John Berger: To the Wedding

Sights are ever-present. That’s why eyes get tired. But voices — like everything to do with words — they come from far away. I stand at Yanni’s bar and I listen to old men talking.

Yanni is the age of my father. He was a rembetis , a bouzouki player, with a considerable following after the war and played with the great Markos Vamvakarious. Nowadays he picks up his six-stringed bouzouki only when old friends ask him. They ask him most nights and he has forgotten nothing. He plays sitting on a cane-seated chair with a cigarette stuck between the fourth and little finger of his left hand, touching the frets. It can happen that if he plays, I dance.

When you dance to a rembetiko song, you step into the circle of the music and the rhythm is like a round cage with bars, and there you dance before the man or woman who once lived the song. You dance a tribute to their sorrow which the music is throwing out.

Drive Death out of the yard

So I don’t have to meet him .

And the clock on the wall

Leads the funeral dirge .

Listening night after night to rembetika is like being tattooed.

*

Ah my friend, Yanni said to me that June evening after we’d drunk two glasses of raki, why don’t you live with him?

He’s not blind, I said.

You repeat yourself, he said.

I left the bar to buy some souvlaki to eat at the corner. Afterwards, as I often do, I asked Vasilli, the grandson, to carry a chair for me and I installed myself on the pavement a good way down the narrow street opposite some trees where the troughs of silence are deeper. Behind my back was a blind wall facing west and I could feel the warmth it had stored during the day.

Distantly I heard Yanni playing a rembetiko which he knew was one of my favourites:

Your eyes, little sister,

Crack open my heart .

For some reason I didn’t return to the bar. I sat on the cane-seated chair with my back to the wall and my stick between my legs and I waited, as you wait before you slowly get to your feet to dance. That rembetiko ended, I guess, without anyone dancing to it.

I sat there. I could hear the cranes loading, they load all night. Then a completely silent voice spoke, and I recognised it as the railwayman’s.

Federico, he is saying, come sta? It’s good to hear you, Federico. Yes, I’m leaving early tomorrow morning, in a few hours, and I will be with you on Friday. Don’t forget, Federico, all the champagne I pay, I pay, so order three, four crates! Whatever you think. Ninon’s my only daughter. And she’s getting married. Sì. Certo.

The railwayman is talking Italian into a telephone and standing in the kitchen of his three-roomed house in the town of Modane on the French side of the Alps. He is a signalman, Grade II, and the name on his letterbox is Jean Ferrero. His parents were emigrants from the rice town of Vercelli in Italy.

The kitchen is not big and seems smaller because of a large motorbike on its stand behind the front door which gives on to the street. The way the saucepans have been left on the stove shows that the cooking is done by a man. In his room, as in mine in Athens, there’s no trace of a feminine touch. A room where a man lives without a woman, and man and room are used to it.

The railwayman hangs up the telephone, goes over to the kitchen table where a map is spread out and picks up a list of road numbers and towns: Pinerolo, Lombriasco, Torino, Casale Monferrato, Pavia, Casalmaggiore, Borgoforte, Ferrara. With scotchtape he sticks the list beside the dials of the bike. He checks the brake fluid, the cooling liquid, the oil, the pressure of the tyres. He feels the weight of the chain with his left forefinger to test whether it’s tight enough. He turns the ignition on. The dials light up red. He examines the two headlights. His gestures are methodical, careful and — above all — gentle, as if the bike was alive.

Twenty-six years ago Jean lived in this same three-roomed house with his wife, who was called Nicole. One day Nicole left him. She said she had had enough of him working at nights and spending every other minute organising for the CGT and reading pamphlets in bed — she wanted to live. Then she slammed the front door and never came back to Modane. They had no children.

On the train going back to Athens the same night, I heard piano music being played in another city.

A wide staircase which has neither carpet nor wallpaper but a polished wooden handrail. The music comes from an apartment on the fifth floor. The lift seldom works here. It can’t be either a record or a compact disc, it’s an ordinary cassette. There is a slight dust on all the sounds. A nocturne for piano.

Inside the apartment a woman is seated on an upright chair in front of a tall window which gives on to a balcony. She has just opened the curtains and is gazing over the night roofs of a city. Her hair is drawn back in a bun and her eyes are tired. All day she has worked on detailed engineering drawings for an underground parking lot. She sighs and rubs the fingers of her left hand which ache. Her name is Zdena.

Twenty-five years ago she was a student in Prague. She tried to reason with the Russian soldiers who entered the city in their Red Army tanks on the night of August 20, 1968. The following year, on the anniversary of the night of the tanks, she joined a crowd in Wenceslaus Square. A thousand of them were carted off by the police and five were killed. A few months later several close friends were arrested, and on Christmas Day, 1969, Zdena managed to get across the frontier to Vienna and from there she travelled to Paris.

She met Jean Ferrero at an evening organised for Czech refugees in Grenoble. She noticed him as soon as he came into the room, for he was like an actor she had once seen in a Czech film about railway workers. Later, when she found out he really worked on the railways, she felt sure he was destined to become her friend. He asked her how to say in Czech: Bohemia is my country. And this made her laugh. They became lovers.

Whenever the railwayman had two days off work in Modane, he drove to see Zdena in Grenoble. The two of them made trips together on his bike. He took her to the Mediterranean, which she had never seen. When Salvador Allende won the elections in Chile, they talked of going to live in Santiago.

Then in November Zdena announced she was pregnant. Jean persuaded Zdena to keep their child. I will look after you both, he said. Come and live in my house in Modane, it has three rooms, a kitchen, a bedroom for us, and a bedroom for him or her. I think our baby is a girl, she said, suddenly enchanted.

On the platform at Athens somebody offered to escort me. I pretended to be deaf, as well as blind.

When Ninon, their daughter, was seven years old, Zdena heard on the radio one evening that a hundred Czech citizens in Prague had signed a petition demanding human and civil rights. Was this, she asked herself, a turning point? Eight years she’d been away. She needed to know more.

You go, Jean said, sitting on the kitchen table, we’ll be fine, Ninon and I. Take your time, maybe you can even get your visa prolonged. Come back for Christmas, and we’ll all go on a luge right down to Maurienne! No, don’t be sad, Zdena. It’s your duty, Comrade, and you’ll come back happy. We’ll be all right.

Still listening to the nocturne in the room on the fifth floor, Zdena closes the curtains and goes over to a wall mirror by a blue and white tiled stove. She gazes into the mirror.

What really happened that evening ten years ago when she asked Jean about the visa? Had they agreed, like people possessed, like the mad, that the three of them would never again know the same place as home?