Synopsis:

Βar Flaubert»a novel by

ALEXIS STAMATIS

Summary

First Part

KILL THE DEAD TIME

In Athens, on the evening of 19^th April 1998 Yiannis Loukas, an Athenian free-lance journalist working for life-style magazines, who will be forty in July, is at bed with Mania, an actress of second order. The whole story that follows is recounted by Yiannis in the first person. During the act of love his mind wanders, he is detached although present, nevertheless his partner, strangely enough, finds the love-making "all right"... The evening comes to an end indifferently at a bar, where Yiannis meets Kostas, a friend of his from the press, a cynical fellow who, as opposed to him, does not move in the perimeter, but right into the heart of the beast, the Fourth Power. Yiannis is up next morning, in low spirits. Following the morning ritual - shower, shaving, coffee, breakfast - his is lost in thoughts. Thoughts leading to the fact that he is living a pre-determined life, a life devoid of any variety.Yiannis is the son of a famous writer, Markos Loukas, who after the collapse of the colonels' junta was one of those who guided the destinies of Greek Literature. His mother, Lydia, an Art historian, is in charge of a small art gallery in the neighbourhood of Psyrri. Yiannis, a graduate of Philosophy, went afterwards to New York for two years for post-graduate studies in Comparative Literature. His real passion is writing, he has not been able yet, however, to write the novel he wants, he has run out of imagination and he jumps each time from one fragmentary story to another. He has only published without success a collection of short stories, the whole lot of which has been finally piled up on his shelves since it is he who covered the expense of the edition. Yiannis is a fairly good looking man but with a problem which pursues him since the age of ten when he became aware of it: His right hand is shorter than the left by eight centimetres. He realises that most people do not notice it at all, but as each defect is for sure an indelible tattoo on its possessor, so is it that he cannot remember a day in those past twenty and something years that he has not been preoccupied, even fleetingly, by this clownish gene encroached upon an otherwise able-bodied and well-built figure.He has to finish next morning an article for a life-style magazine. With a heavy heart he writes a typical modish piece. He is not satisfied with his work, he is fed up with writing articles on command and in the well-known style necessitated for this kind of stuff. He manages with his financial needs by delivering some private lessons. Same as his career, his relationship with women is going through a crisis, he is looking for the one and only love, but for the past six years he is maintaining an affair with Anna, an affair that just keeps carrying on and which he adorns with ephemeral adventures.Yiannis remembers how he met Anna at the National Gallery, at the opening of a painting exhibition of his beloved French impressionist, the name of which, however, is not being mentioned. Anna was the one who came to him and the affair started with a surge of passion which went on for a year or so. What was left since then, was a sweet memory, a tender remembrance which, at least as far as he was concerned, maintained a kind of chemical kinship, an acceptance. An acceptance which started to spread out in all the other sections of his life and to become an essence of life, a manner of living. He was by now living bound with habit.He is being called next day from the magazine to be told that his article had been rejected. They say his style is considered now outdated, the new-comers have gone ahead with new fleeting codes. Upon that Yiannis visits the magazine's "Law 2000" headquarters and meets Daniel Triandafyllidis, an old classmate of his who is running it. Daniel reminds him that when he started his style writing for magazines he was innovative, entirely original, his vision of things was totally unexpected, it was all that a magazine editor would dream having. But now he is dried up. According to Daniel we live at a time when anything that is being decoded dies instantly out. Everything is galloping, new aspects continuously pop up, the visual angle constantly changes its position. If you dismember the script, you have to play with the syntax. Just as one decomposes the images, so one should break up the words. While he, Yiannis, has, on the contrary, started to stick them together...The next visit takes place at his father's house; Yiannis is taking care of his autobiography on behalf of the publisher Thanos Viliotis. His father is an orderly man, accustomed to piling up things, who owing to his temperament never throws anything away and the son has undertaken to put in order the innumerable texts he has accumulated through the years. Their conversation is inevitably led, at a certain moment, to literature. The father's view regarding novels is that everything must fall in line. It has to be a perfect, flawless construction, it should be like a building, must have its structural frame, its bearing elements, its openings, even its expansion joints. Otherwise it collapses and falls apart. Sometime during their talk, the father accidentally mentions the case of a writer by the name of Matthaiou who in '75 had sent him a book of an almost disorderly structure and a totally novel way of expression. Markos Loukas had rejected it cum laude. Irritated, he denounces those texts which are lacking a solid structure, well-built characters and chronological order, to end up saying that writing prose is definitely not jumping here and there. "Prose is to be taking steps one after the other... Taking steps with a steady footstep and open eyes...".On the same evening, the 22^nd day of the month, Yiannis is going in the basement through his father's files looking for useful details regarding the autobiography. Among the texts rejected by his father he finds the manuscript of a novel titled "Bar Flaubert". The text had been sent to his father in 1975 by a young novelist, Loukas Matthaiou, about whom there is no other information. Yiannis remembers his father's mentioning the writer and intrigued, starts reading it. Once proves not to be enough. He stays in the basement, utterly thrilled, almost throughout the whole night. He feels he has found himself before something which is not simply a story, it is as if someone had plunged a needle in his blood and had drawn out the components of his most private universe, things the existence of which he himself had not even suspected or that he had unconsciously buried in the innermost hiding places of his soul.Back home he tries to find some information about the writer; there is nothing at all. Later on, discussing with his father, he hears that Matthaiou was a strange person who had been back from abroad after the collapse of the colonels' junta and had tried to pursue a career in letters. Markos Loukas had flown into a passion with the book, he had even sent Matthaiou a letter in which he ironically suggested to him to abandon any involvement with writing. From what Yiannis senses, his father had employed his prestige to shut off an eventual career of Matthaiou's in letters, considering his style of writing more or less as a menace. Markos Loukas seems to react rather too aggressively against the unknown writer and tries to avoid any further discussion about the subject. The matter becomes complicated when Yiannis senses his mother reacting somewhat uncomfortably on hearing the name of Matthaiou.The novel is the story of a passionate love affair. The narrator's love affair with a woman called Leto. The style is dreamlike, poetical, it is an inner monologue which takes light, a type of writing entirely innovative, considering, particularly, the case of Greece at that time. Yiannis feeling positive that he has a vein of gold before him and being at the same time conscious of a deep attraction of his for the actual text, decides to set out for a more systematic search.In his attempt to find some more information about Matthaiou he turns for help to a poet, Vassilis, a friend of his, who sometime in the seventies had heard something about the author and his text. Vassilis arranges a meeting of his with Arnold Hansen, an elderly and original man of letters who belonged to the milieu of the beat generation in America and who at the time had met, in the late fifties, the eighteen-year old Matthaiou in New York. Matthaiou was then studying biology in the States and was associated with all the big names of that generation: Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac... He was an extremely good-looking boy, of particular intelligence, with a very original psyche which rendered him from irresistibly attractive to disturbingly dangerous. Hansen informs Yiannis that Matthaiou took in '67 refuge in Barcelona following the colonels' coup. He shows him a postcard sent to him by Matthaiou himself in which the names of a certain Jorge Esnaider and of a poet called Fernando as well as the address of a literary meeting place by the name of "London Bar", are being mentioned.Following this meeting Yiannis decides to interrupt for the time being his occupation with his father's autobiography and start the search for Loukas Matthaiou on the basis of the information originating from the text, assuming that what he has in hands is in fact a disguised autobiography. There is an unintelligible code within the book's motto which he manages to break; however the words that result - "Omen, Rave, Area, Lent" - do not have any logical contiguity.Yiannis is by now well involved in the story. He decides to find the issue and ignoring Anna's low spirits - Anna, who for quite some time has been sensing that their relationship is breathing its last - he leaves for Barcelona, telling his father that he is supposedly on a travel assignment for a magazine.

Part Two

DEEP INSIDE THE ZERZUELA

Yiannis arrives at Barcelona on the 3 May 1998. He settles down at the Hotel Oriente on Las Ramblas, the city's main pedestrian thoroughfare. He walks around Barcelona next morning and he finds "London Bar". He meets there Tina Burusaga, a very pretty Spanish young woman of about thirty who is in charge of the literary activities taking place in the establishment. He explains to her the reason of his visit. She has no idea about Matthaiou, she informs him, however, there is a certain Jorge Esnaider, an elderly millionaire who had been a patron of the arts in the city during the decade of the sixties. For the past 25 years he has been confined to a invalid's wheel-chair after a certain accident. Tina offers to bring Yiannis in contact with Esnaider. She arranges for a meeting at Esnaider's house on Wednesday. Moreover, luckily enough, a poetry reading is scheduled for next Thursday at the "London Bar" with the participation of a certain Fernando Salinas, a well-known poet of about sixty... As far as Tina is concerned, an imperceptible air of erotism is hanging out in the atmosphere between them.Esnaider lives at the "Perdera", the apartment building designed by the famous Spanish architect Gaudi, on the terraced roof of which the motion picture "Il passagero" ("Occupation Reporter") was filmed by Antonioni. André, Esnaider's butler shows in Yiannis and lead him to his master through a number of rooms crammed with paintings of rare value. Among them Yiannis recognizes a pastel painting by his beloved impressionist.Esnaider welcomes him, sitting on his high-tech wheel-chair. He is a seventy-year old homosexual loaded with a profusion of plastic surgery marks and a heap of arrogance. Yiannis explains the reason of his visit and Esnaider tries to make out of him what he really knows, apart from what he actually says. During the conversation the old man often becomes offensive, he does not even omit to sneer at Yiannis' minor bodily defect. As for Matthaiou, Esnaider presents him as a superbly beautiful man, extremely clever and dangerous. When Yiannis drops the name of Salinas, Esnaider flies into a passion and threatens not to interest himself any more in the discovery of Matthaiou's whereabouts. It is evident that the old man does not nourish the best of feelings for the poet. Upon leaving Yiannis perceives, protruding behind a hanging, a small part of a Picasso painting of the blue period.Next day Yiannis goes to "London Bar" for Fernando Salinas' reading of poetry. He sits at a table with Tina along with fellow who seems to be her escort. At the next table a lonely woman of about fifty looks touched, she is Salinas' wife. Salinas' poetry is superb, the poet makes a most impressive comeback after years of absence. His verse is replete, ripe, carrying off the public. Later on, in the midst of quite a number of helpings of whisky, Yiannis and the poet start a long talk which is later on continued in Yiannis' room at the Oriente. Salinas confesses to him there that Matthaiou had been an intimate friend of his, he asserts that he indeed was an extremely good-looking man but a genius as well, an exceptional mind, but with an extravagant however behaviour. Matthaiou had arrived to Barcelona following the colonels' coup in Athens, he was being hunted down by the junta's regime. His real name was Pateras and he was called in Spain Loukas Padre. He stayed as a guest in the house of Jorge Esnaider who fell in love with him. Loukas, however, did never give in. But Esnaider was a greedy man, he could not stand not having whatever he wanted. Thus, Esnaider decided to implicate Matthaiou in a deadly game. He offered him a million dollars, half in advance and the other half after, for steling four small Picasso paintings of the blue period from the Picasso Museum at Barri Gótic, the Gothic quarter. It was of course a trap. As soon as Loukas would deliver the stolen articles he would be put out of the way... Nevertheless he, being exceptionally clever, understood everything from the beginning. Taking the decision of playing with Esnaider on his own field he accepted and carried out the theft flawlessly. Upon meeting Esnaider's henchman, to whom he was to deliver the stolen paintings, and as the guy tried to kill him, Loukas ready in advance, knocked him out and took refuge in Salinas' house. The two men had already arranged for his escape to Italy, having rightfully calculated that Esnaider's plan was nothing more than a trap. During the fight with Esnaider's henchman, Loukas had to leave one of the paintings behind, the "Omen". Salinas supplied him with a fake passport bearing the name of Matthaiou and Loukas left for Florence at daybreak. On his return home, Salinas found one of the stolen paintings, the "Rave". It was left to him behind by Loukas, in gratitude. In Barcelona, Esnaider vows vengeance... The names of the paintings "Omen", "Rave" remind Yiannis of the motto in "Bar Flaubert". The suggestion is explicit. Matthaiou chose the names of the four paintings he had stolen, as the motto of his book... Codified of course. Yiannis feels he has got well enough into the heart of the story.Salinas tells him then about the next contact he had with Matthaiou on the phone, in '72. He was living by now in Florence under the name Luca Matteo, married to an actress, Magdalena, who had appeared in films by De Sica and Antonioni. They also had a child, Caterina, born in '69. Matthaiou had called Salinas to inform him about a tragic happening: Esnaider and his henchmen had discovered him in Florence and during an ambush they had set up for him out of the city, a friend of Matthaiou and two of Esnaider's henchmen got killed. But Esnaider was also badly wounded and was left an invalid ever since. Now Salinas, at the end of the conversation, by now quite drunk, becomes more intimate and confides to Yiannis that he is just about to abandon a relationship with a woman much younger than he and return to his wife.All this time Yiannis keeps coming back continuously to "Bar Flaubert" reading excerpts, which render faithfully, but in the poetic, almost transgressive speech of Matthaiou, those episodes from the author's life he sees unfolding before him. It is as if Yiannis lives the story twice, once in reality, in the search for the bits and pieces of the story and once more through the dreamlike text, by decoding Loukas Matthaiou's poetic speech, something that goes on almost throughout the whole development of the story.Next to this Yiannis goes out with Tina. They visit Sagrada Familia, a gothic church designed by Gaudi at the centre of the city's extension. Yiannis tries to kiss her there. Tina does not give in, insinuating that she is going through a relationship with another man who cannot love her. At a certain moment, in the course of the conversation, Yiannis inadvertently drops some hint about the robbery. Tina gives the impression of not having understood. The following day Yiannis receives at the hotel an anonymous telephone call from a man who asks him to meet him at Güell Park to let him have some information about Matthaiou.Yiannis goes to the park and as he is waiting at an isolated place, at the end of a circular colonnade he hears a smothered sound, a shot from a gun equipped with a silencer. He hides behind a bench and he finally manages to escape and take refuse at the hotel, arranging to leave for Athens first thing the next day. Recovering later on from the shock, he wonders in what sort of a dangerous game he has got himself involved. Trying to trace the motive of the attempt he concludes that it has been staged by Esnaider. The old man had got wind that he knows quite a lot. This information could not have been given by anybody else but Tina. As for Tina's lover, the one who is not able to love, this cannot be anyone else but Fernando Salinas, who tired out because of the excesses he has indulged in throughout his life and having decided to let himself get old in peace, returns to his wife, abandoning his younger mistress. Yiannis speculates that Tina, in order to revenge herself on her faint-hearted lover, betrays to Esnaider Salinas' involvement in the theft and the assistance provided by him to Matthaiou. At the same time she informs the old man that Yiannis himself, is aware of the event.This theory proves gruesomely correct when on the plane to Athens, on the morning of Monday, 10^th May, Yiannis reads in the newspaper about the supposed double suicide of the poet Fernando Salinas and Tina Burusaga who have been found together in bed, dead. He naturally estimates that it is Esnaider's doing...The first thing Yiannis does in his return to Athens is to book a ticket for the flight to Florence on Sunday. Until then he spends the time with his parents and carries on with the tale about traveling assignments, saying to his father that he has to go on a mission to Florence. His father even urges him to meet there a friend of his, Theodoros Skylakis, a history of Art professor who teaches at the University.On the eve of his departure, Yiannis wakes up at dawn and looks at his image in the mirror. He feels he knows this image as much as anything. In reality as nothing at all. As much as he knows nothingness.

