself a pistol of sufficient calibre to make your death instantaneous or, better still, some painless narcotic or some other more imaginative device for doing the job with dispatch and … ah … hygiene. I should urge you not to hang yourself. I find hanging a vulgar way to die, and I hope that for my sake you would avoid hanging yourself, especially in our room. Yes, I should feel affronted, my dear Paul, if you were to hang yourself.
“But whatever means you chose to end your life, I should depart from you and after a decent interval, I should telephone the police and report to them where the remains might be found. That night in the Vieux Gand, I should order the finest champagne, and I should lift a glass and call for a moment of reverent silence in sad memory of my dear friend now departed. I should be considerably put out if anyone were to laugh or speak or belch or even pick his nose during that moment. Madame Boschnagel would play some appropriate dirge on the organ. Father Droos would perhaps say a prayer—in incomprehensible but reverent Latin, of course. We would all weep. Then I should begin my search for another person to share my room. I must go on living, you see.”
He put both his hands out in a gesture of finality and satisfaction. Then he lit a cigar. Then he grinned, giving me a sidelong glance of mirth. I believe that I grinned back.
“Now my friendly and entirely disinterested counsel to you, my dearest friend, is that you must go on living. Your uncle has chosen a course that distresses us both. But you are still alive, and you must make the decisions that are appropriate to life. Let us drink to life.”
37
THE HOLIDAYS ENDED on January 6, 1913, a Monday, and we returned to Ghent that evening on the train. I expected two letters from my mother, and a bank draft with my allowance. There was nothing.
I had only a few francs. Guy wanted to go immediately to the Vieux Gand. I made an excuse. I did not have enough money. Two days later a letter came. It was long, detailed, and impersonal. The business was gone. Stephanos had made debts no one in the family had known about. They would have to be paid; our grand old house would have to be sold.
The servants had been let go. They wept much in parting. Eleutheria was hysterical. She wanted to keep working for my mother for nothing. That was not possible. My mother and my sisters moved into the house of her father, old Iannis Pedakis. Grandfather Pedakis was wild with anger. He had given his daughter a handsome dowry, supposing that the marriage he had made for her with Vasilis Kephalopoulos was worth any expense. Now she was back in his house, and the dowry was gone. I could imagine him—old, bald, and bent, wiry as a stick figure, his voice shrill. He would blame his daughter. In his world every bad thing happened because someone had been either criminal or irresponsible. He would tell my mother that she had not been a good wife. That is why my father had taken a lover, he would say. If Vasilis had killed his lover’s husband, my mother was to blame.
My mother would withdraw into dignified silence, head bowed in the submission that a Greek daughter owed her father, even a daughter who had presided over her own household and mothered children now nearly grown. In her father’s house, she would be a child again, and she would wrap her silence around her like a garment and obey him.
Her father had issued commands about me. He allowed me to remain in Belgium to the end of the school year because my fees were already paid. At the end of that time, I should return to Greece and assume responsibility for my mother and my sisters. Grandfather Pedakis had friends in the postal service. I could start work as a clerk. In a few years I might become a supervisor. It was far from the position everyone had hoped for me. But life was life. We must bow to the will of God.
In the meantime my grandfather had forbidden my mother to send me money for incidental expenses. I read my mother’s careful, dispassionate prose, and I could see the scene—my grandfather standing behind his little desk with the heavy ledger books open before him. He would be shouting, pointing to the irrefutable evidence penned in the hand of Stephanos. From time to time he would stride back and forth, waving his bony hands, cursing my father, painting me as a parasite absorbing vast sums from a destitute family, giving nothing in return. The post office was to be my punishment.
My mother’s letter was formal and dry. But at the very end she wrote, “Oh my dear boy! I am sorry that things have come down to this state. I so wanted more for you in life.”
I held the letter and felt tears come. I dried them quickly. Tears were futile. I sat looking out the window. It was a gray day and very cold.
I had no money. I have never forgotten that feeling. I could no longer go with Guy to the Vieux Gand. I could no longer follow his occasional whim to take our meals in a restaurant rather than in the refectory. I could no longer buy any clothing.
