Yacinth, my Hyacinth.
Escape, as I choose to call it, was absurdly easy. I walked down the hill, skirted again the place where the soldiers should have been (though they had left) and, with the lucidity and calm which only a maniac can achieve, I found a taxi. Yes, a taxi. The army was everywhere, in tanks, in jeeps, in lorries, on foot, but through it all, the battered yellow cab came nosing, its windows wide, and the car radio blaring martial music, appropriately enough, filling the streets with the strains of war. I stepped boldly from the bushes. The driver, a wiry man with a pencil moustache and jet black eyebrows, looked at me dubiously as I climbed in behind him. He was chewing gum, and, as I settled down in the back seat, he turned, laid an elbow on the headrest beside him, and blew a huge pink bubble.
‘The arm,’ he said. ‘Don’t let it bleed over the upholstery.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘English?’
‘No, yes.’
‘That’s a bullet wound?’
‘No, I … a fall.’
‘A fall.’
‘Yes. Will you take me to this address? It’s written here, you see.’
We roared away from the kerb, and headed swiftly north. Apart from the army, there were few vehicles on the road. Those little eyes watched me in the driving mirror. I tried to move out of range, but it was impossible.
‘Great things happening today,’ he said, over his shoulder.
‘Yes.’
‘I knew it was coming.’
‘Ah Jesus,’ I sighed.
Those nerves were creeping forward to investigate the torn flesh. I was bleeding on the upholstery. The driver turned up the volume of the radio, and tapped out the rhythm on the steering wheel. I knew that none of this was real, but I closed my eyes, and savoured the dream.
‘English. English, you’re here.’
I opened my eyes to find another bubble being blown in my face. The taxi was parked in the dusty courtyard, near the caged tree. The driver grinned.
‘You’re here,’ he said again.
‘Ah.’
‘You want me to get someone?’
‘Iakavos.’
‘Who?’
‘Papa Iakavos.’
The great door was drawn open, and the little priest with the black beard peered out. He came to the window of the cab, looked in at me, and scuttled away. The driver went around and opened my door, threw a look at the pool of blood on the seat, and shook his head. Iakavos appeared, and gaped at me in astonishment and concern. I lifted my hand in a greeting, and smiled.
‘Take me, Papa, for I die.’
I stayed in the monastery for a long time. I lost count of the days, of the weeks, eventually. They gave me Erik’s old room, overlooking the courtyard. His belongings were still there. That was, in a way, comforting. I thought a great deal about him. One day, when I could at last move around, I found, in the wardrobe, his file against humanity. I sat with it on the balcony all day, going through it, as though it were a dossier on his life, trying to discover what had killed him; for Erik, I felt, had died long before Andreas’s bullet reached his heart. I found, on a blank page near the end, these words written:
What the heart desires, the world is incapable of giving.
B.W.
I could but barely remember having said it. Again and again, I read those words, striving toward some deeper meaning which Erik must have perceived, and at last, after some days, I came to realize that his ruin had come about, not through lack in himself, but through a lack in the world.
Papa Iakavos was a good man. He asked me no questions. Once, in an effort to relieve my torture, I tried to tell him what I had done, what had happened. He sat opposite me in his black robes, smiling and nodding, not understanding one word that I spoke. Perhaps I did not make sense. How could I? There is no sense in any of it.
A doctor was brought to me, a tiny, gentle jew with the round face of a cherub. He ignored the wounded arm which I waved at him, which Iakavos was tending expertly. I realized that this doctor was a psychiatrist. I tried to talk to him, as I had talked to Iakavos, but I could not. I told him lies, clever lies, perhaps, over which he frowned, seemingly baffled. Eventually, he went away, to make arrangements for me to go into a clinic. But he had no sooner left than I packed what things I thought I might need, and walked down the stairs, and through the gate, and escaped, as Erik had once done, so long ago, now.
The city seemed disturbingly normal. I had expected … I do not know what I had expected; martial law, perhaps, and manacled political prisoners being herded through the streets. A few more soldiers than usual were in evidence, and that was all. The evening papers were shouting about a dangerous madman on the loose in the city, and for a long time, before I found the nerve to buy one, I thought they were talking about me; they were not. I sat in a café, in the warm sun, and searched the pages for some mention of Hyacinth’s death. There was none, not a word. Perhaps it never happened.
I went to my bank, stood at the counter, and spoke my name clearly and loudly, expecting the combined might of the police, army and secret service, led by Helena screaming for blood, to come bearing down on me. Nothing happened. The clerk was polite. He closed my account, and paid me my cash. Some royalties had come in; I was richer than I had expected. I took the train to the Piraeus, and bought a boat ticket. I sailed to the island. No one was interested in me. It was, I can admit now, it was disappointing. What a strange cold creature I am.
I wish that I had some last scene with the boy to recount, as a way of saying goodbye to him, some last moment of tenderness; but I have not. I can only speak of a day long ago in spring, some time after the party. I was travelling in a bus through the city, going … where? I cannot remember. It was one of those days when the world seems to be offering some consolation for all the times it has disappointed. Each new scene, as I came upon it, presented to me a further step in what would surely be the unlocking of a great secret. Sunlight, glancing from a high window, found a bit of broken white glass in the gutter, and set it ablaze. Trees fell away and showed me a young girl, her hair flying, riding a red bicycle against a sea of blue sky and light. An old man, on a park bench, gazed at a bird, and the bird gazed at him, turning its head this way and that. Above ugly black roofs, like rotten teeth, where, before, there had been only sky, the pillars of the Parthenon, golden, perfect, rose into view. And then, when the bus was parked for a short stop at traffic lights, I looked through the window, across the road, and saw, under a tree, Helena and Yacinth standing, their faces turned away from me, as they looked intently down the street. Her hand rested lightly, forgotten, on the boy’s shoulder; his hands were clasped before him. Light, breaking through the tree, fell into his hair, creating a burning aureole around his head. He seemed hardly human, but, rather, a manifestation of time itself, of continuity, of history; he seemed a promise to hold up in the face of death. I thought, not daring to take my eyes from him, that if I could see what it was that he saw down at the end of that street, where he looked so intently, I would discover the secret, so long hidden from me, the secret of, yes, the secret of art.