Part Three

THE GARDEN OF MATTHAIOU

In Florence Yiannis initially meets Theodoros Skylakis who has no idea about Loukas Matthaiou but is acquainted with Caterina Matteo through the local Hellenic Association. He gives her telephone number to Yiannis who leaves her a message.Yiannis takes a walk around Florence, the Duomo and the piazzas, with excerpts from "Bar Flaubert" coming back again to his mind and being associated all along with the area. A couple of days later Caterina gives him a call. Yiannis tells her he wishes to see her regarding her father, she gets upset but she arranges to meet him at the University the very evening. At the University, Caterina welcomes and introduces on its behalf a well-known architect who is delivering a lecture in the city. At the end of the lecture Yiannis and Caterina meet at the bar. Yiannis is much impressed by her beauty and also by something else. Caterina has a face on which two opposed psychological dispositions are imprinted: spontaneity and consciousness. Yiannis feels deeply communicating, he senses that there is something inmost binding them.At a centrally located café at Piazza della Signoria he explains her the whole story. Caterina is spellbound. Evidently moved, she tells him that her mother had been born in Germany, her father was German and her mother Italian. Magdalena Hardenberg, for that was the grandfather's family name, lived in Germany until '45, when by the end of the war she returned with her parents to Florence. Grandfather died in '65. Magdalena met Matthaiou in '68 after which they got married. Caterina did not remember anything from the three years up to '72, when she lived with her parents. She practically grew up with her grandmother who initially had told her that her parents had to go away for work and that they would be coming back. When she became older, however, she told her the truth, that much as she knew about the fight. Caterina wonders whether her parents are still alive and tells Yiannis that since they disappeared she is regularly receiving a rather high yearly income. The depositor is unknown. Caterina has by now, during all those years, become accustomed to live in the absence of her parents, it is something, however, she has never been able to explain. At a certain moment she shows Yiannis a picture of theirs. Matthaiou is a dazzling man with an absolutely impressive personality. Magdalena, a beautiful woman, seems to be overshadowed by his presence. Yiannis perceives in the photograph a certain embarrassment, a reticence. He hands to Caterina a copy of "Bar Flaubert" and he encourages her to start together with him searching for her parents. Initially Caterina reacts in a negative way, she begs for time, she feels that all this exacts too much pressure on her. She takes the manuscript to start reading it and tells Yiannis she will call him when she will feel ready to meet him again. Yiannis assures her that he proposes to stay in Florence waiting for her news.Yiannis starts now the search for Magdalena. He goes to the main theatre of the city, the "Theatro della Pergola" and finds out that Magdalena Matteo was born in Potsdam, Germany, in 1939. She played roles in the theatre but also in well-known films of that time such as "The Garden of the Fitzi-Contini" by De Sica. He picks up the film at a video club and they view it with Skylakis and a friend of his who remembers having seen Magdalena at the theatre in a play by Pirandello. Indeed Magdalena appears in the first scene of the film. The resemblance with Caterina is evident, as much as is evident a blockage, a nervousness emerging from that woman.Going again through the excerpts of the manuscript, Yiannis is now positive that Magdalena is the second woman whom the hero of "Bar Flaubert" meets. In those excerpts, Matthaiou's hero is trying to get Leto out of his mind... He has a child by now, but born from another body, from a "rival body". Only the child can cast a shadow on the love that has been lost. Leto, however, does not get out of his mind. He sees her here constantly, in that second woman, in that "second city". Yiannis is quite sure that the "second city" is none other than Florence. Nothing can keep here Matthaiou's hero, the real Matthaiou, any more; doors and windows are open, the piazzas and the churches are empty. Fate will not be late to come, in the form of Esnaider, to uproot him for good. Even before the child is born, he loves it dearly but feels unworthy of it... Yiannis thus discovers the first allusion, the first explanation to the flight, to the desertion...Yiannis is strolling at dawn on the Piazza della Signoria and scenes from the past appear before him as in a dream... Matthaiou's manuscript, his own wandering, Caterina, start penetrating into one another and upsetting his life.He slowly starts to compose the puzzle. Matthaiou returns to Greece after the junta's downfall, having divorced Magdalena. He keeps on sending money to his daughter without however giving any signs of life. In Athens, he writes a novel with another woman as the main character, the woman of his great youthful love of America, a love he is dreaming about during his wanderings in three major European cities. Up to now Yiannis knows only the two: Barcelona and Florence, he is missing the Third, the "Third city", as it is being mentioned in the manuscript, the city where Magdalena must be found. In "Bar Flaubert" there is another excerpt where Matthaiou is speaking about four villages with the initials L.D.S.K. Yiannis is at a loss with it.Caterina gives him a call and they meet again. They have lunch together and come closer to each other. Through the intimacy that develops Yiannis feels that they are now together in the search. Caterina invites him for a three-day vacation at her country house in Chianti. During the trip they pass near the place where the fight had taken place. Caterina remembers and is moved. At her home, they are awaited by Rosa, the family's housekeeper since the time it was a united one. Talkative by nature, she relates to Yiannis the whole bloody event of the fight with Esnaider. Yiannis and Caterina stay together late in the evening. They both feel they are plunging into something deeper than intimacy. They are trying however the utmost to delay the dive.On the next days they go on short excursions, to Sienna and to the tiny villages in the outskirts of the city and on the last evening they engage on a discussion about the Third City. They cannot find it, no evidence may be drawn from the text. At a certain moment Yiannis' look turns to the folded copy of the manuscript's cover featuring the book's title. What he sees is "Bar Flau..". He turns the folded cover to the other side... The title is now completed with "... bert". Something flashes up within him. The Third City is there, facing him.The novel's title in not accidental. Its original components "Bar", "Flau", "Bert", sound like the initials of the cities where Matthaiou lived during the rule of the junta. Of Barcelona, where the theft took place, of Florence where he took refuge and where he met Magdalena and of Berlin, the "Third City" where he went hiding in 1972 when Esnaider tracked down his trail in Florence. Caterina shows him a photograph of the Hardenberg's house at the centre of Berlin. The address is marked behind. Yiannis is now positive that Magdalena must be living in Berlin and decides to go there with Caterina, with whom he has started to fall in love. Indeed at her birthday party - she turns thirty - he kisses her on the lips. The matter however stays there. They both know, but they both hesitate...Going through the few things left back by her parents, Caterina finds a letter addressed to her mother by one Martin Speer, an actor from Berlin. Martin Speer must be well known, since as mentioned in it, he has played in films by Fassbinder. In the meantime, Yiannis comes face to face with danger when he recognizes Esnaider's henchman following them. They leave Florence in a hurry to locate the tracks of Caterina's mother. Yiannis feels he is following Matthaiou's footsteps.

Part Four

THE CHURCH OF MEMORY

Yiannis and Caterina arrive in Berlin on Sunday 6 June. They find themselves in a city looking like an immense building site, reconstructed to take over the role of the 21^st century's major European metropolis. At the same time it is a refitted monument. Periods of history and styles interlace and the visitor finds himself before a living record of the latest years' European history. They take up lodging at the hotel "Funk" which was once the home of the silent movie star Asta Nielsen. Yiannis, alone with Caterina, is by now feeling positive about his love, seeing however that the girl is overwhelmed, he does not make any further move.The first visit takes place to the house of the Hardenberg family, in Motz - Strasse, which burned down during the war and was rebuilt. No sign of Magdalena, apart from a word by an aged tenant that a girl of the Hartnberg family visited the house in the early seventies. Together with her, she said, was a man, a good - looking man.Then Caterina finds Martin Speer's telephone number. They arrange to meet at the bar of a Greek, in Mitte, a neighbourhood of the former East Berlin. Martin Speer is a huge man over 8 feet 4 with a prodigious belly. He has a swollen face bearing the unmistakable signs of years of beer drinking. A homosexual, particularly clever, with an aggressive sense of humour, he slaps Yiannis in the first couple of minutes with a remark about his hand, saying that a disproportionate man does not suit Loukas' daughter. Martin gives his version of the story from his own standpoint, how he met Magdalena while the Berliner Ensemble was on tour in Italy, then how he met Loukas, how the four of them - including Roger, the long - time attachment of Martin who died a few years ago - were going about together, then about the refuge the couple took in Berlin and the splitting. When Loukas left Magdalena she fell in a state of depression and Martin went on to take care of her. She stayed with him for a while but the situation turned from bad to worse, she started drinking and lovemaking here and there, became an alcoholic, could work no more and squandered in one year the money Loukas had left her. Then he lost trace of her and when he called her again two years ago, Magdalena could barely manage to hardly speak on the telephone and from the inarticulate bits and pieces of her talk. Martin made out that Loukas had called her after twenty or so years but it was not for her, it was about Caterina, whose news he wanted to pick up. Martin declares that he was also terribly impressed by Matthaiou, he maintains that not only he was fascinating but that he was also a man of extremes. Matthaiou, says Martin, attracted people around him and when they would open up themselves, he brought them face to face with their innermost thoughts, their most hidden fears. Even for him, Matthaiou was the only person who had made him cry like a little child before him.From the bar, Martin calls once again the phone number where he had found Magdalena last time. The new tenant informs him Magdalena had left long ago. She does not know where she went. A neighbour from the apartment building, Max Elsner, had helped her pack, he perhaps might know something. The house is located in Prenzlauer Berg, a former East Berlin quanter. They arrange to visit it on Wednesday, the day after tomorrow.Martin invites them on the next evening to the theatre. He appears with the Berliner Ensemble in the role of Goering in "Arturo Ui" by Brecht. His last address to Yiannis is rather conciliatory and the latter starts to communicate with the German's unconventional codes. After the performance they all go out for dinner with the company's actors.On the next day Yiannis, Caterina and Martin visit Elsner who gives them Magdalena's new address, a few blocks away, on Knaack-Strasse. She has moved to the house of some friend of hers, Volker Eimer. Walking towards the house of Caterina's mother, Yiannis feels a pang. He has the feeling of being an intruder, a stranger in a foreign story.Caterina rings the bell. An elderly man answers, it is Volker Eimer, who seems somewhat afraid. Through the intervention of Martin whom Eimer recognizes from his roles in the cinema, they are being admitted into the apartment. A rather plump woman with the signs of drink and of abandonment quite apparent was lying on the sofa. Beside her a small table with a half empty bottle of vodka and a partly consumed pie. She had her birthday that day, she had become sixty. It was Magdalena Hardenberg, Magdalena Matteo...In a terribly charged atmosphere, Caterina introduces herself to her mother who does not recognize her. "I never had children" she says, and the scene from "Bar Flaubert" with Magdalena comes to Yiannis' mind, with her, only four years - old, at the big allied bombing, the day the Kaiser Wilhelm church was destroyed, trying to hide beneath a motor car. A maimed little girl is underneath, who before dying tells her its name... Caterina...Magdalena withdraws in something which looks like stupor and Caterina tells Eimer to let her sleep and that she will be coming back next day. Yiannis and Caterina slowly walk through the streets of Berlin. Caterina has decided to undertake herself the care of her mother.Next day Yiannis visits the museums and monuments of the city. On the plot of land where the Gestapo headquarters were standing at the time, in an exhibition under the title "Topography of Terror", he sees Goering's photograph. In his smile he recognizes the perversion of power, the horror... Leaving the exhibition, he feels a shudder, walking in Berlin at the dawn of the year 2,000, only fifty - five years after the disaster, among young citizens to the grandfathers of whom, this smile might have belonged...Back to Knaack-Strasse, Magdalena under the care of her daughter starts slowly to recover. They have taken away the bottles and a specialist doctor is visiting her. She does not yet recognize her daughter but a certain intimacy is gradually starting to develop between them. Caterina speaks to her about places in Florence, she shows her a picture of Matthaiou. Magdalena still draws away from everything, Caterina however gets a glimpse of her mother, one day, looking at the photograph with her eyes in tears.In the search for Matthaiou, Yiannis manages to convince Eimer to let them have a look into the contents of a coffer where Magdalena is keeping under lock her only possessions. Yiannis and Caterina are back to the house an evening, after Magdalena has gone to bed. Eimer delivers to them the contents of the coffer. Photographs, letters and manuscripts. Magdalena has kept photographs of hers from Florence with her parents, others of a later period showing her first performances on stage, pictures from her films and finally of her acquaintance with Matthaiou, of the wedding, of walks in the country etc. Caterina is in tears as she reads the last letter left by her father before leaving which starts: "When you will be reading this I will be far away", to conclude: "What else can I say? From now on I do not exist, more than anytime before".Last, is a folder with art reviews by Matthaiou. Going through them Yiannis realizes that although they seemingly refer to entirely different subjects, Poussin, Goethe, Sanazzaro, Philip Sidney, there is something that binds them together. The explanation is the painting "The Shepherds of Arcadia" by Nicolas Poussin at the Louvre. It shows an idyllic landscape in Ancient Greece with two shepherds and a couple standing before a tomb bearing the latin inscription: "Et in Arcadia ego" - "I also in Arcadia (exist)"... What binds all the texts together is Arcadia. Reading through an essay on Goethe, Yiannis finds, at the point where the poet mentions the specific phrase, a footnote written with a pen of another colour: "I also come to Arcadia at the end of my journey. On the Mountain. At the Four Villages. L.D.S.K.".It is four in the morning. Yiannis finds himself before the solution to the riddle. He remembers Matthaiou's excerpt about the four villages. Arcadia, the Mountain, the Four Villages, L.D.S.K.... He takes a few photographs and the essays along and leaves for the hotel together with Caterina. There, on a map of Greece which is included in his filofax, he moves to the Peloponnese, to Arcadia, and starts looking for the villages. He finds them, the one above the other, at a distance of only 45 kilometres between the first and the last. "L.D.S.K." : Langadia, Dimitsana, Stemnitsa, Karytaina. Loukas Matthaiou is to be found in one of those four villages, in that small parcel of the Arcadian soil.Yiannis and Caterina are seated on the bed close to each other, with the small sheets of the map of the Peloponnese unfolded before them. Yiannis throws away the sheets from the bed with his left hand and with the right one - the defective one - draws Caterina to him, with the embarrassment and the expectation of all these past days overflowing.At noon, next day, Caterina takes her mother, Eimer and Martin along with Yiannis to a restaurant at Motz-Strasse, in the building where the house of the Hardenberg family was located. They all of them take afterwards a walk through the city. Passing before the ruined Kaiser Wilhelm church, the church of memory, where Caterina leads her mother on purpose. Magdalena stands abruptly still, as if thunderstruck. She asks her daughter for her name and when told, she silently embraces her for a long time. Then Caterina takes her mother away and they go back home alone.Yiannis decides to return to Greece and go to Arcadia to look for Matthaiou. Caterina wants to stay in Berlin with her mother with whom they come gradually closer to each other. As for their relationship, Yiannis sees that Caterina is under pressure. "All this is too much, much too much..." she says to him. These are the same words that Leto uses at the end of "Bar Flaubert"... On Wednesday 23 June, at dawn, Yiannis leaves for Greece to search for the father of the young woman whom he leaves asleep by his side in Berlin, the "Third City" of "Bar Flaubert", the book written by that same man, Loukas Matthaiou.

