The Man Who Was Left Behind Read online

  “That’s right. It’s one of the boats in the Epirotiki line. They’re quite good.”

  “Epirotiki?” the Englishman exploded, slapping his thigh. “Christ, I don’t believe it! Epirotiki,” he repeated, and grabbed his girl, who broke up, hanging on to his arm.

  “That’s what we thought, too,” said the American husband.

  “Really,” his wife added. “It’s a real name.”

  The owner began to tell them all a story about a woman who had been on a cruise with a line which had given all its boats names like Aphrodite, and Agamemnon, and Homer. Then she went on a tour to Mycenae and when the guide explained to her how Agamemnon had brought his conquering army back from Troy through the Lion Gates, she had said, “Gee, how did they get a big boat like that through such a little place?”

  Then he told them a story about a woman who had been in his own shop, looking at the icons. He made a brief digression to discuss the kinds of icons he stocked, and told something of the history of the monasteries from which they came, or in some cases, from which the wood came.

  My wife had wandered into the farthest room, but I stayed to admire the owner’s technique. It seemed to be wasted talent in such a small place. On the other hand, the shop looked very prosperous.

  “So I was explaining to her, and she picked up one of the icons and wanted to know the date. I told her it was seventeenth century. And she said, ‘Gosh, B.C.?’ ”

  The American couple laughed a lot. And the English couple joined in, but they had considered Epirotiki much funnier. I wondered if the owner changed the nationalities of the characters in these stories to fit his hearers, but on second thought I doubted it. Most good tourist blunder stories are about Americans, and American tourists always enjoy hearing them.

  I joined my wife in the third room, and the others began to move off to see the icons. She was looking at cocktail trays.

  “Well,” she said, “they’re all nice, but there are just as nice ones at home, and I don’t know how I’d ever get it back.”

  “You could say it was one of your suitcases that got run over by a steamroller.”

  “Yes,” she said absently, and fingered a rack of dresses all made in the style I call “hand hewn”. I went back into the second room. Three more people had arrived. One of the men was saying, “But honey, what would you do with it?” I didn’t see what the object under discussion was. I wandered on into the first room. The two couples had gone and been replaced by three white-haired Frenchwomen. The owner had changed the record on the turntable and was speaking French to the women.

  I looked at the icons, which ranged in size from one big one as wide as an arm, to a few tiny ones about three inches by four. Most of them were about the size of a large book. The prices were marked in pounds, francs, and dollars as well as drachmas, and ran from three hundred and fifty dollars down to eighteen. I was looking at some of the smaller ones just larger than playing cards, when one of them caught my eye.

  It was a picture of St. George slaying the dragon. The saint himself was dark brown, with lighter brown hair, and his horse was pure white. George’s expression wasn’t very interesting, but the attitude of the horse’s raised hoof and flowing mane and the posture of its head, all gave an impression of near-foolish innocence which was rather endearing. What I liked best about the picture, however, was the dragon underneath. It was shaped vaguely like an alligator, and bright green. Up above, St. George was leaning on his lance, which went straight through the dragon and out the other side, bringing with it a runnel of lovingly painted blood that ended in a pool on the ground. The dragon had his tail curled into loops and his ears laid back like a cat, and the one visible yellow-brown eye shone with a look of furious glee.

  The owner came up behind me as I bent over the icon, and began to talk to me about all the different ones that I wasn’t looking at. I admired his technique even more. My wife joined us, and I asked what was the reason for the difference between the prices on the three small ones I had been looking at before, and he gave me a condensed history of the rarity of certain portraits. I didn’t listen very hard. My wife was trying to catch my eye.

  “I like the St. George,” I said.

  “Yes, yes. An English saint.”

  “But the dragon is international.”

  He laughed, and picked the icon up in his hand. “Yes,” he said, “it is nice,” and then he put it back on the shelf. This was not a shop where you tried to knock the price down; if you didn’t buy it, somebody else would.

  “Will you take a traveller’s cheque?” I asked.

  “Yes, certainly. You want to buy it?”

  “Yes.”

  My wife made a sort of hissing noise, and I glanced at her and smiled. She was looking fed up with me.

  The woman at the table told me how to make out the cheques, and I gave her a twenty and a ten, and got the change back, eight dollars in drachmas. There was a pile of other traveller’s cheques under a spring clip attached to the side of one of the compartments of the metal box. She wrapped the icon up in pink tissue paper and put pieces of scotch tape on the corners.

  The owner said, “You have had dinner?”

  “Yes, at our hotel.”

  “There is a good nightclub, if you don’t go back yet. Music and wine, and dancing.”

  He handed me a card like a calling card, with the name of the nightclub printed on one side, and a street map on the other. There were five piles of cards and a ballpoint pen on one of the shelves. One card for the shop, one for the nightclub, and the others presumably for restaurants and hotels. Before he handed it to me he had marked it with the pen.

  “We are here, you see?”

  “I see,” I said. “Well, fine. We might give it a try. Thank you.”

  “Not at all. You will like it. Everybody goes there.”

  “Does the name mean anything special?”

