He said: “Orea, eine…?” (Beautiful, isn’t it…?) He didn’t make any other gesture to touch it but, with motions of two fingers together and the odd word, told me to open it up. It isn’t very expensive. It’s cheap — but it’s a pretty knife. Good. Strong. You like it? It’s nice, yes? Come on, open it up. A good knife. That button there — you push it up. To open it. Yes. Come on.
I pushed the button up, and the blade jumped out, a sliver of light, of metal, of sky.
Here! He laughed. It’s a good knife, yes?
I nodded — that is, moved my head to the side, the Greek gesture for Yes. “Ne,” I said. “Kallos to eine.” (Yes. It’s a good one.)
He said in Greek: You want this knife? You like it? Go on, take it. For you. You keep it. You like it, yes? I give it to you. For a present. Maybe you need it, sometimes. It’s a good knife.
“Yati…?” I asked. Why are you giving this to me?
You take it. He gave a sideways nod, then added a chuckle. Go on. Take it. Yes?
“No,” I said. I shook my head (or rather, raised it in negation). “Ochi,” I told him. I pressed the button. But it didn’t close.
He took it from me now. There was another pressure point you had to thumb to make the blade slip in. With his big, manicured fingers, he thumbed it. The metal flicked into the silver and tortoiseshell handle. Like that. You sure? You don’t want it?
I said, “Ochi — efharisto. Ochi.” (No — thank you. No.)
He put it in his back pocket again and regarded me a little strangely, blinking his green-gray eyes in the sun. Then he said: “Philli, akomi — emis?” (We’re friends, now — us?)
“Okay,” I said, in English. “Just forget it.”
“Esis. Ego. O-kay!” he repeated. You. Me. “O-kay. You like… I like…” With a flipped finger, he indicated him and me. “O-kay. Friend: me, you.” He laughed once more, clapped me on the shoulder, then turned to go back to the others. As he walked away, knife and wallet were outlined on one white buttock.
How, I wondered, were we supposed to be friends?
The other sailors were laughing — I’m sure about something else.
I watched them, trying to see some effeminacy in any of their movements — queer sailors, camping it up on the station platform? Him… maybe. But not the others.
Just once more he caught me looking and grinned again — before the train came.
When we pulled from the station, his group was still talking out on the platform — so he wasn’t on my train. I was glad about that.
That night, in my couchette, while we hurtled between Switzerland and Italy, in the dark compartment I thought about the two sailors; and when my body told me what I was about to do, I had some troubled minutes, when it was too easy to imagine the armchair psychiatrists, over their morning yogurt and rolls at the white metal tables in front of American Express, explaining to me (in three languages) how, on some level, I had liked it, that — somehow — I must have wanted it.
While I masturbated, I thought about the thick, rough hands on the squat one, but grown now to the size of the tall one’s; and the tall one’s hazel eyes and smile — but deprived of the Sen-sen scent; and about sucking the squat one’s cock, with all its black hair — except that, for the alcoholic sweat and cologne, I substituted the slight work-salt of a stocky good-humored housepainter I’d had on the first day I’d got to Athens.
Once I tried to use the knife blade, as he’d held it, full of sky: nothing happened with it.
At all.
But I used my waking up with the sailor beside me, his leg against my arm, his hand between his legs. I did it first with fear, then with a committed anger, determined to take something from them, to retrieve some pleasure from what, otherwise, had been just painful, just ugly.
But if I hadn’t — I realized, once I’d finished, drifting in the rumbling, rocking train — then, alone with it, unable to talk of it, even with John or Heidi, I simply would have found it too bleak. I’d have been defeated by it — and, more, would have remained defeated. That had been the only way to reseize my imagination, let go of the stinging fear, and use what I could of both to heal.
VI
Unknown and alone, I have returned to wander through my native country, which lies about me like a vast graveyard…
In London one night beside a neon-striped eating place, I’d stood outside plate glass, a triangle of blue sliding down at my eye, listening to a record on the jukebox inside, by a group that sang, in the most astonishing antiphony, about “Monday, Monday…”—as rich with pop possibilities as new music could be.
In France, for a day, I’d hitched north toward the Luxembourg airport through a stony landscape — sided with crumbling white walls, shuttered windows and planked-up doors that recalled so many of that country’s warnings, from so many of its writers, about the meanness and a-sensuality of its strict, strict provinces.
And, in New York, three weeks later, I was sitting at the foot of my bed, when, after some argument that had to do with neither money nor sex, my wife walked in and slapped me, about as hard as I’d ever been hit, across the face — the only time either one of us ever struck the other. A week later, with her poems and the red clay casserole, she moved into another apartment, down on Henry Street. Which left me nothing but to plunge into the ending of the novel I’d been working on last fall and spring, full of Greece — but with no Heidi or Pharaoh, no Cosima or DeLys, no Trevor or Costas, no Jerry or [Turkish] John.
Two weeks after that I got a letter from Heidi — which surprised me: I hadn’t written her at all. I sat on the bed in the back of my empty Lower East Side flat to read its more-than-dozen pages. The light through the window-gate made lozenges over the rumpled linen.
The return address on Heidi’s letter was Munich, which was where her family lived. Its many beige sheets explained how she was with them now, how glad she’d been to see her mother once she’d arrived — and how the problems she’d sometimes cried to me about having with her father seemed, briefly, in abeyance. Had I gotten to the Deutsches Museum? (I had. And it had been quite as wonderful as she’d told me. But she seemed to think I’d probably missed it.) She hoped things were going well between me and my wife.
Then, in its last pages, she wrote:
“Before I left Greece, I killed my poor Pharaoh — whom I loved more than anything else in the world. Even more than, for that little time, I loved you. But there was no one I could give him to. The Greeks don’t keep pets. And the quarantine laws are impossible — they would have put him in kennel for six months; and that costs lots of money. Besides, he was just a puppy, and after six months more he wouldn’t even have known me. But the day before I did it, I saw a dog — all broken up and bloody, with one leg and one eye entirely gone, and his innards — Oh, I don’t want to describe it to you! But he was alive, though barely, in the garbage behind Kyria Kokinou’s, because of what some boys had done to him. He was going to die. And I knew if I just let Pharaoh go, with the stones and the glass in the meat, and the Greek boys, he would die too. That’s when I cried.
“Since I was leaving Greece in two days, what I did was take my poor, beautiful Pharaoh out in the blue rowboat that David said I could use, with a rope, one end of which I’d already tied around a big rock (about eighteen kilos). I was in my bathing suit — as though we were going for a swim, back on Aegina. And while he looked up at me, with his trusting eyes — which, because you are such a careful writer, you would say was a cliché, but I could really look into those swimming, swirling eyes and see he did trust me, because I fed him good food every day from the market and took him for his walks in the morning and at night so he could make his shits and his pee-pees, and I had protected him all winter and spring from those horrid Greeks. I tied the rope around his neck, the knot very tight, so it wouldn’t come loose. Then we wrestled together in the boat and I hugged him and he licked me, and I threw him over the side. He swam around the boat, as he used to when I’d take him out in the skiff on Aegina, with most of the rope floating in curves, back and forth, snaking to the gunwale, and back over. Once he climbed in again — and got me all wet, shaking. Then he jumped out, to swim some more.