Part Five

THE SECRETS OF THE GODS

In Athens Yiannis contacts his father. He admits that he did not go to Barcelona and Florence on a reporting mission but on a personal errand, the nature of which he cannot yet disclose to him. His father is annoyed but Yiannis id adamant. He will go to Arcadia. Next day he meets Anna. They have a clear and sincere explanation, he tells her there is a new woman in his life. Anna had already understood it, she knew it was a matter of time; the relationship is over.On 29 June Yiannis arrives at the first village, Stemnitsa, a picturesque settlement built on the western slopes of Mount Mainalon. He takes up lodging at the "Tricolonion" Hotel and starts asking about Matthaiou. He does not find anything and no strange foreigner of that name has ever troubled the peace of this Arcadian village in the past twenty five years.The next stop is Karytaina, with its famous old bridge and medieval fortress. Having collected information from Stemnitsa he goes directly to the café at the main square, "Brenthe", where all the elderly village people meet. He shows them a photograph of young Matthaiou and for the first time a light shines at the end of the tunnel. An old man, a farmer mayor of the village, recognizes in the person of Matthaiou the man who nearly twenty five years ago came to the village and insisted on buying the "Matzouroyiannis Castle", a stone-built two-storey ruin right beneath the fortress. The edifice was naturally not for sale, it had been constructed in the mid 15^th century, a remnant of the old Byzantine settlement of Karytaina and belonged to the Department of Antiquities.Yiannis visits the ruined building. The inside, although utterly destroyed, is fascinating, with an open view over the whole village. And in a lurking hole, Yiannis finds a black cigarette - case with a golden fringe. Back in Stemnitsa he calls Caterina. At the hotel in Berlin there is no answer...He then goes to Dimitsana, a village amphitheatrically built between two hilltops, on the Lousios river. Based on information he has had, he goes directly to the village library where all data regarding the village people are recorded. The librarian, the nice Mrs Dimitriou, cannot find anything connecting to Loukas Matthaiou. Yiannis and the librarian start a discussion about the source of the motto "et in Arcadia ego". She informs him that there are two basic interpretations of the motto.Their main difference, she explains, is in the determination of the nature of the assessing subject, and additionally, in the exact content of the saying itself. The vagueness is due to the absence of the verbal particle. According to the first hypothesis, the omnipotence and everlasting supremacy of Death is being clearly indicated. It is stressed, namely, that no area in the world is exempt from the dominant shadow of ever present Death, not even Arcadia itself. Specifically, it is maintained that Death says: "I exist even in Arcadia".On the other hand, the second position is the one where the subject is not Death, but some unlucky mortal who finds himself in the Great Beyond and recalls with regretful yearning the days of happiness and serenity that he lived in Arcadia's Paradise. The specific phrase denotes here the retrospective vision of a supreme happiness which someone has lived in the past.Yiannis tells the librarian that as far as he is concerned he interprets the phrase according to its second explanation, while correspondingly, he believes that his was the way in which Matthaiou used it.It is then that the librarian speaks to him about a Third explanation which holds that the absence of the verb is nothing else but an intentional action meant to secure the absolutely correct number of necessary letters. And that is because the specific explanation considers that the saying "et in Arcadia ego" is nothing else than an anagram, a "key", an operational tool easily learned by heart, set up for the decoding of a certain secret message, known only to the initiated.In the evening Yiannis has a couple of drinks with the local people and spends the night as a guest of the village taxi-driver. Next day he sets forth for Langadia, the last place where there is a chance he might find Loukas Matthaiou.Langadia is a village built almost perpendicularly on the hillside; the natural slope lends it the form of an ancient amphitheatre with the concave part situated at the foot of the hills where a stream flows by. Yiannis starts exploring the village. Climbing up the hillside in the burning heat he wonders about the utility of the whole enterprise. Reaching unsuccessfully the top building of the village he decides to try the lower part down to the stream in the afternoon. He reaches the last houses without any result. At the very last one a strange-looking young man with a dog, drives him violently away, hinting however that there is yet another building in the woods. Yiannis misleads him and manages to go ahead on his way through the vegetation. He walks for an hour amid an idyllic environment without coming across any sign of life. Eventually he contemplates with awe the dreadful ascent that awaits him on his return. He has just decided to finally make his way back when, at the end of a clearing, he spots an all-white surface far off.Coming closer, he finds himself before a marble slab which is like a tombstone. The whole environment brings something to his memory. The hilltops at a distance, the idyllic landscape, the tree, Arcadia, now the marble slab, the tomb, yes!, the landscape is the same, exactly the same, a duplicate of the landscape on the painting by Poussin! But this is not all... There is an inscription on the slab! Yiannis bending forward reads..."I Tego Arcana Dei" - "Go, I watch over the secrets of the Gods". The last two words "Arcana Dei" refer to him sound-wise to "Arcadia". He remembers the librarian in Dimitsana, the Third interpretation... "The saying ‘Et in Arcadia ego' is nothing else that an anagram, a ‘key', an operational tool easily learned by heart, set up for the decoding of a certain secret message"... Yiannis takes out pencil and paper...Indeed the phrase "I Tego Arcana Dei" is the exact anagram of "Et in Arcadia ego" ! Yiannis moves aside from a raw of trees growing behind the marble stone and finds himself face to face with what he was looking for so long: a three storey stone house with small openings, with a large glazed window surface on the last floor and a metal disc looking like a satellite dish on the roof.He suddenly hears a commanding feminine voice. A dark-complexioned woman in her forties, cladded in drooping clothes aims at him a shotgun. He explains who he is and that he wishes to meet Loukas Matthaiou. The woman reacts savagely and Yiannis begs her to convey to Matthaiou only two words: "Bar Flaubert". The woman returns to the house and when back says that the master agrees to meet him next day at six in the evening.Back to the hotel Yiannis reads through the last excerpts of the book."... Much, it is much, it is too much. How can so much be contained in a numerator..."

Next day is 4 July 1998, his birthday: Yiannis gets forty. At precisely six o'clock he is standing before the tombstone. The woman leads him into the house. Above the entrance door there is an escutcheon, same as the one on Caterina's country house in Sienna. Yiannis waits in a lobby on the upper floor of the house, outside a door through which when it opens, he will see alive before him, Loukas Matthaiou himself for the first time. He feels oddly, as if a shadow, a black veil, bears on him and crushes him.In a little while the door opens and Loukas Matthaiou appears before him in flesh and blood. He is still more impressive than on the photographs, a human being radiating an amount of energy, such as he has never known. But the large room also to which the master of the house leads him is not less imposing... Heavy wooden bookcases, a lengthy construction like a console with digital numbers switching on and off, terminal monitors, a big telescope, candlesticks and torches, make the room look as something between a medieval library and a space centre.Yiannis introduces himself as Yiannis Markou and brings directly the discussion to the subject, speaking about the book. Matthaiou answers that the fact that he is here now means that he has been before to Berlin and invites him to disclose his motive. Yiannis gives the manuscript to Matthaiou, speaks to him about the attraction exerted on him by the text and relates his own story in a few words. "This is my own ‘Bar Flaubert'", he concludes.Matthaiou expresses himself in a special way, full of codes, but which Yiannis by now is in position to interpret. The host gets him involved in a discussion about a fraction which equals life and has man as a denominator ‘Which is the numerator?' he asks himself and Yiannis considers it is probably ‘Love, Death, God'. This notion comes back continuously into the discussion and the fraction, in the sense of proportion, of speech, leads Matthaiou to refer to the Four Gospels and how four people give a different interpretation of the same story, with a different speech... The two men, Yiannis and Matthaiou realize that the names of all four evangelists are included in their own names and surnames...Further on, the talk become more personal, they talk about Magdalena and what she experienced when she was four years old in Berlin during the bombing - "... She never got over it... she ought to have reborne the mutilated little girl..." says Matthaiou.Yiannis drives skillfully the discussion to Leto, the girl in "Bar Flaubert". The host then reflects that he was made for a more congenial relationship with his fellow creatures. Only once did he come close to what would bring him back to his original destiny and it got lost. Matthaiou says that Leto was parts of himself, the harmony he was looking for. She was a real person, they were together for one year, when they were nineteen, in '58, in America,. When Yiannis hands him a photograph of Caterina, Matthaiou conceals with difficulty his emotion, and so does he upon hearing the news of Fernando Salinas' death. Yiannis informs him that he proposes to give a call to the Spanish police. After that the talk moves to the anagram of the motto on the slab. For Matthaiou it is a symbolical deviation, it gives a stir. How out of Death, which maintains that it still exists in a place like Arcadia, does one reach the point where the secrets of the Gods are kept, the secrets that regulate life? How, from the tomb, in one movement, one may reach the cradle? In order to succeed in this deviation, man must break the line, dissolve the letters and set up a new meaning. The matter, maintains Matthaiou, is how does one manage to bring about this at the bodily, the wordly level. Then and only then can one approach the meaning of the numerator.Finally Matthaiou speaks about Atalanti, the woman who showed in Yiannis, whom he found in '75, as an orphan little gypsy at the time he was building the house alone with only three craftsmen, under cover from the village.Night had fallen by now and Matthaiou before the end of their meeting, asks Yiannis how did he find the book. Yiannis tellis him the truth, omitting the fact that he is the son of Markos Loukas. Matthaiou speaks about the war undertaken against him by Loukas which he finds inexplicable. He adds that much later, after he had sent him the book, he learned that Loukas was married and had a child. Yiannis tells him that the son of Markos Loukas is of the same age as he, born in '59, just like himself.Matthaiou looks upset but tries to conceal it. He walks to his mechanical equipment and shows Yiannis some pictures of the universe. The first is the most remote picture of the universe, the other, one featuring the inner part of a carbon atom. The images are similar. A black background with a faint light in the middle... "This image could be that of the numerator", says Matthaiou.Yiannis decides to get back. As he gets up, he takes his shirt away, which not-withstanding the heat he was still wearing because of the tension of the discussion, and he remains clad with his undershirt. At the back, Matthaiou tells him to stand for a while in the light. He wants to have a look at him. After a few moments of embarrassment, standing up in the middle of the lobby, with Matthaiou watching him, Yiannis feels a numbness in his hand. His right hand. Matthaiou drops his glance and with manifest difficulty asks Yiannis to see him again. He answers that next day he will be returning to Athens. Atalanti escorts him to the outer door. Upon leaving Yiannis instructs her to tell Matthaiou that the numerator is Fate. "The numerator is Fate", repeats Atalanti, as Yiannis starts to climb back towards Langadia.Yiannis is back to Athens and abandons his father's autobiography: His father accepts the news with resignation and shuts himself up... His mother comes hurriedly to Yiannis' house and discloses to him that his father is not only the sort of man, the type of character he knows. She, was the one taking deviations, and Markos Loukas has tolerated quite a lot... "This academic, this man sure of himself...He has also taken his risks in life... and very serious risks indeed..."."There it is now, that my turn has come" replies Yiannis, deadly serious, and mother and son hug together for the first time with such tenderness.It is now five months later. A few days before the last Christmas of the second millenium Yiannis Loukas awakes form his midday siesta. He calls Caterina, who by now is staying in Florence with her mother, to announce the arrest of Jorge Esnaider. Maybe, he says, they will meet next Easter in Athens. No, replies Caterina, she has not tried to contact her father yet.Yiannis goes then to his PC. Facing him is a poster of a painting by Degas, his beloved impressionist. Next to hem, the manuscript of the novel he has been writing all that time. The title, of course : "Bar Flaubert".Out of the file with the documents from Berlin, he chooses a photograph of Matthaiou and he sets it up before his father's autobiography which has only recently been published to coincide with his nomination at the Academy. At this moment, another photograph falls down to the floor. He lifts it up. It shows Matthaiou, an adolescent, with an older man. Without paying to it any more attention he puts it back. Had he looked more closely at it he would have seen that the man on the photograph, Matthaiou's father, had one, at first sight, strange bodily particularity. His right hand was shorter than the left by the length of a palm... Yiannis Loukas presses the first key and a capital B, the first letter of his novel, appears on the screen.

 

 

Book Excerpt:

CHAPTER 1 KILL DEAD TIME

Kill dead time

I was down below, exploring her. My tongue teased the opposing skin, twisted it, smeared it with its warm lubrication. My mind wasn’t in it though. My thoughts raced off, elsewhere. At one moment, my gaze fixed on the facing wall. It was my wall, marking the confines of my room. Three candles were burning in the silver candelabra. Their candescent light flooded the room. I drifted in their warm glow. I gazed again before me; only darkness now and a dim light in the distance. I proceeded. A stone door barred the entrance. I uttered the password. A crack opened in the middle of the stone. Light rain. I proceeded further still. Vegetation, mountain peaks, a stream babbling. Yet it was as if nature had faded away. Everything was black, draped in darkness, with only a dim light in the distance, a silver glimmer in the pitch-black forest.‘That’s it...there...,’ I heard her saying. As if I were being given orders through a loudspeaker, my mind was completely detached from what was happening, my body acted of its own accord, mechanically. I recall how, in the past, in similar circumstances, I would think of situations involving some rhythm, some mathematical sequence, in order to keep myself in that erotic flow. It was a good way of being there and not there without neglecting my partner. For, no matter how strange it may seem, that distance appeared to have worked beneficially.‘Yes, yes, Yannis, yes...’ I heard her shout again, louder and louder, till her limbs gave way and she burst, uncontrollably surrendering her love. I took a deep breath. The room had a musty smell about it. As if an enervating gas were escaping through the cracks in the plaster and enveloping me. When I was sure that the modest ritual was over - from her point of view at least - I rolled over on one side. I was about to sit up in bed but she, thinking that I was getting up, rushed to put her arms around me.‘Yannis...it was so good. So different! Today, it was how I always wanted it to be. It was... it was just right.’ Just right and just rot, I thought. What’s ‘right’ supposed to mean? How, when I’m not even really there, can she find it ‘right’? If that was right, then what about the other times, the few times, that is, when I was there in body and soul? How right was it then? When I was there, when the veil enfolding us made me feel our bodies as one, why didn’t she tell me just how right it was then? Just right and just rot. It was a mistake, a big mistake. Like all else, a big fat mistake. ‘Do you want to sleep here tonight?’ she asked, lighting a cigarette. ‘Manya love, I’m not ready to go to sleep yet,’ - a trick that usually worked - ‘why don’t we go out for a drink?’ ‘Okay, I’ll go and wash,’ Manya replied somewhat irritated, and she got up. Manya was an actress. Thirty-two years old, long, straight, red hair. Black, expressive eyes, with a blue circle around the iris. Her lips were fleshy, slightly protruding. Slender, with slightly accentuated hips. At that time, she was playing a supporting role in a TV comedy. She wasn’t bad. She wasn’t good either. She entered the bathroom. I went into the living room and turned on the CD player. When Manya was in the bathroom, I never went in. Not that she’d forbidden me, but after love-making, there was something that made me want to leave her alone, to leave her to wash. The wind instruments began weaving above my head. Portishead. Lyricism with sharp stabs. I lit a cigarette, switched on the TV. Trash and more trash. I switched it off. Manya emerged from the bathroom wearing a bathrobe. She put on her make-up, a thick line of eye-shadow, she dressed and we left. We walked along Mavromichali Street, then turned into Asklepiou Street. The first bar we went into was the ‘Bright Lights’, a popular haunt that recalled a French bistro. The moment I opened the door, I spotted Kostas Anagnostou, a friend and journalist, sitting at the bar. We’d known each other for a good few years. He was salaried, at the heart of the Fourth Estate. As a freelancer, I had a somewhat looser relationship with it. We didn’t sit with him as I knew he wasn’t too keen on Manya – a stuck-up starlet was what he called her. We stayed about an hour and then we went to the bar across the road, the ‘Big City’, a rock bar that hadn’t progressed beyond The Clash and The Stranglers. Fortunately, there wasn’t a soul there, and so at around three in the morning, I got rid of her quite legitimately, putting her into a taxi and waiting till it had turned the corner, supposedly noting the number. I parked the old black Mini in my usual place in the cul-de-sac. Instead of going straight home, I decided to take a walk. Though it was April, Athens was deserted. The night warm. The Parliament building, beautifully lit, looked magnificent. In Harilaou Trikoupi Street, the Vovou office block seemed to be feeling the cold. Two or three transvestites on the street, they too now part of the setting. In Ippokratous Street, on a yard wall, red-painted graffiti: ‘Kill dead time.’ I went to bed and fell asleep straightaway, without the previous hours dripping even one wet image. It had been some time since I’d had any dreams. Quite some time.

Hot chocolate or madeleine?