“I will not go with you to the Vieux Gand anymore,” I told him that evening.
“But why?”
“I am tired of the place. I must study. I cannot waste time.”
“You cannot study all the time, every night. It is not natural.”
“I am sorry. I have made a resolution. I will not go with you anymore.”
“You are offended with me,” Guy said. “My dear friend, I have done something to offend you.”
“You have done nothing to offend me. I do not want to go to the tavern anymore.”
“Let us have a quiet meal somewhere and discuss this over a bottle of French wine,” Guy said.
“No,” I said. “There is nothing to discuss. I am going to stay here from now on and study.”
He argued and apologized, certain that he had done something offensive. He lay at the center of his universe, and he could not think that anything that had happened to me was not somehow related to him. So we fell into a sullen and aggrieved silence. He was deeply hurt. He assumed a tone of elaborate courtesy when he addressed me, the mark of those wanting nothing to do with each other beyond the necessary. We tried to ignore each other.
There was a library on the second floor of the Institute. There I spent many evenings while Guy went to the Vieux Gand. The library was not large or popular. It was not heated well, and to read there in the winter one had to wear a heavy coat and sometimes gloves. Often I sat alone with the books, and I discovered a talent for solitude.
Sometimes three or four young women sat with us, and Guy entertained them all. Often he would depart with one, leaving me to amuse the others as best I could. I was tempted by their eyes, the softness of their skin, their scents of soap, of cheap perfume, their wet young mouths, their eagerness, the breasts their clothing revealed and hid. My mother’s image came to me in those moments, a stern and reproachful vision that made me withdraw and become even more tedious than usual. Guy sometimes returned to our room in the first light of dawn. He wanted to tell me about how he had slipped his hands into their dresses, their ritual protests, their halfhearted resistance, their panting, the relentless progress of his fingers to the tops of their legs, and how slowly, inevitably they parted their thighs and yielded to him with gasps of passion, his sense of victory at that, their arms around his neck, their hesitation overcome by desire, and how he undressed them while they clung to him, and what they whispered in his ears as he pumped away at their responding bodies.
In his view, he came to them briefly from their most romantic dreams. For one night or for two or three or for a week, he was substantial and real, in their arms and in them. They came to him with their eyes, their arms, their moist thighs all open, knowing he would put them aside but that until then they would have pleasure and excitement, and afterwards memories that would warm them when they were old and forgotten.
A few days after I came back to Belgium, Greece went to war with the Ottoman Empire. I was troubled. Should I go home and enlist in the battle against the Turk? Stephanos telegraphed me at once to stay in Belgium. “We are in no danger,” he said. “The war is being fought in the north. If you come home, you may be killed, and the family depends on you to get an education. Do not come home. I repeat. Do not come home.”
My mother wrote me long letters. They came punctually every two weeks, despite the war, fat in their pale-blue envelopes, their regular appearance testimony to the orderly way she conducted her life. She wrote every other Sunday night, apparently setting aside the entire evening for her task, for me, telling me the things people were talking about, reciting the unimportant details of the house. She reassured me about the war. It was not coming to much. People in Greece were not suffering.
She wrote pages of advice, especially about women. Do not let women deceive you. Keep your body pure. Indecent women lurk everywhere, waiting to lead a clean boy astray. Pray to the Virgin Mary; she will protect you from foul women. Pray to St. John the Baptist; he will wash you in the pure water of life. Combat the desire that Satan implants in the heart of a boy your age.
My mother had always been devout. Now her intensity embarrassed me, and I hid her letters lest Guy read them. Still, they brought Greece back to me, and always I stood for a moment holding them to my mouth and nose as if the crisp paper could somehow convey to me all the smells and tastes of home.
The letters were carried to the post office in Piraeus early on Monday morning. The thick pale-blue envelope, bearing her neat and familiar hand, was on the shelf outside the concierge’s window at the Institute by the following Friday afternoon.
The terrible letter arrived on a Wednesday in early December. I had received the customary formal epistle with my monthly bank draft the previous Friday. This was a thin missive, containing only one folded sheet of pale-blue writing paper. I opened it impatiently and saw my mother’s familiar hand, as firm as a copper engraving. I stared at the single terse sentence like a man struck in the head suddenly, not knowing what struck him, hardly knowing that he has been struck. Stephanos had killed himself.
