"The Magus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fowles John)

11

The next morning after breakfast I crossed over to Demetriades’s table. He had been in the village the previous evening and I hadn’t bothered to wait up until he returned. Demetriades was small, very plump, frog-faced, a corfiot with a pathological dislike of sunshine and the rural. He grumbled incessantly about the “disgusting” provincial life we had to lead on the island. In Athens he lived by night, indulging in his two hobbies, whoring and eating. He spent all his money on these two pursuits and on his clothes, and he ought to have looked sallow and oily and corrupt, but he was always pink and immaculate. His hero in history was Casanova. He lacked the Boswellian charm, to say nothing of the genius, of the Italian, but he was in his alternately gay and lugubrious way better company than Mitford had suggested. And at least he was not a hypocrite. He had the charm of all people who believe implicitly in themselves, that of integration.

I took him out into the garden. His nickname was Méli—honey—for which he was a glutton.

“Méli, what do you know about the man over at Bourani?”

“You’ve met him?”

“No.”

“Ai!” He shouted petulantly at a boy who was carving a word on an almond tree. The Casanova persona was confined strictly to his private life; in class he was a martinet.

“You don’t know his name?”

“Conchis.” He pronounced the ch hard—the ch of loch.

“Mitford said he had a row with him. A quarrel with him.”

“He was telling lies. He was always telling lies.”

“Maybe. But he must have met him.”

“Po po.” Po po is Greek for “Tell that to the marines.” “That man never sees anyone. Never. Ask the other professors.”

“But why?”

“Ech…” He shrugged. “Many old stories. I don’t know them.”

“Come on.”

“It is not interesting.”

We walked down a cobbled path. Méli disliked silence, and in a moment he began to tell me what he knew about Conchis.

“He worked for the Germans in the war. He never comes to the village. The villagers would kill him with stones. So would I, if I saw him.”

I grinned. “Why?”

“Because he is rich and he lives on a desert island like this when he could be in Paris…” he waved his pink right hand in rapid small circles, a favorite gesture. It was his own deepest ambition—an apartment overlooking the Seine, containing a room with no windows and various other peculiar features.

“Does he speak English?”

“I suppose. But why are you so interested?”

“I’m not. I just saw the house.”

The bell for second school rang through the orchards and paths against the high white walls of the school grounds. On the way back to class I invited Méli to have dinner with me in the village the next day.

The leading estiatoras of the village, a great walrus of a man called Sarantopoulos, knew more about Conchis. He came and had a glass of wine with us while we ate the meal he’d cooked. It was true that Conchis was a recluse and never came to the village, but that he had been a collaborationist was a lie. He had been made mayor by the Germans during the Occupation, and had in fact done his best for the villagers. If he was not popular now, it was because he ordered most of his provisions from Athens. He launched out on a long story. The island dialect was difficult, even for Greeks, and I couldn’t understand a word. He leant earnestly across the table. Demetriades looked bored and nodded complacently at the pauses.

“What’s he say, Méli?”

“Nothing. A war story. Nothing at all.”

Sarantopoulos suddenly looked past us. He said something to Demetriades, and stood up. I turned. In the door stood a tall, mournful-looking islander. He went to a table in the far corner, the islanders’ corner, of the long bare room. I saw Sarantopoulos put his hand on the man’s shoulder. The man stared at us doubtfully, then gave in and allowed himself to be led to our table.

“He is the agoyatis of Mr. Conchis.”

“The how much?”

“He has a donkey. He takes the mail and the food to Bourani.”

“What’s his name?” His name was Hermes. I had become far too used to hearing not conspicuously brilliant boys called Socrates and Aristotle, and to addressing the ill-favored old woman who did my room out as Aphrodite, to smile. The donkey driver sat down and rather grudgingly accepted a small tumbler of retsina. He fingered his koumbologi, his amber patience beads. He had a bad eye, fixed, with a sinister pallor. From him Méli, who was much more interested in eating his lobster, extracted a little information.