It was eleven-thirty on a Tuesday morning at the end of April when I sat down in my favourite armchair in front of the balcony door. I was drinking a coffee and gazing outside. On the streets of Exarchia, the cars and motorbikes had been performing their routines since early on. Through the open balcony door, I could see the supermarket across the street. Above the main sign, I noticed a new one in red neon: ‘Jacobs Suchard-Pavlides Chocolates.’ I smiled. Uncle Demis’s factory; the last Pavlides was a distant relative of my father. I recalled how, when I was small – six or seven years old – I’d go down to the factory in Piraeus Street and dip my hands into the vat of warm chocolate; I’d completely coat myself in it and the mixture would run from the palms of my hands. Even now, in my nose and mouth, that peculiar taste of hazelnut as it blended with the dark mixture, with the bitter taste of almond and, of course, that divine invention, Merenda! For years and years, I fed myself almost exclusively on Merenda. I used to get through a jar a day. After turning eighteen, though, I cut out sweets, just like that. The reason for my adult abstention from that chocolate paradise is most likely to be found in my excessively sweet apprenticeship in childhood. An age when everything comes in excess. And when you get older, you still have the recollection of that hot chocolate from your childhood that slowly melts in the mouth, a feeling that’s now foreign to you, a sweet recollection, fused in the memory. A lost paradise; the only true one. For sometimes, the recollection of a taste, even when it’s not a small shell-shaped madeleine, is enough to bring back temps perdu. I come from an old Athenian family. Markos Loukas, my father, is one of the most well-known writers in the country. My mother owns a small art gallery. I lived with them until I was twenty-three, until, that is, I graduated from university. Afterwards, I went to the U.S.A. for postgraduate studies in Comparative Literature, began a doctorate which I never finished and returned to Greece to do my military service. After a round of two or three years working in private schools and colleges, I gave all this up just before turning thirty, took on some private lessons and began writing for various publications. In order to supplement my income, I worked for some magazines as a freelance writer; from interviews and features to cultural news and travel articles. In addition to all this – given that I had a good relationship with foreign languages, fluent English, Italian and German, and a little Spanish – I also undertook translation work for a small publishing company. Writing is my great passion. Living in a house where the wall was synonymous with the bookcase – even the bathroom was full of books – it was only natural that my immune system wouldn’t be able to resist the writing virus. I can’t say my father exerted any pressure on me. On the contrary, he was quite against my decision to concern myself with literature. Eventually, as might be expected, I couldn’t resist the temptation to publish my creative endeavours. Four years ago, I published, at my own expense, a collection of short stories, which, despite getting a couple of favourable reviews – reads smoothly, original themes – didn’t sell more than three hundred copies. What I always wanted, though, was to write a novel. In appearance, I’m reasonably good-looking. Tallish, six feet two, brown hair, a thin face, green eyes, narrow arched eyebrows, a slightly crooked nose and, when I laugh, some funny lines that form around my mouth, rather like parentheses, making my delight appear forced – which it isn’t. As with most people, there’s something about me that I don’t like. I don’t like it at all, I hate it, I’d like to be born again just so it wouldn’t exist. And worst of all it’s an imperfection that can’t be put right: an unequal distribution. A genetic quirk led to my being born with my right arm roughly eight centimetres shorter than the left. No one in my family could ever give me a satisfactory explanation for this. Eventually, I set about investigating it on my own. There was no sign of this anomaly in either of the two families, at least for four generations back. The problem began to appear at around twelve, when my right arm suddenly stopped growing. The left continued to develop till I was seventeen, when the present difference of around eight centimetres became fixed. The first shock came with basketball, at which I was especially good player. The ball no longer obeyed my commands, I could no longer perform my famous reverse dribbles, while my baseball passes, that used to reach their target with goniometer precision, now urgently required projectile correction. My skill had been forever amputated by eight lousy centimetres. During the same period, when the difference was now visible to the naked eye, my schoolmates began to make fun of me -‘Hey, Loukas...you weirdo...’– but, fortunately, it didn’t last long. The years at high school passed uneventfully, except for the second field of embarrassment: girls. When the flirting began in the first class of high school, I’d always offer my left hand whenever I was introduced to a girl. Of course, that resulted in the girl being puzzled at first and ended by working against me, since it invariably provoked the question: ‘So you shake hands with your left hand?’ After not a few tragicomical episodes, I decided I’d offer my right hand, cleverly making sure to ‘withdraw’ the left so the difference wouldn’t be so obvious, at least at first sight. The techniques I developed were numerous, based for the main part on some form of trompe l’oeil. I acted somewhat like a Renaissance painter; crooked stances, imperceptible raising of the left shoulder, bending of the spine to the right, a whole pile of tricks so that the girl would see the two limbs as equal in length as possible. After some time, after Nana, that is, my first girlfriend, who never attached any importance to the matter, I began to reconcile myself with the problem. Naturally, I was always obliged to take my pullovers, jackets and shirts to the dressmaker’s to have the right sleeve shortened. There were many people – and I’d checked this closely – who didn’t notice it at all, but just as every complex is its owner’s sole companion, so I too can’t recall a single day in over twenty-five years when I haven’t been concerned, albeit in passing, with this slight imbalance, this weirdo gene inserted in a generally sound, well-shaped body.I have often reflected that whatever you are, it’s always too little; however, it’s this too little that from an early age encloses you inside a social shell: alienation. I came to know love as a factory that was more fascinating than its products. Only on two occasions did I follow the process to the end. The first time, which lasted for four years, from twenty to twenty-four, was with Elda, a fellow student at university. We didn’t put in very many appearances at the lectures; we were always going on trips and going through various emotional dramas that would end in exhilarating sex. The second long-term relationship began when I was thirty-three and is still in progress, six years to the good. Her name’s Anna, she’s an art historian, ten years younger than me. We met one Friday afternoon at the opening of an exhibition at the National Art Gallery. I’d gone alone, I was in no mood for company and all I wanted was to see for the first time from close up the works of my favourite painter, a French impressionist who used hardly anything but pastel. Each painting was better than the next. The subjects were much the same: scenes from ballets, moments from the opera, horse races and, above all, young women. Women holding chrysanthemums, others holding anemones, women in the bath, women in the countryside. Despite his being a French painter working in Paris, the oriental influences were more than evident. At one point I found myself looking at a painting that left me ecstatic. It was a woman sitting naked in an armchair, with her back turned. Her torso was leaning forward, her right arm was resting on the back of the armchair, while in her left hand she was holding a towel with which she was drying her hair. The painting was in pastel, with firm, sweeping strokes. My interest focused on the bones of the spine, which were sticking out of her back like an animal poised to attack. Yet, although the dominating feature was the twisted skeleton, it was something else that stole the show. A delicate hand, almost separate from the rest of the body, was gracefully holding the cotton cloth, reminding us that this delicate creature had just finished one of the most noble acts of the race: her personal hygiene. At that moment, I felt a warm breath directly behind me. I turned round; a tall, slender girl with a pretty, intelligent face and black hair cut like a boy’s. She was standing so close to me that it would have been rather silly not to have spoken. Before I could think of anything, the girl charged: ‘A women drying herself. Quite daring for the time, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, putting the catalogue into my bag, stalling for time. ‘I like the way the artist has captured her. An uncommon perspective. I like that element of the unusual.’ ‘Do you like unusual women?’ she asked. ‘I like what isn’t easily comprehended,’ I answered with a smile. ‘Why do you think she sat up?’ she went on, unrestrainedly. ‘Perhaps he didn’t understand...’ I stammered. ‘What didn’t he understand?’ ‘What she wanted...herself.’ ‘Why don’t men ever understand?’ Suddenly, there was an embarrassed silence. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Hang on a moment, we still haven’t been introduced,’ in order to gain a little time. ‘My name’s Yannis, Yannis Loukas.’ ‘Mine’s Anna, Anna Rigopoulou.’ A smile like a pink brush stroke lit her face. Pretty girl, I thought. The rest was what you’d expect. A year of ardent passion that I drained to the very last drop. A passion that I experienced in all its aspects. I lived through its transformations, its cataclysmic intensity, its tiny liquid drops as they evaporated. Her body was a landscape without end, a Russian doll that continually donned new garments, each more beautiful than the last. Though all this lasted just twelve months. When it eventually came to an end. It came to an end and the passion faded. Just as with a bang it had been born, so with a salvo it expired, and I resolved myself to the fact that it was over, that it was destined to go on for just as long as it had lasted. What remained was a pleasant feeling that, for my part, turned into a kind of erotic resignation. A resignation that spread to other areas of my life and became second nature, a way of life. I went through the motions out of habit. I didn’t break off the relationship. Anna and I remained rather like friends and lovers at the same time. She was my worldly companion, an unofficial fiancée. She’d realized the change in my feelings, though she seemed to have accepted the new situation. I was sure that Anna suspected that there were other women in my life, but she never let it show. An undefined sense of duty kept her with me, a sense of devotion that patiently awaited its reward. But I was already gone, elsewhere. And this city was full of the opportunities that, albeit occasionally, give flesh and bone to that indefinite elsewhere. I sipped the last drop of coffee and went into the living room. I switched on the computer and went straight to the previous day’s file.

Whatever is decoded dies

After an hour and a quarter, I looked up from the screen. The text was before me; it covered three pages, nine hundred and twenty-five words. I’d send it to Law 2000, a lifestyle magazine. I printed it and began reading: ...He opened his eyes. For a while he didn’t know who he was, where he was, what he was. A 180-degree panning round the room brought him to his senses. The objects were known to him, the air familiar, the smell recognizable. Yes, he was Nikos Marinos, thirty-four years old, single, a journalist. It was one-thirty in the afternoon and he had just woken up on his living room couch in a two-roomed apartment in Metz, on that day, July 4th, his birthday, with a head heavy from his intemperate beer-drinking of the previous night. I went on reading the next pages that described his chance meeting with an old girlfriend, the recollections from their summer holidays of two years before, his invitation to her to have dinner together. I read it again. It’s not bad, I thought and I saved it onto a floppy disk. Law 2000 had asked for a two-thousand-word article on bachelor life. I picked up the phone and dialled the number of the chief editor:‘Hi Dimitris, it’s Yannis. I’ve finished the piece, I’ll send it to you.’‘Okay, Yannis. Daniel will have to have a look at it too.’‘If it’s accepted, the fee’s the same, right?’‘Yes, sure, a hundred thousand gross, bye then.’In recent years, this had been one of my two main sources of income. Regular contributions to two magazines, less regular work for two more. The two standard magazines were Law 2000 and Individual. I’d been at high school with Daniel Triandafyllides, the publisher of Law. He was a tough kid who went around on a motorbike. As a student, he’d got onto coke and all the rest, eventually going clean after a period of post-graduate detoxification in France. Being smart as he was, he soon grasped the spirit of the times – you enjoyed yourself, the enjoyment level was always one inch higher, you leapt but never quite reached it – and he published three highly successful magazines that sold like mad.As for my literary concerns, they were at that time confined to editing my father’s autobiography. The ultimate goal, my novel, was a work constantly in progress. Or, to be honest, constantly in a state of postponement. For a good few years, I’d simply abandoned whatever I’d begun.In the evening, I was awakened by the sharp sound of the phone ringing. At the other end of the line was Dimitris Papadopoulos, the chief editor at Law 2000. Daniel had rejected the piece.‘I’ll send you some paid ads that need editing,’ said Dimitris, trying to sugar the pill.It was the third time in succession that the same thing had happened. I wondered why. I admit that it wasn’t one of my best, it wasn’t like the ones I used to write three or four years earlier, but with that kind of writing, you’re walking a tightrope. Nevertheless, the fact was that I desperately needed the hundred thousand drachmas. I also wasn’t very happy about the rejections. I decided to go and speak directly to Daniel. Just a month previously, Law 2000 had moved to a post-modern four-storey building in Kifissias Avenue, one of those that for some incomprehensible reason incorporate fragments of ancient Greek art in their facade. I went up to the second floor and gave my name to the secretary; a man strangely enough. After about ten minutes, the fellow announced that Mr Triandafyllides was waiting for me.Daniel was standing in front of his desk.‘How are things, Yannis?’ he said, welcoming me cordially.‘I’ve been better,’ I murmured, and planted myself in an armchair.Daniel sat down on his designer leather throne. The entire wall behind him was covered with a smoked-glass mirror, thus putting his interlocutor in the unenviable position of having to speak while gazing at his own reflection.‘What’s that then, Daniel, some kind of post-modern interrogation?’‘A little test for my colleagues. The insecure ones keep checking their appearance, the self-confident don’t care.’‘Then I’ve most likely failed, because I’ve already noticed that I’m getting fatter,’ I retorted ironically.‘That’s the trick. It’s a special mirror that enlarges the reflection by twenty per cent.’‘You’re a satanic one all right, a real Manson of the press,’ I said, pretending to be serious.Daniel laughed out loud.‘You’ve a way with words, Yannis, pity you’re not able to write so well of late.’‘That’s just what I’ve come to see you about. Is there some problem, Daniel, you’ve rejected my last three pieces.’‘Look, you’re not new at this game. When you began, you remember what I told you. That your writing is at the forefront, your angle’s new, exactly what every editor dreams of. You have to admit though that lately you’ve come to a standstill. Or rather...you’ve taken a step backwards. In this business, you have to be always moving forwards. You have to be on top of what’s happening out there, and I mean globally, and choose whatever’s hot, whatever’s up front. Then you have to dissect it, fragment it, extract the essence. Today, Yannis, whatever is decoded dies. Instantly. Look how the young kids are writing. You have to break up the text, experiment with the syntax. We have to dismantle words in the same way we dismantle images. Whereas you’ve begun to paste them together.’‘It’s true that I’ve come to the end of my limits. It’s not in me to dissect either time or words. Okay, I’ve got stuck. Perhaps... It’s my father’s autobiography too. I’m tired of rummaging through his archives. But why am I telling you all this...,’ I said, seeing him adopt an expression that showed I’d got off the topic. ‘What do you care,’ I went on, ‘you’ve got plenty to be pleased about. Apart from your Orwellian practices’ – I glanced in the mirror and Daniel laughed – ‘you’re just fine. That’s just how you were in school, a finger in everything… ‘All right, Yannis, I understand. We’re friends. You’re going through a rough patch. But here we’re talking as colleagues. Everybody has a block at some point. Just don’t let it get you down. Get on top of it so it won’t get on top of you.’‘Don’t worry, no one’s going to get on top of me. Message received and understood. So long, Daniel, take care,’ I said and got up out of the armchair, casting a last glance at my inflated reflection. That evening, Anna had a family engagement. I phoned Kostas, my journalist friend who hung out at the ‘Bright Lights’. We arranged to meet there at around eleven-thirty.‘Hi there. What’s that smile for? You’re pleased because you trounced us again?’‘Can’t say I didn’t tell you. You lost it on the right wing. Yannakopoulos, Mavroyennidis.’‘Our turn’ll come. We’ll see who’s laughing come the end of the season.’‘At least the team’s doing well, because everything else is...’‘Oh, so we’re feeling down in the dumps and remembered our old friend. Is that it?’ said Kostas sarcastically.‘I’m not joking, lately everything seems to be going wrong.’You know what you need, Yannis? A bit of excitement. You’re forty this year aren’t you? Born in 1958, no?’‘Yes, July 4th, Cancer with Leo for horoscope.’‘Come off it, that’s for old ladies. What matters is that you’ve got yourself into a rut, old friend. Same old tune year after year. Articles for magazines, wracking your brain to come up with topics, trying to adapt to every bloody style. That’s not for your age, old boy. Either find a steady job and get it into your head that that’s what you’ll be doing for the next twenty years, or make a new start. Begin something new. And bear in mind that what I’m saying doesn’t only apply to your work. I’ve seen you out at night with that bit of skirt. Why are you wasting your energy, Yannis? What’s that little slut got to give you that Anna can’t give you?’ ‘She gives me what Anna can’t. And I get from Anna what I can’t get from her.’ ‘Sounds to me like you’ve been taken in by all that stuff you write in your magazines. I thought you kept a distance...’ said Kostas. ‘Listen who’s talking! With a new bird every other week...’ I retorted, moving into the attack. ‘Yannis, you keep making the most screwed-up mistake. You project yourself onto others. Me, old friend, I’m not you. I believe in what some wise bloke once said: love is the overestimation of its object. I don’t want love, I want to screw, I’m not searching for anything through writing, I make money, I’m not imaginative, I’m realistic, I flutter around truth and I don’t get burned, you dive straight in and become kindling. So let me get on with it in my own way and you see to it that you make some changes in your life. Anyway, let’s have another drink. I’ve had enough of all this soul-searching bullshit.’ Kostas and I stayed until late, downing the drink. At around one, I bundled him into the car, drunk as he was, and took him home. Then I went back to my place and flopped onto the bed. I couldn’t sleep. Between two and four, I watched The Old Man and the Sea on cable TV. Then I spent most of the night awake, thinking about Kostas’s eyes, the fleshless backbone of the swordfish caught by the Old Man, and my own eight missing centimetres.