How? She did not say. I stood in the open and read it again and again, seeking to squeeze some larger knowledge from the naked words. The air was chill. Low, dark clouds scudded overhead. The cobblestones glistened with the damp. Within the courtyard of the school, tall windows, going up four floors, looked blankly down on me. Life on the street beyond the great portal went on. Boys came and went and spoke to me. I heard the rattle of crockery and pans in the kitchen across the courtyard. I could hear in the distance the murmur of the town. And Stephanos was dead.
I supposed he had shot himself. I wept at the thought of what the bullet did to his beautiful head. I went up to my room without replying to Madame Conrad, who rushed after me, asking me for the stamps, which she sold. I heard her muttering indignantly when I went away without speaking. I pulled the shutters over the windows and sat all afternoon in the dark. I thought of the bouzouki Stephanos had given me, thought of it rotting down in the sea, and I wept bitterly. Finally I could not weep anymore. I sat. The iron radiator popped and gargled. It gave little heat. I did not feel the cold.
Guy came in at six, turned on the light, and jumped when he saw me sitting there.
“What is wrong with you? What …?”
“My uncle has killed himself.”
“Your uncle? The one in …? What was his name?”
“Stephanos,” I said.
“Well, I never can remember names. Killed? Well, I don’t … Terrible, my dear friend. Simply terrible.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I am desolate,” Guy said, using the conventional French politeness. “I do—”
“You did not know him,” I said.
“Well, I am devastated nevertheless. Truly I am.”
“Please go away and leave me alone. I beg you, Guy. Go away.”
He left, and I turned out the light. In a few minutes I could hear the boys singing grace downstairs in the long refectory, where they were sitting down for supper. The sound seemed to come from a great distance, muffled and somehow grand and harmonious because of the distance, rising and falling in hearty waves. The words were indistinct, but I knew them by heart.
Toi qui dispose
De toute chose
Et nous les donne chaque jour,
Reçois, O Père,
Notre prière
De reconnaissance et d’amour.
The sound made me ache inside, and I wept again. Then I was empty and could cry no more.
Father Medulous rushed into the room after supper. “My dear boy!” he said. “Guy has told me. What a terrible, terrible thing.” Father Medulous sat down on the edge of the hard bed and took me clumsily in his arms. He smelled vaguely of onions and old sweat. My face pressed into his rough cassock. I was as still as death. When I looked up, Guy was standing in the door, doing his best to look compassionate.
Two days later Father Medulous said a mass for the soul of Stephanos. It was a kind gesture—strictly against the church doctrine. Suicide was a mortal sin, worse than murder because the sinner could not confess and gain absolution. Stephanos was in hell. Hell was a place of black fire, and it went on for eternity. A mass said for souls in hell accomplished no good. It might be blasphemy, like praying for the salvation of the devil.
“We cannot know what went through your poor uncle’s mind in his last moments,” Father Medulous told me. My ignorance about how Stephanos had died allowed Father Medulous to speculate. “Perhaps he took some sort of drug, something that put him to sleep. At the last instant, when he had no strength to move or cry out or save himself, he regretted what he had done and prayed one final prayer for forgiveness. That is all it would take to get him safely into purgatory—one prayer at the moment of his death. No matter how low he is in purgatory, no matter how many thousands of years of pain he must suffer, it is enough to put him within reach of the mass and the help that the Holy Catholic Church on earth can give him.”
The mass was sung at dawn, and nearly every boy in the school came and sat in unusual stillness and silence. Father Medulous sang the ancient rites in his rough, strong voice. The pale light of a new, cold day brightened outside, making the stately figure of the serene Virgin glow hot in the stained-glass window over the altar.
I sat in front next to Guy. I heard the litany and thought of Stephanos, remembering the little perfumed Turkish cigarettes, and remembering, too, the sound of his voice, so familiar, feeling a quiet and unreal astonishment at the finality of death, which took familiar things away forever.