What did Mr. Conchis do? He lived alone—yes, alone—with a housekeeper, and he cultivated his garden, quite literally, it seemed. He read. He had many books. He had a piano. He spoke many languages. The agoyatis did not know which—all, he thought. Where did he go in winter? Sometimes he went to Athens, and to other countries. Which? The man did not know. He knew nothing about Mitford visiting Bourani. No one ever visited.

“Ask him if he thinks I might visit Mr. Conchis.”

No; it was impossible.

Our curiosity was perfectly natural, in Greece—it was his reserve that was strange. He might have been picked for his sullenness. He stood up to go.

“Are you sure he hasn’t got a harem of pretty girls hidden there?” said Méli. The agoyatis raised his blue chin and eyebrows in a silent no, then turned contemptuously away.

“What a villager!” Having muttered the worst insult in the Greek language at his back, Méli touched my wrist moistly. “My dear fellow, did I ever tell you about the way two men and two ladies I once met on Mykonos made love?”

“Yes. But never mind.”

I felt oddly disappointed. And it was not only because it was the third time I had heard precisely how that acrobatic quartet achieved congress.

Back at the school I picked up, during the rest of the week, a little more. Only two of the masters had been at the school before the war. They had both met Conchis once or twice then, but not since the school had restarted in 1949. One said he was a retired musician. The other had found him a very cynical man, an atheist. But they both agreed that Conchis was a man who cherished his privacy. In the war the Germans had forced him to live in the village. They had one day captured some andarte—resistance fighters—from the mainland and ordered him to execute them. He had refused and had been put before a firing squad with a number of the villagers. But by a miracle he had not been killed outright, and was saved. This was evidently the story Sarantopoulos had told us. In the opinion of many of the villagers, and naturally of all those who’d had relatives massacred in the German reprisal, he should have done what they ordered. But that was all past. He had been wrong, but to the honor of Greece. However, he had never set foot in the village again.

Then I discovered something small, but anomalous. I asked several people besides Demetriades, who had been at the school only a year, whether Leverrier, Mitford’s predecessor, or Mitford himself had ever spoken about meeting Conchis. The answer was always no—understandably enough, it seemed, in Leverrier’s case, because he was very reserved, “too serious” as one master put it, tapping his head. It so happened that the last person I asked, over coffee in his room, was the biology master. Karazoglou said in his aromatic broken French that he was sure Leverrier had never been there, as he would have told him. He’d known Leverrier rather better than the other masters; they had shared a common interest in botany. He rummaged about in a chest of drawers, and then produced a box of sheets of paper with dried flowers that Leverrier had collected and mounted. There were lengthy notes in an admirably clear handwriting and a highly technical vocabulary, and here and there professional-looking sketches in India ink and watercolor. As I sorted uninterestedly through the box I dropped one of the pages of dried flowers, to which was attached a sheet of paper with additional notes. This sheet slipped from the clip that was holding it. On the back was the beginning of a letter, which had been crossed out, but was still legible. It was dated June 6, 1951, two years before. Dear Mr. Conchis, I am much afraid that since the extraordinary… and then it stopped.

I didn’t say anything to Karazoglou, who had noticed nothing; but I then and there decided to visit Mr. Conchis.

I cannot say why I became so suddenly so curious about him. Partly it was for lack of anything else to be curious about, the usual island obsession with trivialities; partly it was that one cryptic phrase from Mitford and the discovery about Leverrier; partly, perhaps mostly, a peculiar feeling that I had a sort of right to visit. My two predecessors had both met this unmeetable man, and not wanted to talk about it; in some way I felt I had a turn coming, too.

I did one other thing that week. I wrote a letter to Alison. I sent it inside an envelope addressed to Ann in the flat below in Russell Square, asking her to post it on to wherever Alison was living. I said almost nothing in the letter; only that I’d thought about her once or twice, that I had discovered what the “waiting room” meant; and that she was to write back only if she really wanted to, I’d quite understand if she didn’t.

I knew that on the island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was. It was likely that Alison hadn’t given me a thought for weeks, and that she had had half a dozen more affaires. So I posted the letter rather as one throws a message in a bottle into the sea. Not as a joke, perhaps, but almost; yet with a kind of ashamed hope.