Outline: A Novel Read online

  The person she was involved with now, she said – a man named Konstantin – had given her for the first time in her life a cause to fear these tendencies in herself, for the reason that – unlike, if she was to be honest, any other man of her experience – she judged him to be her equal. He was intelligent, handsome, amusing, an intellectual: she liked being beside him, liked the reflection of herself he gave her. And he was a man in possession of his own morality and attitudes, so that she felt – for the first time, as she had said – a kind of invisible boundary around him, a line it was clear, though no one ever said as much, she ought not to cross. That line, that boundary, was something she had never encountered so palpably in any other man, men whose defences were usually cobbled together out of fantasies and deceptions that no one – themselves least of all – would blame her for wanting to break through. And so not only did she feel a sense of prohibition around Konstantin, a sense that he would regard her raiding him for his truth much as he would have regarded her breaking into his house and stealing his things, she had actually become frightened of the very thing she loved him for, his equality with herself.

  It remained, therefore, within his grasp, this weapon of which she had been so quick to disarm every other man: the power to hurt her. At a party recently, where she had taken Konstantin and introduced him to many of her friends, she had been enjoying the feeling of showing him off to her social circle, seeing his handsomeness and his wit and his integrity through their eyes – and vice versa, because this was a house of artists and other interesting people from her world – and she had started to eavesdrop a little on his conversation with a woman she knew but didn’t like very much, a woman called Yanna. It was partly out of spite towards Yanna that she had given into the temptation to eavesdrop: she wanted to hear Konstantin speak, and to imagine Yanna’s jealousy at the intelligence and good looks of Elena’s boyfriend. Yanna was asking about Konstantin’s children, of which he has two from a previous marriage, and then, quite casually, while Elena was listening, Yanna asked him whether he’d like to have any more children. No, he said, while Elena, listening, felt as though knives were being plunged into her from all sides; no, he didn’t think he wanted any more children, he was happy with things as they were.

  She raised her glass to her lips, her hand trembling.

  ‘We had never,’ she continued quietly, ‘discussed the question of children, but it is obvious that for me it remains open, that I may very well want to have children. Suddenly this party I was enjoying, where I had felt so happy, became a torture. I was unable to laugh or smile or speak to anyone properly; I just wanted to go away and be alone, but I had to stay there with him until it was over. And of course he had noticed that I was upset, and kept asking me what was wrong; and for the whole of the rest of that evening and night he kept asking me to tell him what was wrong. In the morning he was due to go away on business for a few days. I had to tell him, he said. It was impossible for him to go to the airport and get on a plane with me in this upset state. But of course it would have been so humiliating to tell him, because I had overheard something not meant for my ears, and also because of the subject itself, which ought to have been approached so differently.

  ‘It seemed to me that this was a situation it was impossible to get out of, while still thinking as well of one another as we had before. I had this feeling,’ she continued, ‘which I have had since and which gets worse each time we argue, that we were caught in a net of words, tangled up in all these strings and knots, and that each of us thought there was something we could say that would set us free, but the more words we spoke the more tangles and knots there were. I find myself thinking of the simplicity of the time before we had said one syllable to one another: that is the time I would like to go back to,’ she said, ‘the time just before we first opened our mouths to speak.’

  I looked at the couple at the table next to ours, a man and a woman who had eaten their meal in a more or less unbroken silence. She had kept her handbag on the table in front of her plate, as though she was worried it might be stolen. It sat there between them and both of them glanced at it occasionally.

  ‘But did you tell Konstantin that you had heard him?’ Melete said. ‘That morning, while you were waiting for the taxi, did you admit it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Elena said. ‘He was embarrassed, of course, and said it had been a thoughtless comment, that it didn’t mean anything, and in a way I believed him and it was a relief, but in my heart I thought – why bother to speak at all? Why say anything, if you can just take it back the next minute? Yet of course I wanted it to be taken back. And even thinking about it now the whole thing seems slightly unreal, as though by allowing it to be taken back I can no longer be sure that it actually happened. Anyway,’ she continued, ‘the taxi came and he got in it and left, both of us friends again, but afterwards I had the feeling of a stain, something small but permanent, like a little stain that ruins the whole dress – I imagined all the years passing, and us having children, and me never being able to forget the way he had shaken his head and said no when someone had asked him whether he wanted them. And him perhaps remembering that I was a person capable of invading his privacy and judging him on what I had found. This idea made me want to run away from him, from our apartment and the life we have together, to hide myself somewhere, in something unspoiled.’

  There was a silence, into which the noise from the surrounding tables steadily flowed. We drank the soft, dark wine, so soft it could barely be felt on the tongue.