  “It is a Turkish word. It means a—hob-goblin.” He searched with his fingers in the air for another word. “A bogey man. They are night spirits.”

  I thanked him again and said good night to him and the woman at the table, and my wife was polite in saying her goodnights, but furious when we got outside.

  “Don, those things are all fakes. It was probably painted last week and the varnish has just dried.”

  “I know that. I just like the dragon.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

  “I’m not interested in whether it’s genuine or not. I think it’s worth it for the picture.”

  “It’s a waste.”

  “But I like the dragon. Do you want to go to this place?”

  “Not specially.”

  “We could just look in and see what it’s like.”

  “If we ever get out of here. I’m lost.”

  The night had gone dark while we were inside the shop, and there weren’t many lights. I decided that if we kept walking downhill we’d reach the harbour.

  “There it is,” my wife said after a while. “I can see the lights on the boats.”

  The lights on the tourist boats reminded me of something, but I wasn’t sure what. Not exactly of Christmas trees or of ferris wheels, but of something just as definite which I couldn’t for the moment recall.

  We came out two streets to the right of the café, and looking farther to the right I saw the nightclub. The name was written out in electric lights over the door and the painted letters underneath the lights had the bulbous, curlicue shape of circus poster writing.

  “Let’s have a look,” I said.

  “All right.”

  There was a knot of people entering as we came up. We followed them in to a sort of cloakroom and I saw that you had to buy tickets as a cover charge. The door into the club opened and the sound of the music came through, and I could see lots of people sitting at tables.

  “What is it?” my wife asked.

  “Just a cover charge.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “Don’t be so sting
y. It looks like this is the only nightclub in town. We might as well see it, and hear some of the music.”

  I paid, and we were pushed through the door. The people who had gone in ahead of us were still standing up, waiting for a table. There was a circular dancefloor in the centre of the room; it was about ten feet in diameter, raised up, and the surface looked as though it had been covered by a special material to insure against slipping. No one was dancing on it.

  Looking from the doorway, the building was a reversed L-shape. The foot of the L was very broad and branched off to the left. Everyone sitting in it would be able to see the little wedge of dancefloor. About three-quarters of the way across from the door, the part of the room in the longer upright of the L was raised three feet up, and there was a white open-work fence like a stair railing across all that part of the room except for the middle passage, where there were stairs going up. The whole floor, not counting the dance circle, was bare wood and very scuffed. Two carpets ran across it like trails, one up the stairs, and one over to the left. To the right of the door, backed up against the wall, a sitting band played, and a statuesque girl was singing at a microphone.

  We were bullied along the carpet and then halted.

  “You don’t mind you sit all at one table?” the waiter asked me. He seemed to be including several other people in the request.

  “We don’t mind,” I said. Two of the people turned around. It was the English couple from the shop.

  “Do you mind sharing?”

  “Not in the least, old chap,” he said.

  The other couple were very young. The boy was saying to his girl, “I don’t think there’s a table for two.”

  “Are you American?” I asked him, and he turned around. A big, beefy boy in a seersucker suit, with a light crew cut and a face full of freckles. He smiled sheepishly.

  “Yeah,” he said. “What gives here, anyway?”

  “They’re doubling us all up. Do you mind joining us?”

  “Oh. No, we don’t mind, do we, Linda?”

  The girl looked at me and gave me a come-on smile.

  “We’d love to,” she said. She was small, but wearing very high heels. Her eyes opened all the way up like a doll’s so that no lid showed.

  “It looks like they’ve got plenty of tables up there,” the boy said, indicating the raised part of the room behind the railings.

  “Reserved for a party, maybe. Or maybe the Greek navy’s arriving at midnight.”

  “I’d like to see that,” the Englishwoman said. We all started to introduce ourselves. Her name was Betty and the Englishman was Graham. The waiter darted forward and began to shoo us along the carpet to the left, and sat us down at a table not far from the wall. Another waiter was hanging over us with a notepad in his hand before we had even sat down. I ordered a bottle of retsina. Graham wanted to go through the wine list. I said to the American boy, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your names.”

  “Linda Whiting,” the girl said, and then corrected herself. “Linda Butterworth.”

  “Rocky Butterworth,” he said, and held out his hand. I shook it and introduced myself and my wife and Betty and Graham, whose last names I hadn’t heard distinctly.

  “Honeymooners, or I miss my guess,” Graham said to them.

  “Give the poor kids a chance,” I said. “Everybody and their grandmother has been asking them if they aren’t on their honeymoon.”

  “They certainly have,” the girl said, and Butterworth grinned self-consciously. I told him that I didn’t think there would be much sense in ordering a cocktail unless they were really dying for one. It would be a lot better, and also cheaper, just to order a bottle of the local wine.

  “I can’t bear the local wine,” Graham said.

  “What I’d give for a snowball,” Betty told him.

  “What do you say to some champers, old girl?”

  Linda looked up. “What’s champers?” she asked.

  “A spot of the old bubbly.”

  “Champagne,” I said.

  “Do you want some?” Butterworth asked.

  “No, let’s follow Mr. Coleman’s advice,” she said, demurely flicking her doll’s eyes in my direction.