On my other side that morning sat Bernal Díaz y Aguela, newly arrived that year, veteran of other universities, native of Argentina, fabulously wealthy, inordinately devout, occasionally drunk and dissipated. He greeted me with profound sadness after the requiem. I saw with a start that his sadness was genuine. He held my hand for a moment, looking at me with his steady brown eyes, and I believed that he felt my grief more than anyone else in that place felt it. It was the first time that we spoke, and we did not immediately become friends, for he quickly withdrew into the aloofness and silence that kept him isolated from the rest of us. But that was the beginning.
36
I PASSED INTO a period when I could think of nothing but death. Sometimes at night when Guy was with a woman, I lay insomniac and thought of the infinitesimal point that is the present, and the thought would strike me that at some present moment, a moment that would be as present as this one, I would die. Often I lay listening to the bells toll the hours. Every bell had a different tone. I knew them all and lay waiting for them to come one after another. When Guy came in, making his clumsy efforts not to waken me, I pretended to be asleep. Soon his deep, regular breathing indicated that he slept, untroubled and thoughtless, dreaming happy dreams. I lay still and miserable, waiting for dawn, listening to the bells.
My evenings at the Vieux Gand became more and more rare. I could not bear company. I sat at one of the big tables looking at happy people, and I could not understand them. They were going to die. Did they not know that they were going to die? Why were they so happy? I walked alone hour after hour on some nights, sometimes into the countryside by empty fields, bundling myself against the dank chill of the Belgian winter, walking, walking, feeling no sense of fatigue or drowsiness, impervious to the cold that crept into my clothes, returning at last at first light to sleep fitfully for an hour or so before rising for the Holy Eucharist which comforted my soul.
Guy took me home with him for the three weeks of Christmas vacation. Dinant was covered with snow. He and and I tramped around together, and under the continual force of his bantering goodwill, some of my gloom dissipated.
“If a man wants to kill himself, what are we to do?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders and lifting his eyes towards heaven in an imploring gesture meant to call on God to witness his innocence and helplessness before events.
“It is a sovereign right, one we all possess. Now, my friend, suppose you come to me, and suppose you say, ‘My dear friend Guy, I am going to shoot myself.’ What should I do? I should of course attempt to persuade you that you are following a course of action that could lead to no progressive result. I would point out that suicide is contrary to the optimistic spirit of the age. I should declare that suicide leads one to a fate of great uncertainty and that on the whole, uncertainty is to be avoided by the prudent. I would tell you that suicide would distress and inconvenience your friends, of whom—without meaning to presume—I count myself chief. I should express my sincere conviction that we would all miss you extremely.
“But now suppose that after due deliberation you remained resolved to put an end to your life no matter what I said or did. At a certain moment I should recognize your sovereign right to make the proper decisions about your own life—or in this example, your own death. I should bid you a most fond farewell. I should embrace you as a brother. Then I should politely leave the room, assuming that you had procured for yourself a pistol of sufficient calibre to make your death instantaneous or, better still, some painless narcotic or some other more imaginative device for doing the job with dispatch and … ah … hygiene. I should urge you not to hang yourself. I find hanging a vulgar way to die, and I hope that for my sake you would avoid hanging yourself, especially in our room. Yes, I should feel affronted, my dear Paul, if you were to hang yourself.
“But whatever means you chose to end your life, I should depart from you and after a decent interval, I should telephone the police and report to them where the remains might be found. That night in the Vieux Gand, I should order the finest champagne, and I should lift a glass and call for a moment of reverent silence in sad memory of my dear friend now departed. I should be considerably put out if anyone were to laugh or speak or belch or even pick his nose during that moment. Madame Boschnagel would play some appropriate dirge on the organ. Father Droos would perhaps say a prayer—in incomprehensible but reverent Latin, of course. We would all weep. Then I should begin my search for another person to share my room. I must go on living, you see.”
He put both his hands out in a gesture of finality and satisfaction. Then he lit a cigar. Then he grinned, giving me a sidelong glance of mirth. I believe that I grinned back.