The autobiography

When, on approaching the milestone of his seventieth year, my father decided that he should reveal the course of his life to his readership, he realized that it would be an extremely tiring task, considering that this was a man with a compulsive obsession for hoarding whatever data might one day be useful to him. His mania for collecting naturally extended to the object of his work, with the result that the basement of the family home had been turned into a library-cum-storeroom. Apart from being scholastic, however, my father was also intelligent, and so he sensed quite early on that he would need an assistant, an editor to sort through this pile of material. And because he was by nature suspicious, he knew he wouldn’t find anyone better than me, someone who knew the subject and, in addition, someone who as a close relative would be under his total control. For my father, I was the personification of the ideal research assistant, who would delve into his huge archives and, always under his supervision, would classify, evaluate, and present him with the fruit of his creation, the flower of his fifty-year struggle with the written word. Reviews, unpublished stories, correspondence with other writers, interviews, notes, conference papers, drafts for novels never written and hundreds of other papers, files and envelopes had to be assiduously examined by me. It wasn’t easy, but we finally managed to agree that the sort-out should be kept to a minimum and that the potentially mammoth bibliography should not exceed six hundred pages. The book had progressed. I’d already been working on it for eight months and I reckoned that in another four months or so, my role in it would be finished. At the same time, my father was writing the text, which he showed to no one. ‘It’ll be a surprise for everyone,’ he said, ‘including the family.’ The time had come for the additional task that my father had insisted on: the sorting out of the blue bookcase. In the same basement where that enormous amount of material was stored, in the second room on the right, there was a blue bookcase with manuscripts and typed texts – novels and novellas – sent to him by aspiring authors, something that went on throughout the course of his career. It was Wednesday, the day of the week that I devoted exclusively to the autobiography. My father and I had a meeting about what to do with his correspondence with Nikos Gavriel Pentzikis. This consisted of ten letters, from both sides, in which a heated argument unfolded concerning whether or not the stream of consciousness technique had been successfully assimilated into Greek literature. In his letters, my father, a fanatical opponent of the inner monologue, both reviles and is reviled by the author of Mrs Ersi. The expressions used by both of them would make the monks on Mount Athos want to hide their fondness for this pharmacist from Thessaloniki and make our academicians think again before confirming the rumour that had been circulating widely in the previous year, namely that my father was soon to join the ranks of the ‘immortals’ in the Academy of Athens. Before meeting with him, though, I had to stop by and see my father’s publisher, to give him some photos that were to accompany the text. Panos Viliotis was relatively young, considering the twenty-odd years that he’d been at the peak of the publishing world. He couldn’t have been more than around fifty. Well-preserved, with long grey hair tied back in a ponytail and an impeccable blue suit, he welcomed me from behind his high-tech desk. ‘How are you doing, Yannis? It’s been some time since I last saw you. When will you be through with it all?’ ‘I wish I knew,’ I replied, at a loss. ‘At present, I’m sorting through some letters, there’s so much material, and he wants it all...’ ‘Yes, your father’s more than a little scholastic. When do you think you’ll both be finished?’ ‘I need another four months or so. Now, I’m about to start with all the manuscripts sent to him by young writers just after the dictatorship. There might be something interesting, though I doubt it. Most likely, he told them all where to go with their manuscripts. I think we ought to leave out the chapter on my father as an encourager of new writers!’ ‘What about you, Yannis, what are you up to? Are you still writing? I remember those short stories you published in Patrol. People said good things about them.’ ‘I keep trying to begin something, but it never comes out as I want it.’ ‘The dough’s in the magazines, eh?’ ‘Yes, something like that,’ I replied, making it clear that I didn’t want to go on with the subject. ‘Anyhow, if you do get anything finished, bring it to me to have a look at. After all, a little bit of post-war literary history must have been recorded on your genes.’ ‘The DNA alphabet is more complicated than the Greek one. When our chromosomes can be decoded into bytes, then we’ll be able to speak with certainty about what’s recorded and where,’ I answered with the air of an expert. ‘Then, dear boy, nothing will be written. Novels won’t be written at all or they’ll be written by computer programmes. It’s just another product, don’t you agree? Did you see Kokkiades on TV? Twenty-five years old, first appearance, best-seller, and just listen to him on literature in the next century. You’ll load your computer with the characteristics of the hero, of the object of desire, of the bad guy, of the timescale, the type of conflict, you’ll click on the narrative style of your choice and you’ll choose between the thirty-three possible texts that exist. All the rest will be taken care of by the bytes. Just as we’ll have “smart” drugs and “smart” homes, so we’ll also have “smart” novels.’ ‘Except that the reader won’t be especially “smart”.’ Panos laughed and looked at his watch: ‘You get your humour from your father. Come on, then, show me the photos.’

My father

‘You mentioned on the phone about some phrase...’ My father puffed at his pipe. ‘Difficult to fight with your soul. It’s an unequal contest. Like all wars...’ ‘Like all...?’ I asked. ‘Wars.’ ‘Wars?’ ‘Yes, civil ones. Like all civil wars.’ ‘When did you write that?’ ‘I didn’t write it. I felt it.’ ‘You felt it?’ ‘Yes. As soon as I woke up. It wasn’t a dream though. It was that tender hour just before waking. When everything is in a state of semi-inertness...’ ‘It must have been the after-effects of some dream. That intermediate stage between sleeping and waking.’ ‘No doubt that plays some role. The closer a thought is at the time you wake up, the greater the effect of the dream’s warmth on it. The person’s at an intermediate stage, his mind is wandering in a fantasy.’ I smiled: ‘Just imagine if you heard another father and son talking about such things. It still seems strange to me that I’ve a father who’s a writer...’ ‘It struck you as strange even when you were small. I remember you secretly watching me through the door of my study.’ ‘Yes. I used to think that you lived somewhere else, in a strange land. Do you remember how I liked to listen to stories when I was a boy? At first, I thought that they came from beyond the world, from where music comes and numbers... When I first realized that my dad’s work was to make up stories in our own home, where we ate and slept, I got quite a fright! Don’t laugh! It was dangerous for a boy to live in a house with a father who made up stories and heroes.’ ‘Heroes? There are no heroes, only people. People, characters that visit me. It’s a kind of co-existence,’ said my father, who appeared to be enjoying the conversation. ‘When I’m writing, I can feel them moving inside me, experiencing what I experience during the course of the day.’ ‘And when you finish the text, they go away. They go to sleep...’ ‘When the text is finished, it’s they who belong to the readers. I’m the one who goes to sleep!’ said father, laughing. ‘No, that’s a lie, there’s no sleep for me.’ He went on, ‘After I’ve put the final full stop, I go through a period of inner reflection, almost meditation, on the text.’ I didn’t ask him what he meant. It wasn’t necessary. ‘I sit and observe it,’ he added, ‘like looking at a painting. I note the balance, the volume, the correspondences. I want the finished text to breathe with sharp gasps, to crack open without revealing its openings. And it’s there, in the cracks, that I try to entice the reader, to camouflage the hole so that the unsuspecting reader will fall in. But take note! I’m referring to a reversal that has to be justified by two things: by the particular weight of the characters and by the conflicts between them. Everything, but everything, has to be justified in a novel, Yannis! It has to be a perfect, flawless construction – like a building – with the supporting structure, the elements it supports, openings, even an expansion joint! The reader may see it all as being smooth and plastered, but inside there’s a whole cosmogony: mortar, stones, bricks, cement, beams... The text’s intestines have to work to perfection. Otherwise, dear boy, it collapses. It collapses and dissolves into its constituent parts.’ ‘Reversal... Though in your last book, not every page goes hand in hand with the previous one. Everything is linear. Everywhere detailed images, historical references completely documented, you’ve left nothing to chance. I remember somewhere how you even describe the cut of the lawyer’s clothes. The narrative is chronologically constructed. Twenty-four hours in each chapter. The entire novel covers a week. The book’s like one long sequence.’ ‘I’m glad you see it that way. Except that, to get to the end of that sequence, you have to read through some five hundred pages,’ my father said with a wily grin. ‘Come on, I didn’t mean it negatively. You know how much I like it,’ I said, apologetically. There was a sudden silence. That often happened in conversations with my father. It was an unequal silence. For him, it was ‘functional’, part of the flow of the conversation. For me it was embarrassment, since, while it lasted, my father never stopped looking at me, and intently too, as if he were trying to gauge the impact that his words had had on me. Even as a young boy, I remember him with his beady eyes fixed on me from behind his glasses as if I’d done something bad. Now, of course, it was no longer Markos Loukas in his prime that I had before me. I had a seventy-year-old man, opinionated and capricious. Outwardly, he was in pretty good shape. Tall, round-faced, stocky build, with a good crop of white hair for his age, a delicate well-formed mouth; he vaguely recalled his implacable friend, Pentzikis. His health in recent years hadn’t been the best, a balloon to unblock his arteries, a prostate operation, yet these hadn’t seemed to get him down. My father continued to stare at me with an Apollonian calm. Markos Loukas was not the sort a boy would want for a teacher. A cool breeze that came unexpectedly through the half-open balcony door made him shudder. I got up and shut it and, returning to my armchair, I lit a cigarette and broke the deadlock: ‘When’s Mum coming?’ ‘I’m expecting her any time now.’ ‘I haven’t seen her for a long while. It must be at least a month. How time goes...’ ‘A month. What’s a month? You young people have a strange relationship with time. At my age, time flows by somewhat differently. Mine is coming to a standstill. When the biological hand reaches fate’s slot, then time will point to my allotted hour.’ ‘Dad, I don’t want you thinking like that...’ ‘Look, Yannis, I’ve always been a realist. Even in my collection of short stories, back in ’65, when all the critics had a go at me – what’s up with Loukas, the characters aren’t convincing, the structure’s unsound – even then I knew that my writing was realistic. I knew that everything that happened in the book was what the characters had either felt or were in a position to have felt. I told you, everything has to be justified. In any case, I never set much store by what the critics said...’ ‘That didn’t stop you writing critical reviews yourself. All those years you wrote for Narration...’ ‘Don’t forget that, first of all, I wrote under a pseudonym and, secondly, I chose books that I liked. I’ve also written libels, of course. Like in the case of that fraud, Matthaiou, in the period following the dictatorship,’ said father. Immediately, I sensed him wincing, as if he’d uttered something that was forbidden. ‘What fraud? Who’s Matthaiou?’ I asked, astonished. ‘Water under the bridge...’ ‘Come on, tell me. Besides it has to do with our work,’ I argued. ‘Nothing to tell, he was a strange fellow who’d sent me a text.’ ‘What text? Was it ever published?’ ‘No, thanks to me. He’d sent me a novel, God forbid... I went to a lot of trouble to make sure Hestia didn’t publish it. He had people behind him in America. People with influence. Ginsberg, Burroughs and such like. Didn’t you find anything in the archives?’ ‘Not yet.’ ‘Yes, that’s one thing I most likely threw away. Anyhow. It was at around that time that we almost ruined our literature.’ My father had begun to raise his tone: ‘Greece wasn’t America! We didn’t have a Dos Passos in prose; we didn’t have a Cummings in poetry. We had Karagatsis and Seferis. That’s why I fell out with Pentzikis. I’d no objections at all to stream of consciousness, even Faulkner used it. But that total disintegration, no respect for anything...Where’s the structure, the characters, the sequence of events? Prose is not just jumping from one thing to another. Prose is footslogging, you need a steady step and keen eyes.’ I understood that my father didn’t want to go on discussing this particular subject. ‘I suppose you’re talking about the trend in new novels after the dictatorship.’ ‘New novel? That wasn’t a novel. Not even a story.’ ‘But there were some writers...’ I began. ‘Writers?’ said my father, abruptly. ‘Only in name. I’m a writer too. But something more.’ ‘Something more?’ ‘Writer is a noun and nouns get tired of standing alone. They look for an adjective to lend them support. I’m more than a writer.’ ‘Won’t you ever stop talking in codes, father?’ ‘I like codes, Yannis, I wouldn’t have got where I am without them.’ ‘That cynicism,’ I started to comment. ‘Cynicism, Yannis, is adrenaline to an old man.’ ‘You’ve certainly got a way with words, Dad...’ ‘I’ve a way with them because I used to listen to them.’ I knew what was going to follow. ‘From the age of fifteen, I accompanied your grandfather round the salons,’ my father went on unstoppably. ‘Always just behind him. And they were all there: Myrivilis, Karagatsis, Seferis, Terzakis, Prevelakis...’ ‘You don’t have to tell me the story again. I’ve heard it countless times...’ I said, almost pleading. ‘You need to hear it and to hear it again and again. I didn’t spend all my days and nights with journals and glossy magazines. For the whole time that I was a student, for five years, I’d go twice a week to the houses of writers – your grandfather hung out with all the most interesting people – and I’d listen. I didn’t speak, I listened. I made coffee, helped the women serve, emptied the ashtrays... Only if they spoke to me did I mumble something back to them. And like that, my mind eventually opened up. Through listening. That’s how it is, literature calls for hard work. We don’t just churn out a couple of incomprehensible phrases like Matthaiou and think we’re through. That’s where the adjective comes in that I was telling you about – and don’t think I’m arrogant, but I’m more than just a writer. I’m a true writer.’ At that moment, we heard the sharp sound of the front door opening and, a couple of seconds later, my mother appeared in the living room with two large plastic bags full of shopping. A faint smell of perfume spread through the air, lightening the atmosphere. She stood at the entrance to the living room and stared at us, smiling. My mother is a tall woman, almost the same height as my father, very thin, her hair dyed a brown tint and, in recent years, quite short. Her face is slender, aristocratic, an accentuated nose, bright green eyes, a slanting scar on her forehead, the result of a car accident when she was a child. Her movements are delicate, like those of a dancer. Her gait has something rhythmic about it, something imperceptibly affected, as if her every movement is obeying some personal choreography. I got up and kissed her. She gently touched her lips against my cheek. My mother, like my father, was not particularly demonstrative. Effusiveness was not something held in esteem in the Loukas household. Our relationship was characterized by an emotional reservation, each member kept a safe distance from the other. It was by no means a coincidence that I’d never seen my parents kissing on the lips, nor ever holding each other’s hand. My mother is best described as ‘indefinable’. Her motherliness is faint, like a wet windowpane, I never knew where I was with her, at times I felt her clinging to me like an oyster, without leaving me any space to breathe, at others like a limpet prised free and sinking to the bottom of the sea. I loved my mother, I loved that transient emotion she conveyed to me, I loved her in the way she fluttered around me like a butterfly. Her tenderness was so special that for many years I couldn’t deal with it, until I accepted it as it was, I accepted that goodwill, that discreet tool that in our relationship drew that fine line separating parent and child. My mother didn’t stay long. She was tired, all day at the art gallery and then shopping, and she wanted to go and lie down. I proposed that we all eat together, but she didn’t want to. She didn’t eat much, two mouthfuls and that was it. I sat with my father a bit longer, we discussed one or two things about the book and then, since it was already late, we postponed the Pentzikis correspondence for the next day. I said goodnight and went down to the basement.