  My wife lit a cigarette and blew a long jet of smoke across the table. Then she looked as though she were about to smile, and murmured, “My goodness.” Butterworth started to turn around. “No, don’t look just yet,” she said.

  I glanced quickly to the side and saw what she was looking at: the table to the left, up against the wall. It was like a tableau out of something by Zola. A local tart, perhaps attached to the club, was being treated to champagne by a family man out on the town. He looked very respectable and was wearing Sunday best with a stiff collar. And he was very, very drunk, but quietly so. As I watched, the waiter poured out the last of the champagne, upended the bottle in the bucket, and went for a new one. He seemed to be working for that table only. And the whore was fabulous. She was squat, well muscled but not fat, and wore a nineteen-twenties’ type of sleeveless black evening dress with glimmering black beads or sequins sewn on it. Her bushy short hair was parted in the middle and dyed a dark orange-red, and underneath it her face—low forehead, deep-set eyes and a prominent nose—had the stony, libidinous look of a gargoyle. She might have been any age from twenty-five to fifty, and she was the only clip-joint girl I had ever seen who actually drank. She was belting back her champagne as fast as the man.

  Their fresh bottle of champagne arrived at the same time ours did.

  “No, leave it here,” Graham ordered our waiter. Nobody was going to wrap a towel around his bottle and turn it upside down into the bucket while it was still half full.

  “Chin chin,” he said.

  “Cheerio,” Betty laughed.

  “Christ, I hope he thinks it’ll be worth it.”

  “He probably won’t be sober enough to find out,” I said.

  “Always sober enough for that, old boy,” Graham said, and leered in the Butterworths’ direction. Butterworth looked into his glass as though searching for a fly. Linda asked my wife what resin was.

  “It tastes like leather,” she said. “But it’s some kind of gum, isn’t it?”

  The girl at the mike started on another song which I thought was probably Turkish. She was getting a lot of appreciation out of the two big tables to our right, where about fourteen men dressed in unpressed dark suits were drinking together. They might have been dockworkers or taxidrivers, or waiters on their time off. None of them was out of hand, but the pitch of their talk rose, and they were looking at the singer with increasing approval.

  “Can you understand any of the words?” Butterworth asked me. His wife and mine were carrying on their conversation across us.

  “I have a feeling this one is Turkish,” I said. “All the Greek ones have words like monos, which means alone, and then there’s another word that means pain. As far as I can figure out, they’re all about some boy standing on his girl’s doorstep and feeling out in the cold.”

  “Would you say this was very authentic music?”

  “I don’t know. They haven’t played ‘Never On Sunday’ yet, or that other one.”

  “‘Zorba,’” he said.

  “Just taking a guess, I’d say it’s like American and Scottish folksongs: the more off-key it sounds, the more authentic it is.”

  The singer was doing a lot of sexy death-of-the-breath business around the minor notes. I took a long drink and began to feel high.

  “Does it excite you?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know. It just sounds so foreign to me. And a little monotonous.”

  “It makes me feel excited,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t go there,” my wife was saying to Linda.

  “I like the ones they dance to,” he said. “The faster numbers. Like balalaika stuff.”

  “Yes, I like those, too.”

  A waiter sped past with another bottle of champagne for the two against the wall.

 
“You can look now,” I told Butterworth.

  He turned his head slowly, saw them, turned back and was laughing.

  “Gee, is he going to be sorry in the morning,” he said. “They’re going to have to carry him out.”

  Graham was making toasts to Greece, to Rhodes, to the nightclub. A man sitting at the table to our right had been included in the toasting and given a glass of champagne.

  “I wonder who that is,” my wife said. Linda turned around, and I looked, too. At a table just below the raised part of the room sat a man in a white dinner jacket, a red flower in his lapel. He had his own private waiter. While we were watching, the waiter presented him with a tiny grey tiger-striped kitten.

  “Oh, how cute,” Linda said. “I guess that’s the local millionaire or something.”

  He was middle-aged and looked rich, healthy, civilized, and as though he were enjoying himself.

  “All alone, too,” Linda said. “Do you suppose he’s waiting for somebody?”

  “Maybe he’s the owner,” I said.

  “Oh no, I’m sure he’s sailed here in his yacht.”

  “You romantic,” I said, smiling.

  “Oh yes, I sure am. I’d hate to be anything else.”

  My wife was taking small, discrete sips of her wine. She wasn’t enthusiastic about retsina. The song ended, and Graham leaned over Betty.

  “This chappie says the bloke’s the chief of police from one of the other islands.”

  “The guy with the gargoyle?”

  “That’s the one. If they knew about it at home!”

  “And he probably has a wife and five children at home, too,” said my wife. “I bet that’s his year’s salary. And what do they get?”

  “If she knows what she’s about, she gets the milkman while he’s away,” Betty said, laughing.

  Graham pinched her under the table.

  “Now then, none of that,” he said.

  “Not a chance,” my wife said. “In Greece they probably lock them up before they go away.”

  For a moment Graham had the look of a man about to unburden himself of a story about chastity belts, but he changed his mind and took another long look at the visiting policeman and his incredible child of joy.