The Man Who Was Left Behind Page 9

  “Oh Jesus, do you think I’m going crazy?”

  “Not a chance. You’re doing fine.”

  “Don’t let go of me or I’ll fall over.”

  “I won’t let go of you.”

  “I think I’m dying,” she said. He held her as tightly as he dared, and felt her back and shoulders jump. Then she was like a sack of potatoes and he was holding all her weight. A voice said, “Are you having any trouble?”

  He turned his head and found himself looking into a bespectacled woman’s face inches from his own. There was a battery of rhinestones at the top of the lenses.

  “Just a private domestic argument,” he told her.

  “Oh,” the woman said, and moved away.

  Amy took her hand from his neck and stood straight on her feet again.

  “Better?” he said.

  “Yes. What happened?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Is everybody looking at me?”

  “Just me.”

  “Everything’s all right, isn’t it?”

  “It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Do you think you can walk?”

  “Oh yes, I’m fine now.”

  They started to walk with the other people from the boat. He kept his arm around her and looked at her face. She looked happy.

  “Is that it up there by the trees, where all those people are sitting on the wall?”

  “I think that’s just where we assemble. I can see the French-speaking guide.”

  “I passed out, didn’t I?”

  “Sort of.”

  “But I feel fine now. Maybe it’s just the heat.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Let’s skip the museum and go back to the hotel and do it together next time.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t,” she said. “I felt as though I was dying.”

  He started to laugh.

  “Honestly!” she said.

  They reached the wall, which went up the square like a ramp. The buses were parked below, and the entrance to the next building on the tour was across the square. She sat on the wall and he stood beside her. The people around them were speaking French.

  “Everything’s all right now, isn’t it?” he said. “About that other business, I mean. It’s like I told you, the doctor said it couldn’t be inherited. Not possibly.”

  “Shut up about this inheriting stuff. I’ll inherit you right on the nose if you don’t quit talking about it.”

  “Okay, I just want you to know.”

  She looked past him and yawned. “This is a nice place,” she said.

  “Yes, it’s nice.”

  “I like this place.”

  “Good.”

  “Only it’s a little hot right in the sun.”

  “We can move over to the entrance there.”

  He helped her down off the wall and they started to cross the square.

  “Oh, John, I’ve got to go to the bathroom again.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “I mean it.”

  “We’ll miss the group.”

  “That doesn’t matter.” She looked from one side to the other.

  “Down that other street. There’s a café.”

  “All right,” he said.

  She marched off quickly down the street. The café was crowded with working men sitting out at the tables. Without hesitating, she stepped through the open doorway, through the hanging plastic strips for keeping flies out, and went inside. There were a few more tables, but most of the men were standing up at the counter. They all looked at her. He felt like a man in a cartoon, his head turned away while his dog strains on the leash to get at a lamp post. She went straight up to the counter, said hello in Greek, and then asked in clear American French, “S’il vous plaît, lavatoire.” The man serving didn’t understand. She repeated it. John stepped up beside her and reeled off sotto voce all the various cognates for toilet he knew. Finally, hoping that it wasn’t an indecent gesture, he made motions of washing his hands, and that seemed to get across. The man called into the back room and a boy in an apron came out. He explained something to the boy in Greek, and Amy bustled forward and out into the back room. Then there was silence. John ordered a coffee and felt uncomfortable. Gradually people began to talk again, but not much. The coffee was very hot and sweet. He had finished it long before she came out again.

  She was still looking happy, and did not seem to mind the fact that everyone was looking at her, although she was normally so self-conscious. She said thank you in Greek to the man behind the counter, which seemed to gain her the approval of everyone, and they left.

  “I was beginning to wonder what had happened to you,” he said. “I had visions of you waking up in Rio de Janeiro, doped to the eyeballs and forced to lead the rest of your life as a white slave.”

  “Ha!” she said. “It was just miles away and like a real old farm privy. I’m dying to wash my hands. They have a little garden out back there, full of flowers.”

  “Did it have a half moon on it?”

  “No,” she said, and laughed.

  There was no one to be seen in the square. They went through the entranceway of the building across the square from the wall and couldn’t see anyone there, either. Then they found a guard and asked where the museum was. He walked back with them and pointed up the street to what looked like another part of the fortifications.

  “This must be it,” John said.

  “I can hear them inside.”

  The guard at the door tried to sell them tickets and John pointed ahead, saying, “Group” until he let them in.

  It was a small museum, cool inside, with several lovely busts and funeral reliefs and a small kneeling Aphrodite, which was famous. There was also a bust of Alexander the Great as a youth, hair down to his shoulders and the nose knocked away. John looked closely at this, liking it very much, and decided that portraits of Alexander never looked ruined if they had been damaged, because somehow you had the feeling that it had happened in battle. He was still thinking about the idea and looking from a three-quarter view at the bust, when Amy from the other side of the room announced in a loud, isolated voice, “There aren’t any postcards in here.”