The blue bookcase

On opening the door, a strong musty smell took my breath away. I opened the small window of the cour anglaise, cursing the criminal architects of the ’50s and the reinforced concrete visions of the Minister of Public Works of the time. The basement had three rooms, a very basic kitchen and a small bathroom. The one room was filled with the dozens of items collected by my father. Some were packed into large cases and others were piled in two oak chests. The other two rooms were filled with bookcases running from wall to wall, with two in the centre of each room, thus creating three inner aisles. The blue bookcase stood out like a sore thumb. It wasn’t just the colour and the material – the only one made of iron among all the wooden ones – but also the height. It was noticeably higher than the others and reached all the way up to the plaster cove around the ceiling. It was in the blue bookcase, then, that my father had stacked all the texts that various aspiring writers had sent him over the years. I suspected that he’d never even glanced at some of them, at least those inside the old-style files, where the knot appeared untouched, as if it had never been untied. Most of them, though, appeared to have been subjected to the test according to Loukas and, of course, had been rejected to great acclaim. The few that he had approved, some nine in total, had more or less all found their way into the hands of the reading public, given that Mr Markos Loukas was one of the major despots of Greek literature, at least for five or six years following the fall of the dictatorship. These occupied half the bottom shelf and had a sticker on their spine on which was written ‘Prose/OK’. My struggle with the pile of rejects was obviously going to be an unequal one. Naturally, I couldn’t read them all, not even a representative section of each. Besides, the only reason that I’d go to the trouble was on the off-chance that among the defeated armada there was some frigate that had later become famous, having survived the first unfortunate battle at sea. I decided to begin by drawing up a list of names and titles. After two and a half hours, I’d been through all the shelves except the last one. Two hundred and forty-four names filled seven pages of my notepad. It was with some relief that I picked up the last manuscript. It was a mauve file tied with a blue ribbon. There was nothing written on the outside, neither the title nor the author. I opened it up. Inside was a note in pencil: ‘Matthaiou/Novel. Reject’. I recognized my father’s writing. Underneath was a large envelope, again without any writing on it. It contained some two hundred and fifty closely-written sheets tied with a thin string. The handwriting, though clearly legible, was very strange. The letters appeared as if carved; they stood out in relief from the tattered paper. The title, author and date were written on the first page in thick black felt-tip: BAR FLAUBERTBY LOUKAS MATTHAIOUATHENS, 1975 The name seemed familiar. Matthaiou... Matthaiou. Of course, it was the same man my father had been telling me about that afternoon. The ‘fraud’, the one who churned out ‘incomprehensible phrases’, that my father had gone to a lot of trouble to keep from being published by Hestia. I was seized by curiosity. I took the file and climbed down from the stepladder. I sat down on the only chair that there was in the basement and began to read:

CHAPTER ONE

oral mareeven neat Suddenly. Suddenly is the word. The dream comes like an oyster and attaches itself to sleep’s tail. I blink my eyelids at the first ray of light: the image comes unstuck, falls and shatters. Suddenly. In this night of the male, when the woman’s inauguration is splendidly celebrated. I arrived at the bar around twelve. 48th Avenue. The sign is in Greek: ‘Bar Flober’. I hesitated before climbing the steps. A familiar smell. Like a warning. The steps winding. A spiral. Wooden stars, blue and white like hooks from the curved ceiling. And a half-moon. Menacing. A flow of water. Muddy water. Mirrors, dust, heavy fabrics. And plants, dark plants, black stems and leaves, a pitch-black forest. Climbing up; discomfort. On the door upstairs, again the sign, this time in English: ‘Bar Flaubert’. The association was lost. Bar Flober is one thing, Bar Flaubert another. Curiosity concerning the name. A dead white European author in the heart of New York. Straight up to the counter. Lots of people and I didn’t feel comfortable with so many people. Before, because now they tell me I’m okay. The atmosphere grey, smoke; like a battlefield. The battle I’d been waging of late. My gaze straight on Andreas, the Greek owner. Standing among the guests, talking to a girl, Andreas with a light-blue shirt, a dark-blue gaze. Hardly a girl, thirty-seven years old, almost twice my age, who worked in TV. She was wearing a huge earring. I went over to Andreas, who was standing with glass in hand. I was about to say something when a thin shadow passed fleetingly before me. Whether an angel or a demon, all I grasped was the moment, just a wisp of hair that like a diaphanous kerchief traversed the air - pitch-black as it was. I breathed her outline in its luminous aura. I stole a glance – her hair half covered her eyes, three centimetres, oh those three centimetres! Just what was required. Andreas introduced us with some embarrassment. Her name was Leto. She was beautiful and slender and stooped as though shy. Something blind for a long time suddenly sparked. From the first movement of her head, I recognized the anger. At first I thought it was weakness, but it was anger, a dark anger, a black mound of anger, together with another emotion that I hardly knew. Only once previously had I felt it. Being a child, I didn’t understand, I thought that I was responsible when the mouth twists, when the eyes glare. It’s the eye, the whites of the eyes. That’s where it shows. Anger. In women. For them, I’m no longer responsible. I’d replace the women in my life and christen them. With new names. She, no. We talked, I saw that she didn’t look me in the eye. I saw her as we talked and her features surged everywhere, broke like the sea against rocks. And it was this night of the male, when the woman’s inauguration is splendidly celebrated... I read the first chapter in one go. I took a deep breath and went on with the second.

CHAPTER TWO

Nel mezzo del camino di nostra vitami ritrovai per una selva oscura,che la diritta via era smarrita*Dante, Divine Comedy[*In the midst of life’s pathI found myself in a black forest,and my life as I knew it was lost]

Ten months passed. Months of stone, cylindrical ones with openings as in an aqueduct where our love surged like a wave. I felt a dizziness planted in my insides by weakness. Because it was weakness that this love brought with it, and I had to protect myself. And my protection was for me to paste together the pieces and for her to see someone devoted. Leto became frightened. She saw happiness coming and she couldn’t deal with it, couldn’t comprehend people and happiness together. She was shaken. And she began the dismantling, with excuses, how she was supposedly offended by that insecurity in the corner of the eye. And even fewer touches. In the past, I’d been unable to bear it. Overly sensitive, I fell apart. Now, I was able to keep a hold. Even during sex, I was less and less tender. And she told me that one day she’d make me say ‘I love you’ for real, maybe in a year’s time, she said something about a lifetime, and became upset, and her truth came out, and she looked it in the eye for the first time, though she was afraid lest it consume her, lest it consume the relationship, and she couldn’t deal with it; she came out in spots, on the bottom right side of her cheek. There.

She accused me of being arrogant, ironic. You’re losing me she said. You’re losing me. I’m leaving. And during the day she usually left. Only at night, each one’s soul visited the other in sleep. When she woke up, always before me, she calmly got out of bed and made the coffee. In the afternoon, when she came home, she got the meal ready and cleaned the house. And that’s how we went on. Full of anger, we continually spouted and fell, each of us like clay into the other’s cracks. And a breeze, sweet and perspiring, burdened our hearts. Just kids, not yet nineteen, we didn’t wish for tomorrow, because tomorrow was a lost cause. Nevertheless, I wasn’t the one to leave. One evening when I was lying on her belly and listening. I was trying to hear something, but nothing, darkness and silence. She told me she was leaving. And just like that, she took her beauty and disappeared. Since then, I’ve felt as if she swallowed me up. That her tongue performed its double duty. With one word she discarded me and with one movement she swallowed me. Since then I’ve lived there, in the body of the beloved, with her words saliva spread over my body. For ten months I’d removed the beauty from the black forest. And beauty is always greater than humans. When it’s removed, you remain less than you are yourself. I’d search for her. Everywhere... I went on reading. When I’d finished, the first rays of the sun furtively passed through the chinks in the curtains. I left the file on the floor and remained motionless for a while. Then I noticed that at the end of the two-hundred-and-fifty-page manuscript was a typed letter. It was from Matthaiou to my father:

Athens, 15 March 1975

Dear Mr Loukas, I’m making so bold as to send you my novel Bar Flaubert. It was written in Greece last year and has to do with my own personal experiences. I lived for many years in America, where I studied biology. It was there that I met with the leading representatives of the Beat Generation: William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac. I was a close friend for some time of the first two, though we’ve now lost touch. My return to Greece coincided with the 1967 coup d état and for obvious reasons I was obliged to leave for Europe. I have published numerous studies in academic journals in Italy and France, together with short stories in English literary magazines. A text of mine was also published in the Greek magazine, Pali, in the sixties. I would regard it as a great honour, Mr Loukas, if you were to take the trouble to read my manuscript, and even more so if you were to give me your opinion. I would like to express my deep respect for you and my confidence in the reliability of your judgement. I have already submitted the manuscript to Hestia. With my most sincere wishes,Loukas Matthaiou PS. If you wish to contact me, you can write to me at the following address: 6 Sekeri Street, Kolonaki, Athens. My telephone number is: 722.435. I gave little thought to the letter, as what I’d read before had left me stunned. It was only the first reading. I’d read it again and again, because what I had before me wasn’t a story, it was as if someone had stuck a needle into my blood and had extracted the constituents of my most personal universe, things that even I hadn’t suspected or, better, that I’d buried in the most secret crypts of my existence. It was as if I’d looked my soul in the eye. Yes, in the eye, in the same way that I felt that this writer was looking at me. A man about whom I knew nothing, other than that twenty years before, my father had gone to great lengths to prevent his novel from being published. Being well aware, of course, of my father’s views on literature and with our exchange in the living room still fresh in my mind, I wasn’t at all surprised at his reaction. Nevertheless, he surely must have recognized the man’s talent. What was it that had scared him? In 1975, Markos Loukas was all-powerful. Forty-seven years old, six novels to his credit, an associate professor at the university and a consultant editor at Hestia, he was the leading member of the select club of seven that held sway in the Greek literary scene. What was it that had scared him in the case of Loukas Matthaiou, with whom he shared the same name, one having it as a surname, and the other as a first name. I recalled his words from that afternoon: ‘I’ve also written libels, of course. Like in the case of that fraud, Matthaiou, in the period following the dictatorship...’ Those words of his concealed anger. Anger and fear. And there were very few times that I’d seen my father afraid.

My father’s ex libris

By the time I got home, it was already daybreak. The impression left on me by the manuscript was of a fluid text that resembled a sculpture in the making; a male figure that was indeterminable yet familiar. I woke up at around twelve. I’d slept just six hours. I was uptight, something was needling me. I had work to do on the autobiography, on the Pentzikis correspondence. My mind, however, was on Matthaiou’s hero, and on the author too. I searched through my archives in case I came up with some information. Nothing. Greek prose-writing, since the fall of the dictatorship at least, didn’t include as much as a word from the pen of Loukas Matthaiou. It was as if the man had never existed, at least as a prose-writer. I’d begun to despair, to the point that I started to wonder whether I should consider the matter closed, when I suddenly thought of Telemachus. Telemachus Anghelis was, among other things, a very well-known literary historian. A friend of mine for over ten years, he was what you’d call a walking encyclopaedia of Greek literature. He was the one who could tell you what pseudonym Taktsis used when out cruising, in which U.S. State Seferis’s American publisher was born, what brand of cigarettes Skarimbas used to smoke... I called him straightaway on my mobile phone and we arranged to meet that evening in Kolonaki. Before that, however, I had to see my father - not only about the autobiography. I found my mother at home alone. My father had gone to the local café. ‘I don’t see much of him,’ she said in a melancholic tone, ‘he prefers the café with his friends...’ ‘A little men’s talk is good for him,’ I said, reassuringly. ‘Your father’s changed, Yannis, he’s become grumpy. He’s growing old and becoming difficult.’ ‘Just between us, he always was a bit eccentric.’ ‘There’s his work as well.... But now it’s getting too much. He’s opinionated and capricious, he wants everything to be just as he wants it. It’s so tiring. It’s lucky I have my own outlets. What about you? How are you getting on? Is it progressing? Is that folder for him?’ ‘To tell you the truth, it’s actually about that folder that I’ve come. It’s a novel that someone had sent to father in ’75 and he rejected it. One of the few things that have spoken straight to my heart. And I don’t consider myself easy to please as a reader.’ ‘Who’s the author?’ ‘You can’t possibly know him. Even I don’t know very much about him. Just his name and some information contained in a letter to father.’ ‘What’s his name?’ ‘Matthaiou. Loukas Matthaiou.’ My mother, who all that time had been holding a cup of coffee, put it down on the table. She turned her gaze to the front door as if waiting for something. ‘What...do you know him?’ I asked. ‘The name sounds familiar. I can’t recall...’ ‘Mum, if you know something, you’d be helping me a great deal.’ Her intuition proved right as, before I was able to continue, there was the sound of the keys in the door and in walked my father, carrying the newspapers and two magazines. ‘You’ll have to excuse me. I’m going to change, I have to go to an auction,’ my mother said, leaving the room. ‘What’s wrong with your mother, Yannis?’ my father asked when she’d gone. ‘Don’t tell me you had a fight?’ ‘No. Sit down. I want to talk to you.’ My father sat down on the couch. I made myself comfortable in the armchair facing him. The afternoon light fell slantwise across his face and boldly outlined his features. I didn’t look very much like my father. I noticed the two slanting lines that, starting from the base of his nose, reached down to his chin, as if wanting to delineate the area of his mouth, to accentuate the two lips that were as fine as a woman’s. A charming dissonance in an otherwise manly face that beneath thick, grey eyebrows concealed two restless eyeballs, glinting from behind myopic lenses. Above, in the centre of his forehead was a birthmark, the family seal, proud and perfectly round. A circular concession on the part of the skin, roughly a centimetre in diameter, as if positioned precisely on the central vertical of the notional axis joining his two irises. A biological ex libris, a third eye, an additional controlling mechanism, superior even to that of the family gaze. ‘Dad, I came across Matthaiou’s novel in the blue bookcase,’ I said, showing him the file. My father seemed momentarily taken aback; he instantly recovered his composure, however. ‘Matthaiou? Oh, you mean that hack writer we were talking about yesterday...’ ‘Well, I find his work extremely interesting and I’d like you to explain that hatred that I sense you have for him.’ ‘Hatred? What hatred? The man was useless, I’m telling you. You may like those ravings, but you’ll do me the honour of allowing me to disagree. A hotchpotch of materials all thrown together.’ ‘Come on, I know you, you’re as stubborn as a mule. Though Mum didn’t seem to be too keen on him either.’ My father’s third eye flickered. ‘What, was it him you were talking about?’ ‘We weren’t talking about him. We were cut short. Anyway, what could Mum tell me about Matthaiou?’ ‘Absolutely nothing. Your mother, dear boy, has not the slightest interest in literature. The only things she’s bothered about are exhibitions and auctions. The people she associates with are all from the art world. She only has anything to do with writers when they invite us round for dinner. I have to admit though that it worked out well for us like that; it means we’re not treading on each other’s feet. At least, not often.’ ‘Dad, you’re avoiding the issue. There’s more to it than that,’ I said, applying a little pressure. ‘Listen,’ he retorted, ‘I’ve had enough of the matter. If that kind of pulp fiction is your cup of tea, then good luck to you. De gustibus non disputandum... I’ve said all I have to say about the man.’ ‘You haven’t told me anything. I want to know where he is now. To talk to him.’ ‘Right, let’s put an end to this once and for all, Yannis. After I’d read his monstrosity that you find so marvellous, I replied to his letter, giving my frank opinion; that it would be better for him to put down his pen and go back to the laboratory; he was a biologist or some such thing. His case even prompted me to write an article in Narration on the new trends in prose-writing following the dictatorship. Since that day, I’ve never heard of the man again, nor want to.’ ‘But what happened? He can’t just have disappeared from the face of the earth.’ ‘I don’t know. I told you, I wasn’t in the slightest bit interested. Now, let’s drop it shall we... Are you ready to start on the correspondence? Not that I’m particularly fond of Pentzikis, but at least the man knew about literature.’ I didn’t pursue the topic. My father was annoyed, angry almost. Something had happened concerning that man, Loukas Matthaiou. I had to find out more. I decided not to mention the irritating name again. The day went by calmly, without further excitement. We decided on which letters to include in the book and did whatever censoring was necessary, my father even wrote a short prologue. I left him in the afternoon as he was getting ready for his two-hour siesta. At home, I read the manuscript once again. The fluid material began to take on a clearer shape. It was a man’s head. His features were confused. From one angle, they reminded me of my father and from another of myself, but when I tried to picture him as a whole, it was someone else, someone strange and yet familiar. I was struggling with something that I was unable to put my finger on.

