Perilous Adventures
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Pandora

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Olvar Wood Writers Retreat

 
 

Greek Romance

Mary Byrne
 

PeripheriqueThe disco was in a tent. He was drunk and wearing a cloth cap he'd swiped from another tourist. She liked his smile. They spent the night in his room: just a rented room for the season. Before making love, he said, "I am healthy." She knew what he meant, but she didn't care. It was her first real holiday alone as a successful businesswoman, independent and well off. She was drunk with it all. No one had heard of AIDS yet. Europe was still small, Greece wasn’t in it and was far from the British Isles. The Berlin wall was still up, and functional.

When she went back to her pension, just before dawn, she hoped her roommate wouldn't notice the strong smell of alcohol and cigarettes.

Pretty soon after that she hardly saw her roommate at all. She'd come to his shop and sit with her lover, smoking and looking out at the white houses, watching the tourists flick through the stands outside the shops, waiting for the sun to set, thinking of dinner.

"Tourists buy nothing this year," he said. “They have too much bloody black wine for lunch.”

He took her out every evening, and insisted on paying.

“Eat, before it’s too late!” he would say, waving his hand at the generosity of little white plates before them. They ate salads and grilled red mullet and listened to ropes dinging on the boats. The phrase ‘Three sheets to the wind’ came into her head. He sprinkled black pepper on fresh white cheese made from sheep’s milk, and ate it with a fork. She was fascinated by a young oriental woman and an elderly man attacking a lobster with pincers, very efficiently.

He just shrugged. The rich didn’t interest him.

They'd go home to his bare room and screw like they'd never get enough of it. Sometimes she stayed awake while he slept, sometimes they talked. Once he frightened her when he got up in the middle of the night and drank neat vodka. He was always wound up, chain-smoking, on the lookout for something beyond himself.

In the mornings, an old lady in black brought him home-made yoghurt with wrinkled skin on the top, which they ate with honey poured over it. The old lady adored him and ignored her. Women of her own age glared balefully when they met her on the street or the stairs. Later, she saw the old lady walk down the street carrying a bucket.

“Her toilet,” he explained. “She put in the sea.” He laughed heartily. “Tourists not see, not know. Tourists very ignorant. Tourists is selfish.” 

He didn't ever want to get serious about anyone, he said, he wanted to stay free. But he took to her little by little. He talked about his favourite things and put a Vivaldi violin concerto on continuous play all night. He told her the big brass bed came all the way from Istanbul. He quoted from Yannis Ritsos, and recounted how the communists had been hunted from one end of Greece to the other after the war, sweeping his arm diagonally as if to clear the table. His father had been a communist with a Russian connection. “Capitalism has for basic the selfishness,” he said. In winter when the season was over, he went travelling until his money ran out. Sometimes he went to Moscow. He had friends in Sweden; he had friends all over. Occasionally, he received parcels from girls from other summers. The other men on the island seemed to like him. He got involved in island activities, attended meetings, talked about the future. He never asked anything of her.

When autumn came he took her to the boat. Her friend was there taking photos, as usual, with an old Leica. She noticed for the first time, as she kissed him goodbye, how discoloured his teeth were, and remembered that her friend’s father was a dentist. As their boat backed out to turn she watched him hunch his shoulders against the wind to light a cigarette, and thought she'd like to have stayed.

She was surprised one night in winter when the phone rang, very late, long distance. He wanted to say he loved her. It wasn't that easy on the phone, in bad English. After that she wrote to him a lot, sent him records and things, and looked forward to the airmail letters in the hall.

Nearer to Christmas there was a call from Moscow. He was on his way, he said, could they meet somewhere. He persuaded her to take a week or two off work. She said she'd collect him at Heathrow.

When he didn't appear off the flight she made enquiries, and they took her to where they were holding him. Nobody could explain why they were keeping him in the little grey room, but an interpreter had been called and they were having some paper translated. He didn't seem overly worried. He was used to this sort of thing, he said.

They waited several hours. What British immigration were having translated was a certificate he'd got recently after passing a mechanics exam. This amused him considerably. After they had made him pay extra for having too many cigarettes and too much vodka, they let him go.

When they got out of the airport and into the car, he laughed and said they hadn't found the money in his boot. Communists were always being treated like that, he said, better to leave this God-forsaken country, quick.

They drove to France.

When they hit the Périphérique he was terrified, and cried out for her to slow down. He preferred small villages where you could have a ballon of red standing at the bar. In the bitterly cold streets she no longer liked the way he hunched over his lighter. He complained about the winter, the dark days, the north, the French. Whenever she got mad at something he was delighted, and laughed heartily, angering her still more. He said Spain might be better, that he liked Spain. He talked of other visits, which had been great down there. He sang republican songs.

So they drove down to the Basque country and had soup from huge bowls and wine from house bottles on white tablecloths in empty restaurants all around the coast. The sun occasionally shone but it was still cold. On grey days they sat in crowded bars and looked out at blackened churches covered with graffiti. He talked about the Basque freedom movement.

"What do you think of Spain this time?” she asked.

"Is very dark," he said.

They were just driving along when they saw the sign for Guernica. Nothing would do for him but to turn off and go there. She was quite curious, too, but it turned out there was nothing to see, and certainly not the painting.

It was in the cheap hotel room in Guernica that she got sick. She could smell the garlic from the restaurant downstairs. Their bedroom was full of Greek cigarette smoke.

"You OK,” he said. “Come and eat, you feel better."

He drank a lot of vodka from the bottle while he was waiting for her to make up her mind. She couldn't make him understand that she was really sick. Before he went down to dinner he had to ask her for money, because he'd spent most of his summer money on Moscow, the flight to London, and on drink and cigarettes since.

"Was my money for all the winter," he said.

The next morning she told him she was going home. At the railway station she gave him the money for the ticket.

As she rolled up the window of the car he stood there in the rain, crying, waiting for the train to Sweden, where he had friends.

About the Author

Mary Byrne was born in Ireland, though she is currently living France. Mary is a French-English translator and editor for British & Irish publishers.

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