George coughed, which wasn’t a good idea, because he’d taken a swig of wine a moment before. “I don’t know that Germanus does like pretty boys,” he said once he wasn’t trying to choke to death.
“Neither do I,” John said cheerfully. “That wouldn’t stop me from telling jokes about him, though.” He took a sip of his own wine, making a point of doing it neatly. A moment later, though, he looked glum, which added close to ten years to his apparent age. “Of course, that’s why I don’t live in Constantinople anymore, which I suppose proves your point.”
A barmaid came around with a bowl of salted olives. Before the Slavs came, a big handful had cost only a quarter of a follis. They were up to three quarters of a follis now, but that was still cheap. George bought some and ate them one by one, spitting the pits onto the rammed-earth floor. By the time he’d finished them and licked his fingers clean, he was thirsty again. He called for another cup of wine. The wine was where Paul really made his money.
John ordered more wine, too. When the girl brought it to him, he slipped an arm around her waist and said, “After I get done tonight, why don’t we go someplace quiet and--”
She twisted away, shaking her head. “I’ve heard about you. If you don’t like me in bed, you’ll call me names so nasty, they’ll make me cry, and then you’ll tell jokes about me tomorrow night. And if you do like me, you’ll sweet-talk me till I don’t know up from down--and then you’ll tell jokes about me tomorrow night. No thank you, either way.” She went off, her nose in the air.
George had heard John tell a lot of jokes about a lot of different women, which made him think the barmaid was likely to be right. John peered down into the cup of wine the girl had given him. Harsh, black shadows from the hearthfire and the torches on the wall kept George from reading his expression.
After a while, Paul thumped his fist down on the bar in front of him, once, twice, three times. The racket in the tavern faded, though it did not vanish. Paul said, “Now, folks, here’s someone who can keep us laughing, even with the Slavs all around. Come on, tell John what you think of him.”
“Not that!” John exclaimed as he bounced to his feet and, seeming like a builder’s crane, all built of sticks, with joints in curious, unexpected places, made his way up to the little platform that might at another time have housed a lyre-player or a fellow with a trained dog. Most of the people in the tavern clapped for him. A few did tell him what they thought--likely those who’d been his butts in the recent past.
He ignored them, with the air of a man who’d heard worse. “Being a funny man is hard work, you know that?” he said, swigging from the cup of wine he’d brought with him. “I was trying to talk a girl into bed with me, and she turned me down, just on account of I’m a funny man.”
“Who says you’re a funny man?” a heckler called.
John turned to Paul, who was dipping up a mug of wine behind the bar. “You’ve got to stop feeding your mice so much. They keep squeaking for more while I’m doing my show.” He waited to see if the heckler would take another jab at him; he disposed of such nuisances with effortless ease. When the fellow kept quiet, John shrugged and resumed: “Like I was saying, she told me that if I didn’t like her, I’d insult her and then tell jokes about her, but if I did like her, I’d say all sorts of nice things to her--and then I’d tell jokes about her.” He waited for his laugh, then went on, “So you see, friends, this isn’t easy work.”
George looked around the tavern till he spotted the barmaid who’d turned down John’s advances. She stood with both hands pressed to her cheeks. She hadn’t said yes--and, by the same token, John hadn’t waited till the next day to tell a joke about her, even if it was the same joke she’d told about him. George envied the comic his ability to take something from everyday life and incorporate it into his routine as if he’d been using it for years.
Thinking about the way John told jokes kept him from paying attention to the jokes John was telling. He started listening in the middle of one: “--so the Persian king had this new woman brought in before him, and he looked her over, and she was pretty enough, so he said, ‘Well, little one, tell me, are you a virgin or what?” And she looked back at him, and she said, ‘May it please you, your majesty, I am what.’ “
About three quarters of the people in the tavern got the joke and laughed. “What?” several people said at the same time, some of them smugly, showing they understood, others sounding bewildered enough to prove they didn’t.
“Day after tomorrow,” John said, “I promise you, an angel of the Lord will come in here and write it out in letters of fire, but it probably won’t do you any good, because if you can’t figure that one out, it’s a sure bet you can’t read, either.”
“Oh, John,” George said softly This was how his friend got into trouble: when he started insulting his own audience, they stopped thinking he was funny. George instinctively understood how and why that was so. Clever though he was, John had never figured it out.
But tonight, John steered clear of that danger, at least for the moment. “Talk about your miracles, now,” he said with a wry grin. “Isn’t it wonderful how God gave Menas back his legs just in time for him to run away from the Slavs?”
That got a laugh, too, but a nervous laugh. Some people were probably nervous about John’s questioning the will of God, others about what Menas would do to John if the joke got back to him. George, who prided himself on being a thorough man, was nervous about both at once.
“It’s all right,” John said soothingly. “I saw another miracle, too: when St. Demetrius told Rufus to let the rest of us know the Slavs were attacking, old Rufus didn’t swear once. If that’s no miracle, what is?”
George looked around again, and saw he wasn’t the only one doing so. He didn’t spy Rufus in the audience, which meant nothing would happen to John right away. Sooner or later, though, the veteran would hear about the joke. That was the way life worked. Rufus had been around a long time. He might laugh it off. If he didn’t, being a shoemaker would have nothing to do with why George wouldn’t have cared to stand in John’s sandals.
If John knew he’d skirted trouble again, he didn’t let on, but then, he never did. He went on with another story: “Did you hear about the fellow who got an audience with the Roman Emperor by claiming he was God? The Emperor told him, “You’d better think about this, because last year a man came before me saying he was a prophet, and I ordered his head cut off.’ And the fellow looked at him and said, ‘Your Majesty, you did the right thing, because I did not send that man.’ “
More people groaned than laughed over that one, but John didn’t mind. If anything, he looked happy: the silly story let him slip away from the dangerous ground on which he’d been treading. Listening to him tell more tales, George fully realized for the first time that he wasn’t just spinning one story after another; they all fit together in a pattern as elaborate as any a mosaicist could make with colored tiles. And part--much--of the art here lay in concealing from the audience that a pattern existed. One more reason, George thought, I couldn’t match what John is doing.
“Do you know,” John said, “our friend Sabbatius there” --he pointed to Sabbatius, who seemed to have slept through his entire performance-- “has never seen a drunken man in his life?”
“Oh, come on now!” Several people said that, or words to that effect, at the same time. Nobody who came regularly to Paul’s tavern--or to any of a good many others in Thessalonica--could fail to know Sabbatius was a tosspot of epic proportion.
But John only grinned his lopsided grin. “It’s true,” he insisted. “He drinks himself to sleep before anybody else, and he doesn’t wake up till long after everybody else is sober again. Deny it if you can.” No one could; he got an appreciative hand instead. Raising his voice to a shout, he called, “Isn’t that right, Sabbatius?”