“Now my friendly and entirely disinterested counsel to you, my dearest friend, is that you must go on living. Your uncle has chosen a course that distresses us both. But you are still alive, and you must make the decisions that are appropriate to life. Let us drink to life.”
37
THE HOLIDAYS ENDED on January 6, 1913, a Monday, and we returned to Ghent that evening on the train. I expected two letters from my mother, and a bank draft with my allowance. There was nothing.
I had only a few francs. Guy wanted to go immediately to the Vieux Gand. I made an excuse. I did not have enough money. Two days later a letter came. It was long, detailed, and impersonal. The business was gone. Stephanos had made debts no one in the family had known about. They would have to be paid; our grand old house would have to be sold.
The servants had been let go. They wept much in parting. Eleutheria was hysterical. She wanted to keep working for my mother for nothing. That was not possible. My mother and my sisters moved into the house of her father, old Iannis Pedakis. Grandfather Pedakis was wild with anger. He had given his daughter a handsome dowry, supposing that the marriage he had made for her with Vasilis Kephalopoulos was worth any expense. Now she was back in his house, and the dowry was gone. I could imagine him—old, bald, and bent, wiry as a stick figure, his voice shrill. He would blame his daughter. In his world every bad thing happened because someone had been either criminal or irresponsible. He would tell my mother that she had not been a good wife. That is why my father had taken a lover, he would say. If Vasilis had killed his lover’s husband, my mother was to blame.
My mother would withdraw into dignified silence, head bowed in the submission that a Greek daughter owed her father, even a daughter who had presided over her own household and mothered children now nearly grown. In her father’s house, she would be a child again, and she would wrap her silence around her like a garment and obey him.
Her father had issued commands about me. He allowed me to remain in Belgium to the end of the school year because my fees were already paid. At the end of that time, I should return to Greece and assume responsibility for my mother and my sisters. Grandfather Pedakis had friends in the postal service. I could start work as a clerk. In a few years I might become a supervisor. It was far from the position everyone had hoped for me. But life was life. We must bow to the will of God.
In the meantime my grandfather had forbidden my mother to send me money for incidental expenses. I read my mother’s careful, dispassionate prose, and I could see the scene—my grandfather standing behind his little desk with the heavy ledger books open before him. He would be shouting, pointing to the irrefutable evidence penned in the hand of Stephanos. From time to time he would stride back and forth, waving his bony hands, cursing my father, painting me as a parasite absorbing vast sums from a destitute family, giving nothing in return. The post office was to be my punishment.
My mother’s letter was formal and dry. But at the very end she wrote, “Oh my dear boy! I am sorry that things have come down to this state. I so wanted more for you in life.”
I held the letter and felt tears come. I dried them quickly. Tears were futile. I sat looking out the window. It was a gray day and very cold.
I had no money. I have never forgotten that feeling. I could no longer go with Guy to the Vieux Gand. I could no longer follow his occasional whim to take our meals in a restaurant rather than in the refectory. I could no longer buy any clothing.
“I will not go with you to the Vieux Gand anymore,” I told him that evening.
“But why?”
“I am tired of the place. I must study. I cannot waste time.”
“You cannot study all the time, every night. It is not natural.”
“I am sorry. I have made a resolution. I will not go with you anymore.”
“You are offended with me,” Guy said. “My dear friend, I have done something to offend you.”
“You have done nothing to offend me. I do not want to go to the tavern anymore.”
“Let us have a quiet meal somewhere and discuss this over a bottle of French wine,” Guy said.
“No,” I said. “There is nothing to discuss. I am going to stay here from now on and study.”
He argued and apologized, certain that he had done something offensive. He lay at the center of his universe, and he could not think that anything that had happened to me was not somehow related to him. So we fell into a sullen and aggrieved silence. He was deeply hurt. He assumed a tone of elaborate courtesy when he addressed me, the mark of those wanting nothing to do with each other beyond the necessary. We tried to ignore each other.
There was a library on the second floor of the Institute. There I spent many evenings while Guy went to the Vieux Gand. The library was not large or popular. It was not heated well, and to read there in the winter one had to wear a heavy coat and sometimes gloves. Often I sat alone with the books, and I discovered a talent for solitude.