Telemachus

At around ten in the evening, I was at Leo’s café-bar in Kolonaki Square. The bar was designer chic, completely transparent with the floor continuing out onto the street. I sat down at a table behind the glass facade, ordered a vodka and lemon and waited for Telemachus,, who turned up a quarter of an hour late as usual. A brilliant mind and loyal friend, Telemachus, apart from being a literary historian, was also an exceptional poet. His most recent collection, Dust, had been hailed as one of the best of the year. ‘Hi, Yannis,’ said Telemachus, ‘good to see you, old friend.’ ‘How long has it been? All I seem to recall are answering machines and messages.’ ‘Yeah, Yannis... Never any time, for Christ’s sake... How’s the autobiography going? Is it coming on?’ ‘There’s still a fair bit of work. What with my father’s demands... Just sorting through the material in the basement is going to break my back.’ ‘He’s kept everything, eh?’ ‘His favourite song is Thanks for the Memories,’ I said, laughing. ‘But you come up with some pretty interesting things. And this is where I need your brains. Does the name Loukas Matthaiou mean anything to you?’ ‘Loukas Matthaiou... That’s a tough one.’ ‘You must know something. I can tell you that he once published a short story in Pali,’ I continued. Telemachus pulled a face, as if he’d been offended. ‘I said tough, not impossible. So let’s see what we have: Loukas Matthaiou. He must have been born around ’38 or ’39. As a young lad, he went to America to study, biology I think it was, and then he got involved with the Beat group, straight into the heart of the beast: Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso. The whole damn gang of them. I’ve heard that there was a time when the Jew made a play for him, then Burroughs did the same. He came back to Greece for a short while at the beginning of the sixties, and Taktsis helped him to get a story published in Pali, under another name I think. Patras...something like that. He was back here again in ’67, seems he’d decided to settle here, but it was the time of the coup and he left. Then I heard that he’d unsuccessfully tried to get a novel published under the name of Matthaiou. After that, he disappeared from the face of the earth. I once saw him in the flesh, in a club in Kypseli in 1967, a few days before the coup of 21st April. He was a real good-looker. I’ve never seen more handsome man. It’s said though that he was a bit strange. Aren’t you going to tell me where you got hold of his novel?’ ‘Sure, I found it in my father’s basement and I read it in one go. It’s amazing.’ ‘I tried to find it myself years ago. A friend in America had told me about it. There’s a bit of a myth surrounding that work in certain circles abroad. And about Matthaiou too. The title has some reference to Flaubert, doesn’t it?’ ‘Yes, the title is Bar Flaubert, though it doesn’t have anything to do with the writer. Did I tell you my father had rejected it?’ ‘I don't think they had much in common.’ ‘Maybe, but so much so that even today he still doesn’t want to hear that name. Something’s not right, Telemachus.’ ‘It’s very strange...’ ‘Listen, I’ve decided to dig up everything I can. Besides, not a lot’s happening and my personal life’s pretty much of a muchness. The whole business intrigues me more than you can imagine. I’m sure you know what I mean. A text opening up and spreading out inside you... The sad thing is that I can’t find any clue, any lead on Matthaiou.’ ‘It seems that uncle Telemachus is going to have to come to the rescue once again,’ said my old friend, laughing. ‘I can help you. I’ll send you somewhere. To someone who must know much more than me. At least, he must have known then.’ ‘Who? What’s his name?’ ‘Hansen. Arnold Hansen.’ Telemachus stopped for a long pause. He’d uttered the name as though part of a rite and now he was waiting. That was Telemachus Anghelis all over. He liked tossing out utterances like oracles and then waiting for them to drop. In this case, however, he was waiting in vain. Mr Arnold Hansen was completely unknown to me. ‘So, who is he?’ I asked. ‘You must read books from the back cover! Arnold Hansen, dear boy, is a well-known American poet and much more; he was one of the first members of the Beat group, the man who typed out Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, who organized the poetry evening at City Lights when Ginsberg first read Howl, who arranged Gregory Corso’s painting exhibitions. And, in addition, he also acted as Samuel Beckett’s secretary.’ ‘Beckett... I can’t imagine Beckett with a secretary. Anyhow, that’s all very impressive, but what’s the connection with Matthaiou?’ ‘Like I told you, when Matthaiou was studying in America, he went about with the Beat group. He was a very good-looking lad and all the gays in the group buttered up to him for his favours. Of course, Hansen knew all this first hand. And this, Yannis, is where we get back to the matter in question. For the last fifteen years, Arnold Hansen has been living in Greece, somewhere on the Lycabettus ring road. He lives alone in a house full of books and paintings, he’s ill – some problem with his legs – and he has no one to take care of him. That man, who’s a part of the history of post-war American literature, is growing old alone and destitute. Of course, up to a point, it’s his own choice, he’s rather unsociable and he hates interviews and the limelight. A few of my friends and I, mainly poets and critics, visit him every so often. We stay a couple of hours, have an ouzo, and when he’s had one or two, he tells us stories from the past. You’ve no idea what my ears have heard about the various giants of literature. All of it off the record, of course. What the man wants is a bit of friendly company, something to ease his loneliness, so none of us has ever thought to take advantage of him. Back to our topic, then. I remember that, one evening, when he was talking about the Beat crowd, Arnold mentioned your friend Matthaiou. It seems he knew him quite well. I think he’s the only person in Greece who may be able to help you, though I don’t really understand your obsession with it all.’ ‘Let’s not go into that. It’s personal. Go on with what you were saying.’ ‘As you wish. I can send you to Arnold, though it has to remain between us. Or, even better, I can arrange for us to visit him together. He knows your father and I know he respects him. But we have to agree on something beforehand. You won’t mention to anyone whatever he tells you. I want you to understand that. Not to anyone.’ ‘You have my word, Telemachus. Besides all this business is a personal affair, an obsession if you prefer, but I have a feeling that I’m on to something important.’ ‘Yannis, you know how fond I am of you. If your intuition takes you somewhere, follow it. I’m happy to see you enthusiastic about something at long last. Albeit about a book, a name.’

Arnold Hansen

I spent a rather boring weekend with Anna in Aegina, and on Monday morning I stayed at home re-reading Bar Flaubert. In the evening, I waited for Telemachus while listening to the news on TV. The main story concerned a large naval and air exercise called ‘Flexible Tongs’, being carried out by the Turks in the Aegean. The instigator of the exercise, a Turkish General and repressed author so it seemed, had imagination if nothing else. The doorbell rang bringing me back to reality. It was Telemachus with a bottle of Barbayannis ouzo under his arm – our host’s favourite kind. Before long, the Mini Cooper was on its way along Asclepiou Street, heading towards Bulgaroctonou Street, where Mr Arnold Hansen lived. We were greeted on the doorstep by an elderly man, around seventy-five years old. He was tall, though his body was bent with age, and on the chubby side, with a face in complete contrast to his body. It was the face of a child, with large blue playful eyes, rounded cheeks, a roguish mouth and unnaturally red lips. ‘Come in, come right on in.’ He welcomed us in his New York Greek. Telemachus made the introductions. ‘Arnold Hansen, poet and critic – Yannis Loukas, literary scholar.’ Hansen looked me up and down. ‘Telemachus tells me that you’re Markos Loukas’s son. I knew your father, I met him years ago. It must have been ’78 or ’79. Very good writer. Has he passed on the bug to you?’ ‘No signs of the illness as of yet. So far, all I’ve managed are a few short stories…’ ‘Short stories… It’s a start. Though I was never one for them myself. Castrated tales, that’s what short stories are… Oh and from the moment you step inside here, I’m Arnold and you’re Yannis,’ said the effusive Mr Hansen as he led us through to the sitting room. Arnold Hansen’s room was full of books. On the shelves, the table, the desk, the floor, books everywhere, books flung down, books in piles, hundreds of books swamping the place, giving the impression that someone was reading them all at the same time. The walls, on the other hand, were almost entirely covered with paintings by the same artist. Naïve landscapes with elements of ancient Greek civilisation. Arnold read my thoughts. ‘The artist? Ah, he’s my favourite. Greg. Greg Corso. You’ll have heard of him, I imagine. I’ve been translating one of his poems today. A collection of his work is going to be published in Greek. Do you want me to read you one or two?’ Before I could answer, Arnold picked up a yellow folder lying half open on the table and began reading with old-style grandiloquence: [NEED TO FIND ORIGINAL] Seated on the steps of the shining madhouse I listen to how the male bell shakes the bell-tower… When he’d finished, he gathered up the papers and broke out into a cackling laughter, a childlike laughter that shook the whole room. ‘Greg. Crazy old Greg. Great poet. Completely crazy…’ I wanted to get straight down to the main business, and I tried to steer the conversation in that direction, with Telemachus playing a largely decorative role. Besides, Arnold seemed to like me, he kept looking me straight in the eye, while every now and then, he broke out into spontaneous laughter, making communication easier. We began talking about New York; I recounted my impressions from my years there as a student. About the first time I ever set foot in the big city. The feeling of awe when I first set eyes on the Statue of Liberty. ‘A tall, young girl expecting a child. The birth of a nation, I suppose,’ Arnold commented with a roar of laughter. I continued, making some observation about the vertical expansion of the city into the skies. ‘New York will be one hell of a place when they’ve finished it,’ he added. The analysis of New York went on in this fashion with Arnold supplementing my pompous account with one-liners, till eventually this old boy who was full of laughter got tired, opened a cupboard and offered us some nuts and sweetmeats, brought by a woman friend of his from Andros. ‘There’s only Marianna who takes care of me. It’s my leg, arthritis, osteo-something or other it’s called, I’m unable to get out. Not that I like going out. I prefer to sit at home. I read, write, listen to music. Radio Three. All day. Today they had Richard Strauss. Zarathustra and Don Juan.’ Classical music wasn’t my forte, so I switched the discussion back to its ultimate aim. ‘Arnold,’ I said, smoothing the ground, ‘will you allow me a somewhat trite question? What were Ginsberg and Burroughs like in the flesh? You knew them. What kind of people were they?’ Arnold broke out once again into an unstoppable cascade of laughter. ‘Oh! Allen. Allen was a kid, a clever kid… As for Bill, he was the reckless kind. They died more or less at the same time,’ he said, and his gaze fixed on the picture hanging above me. ‘And Beckett?’ ‘Beckett was Irish,’ he replied abruptly. Silence fell in the room and it was as if Arnold’s great big eyes filled with tears. I sensed that things were delicately balanced, but I had to go on. From across the room, Telemachus gave me a nod to tell me that the time was right. ‘Arnold, forgive me for being so persistent, but there’s still something I wanted to ask you about that period. There, round about the end of the fifties in America, did you ever meet a young Greek? He must have been about twenty, he was studying biology, but he wrote his own stuff too.’ ‘What was his name?’ asked Arnold. ‘Loukas Matthaiou.’ Arnold laughed - through his teeth this time. He was called Luke all right. But not Matthaiou,’ he said, stressing the surname. ‘What do you mean?’ He was called Pateras, Luke Pateras. When we spoke again in ’76, he’d changed his name to Matthaiou.’ ‘Look, Arnold… I’m trying to find this Loukas Matthaiou or Luke Pateras.’ ‘Why?’ ‘It’s a personal thing… I read a novel by him and something happened to me. I was completely captivated. I want to find the man. Wherever he is. I’ve not been able to find out anything from my own sources. Telemachus told me that you’re the only person who may be able to help,’ I said with the boldness of someone with nothing to lose. ‘Arnold, I have to confess that it’s true. I was the one to put the idea into his head,’ Telemachus interjected. ‘I told him about that day we were here with Jane and Tom, when you talked to us about Matthaiou. When you said that you knew him.’ ‘But how can I help you now? Yes, I met him in New York in ’57. He’d have been about eighteen or nineteen then… The last time I saw him was in Boston in ’65. Oh yes, and there was that time in ’76 when we spoke on the phone. But then he was another man… He’d changed. Even his surname.’ Do you know where he lives?’ I asked impatiently. ‘No, not even if he’s still alive. All I know is that when he decided to return permanently to Greece in ’67, it wasn’t long before the dictatorship came into power and he was forced to leave the country. He went to Spain, to Barcelona.’ ‘To Barcelona? What on earth was he doing in Barcelona?’ My excitement must have seemed excessive as, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Telemachus gesturing to me, as if to say ‘gently, calm down, don’t press him.’ But Arnold didn’t have any problem. He was going to tell all. ‘Luke was a very strange lad. Perhaps it was what he was studying, I don’t know. He was very young, his mind was over his head. I know about Barcelona, because he sent me a card from there to Utah, where I was living then.’ ‘Do you remember what he wrote?’ I asked. ‘No, but I can show you,’ and he added: ‘Mind you, I don’t usually do this sort of thing…but I like you Yannis. There’s something original about you. I’ve kept everything. In the bedroom, there are forty-two files containing my correspondence with all the guys from ’45 onwards. Greg and I have corresponded every month right up to today. Excuse me for a moment.’ Arnold got up with some effort and went into the other room. Telemachus and I were left alone together for about five minutes. My friend was beside himself. ‘He likes you. It’s rare for Arnold to talk so openly like that about his personal life. He usually needs half a bottle of whisky.’ When he came back, Arnold was holding an envelope. He opened it and took out a postcard. It depicted the Sagrada Familia, the church designed by the Barcelonian architect, Antoni Gaudí. Arnold began reading: Barcelona, 5 May 1965 My dear Arnie, I’ve been in Gaudí’s city for ten days now. I had to get away from Greece. Things are extremely difficult there. My family are all known leftists, I told you that Christos, my father, was with the partisans during the Civil War. I had to keep going into hiding. God knows how I managed to get away. They arrested my father, but fortunately they let him go after a week. He’s ill. I have a friend here, Jamon Esnaider, who’s offered me a room in his house. Jamon is an art dealer, in his forties and very rich. How’s the old gang? Bill wrote to me in Athens, no news from Allen. I hear that Jack’s not very well. Drink… Tied to his mother, tied to Stella… I read Satori in Paris. Tired… As if the flame’s starting to flicker. Pity. I’m working on something myself. I’ll show it to you sometime soon. I’ve found a good crowd here. Some poets, two Spaniards and a Portuguese, good pals. One of them, Fernando, is regarded here as the biggest new talent. Every evening we go to the London Bar, in Ramblas, where Hemingway used to go. I miss Greece, miss the gang, miss you all. If you want to write to me, send the letter to:London Bar, Nou de la Rambla 34(Give this address to the others too) Joy, boyLuke Arnold put the card back into the envelope. My mind was working nineteen to the dozen, and for every eventuality I’d memorized a full name, a first name and an address: Jamon Esnaider, Fernando and London Bar, Nou de la Rambla 34. ‘That’s the last news I had from Luke,’ Arnold said, ‘at least in writing. For, as I told you, in ’76, in the first years after the return of democracy to Greece, we spoke on the phone. Luke was then called Matthaiou. He seemed very changed. He spoke through his teeth as if he were afraid. I asked him where he was phoning from; he didn’t answer me. All he told me was that he’d been through a difficult time, that he’d got married, divorced and that he’d never write anything again. When I asked him how he got by, if he had money, I remember his reply as if it were yesterday: ‘Money? The only thing I do have is money.’ Since then, how long is it, twenty years or more have gone by without so much as a word.’ ‘Did he say anything to you about a novel he’d written, anything about a Bar Flaubert?’ I asked. ‘Bar Flaubert? What’s that? The title of a book? The one you read? No. In America, Luke started out with poetry at first, then later, with Allen’s encouragement, he wrote a couple of stories. I remember them. They were excellent. His style was overwhelming. He wrestled with it. Style, dear, is a wild thing. Like a wild animal. At that time, we were all continually fighting with it. We skinned it, tore it to pieces, but it always managed to leave its scars on us. In our insides, on our bones. Luke was at the forefront. I recall him writing more or less where he stood, in restaurants, in bars, everywhere… And he read, read all the time. He was far more well-read than me, though I was a good fifteen years older than him.’ ‘I imagine he must have had a girlfriend at the time…’ I said hesitantly. Arnold smiled. ‘At that time, Yannis, things were different. Sexually, we were all very free, and though we were forever passionately falling in love, there was no exclusivity, nor any clear-cut distinction between being gay or straight, as we say today. Luke was a real good-looker. They called him the Apollo of Athens, in contrast to the Apollo of Denver, which was Neil Cassidy’s nickname, you know, Kerouac’s hero in On The Road. It was only natural that both men and women chased after him. You couldn’t classify him. There was no comparison with the other lads around then, he was quite different…’ ‘So, to recap, the last place that Matthaiou lived before returning to Greece was Barcelona?’ ‘Yes, for a year at least. I know that from Allen, who told me in a letter some time in the middle of ’68 that he’d met him in the so-called London Bar.’ ‘Do you know anything about the Fernando he mentions in his card?’ ‘It’s not Pessoa for a start!’ once again finding his repetitive laughter. I turned to my friend. ‘What about you, Telemachus, how well are you up on Spanish poetry? What was the scene like then in Barcelona?’ It didn’t need much thought on his part.‘What I know is that in Barcelona in the sixties, there was a nucleus of poets centered around the critic, Castellet. I recall that the most notable thing was that they all wrote in Castilian rather than in Catalan. I can give you some names: Carlos Barral, Jaime Gil de Biedma, Claudio Rodriguez…’‘No Fernando,’ said Arnold, smiling again.‘No Fernando,’ I replied. I’d already learned as much as I was going to learn. The rest of the evening passed without any further reference to Matthaiou. Arnold downed a good few glasses of ouzo, was in a good mood, and sang us some spirituals in his nasal, out-of-tune voice. At around midnight, he announced that it was time for bed, and the evening ended with me a good bit wiser concerning the Matthaiou affair.On leaving Arnold’s house, I felt an overpowering need for a drink. I didn’t drink ouzo and I needed a little beneficial alcohol. I suggested to Telemachus that we go to the Bright Lights, but he was too tired. I thanked him and left him outside his house. Then I headed for Exarchia.