  His head went around fast, and he saw her turning from side to side and glaring. People were beginning to bunch around her as he reached her side.

  “Where are the postcards?” she demanded. In an even louder voice, imperious, she called again for the postcards.

  He moved her away by the arm.

  “They’re outside, honey. This way,” he said. He wanted to go through the floor.

  “I don’t see any at all,” she said, still loudly, but not shouting.

  “Right out here. I’ll show you.”

  Behind them the Germans were making comments. They passed the man of the couple who had sat at their table for lunch. He had a pair of sunglasses folded in one hand and his cameras around his neck, and was standing up like a boiled slab of meat with his eyes turned coldly on Amy. Oh God, John thought, oh God, oh God. He got her out into the hallway with the desk and its racks of postcards, and the belligerence left her immediately.

  “Oh good,” she said, “they have lots. And pictures of the town, too.”

  She started to thumb through the cards, smiling.

  “I don’t want that one,” she said, lifting out a picture of the Aphrodite.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I couldn’t send Mother a picture of a naked woman, could I?”

  “Why not? It’s a work of art.”

  “It’s a naked woman. Look. They’d never let it go through the mail.”

  “Sure they would, Amy. It’s a postcard.”

  “Well, it isn’t right. And Mother wouldn’t like it anyway. It isn’t the kind of thing you’d want to send your mother. Specially if she’s sick.”

  She put the card back, and chose seven others.

  “That’s enough, now,” he said. She still looked peaceful and composed.

  “Wh
ere can we sit down? I want to get them off right away.”

  He led her out of the room and over near the entrance to a place where the wall jutted out into a shelf. They sat down and she put the cards beside her and opened her purse. He picked up the postcards and took away two and put them in his pocket, not in the same pocket the others were in, since she might notice. She put stamps on the five he had left her and began to write.

  “Do you think she can understand all the things you’re writing?”

  “Sure. The nurse can read them out.”

  That hadn’t been what he had meant.

  “And she can look at the pictures,” Amy said. She wrote quickly, putting the cards down one by one as she finished. He picked one up and read it through. It was perfectly lucid. Then he looked at the date at the top. He picked up the other cards. On all of them it was the same day and December, 1963; the day they were married.

  “Do you mind if I just add my regards?”

  “Go ahead. That would be nice.”

  She was working on the fourth card and beneath her hair her face looked full of sweetness, and serene. He took his ballpoint pen out of his pocket and changed the dates on the cards, inking out the date she had written. He did the same for the last two, and quickly read through her messages. She had described every chink in the walls, every corner of the hotel they were staying at and the hotel where they had had lunch, and what they had eaten, and what they had seen, not to mention the historical parts.

  “Well,” he said. “All we need now is a mailbox.” He kept the cards in his hand and she packed up her handbag and they stood up. When they came out into the sunlight the change of temperature was a shock. They walked hand in hand.

  “I see one,” she said. “Isn’t that lucky?”

  They came up to the mailbox and he said, “Do you want to put them in, or can I this time?” He didn’t want her to see the dates.

  “Oh, you can.”

  He pushed them in.

  “Aren’t you being nice to me today?” she said, smiling up at him brilliantly. “Mailing my postcards and everything. Aren’t you nice to me.”

  “My pleasure, Miss Amy,” he said.

  She hugged him, and he smiled at her and hugged her back. It’s going to be all right, he was thinking. It’s got to be all right. This is Amy, her face and eyes and mouth and hair and the way she looks and all the things about herself that she thinks are ugly which I love so much, and she’s the only person who’s ever understood me and it’s just got to be all right.

  They walked down the street with their arms around each other. They passed the café where she had had to go to the bathroom. She took his other hand in her free one and squeezed it and held on to it, and they kept walking slowly, a bit like drunks tied to each other. Her hand was much smaller than his and damp, and still clung the way a tree animal clings to a branch. He began to sweat.

  “It’s hotter in the sun,” he said, and took a handkerchief from his pocket. He hugged her shoulder to him as he took away his hand.

  “But it’s nice,” she said. “I like this place.”

  He wiped his forehead and his upper lip, and put the handkerchief back in his pocket.

  “So do I,” he said.

  They turned a corner and passed four more tourists coming up the street. They passed by a man selling honey and almond cakes, and turned in to a narrow street where there was shade, and saw a donkey carrying a load of sacks, and walked under a hanging wall of bougainvillea flowers. He began to sweat again.

  St. George and the Nightclub

  After dinner we decided to have coffee in the town and to walk around for a while. It was still light outside, although the sun was gone. Dusk was just beginning to accumulate, making the distances look different. And sounds, especially footsteps, were altered and had an echo as they do early in the morning. My wife buttoned her cardigan at the neck, but didn’t put her arms in the sleeves.

  We walked around the little garden plot outside the hotel and after we had gone by I remembered that I had meant to take a closer look at the statue in its centre. We passed the old graveyard where some of the tombstones were crowned by turbans and the grass was growing wild. Then we came to a place where it looked as though a new villa was about to go up.