  ‘Last night I had a dream,’ Melete said presently, ‘in which I and several other women, some of whom were friends of mine and some of whom were strangers, were trying to get into the opera. But all of us were bleeding, pouring out menstrual blood: it was a kind of pandemonium, there at the entrance to the opera house. There was blood on our dresses, dripping down into our shoes; every time one woman stopped bleeding another started, and the women were placing their bloodied towels in a neat pile by the door to the building, a pile that got bigger and bigger and that other people had to pass to get in. They looked at us as they passed, men in their dinner jackets and bow ties, in absolute disgust. The opera began; we could hear the music coming from inside, but we couldn’t seem to get ourselves across the threshold. I felt a great anxiety’, Melete said, ‘that all of this was somehow my fault, because I was the one who had first noticed the blood, noticed it on my own clothes, and in my tremendous shame I seemed to have created this much bigger problem. And it strikes me’, she said to Elena, ‘that your story about Konstantin is really a story about disgust, the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women and that you are always trying to purge with what you call frankness. As soon as you cease to be frank, you see a stain, you are forced to acknowledge imperfection, and you want only to run away and hide in shame.’

  Elena nodded her golden head, and put her hand across the table to touch Melete’s fingers.

  When she was a child, Melete continued, she used to suffer from the most terrible attacks of vomiting. It was a quite debilitating condition that persisted for several years. The attacks always occurred at exactly the same time of day and under exactly the same circumstances, the hour when she would return from school to the house she shared with her mother and stepfather. Understandably enough, her mother was very distressed by Melete’s suffering, which had no apparent cause and therefore seemed to be nothing less than a criticism of her own way of life and the man she had introduced into the household, a man her only child refused – as though by a point of principle – to love or even to recognise. Every day at school, Melete would forget about the vomiting, but then as it became time to go home she would feel the first signs of its approach, a feeling of weightlessness, almost as though the ground were giving way under her feet. She would hurry back to the house in a state of anxiety, and there, usually in the kitchen, where her mother was waiting to give her her afternoon snack, an extraordinary nausea would start to grow. She would be taken to the so
fa to lie down; a blanket would be put over her, the television switched on, and a bowl left by her side; and while Melete retched, her mother and stepfather would spend their evening together in the kitchen, talking and eating dinner. Her mother had taken her to doctors, therapists, and finally a child psychoanalyst, who suggested – much to the mystification of the adults who were paying his bill – that Melete take up a musical instrument. He asked her whether there was any instrument in particular she had ever thought of playing, and she said, the trumpet. And so, reluctantly, her mother and stepfather had bought her a trumpet. Now, every day after school, instead of the consuming prospect of the vomiting, she had before her the prospect of blowing through the brass instrument to produce its great rude noise. In this way she had made manifest her disgust in flawed humanity, and also managed to interrupt those tête-à-têtes over supper in the kitchen, which could never again be conducted in quite the same way, without her as their victim.

  ‘Lately,’ she said, ‘I have taken the trumpet out of its case and started practising. I play it in my little apartment.’ She laughed. ‘It feels good to be making that rude noise again.’

  On the way back down the hill, Elena said she would have to stop off in Kolonaki Square to get her motorbike. She offered Melete a lift on the back, since they lived close to one another. There was plenty of room for two people, she told me, and it was the quickest way. She had travelled all over Greece like that with her oldest female friend, Hermione, the two of them even taking the bike on the ferries out to the islands with just some money and their swimming costumes, finding beaches down dirt tracks where there wasn’t another person to be seen. Hermione had clung to her down some formidable mountainsides, she said, and they had never yet fallen off. Looking back, those were some of the best times of her life, though at the time they had had the feeling of a prelude, a period of waiting, as though for the real drama of living to begin. Those times had more or less gone, now that she was with Konstantin: she wasn’t sure why, because he would never have stopped her from going off travelling with Hermione, in fact he would have liked it, as modern men always liked it when you proved your independence from them. But it would have felt like a fake somehow, she said, a copy, to try to become those girls again, hurtling down those dirt roads, never knowing what they would find at the end of them.

  IX

  The assignment was to write a story involving an animal, but not all of them had completed it. Christos had invited them to go Lindy Hop dancing the previous evening; it had been a late and exhausting night, though Christos himself appeared unaffected. He sat there beaming with his arms folded, proud and fresh, laughing startlingly and loudly at their observations concerning the evening’s events. He had got up early to write his story, he said, though he had found it hard to introduce an animal into his chosen subject-matter, which was the hypocrisy of our religious leaders and the failure of public commentators to subject them to the proper scrutiny. How would ordinary people ever become politicised, if the intellectuals of our time didn’t show them the way? This was something about which he and his close friend Maria, incidentally, disagreed. She was an adherent of the philosophy of persuasion: it sometimes did more harm than good, she said, to try to force people to recognise unpleasant truths. One had to stay close to the line of things, close but separate, like a swallow swooping over the lineaments of the landscape, describing but never landing.