Wordgames

The next morning, with the breeze caressing my face on the balcony, I tried to focus my thoughts. The time had come for me to take serious stock of things and see just where I stood. The previous evening, Arnold, the postcard all helped me to sweep away the dust that had settled over everything. For so long, I’d felt as if I were looking from behind misty glasses, through smudged contact lenses. I needed a cleaning agent to get rid of the dirt from my eyes. And it seemed that I’d found it. On the one hand, I had before me an unknown manuscript, the existence of which only a handful of people knew about. A strange author with an equally strange history. Someone who lived for many years in America, returned to Greece, disappeared during the dictatorship, reappeared like a comet in ’75, wrote a novel that was never published, only to disappear again for good. The only reliable information I had was what Arnold had given me. At least it gave me some direction and led me to a city, to Barcelona, to two names, Jamon Esnaider, Fernando, and to a haunt, the London Bar. Then, on the other hand, there was me. In a state of inertness, without the slightest desire to go hunting after stories for magazines, with the pressure of my father’s autobiography weighing on me, my relationship with Anna more of the same. I found myself at a junction, with two choices. To the left was an asphalt road that seemed endless, full of traffic, with a strict speed limit, with traffic lights and policemen. To the right was a rough dirt road, without signals or limits and with a name hastily etched on a dusty sign, a name at once dental and labial: Loukas Matthaiou. So, I had to make an important decision; I was standing naked in front of the mirror. There, looking at my reflection, I tried to totally empty myself of thoughts and remain with the two ultimate choices. Yes or no. Right or left. I went into the bathroom and undressed. I didn’t need much time. An overpowering instinct turned me to the right, towards the dirt road, towards the defective half, there where the eight missing centimetres stubbornly stared at me from out of the mirror, as if looking for a complement, an addition, that something extra. For many years now, I hadn’t allowed them to speak. As if I’d had them in quarantine, as if I’d ritually buried them in some riverbank, and now, like the weapons for a holy war, I was unearthing them, unearthing my eight lost centimetres one by one, and girding them around my breast, as equipment, ready for the great mission. I returned to the living room and began reading the novel once again. Four chapters, an epilogue, two hundred and fifty-one manuscript pages. Then, I tried to summarise it in one paragraph. I read the one hundred and thirty words I’d written: It’s the story of a young man who meets a girl, Leto, in a certain Bar Flaubert in some American town. They fall in love at first sight. But though the girl loves him, she is afraid of living her love. They separate. Years later, he is on the run and finds himself in a town that is not named. He gets involved there in some unspecified criminal act. He escapes in the nick of time. He is forced to flee to another town. There, he meets another woman and has a child with her. A bloody episode once again forces him to seek refuge, together with this woman, in another town – the third one. His memories of Leto constantly hound him. His relationship falls apart. Eventually, the man succeeds in coming into contact with Leto again. Seventeen years have passed. She remembers, but hasn’t the strength to respond to his call. How simplistic it all seemed to me like that! You’d think it was a cheap romance, a tearjerker… So why had it so stirred my imagination? I folded the paper and put it in the file, on top of the first page. My gaze once again fell on the incomprehensible caption to the first chapter: Oral mareeven neat I searched through my dictionaries but got nowhere. It wasn’t some well-known quotation, nor could I recall any verse like that from some well-known poem. Besides, if it were taken from a text, the author would have been obliged to mention his source. What could these seemingly incomprehensible lines possibly mean? They certainly didn’t come from the work of any poet I knew. ‘Oral mare’… Could he mean the sea of words? Speech as a single unity? Possibly. But ‘even neat’? This is where I completely lost him. Did it refer to something that happened in the novel? It had nothing to do with the sea, far less with an even and neat one. All I could suppose was that, with poetic licence, the author was commenting on the speech of his heroes. But here was a total discrepancy, if ever there was one. The heroes - or rather, the hero, who was obviously Matthaiou himself, except that he never once raved throughout the entire length of the novel. I then tried to decipher the phrase as a whole. Did it refer to the expression of a discourse that flows regularly, obeying some force keeping it under control? Was it perhaps an allusion to the narrative ‘plod’, the type of prose so fanatically advocated by my father? Or had Matthaiou, who employed anything but a linear, smooth discourse, chosen that caption precisely in order to mock the straight, traditional narration that prevailed in the novels of his fellow authors? Or was it perhaps, after all, no more than a cryptic game, a game with the words themselves, some kind of anagram, a cryptograph? I played for quite some time with the letters, mixing them up and trying to form new words, or an entire phrase with meaning. Nothing came of it. After several failed attempts, now disheartened, I wrote them out in turn, one beneath the other. I stepped back and stared at them as if looking at a painting. Oral, Mare, Even, Neat. Four words, each one of four letters. At that moment, it was as if the Gold Bug had shone within me and revealed the solution to me. The first letters of each word, placed in a row, formed a new word. So reading the letters vertically, I had in my possession four new words, each one again made up of four letters. I wrote the two four-word groups out clearly:ORAL OMENMARE RAVEEVEN AREANEAT LENT Omen, Rave, Area, Lent. Another riddle. Even more difficult that the previous one. The omen that raves in the area of Lent? The omen concerning the rave in the area of Lent? The omen concerning the rave area in Lent? No combination made any sense. So this Loukas Matthaiou was either mad or amused himself by devising riddles for his readers, who - it must be said - he never acquired. And he didn’t seem mad to me. Or inclined to jesting either.

Wanderlust?

That evening, I wasn’t in the mood for going out. I decided to invite Telemachus and Kostas to my place for dinner. I saw it as a kind of farewell meal. It was as if months and years had been condensed into the previous few days. I felt that something had changed in my life - and very quickly too. I served my friends and the three of us began to eat heartily, joking with each other at the same time. Just before dessert, I broke the news: ‘I’m leaving for Barcelona.’ ‘Oh, so it’s that serious, is it!’ remarked Kostas, who’d been filled in on everything by Telemachus. ‘It’s as if you’d fallen in love with that Matthaiou character! It couldn’t be, could it, that in your old age you’ve found your true nature?’ said Telemachus, laughing. ‘When I’ve got something on my mind, it stays there. If I’ve inherited anything from my father, it’s his obstinacy. Then again, there’s not a lot keeping me here. To tell you the truth, I’m bored, I need a change of scene. The trip alone will do me good. I’ve never been to Spain.’ ‘And the money for all this, old boy? Who’s going to pay?’ asked Kostas. ‘There’s a solution. I’ve three million drachmas in the bank from a small piece of land just outside Volos that I sold recently - an inheritance. I was keeping it to buy myself a new car. I’ll keep my old banger for the time being and allow myself some leave. I’ll go to Barcelona first and then wherever things lead me. But all this is just between us, okay?’ ‘That’s called late-developing wanderlust,’ quipped Telemachus in a highbrow tone. ‘Wanderlust… Always wanting to move on. Yes, that’s exactly how I feel,’ I said sceptically. ‘Aren’t you a bit old for such things, Yannis?’ Kostas asked. ‘How d’you mean old… It’s nothing to do with age. Do you know how I feel? As if I’ve been waiting for ages for some sort of sign and now it’s come. That’s how it is in life. You go out to buy a newspaper, turn the corner and everything changes. All this business with Matthaiou appeared at the right time.’ ‘The crisis of the approaching big Four-O!’, said Kostas, laughing, and explained, ‘I mean your forties, Yannis, old boy.’ ‘You don’t seem to remember how you were a couple of years ago. You weren’t so cynical and detached then. Myrto had you by the nose…,’ I said sarcastically. ‘Yes, till I got myself together. If you recall, Yannis, I went off to Melos for two months, shut myself up in a hovel, drinking and reading, till I finally made up my mind. A relationship means war! Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.’ ‘I sometimes wonder why we two keep company,’ I said with a sly smile. ‘Opposites attract, my boy…’ came the riposte. ‘Let’s get serious,’ said Telemachus. ‘I think Yannis should follow his hunch. He’s probably chasing a chimera. Matthaiou could very well be a minor clerk in some library or a miserable teacher in a private school and have relegated his youthful writing aspirations to the dark recesses of his memory.’ ‘He may even be dead,’ said Kostas with a strange grimace. ‘How old will he be now? He was at most nineteen in ’57, according to Arnold, so he must be around sixty now. Yes, he may no longer be alive…’ I murmured.

Female intuition

I devoted the whole of the following morning to preparing for the trip. The first thing was to book a ticket to Barcelona with Iberia on the Sunday flight. I left the return open to allow for every eventuality. Then I booked a single room for ten days at the Hotel Oriente, following Arnold’s advice: ‘If you want to stay in a real hotel in Barcelona, then stay at the Hotel Oriente. It was opened in 1842 and included part of a Franciscan monastery that had been built two centuries earlier. One of the most illustrious guests at the opening and a regular client was the then American Ambassador to Spain, the author Washington Irving, who in 1819 had published the well-known story of Rip Van Winkle, the tale of a farmer who drank a potion given him by some strange characters and who woke up twenty years later, an old man with a white beard, with his wife dead and with a portrait of George Washington hanging in the place where the portrait of King George III had been. The Hotel Oriente, my dear boy, has entertained famous writers, such as Hans Christian Anderson, statesmen, such as General Grant, movie stars, such as Mary Pickford and Errol Flynn, and countless other celebrities. Oh, and Maria Callas, of course. I remember when Bill and I had stayed there in ’63, he’d riddled the wallpaper. He kept aiming at Franco’s portrait. He wanted to get him between the eyes. The problem was that Bill Burroughs’s aim wasn’t always spot on…,’ Arnold had said before breaking into a torrent of laughter. It seemed, however, that the Hotel Oriente didn’t cash in on its fame, since it charged the relatively cheap room rate of ten thousand pesetas per night – around twenty thousand drachmas at the current exchange rate – though even if it had been more expensive, my mind was made up; the money from the piece of land would be squandered in style, without stinting, for as long as it lasted. Now, all that was left for me to do was to take care of a few loose ends. First and foremost, to reassure my folks that everything would be all right. I phoned my father and, after cancelling our usual appointment, I told him that I’d accepted an offer with good money from a magazine to do a travel piece on Spain and that I couldn’t turn it down. I relied on the fact that my father - who’d never done any work in his life other than lift his pen, if we exclude his courses at the university - respected people who earned their living outside the four walls of their house. Of course, it was to do with writing again, but the trip, the feature, the difficulties with the foreign language made my fabricated assignment seem attractive in his eyes. So much so that he agreed to go on with his autobiography alone for a while. In fact, he took it upon himself to talk to Viliotis and to reassure him with regard to deadlines and practical matters. The second phone call was to Daniel, who, on hearing the word ‘Barcelona’, jumped out of his chair. ‘I want a piece on the night life and the tapas bars!’ he cried. ‘Oh yes, and on the Barcelona designers! Remember what we said. Go on, and find your old self again!’ I replied that I’d try to write something and I closed the door, reflecting that the idea of the trip wasn’t a bad one after all. The third contact was also the most difficult one. I would have preferred to announce my decision to Anna over the phone, but, sensing the sadness in her voice, I suggested that we went out that evening. Women have a strange intuition. Something goes on in their system, some mysterious elements seem to interact in their cells. Through complex chemical processes, inconceivable to the male organism, they apparently produce certain substances that allow them to communicate with the real ‘intentions’ of the other person, without being in possession of any clues whatsoever. Perhaps it was something in the tone of my voice on the phone, a pause that lasted longer than it should, an adjective, a pronoun put in an unusual place. At any rate, when Anna appeared before me, she had the look of a woman betrayed: a slight flush, her hair done up in spikes, her skin swollen and rows of tiny red patches covering her bare back.. ‘What’s up, Yannis? Are you taking off somewhere?’ she asked, following a rushed kiss. ‘Yes, I’m going. Somewhere,’ I said with a half-grin. Then, seriously, ‘I’m leaving for Barcelona for a while. How did you know? Have you been talking to Telemachus?’ ‘There’s no need for me to talk to anyone, I can see it in your eyes,’ she said sharply. ‘I need a change. My mind has come to a standstill, lately. I can’t concentrate, can’t work…’ ‘It’s obvious that you can’t concentrate. You don’t have to tell me about it.’ ‘Don’t go imagining anything else. It happens to people.’ ‘It doesn’t happen to people. It happens to you. And as always, the only thing that concerns you is yourself. Of course, I’m not at all surprised. I’m no fool. Right from the beginning I realised you wanted room to breathe in the relationship, that you need your own space, some distance to make you feel safe. You made sure it was all quite clear to me. The type of relationship you wanted became quite clear after the first week, after the first couple of dates. What happened afterwards was simply a cyclical repetition, a variation on that first week, but without the passion, of course.’ This last phrase was uttered with neither aggression nor jealousy. She articulated it under her breath, as if not wanting to believe it even herself. I tried to explain to her that the trip had nothing to do with what was between us, that I was going through a difficult period, that it was an entirely personal need. ‘Your personal need! That could be a perfect motto for our relationship,’ said Anna, seizing the occasion. ‘You don’t waste any opportunity, do you?’ I said, irritated, as it was precisely that aspect of her character that irritated me the most. ‘Look, Anna, if you’re trying to tell me that you’ve made your decision, then say it now. But come straight out with it and stop all the hinting,’ I continued, trying to get the upper hand in the exchange. ‘Come on, Yannis, calm down. Let’s not make a big thing of it. What do you want me to say to you? To ask you to stay here? Since you need to get away so much… go. Make sure you have a good time and come back a new person.’ I caressed her cheek and kissed her. Anna closed her eyes. We spent a tender night together, the love-making was what it should be, though above the candelabra I kept seeing a blinding neon light flashing on and off with the two words: Bar Flaubert. …Exams. So many exams. To have graduated from university and to be still taking high-school exams. How can that be? But I have the certificate. In the room, framed and hanging behind the door. So why are they taking me back? And the Army. The Army again. ‘Is ordered to return to his unit no later than 06.00 hours…’. But I have my discharge papers. In the top drawer, under the parental bequest. It explicitly states: ‘Discharge and Call-up Papers. Category: Active Service: Intake of ’86… Reserve private is discharged… in the event of mobilization, to report for duty at the Camp…’. Okay, but we’re not at war now, why do I have to report for duty… Yet another document, deferment papers this time: Certificate Type B: ‘is exempted from military service for the duration of his studies.’ Good Lord! How can that be? And that man? Who’s that in the painting? A teacher? On the Ministerial Committee? Yes. Summer. In Athens. A heatwave. Me in a blue T-shirt. ‘Turn over your papers. You have three hours beginning now. Absolute silence. Your time begins…’ Now! At that moment, the sound of an alarm shattered the silence. Some car in the neighbourhood had become the target for theft, with the result that I woke up just as I was about to start the unseen ancient Greek passage. The same damn dream for so many years now. Exams that never end. And the Army, always the Army and mobilization, endless military service.

I felt thirsty and got up to get a glass of water. I was so shaken that I didn’t notice that next to me the bed was empty and so I got a shock when I saw her in the living room, lying on the green sofa. Anna was wearing her dressing gown, curled up on her side and quietly crying. Trying not to be heard, walking on tiptoe, I turned on the spot and went back to bed, leaving her alone. Her crying was barely audible, yet its volume filled the whole house.

(Translation: David Connolly)

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