  “You don’t think it could be an excavation of some kind, do you?” she said.

  “I don’t think so, but you can never tell around here. Might be.”

  We turned the corner and came to the building whose function I hadn’t been able to guess. It was stucco and had arches cut into the sides, which lent it a South-of-the-border look. I still couldn’t determine whether it was the post office or the jail. In any case, no one was on duty.

  We came out into view of the harbour. Two large tourist cruise boats were tied up at the quay. There were people strolling around between the beds of hibiscus flowers, and three taxicabs still parked to the side of the café, with about a dozen men standing near them and talking.

  I stopped, and tried to figure out the view we had had from the beach that morning. If you had your back to the sea, you could look towards the harbour and see a mass of houses and other buildings. That was what we had seen when we stood up to leave the beach before lunch, and then we had watched a large schooner, white as a swan, come sailing in from the ocean towards the buildings. It had looked just as though it was going to crash into them, but as we watched, it went straight through the middle and you could see that there must be water between the houses. It was one of the most extraordinary tricks of eyesight I had ever experienced. From where we stood we had seen the white sails riding serenely forward above the rooftops. It was as if I had been on the way to my job in the middle of the city and seen a few streets off a boat sailing past the office where I worked. Just to see such a phenomenon, to have had the ability to see it, convinced me for a moment that I had participated in the workings of the supernatural. It had made me feel transported, as though I had seen into another dimension, or been granted a special freedom or a miraculous talent not normally available to mankind. But my sense of perspective had altered now, and I doubted the fact that we had been able to see the thing happen.

  “What are you looking for?” my wife asked.

  “I’m trying to think of where that schooner could have come in this morning.”

  She pointed.

  “Right over there, I’d guess.”

  “But there aren’t many buildings around there. You remember how it looked? It seemed to be going through the centre of a town full of buildings.”

  “Maybe it has something to do with the level we were standing on. Maybe the buildings we saw were farther away, like over there.”

  I looked, and she looked, and then I gave it up. We went up the café steps and sat down at one of the tables outside, and ordered coffee. While we were sitting there the café began to fill up fast. The light was still good, but suddenly we saw both tourist boats leap into different shape as the party lights, strung up high over the decks lengthwise and crossways, came to life.

  “Want to stay here, or walk around?” I said.

  “Let’s walk.”

  We set out in the only direction there was to go, back into the town. There were people wandering around everywhere, some even taking photographs in the darkening air. All the shops were still open: copperware, rugs, jewellery. They all had their doors still open and someone standing in the doorway. We turned off on to a side alley, up stone stairs and through several similar streets and didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

  “There’s a shop,” my wife pointed out to me.

  “Where?”

  “Up those steps, where those people are going. Listen.”

  There was music coming from inside.

  “I think it’s a private party.”

  “No, there’s a sign. Let’s go see.”

  “Do you want to buy anything?”

  “No,” she said, “but we might just take a look.”

  We climbed up t
he stairs. Two people came out of the door as we reached the top, and the rooms inside were loud with voices. There were three rooms full of rather better-quality tourist wares than we had seen so far: icons, bedspreads, blouses, records, ashtrays, cocktail trays, and so on. There was even a collection of marble eggs. The music came from a portable phonograph, and all the talk from the people who had come inside to buy and had either struck up conversation with each other or with the owner.

  The owner was a large man in his fifties, with a moustache and the sort of beard which had had a name given to it in the nineteenth century. Most of the beard was on the chin and the moustache was cut to grow down around the sides of the mouth to meet it, but the cheeks were bare. It suited his face. Sitting down at a table in a corner of the first room was a woman who might have been his wife or a sister, or a more distant relative. She had an account book and pencil beside her on the table and a metal cash box next to them. She nodded to us as we came in.

  My wife said good evening in Greek. I said it in English. The woman replied to both of us in English and Jean said, “May we just look around?”

  “But of course,” the woman said, and made a graceful gesture with her hand as though she were giving us the whole house. My wife headed for the hand-printed materials in the second room, where the owner was talking to two couples. One of the couples was American, the other was English. The Americans looked married and neat and relaxed. They were both deeply tanned and grey-haired. The English people looked as though they might have been a heavy industry salesman and his secretary on an illegal expense-account holiday. She had incongruously platinum blonde shoulderlength hair held back with a scarf which was tied like an Alice-in-Wonderland headband and she made frequent use of the kind of laugh that let any man within hearing know that she would be a heavy drinker and game for propositions and got a lot of fun out of life. The man was in slacks and a sportsjacket, without a tie, and spoke with one of those English accents that’s only just off around the vowels. He had a moustache, too, but on him it seemed more a matter of habit than adornment, and didn’t do much to tone down his expression of happy lecherousness.

  The American woman had forgotten the name of the cruise ship she had arrived on. She asked her husband, who told her the name.