  So he had struggled, Christos said, to bring an animal into his account of the scandalous conduct of two orthodox bishops at a recent public debate. But then it had occurred to him that this was perhaps what I had intended. I had wanted, in other words, to present him with an obstruction that would prevent him from going the way he was naturally inclined to go, and would force him to choose another route. But try as he might he could not think of any way of getting an animal into the debating chamber of a public building, where it had no right to be. Also his mother kept disturbing him by coming in and out of the dining room, the room in their small apartment that was least often used and where, consequently, he usually did his studies, spreading his books and papers all over the old mahogany table that had stood there for as long as he could remember. Today, however, she had asked him to clear his things away. A number of family members were coming to dinner and she wanted to clean the room thoroughly in preparation for their arrival. He asked her, with some irritation, to leave him be – I’m trying to write, he said, how can I write without my books and papers and with you coming in all the time? He had completely forgotten about this dinner, which had been arranged a long time ago, and was being held in honour of his aunt and uncle and cousins from California, who had returned to Greece for their first visit in many years. His mother was not, he knew, looking forward to the occasion: this particular branch of the family was boastful and ostentatious, and his aunt and uncle were forever writing letters to their Greek relatives that pretended to be loving and concerned but were really just opportunities for them to brag about how much money they had in America, how big their car was, how they had just had a new swimming pool installed and how they were too busy to come home for a visit. And so, as he had said, many years had passed in which he and his mother had not laid eyes on these relatives, except in the photographs they regularly sent, which showed them standing in bright sunlight beside their house and car, or else at Disneyland or outside the Hard Rock Cafe, or in some other place where you could see the big Hollywood sign in the background. They also sent photographs of their children, graduating from this college or that, in mortar boards and furred gowns, baring their expensive teeth against a fake blue sky. His mother displayed these photographs dutifully on the sideboard; one day, he knew she hoped, Christos too would complete his degree and she would be able to put his photograph beside them. The photograph Christos hated most of all was the one of his handsome, grinning, muscular cousin Nicky, which showed him in some sort of desert setting with a giant snake – a boa constrictor – draped across his shoulders. This image of superior manhood had often haunted him from the sideboard, and looking at it now, he no longer felt annoyed with his mother: he felt sympathy for her, and wished that he had been a better and braver son. So he stopped what he was doing and helped her clear things away.

  Georgeou put his hand up. He had observed, he said, that where yesterday we had the windows open and the door shut, today it was the other way around: the windows were sealed, and the door to the corridor was significantly ajar. Also, he wondered whether I had noticed that the clock had moved. It was no longer on the wall to the left, but had taken up the mirroring position on the wall opposite. There was certainly an explanation for the movement of the clock, but it was hard to think of what it might be. If an explanation occurred to me perhaps I would inform him, because as things stood he found the situation disturbing.

  He had finished writing his story, Christos continued, on the bus here, after he had realised that the photograph of Nicky had after all given him a way out of his dilemma. One of the bishops has a hallucination, there in the debating chamber: he sees a huge snake, draped over the shoulders of the other bishop, and realises that this snake symbolises the hypocrisy and lies they have both been spouting. He vows then and there to be a better man, to tell only the truth, and never to mislead and deceive his people again.

  Christos folded his arms again and beamed around the room. Presently Clio, the pianist, put her hand up. She said that she too had found it difficult to write about an animal. She knew nothing about animals: she had never even had a pet. It would have been impossible, given the exacting nature of her practice schedule even in early childhood. She would have been unable to look after it and give it the attention it needed. But the assignment had caused her to notice things differently: walking home, she had not looked at the things she usually looked at but instead had become, as she walked, increasingly aware of birds, not just the sight of them but also their sound, which, once she attuned her ear to it, she realised she could hear constantly all around her.
She remembered then a piece of music she had not listened to for a long time, by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, written during his internment in a prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War. Some of it was based, or so she had understood, on the patterns of birdsong he had heard around him while under detention there. It struck her that the man was caged while the birds were free, and that what he had written down was the sound of their freedom.

  It was interesting to consider, Georgeou said, that the role of the artist might merely be that of recording sequences, such as a computer could one day be programmed to do. Even the question of personal style could presumably be broken down as sequential, from a finite number of alternatives. He sometimes wondered whether a computer would be invented that was influenced by its own enormous knowledge. It would be very interesting, he said, to meet such a computer. But he sensed that any system of representation could be undone simply by the violation of its own rules. He himself, for instance, leaving the house this morning had noticed, perched on the verge beside the road, a small bird that could only have been described as being lost in thought. It was gazing at something in that unfocused way one observes in people trying, for example, to work out a mathematical problem in their heads, and Georgeou had walked right up to it while it remained completely oblivious. He could have reached out and grabbed it with his hand. Then, finally, it noticed he was there and nearly jumped out of its skin. He did have some concerns about that bird’s capacity for survival, however. His own story, he added, was based entirely on his personal experience, and described in detail a conversation he had had with his aunt, who was researching mutations in certain particles at a scientific institute in Dubai. His only invention had been the addition of a lizard, which had not been there in reality, but which in the story his aunt kept tucked safely under her arm while they spoke. He had showed the story to his father, who had confirmed that all the details were accurate, and who said he had enjoyed witnessing the conversation, whose subject interested him, for a second time. He described the lizard, if Georgeou remembered the phrase correctly, as a nice touch.