Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

“It was the boy — I mean the porter. You know, the one who works on this floor.”

My wife has stopped crying. She is lying on the bed. She wears a dark skirt; her legs are creamy. I know who she is talking about, have half guessed it before she spoke. I have seen him, in a white jacket, collecting laundry and doing jobs in the corridor: one of those thick-faced, crop-haired, rather melancholy-looking young Turks with whom Istanbul abounds and who seem either to have just left or to be about to be conscripted into the army.

“He knocked and came in. He’d come to repair the heater. You know, we complained it was cold at night. He had tools. I went out onto the balcony. When he finished he called out something and I came in. Then he came up to me — and touched me.”

“Touched you? What do you mean — touched you?” I know my wife will not like my inquisitorial tone. I wonder whether she is wondering if in some way I suspect her behaviour.

“Oh, you know,” she says exasperatedly.

“No. It’s important I know exactly what happened, if we’re—”

“If what?”

She looks at me, her eyebrows wavering.

I realise again that though I am demanding an explanation I really don’t want to know what actually happened or, on the other hand, to accept a story. Whether, for example, the Turk touched my wife at all; whether if he did touch her, he only touched her or actually assaulted her in some way, whether my wife evaded, resisted or even encouraged his advances. All these things seem possible. But I do not want to know them. That is why I pretend to want to know them. I see too that my wife does not want to tell me either what really happened or a story. I realise that for eight years, night after night, we have been telling each other the story of our love.

“Well?” I insist.

My wife sits up on the bed. She holds one hand, closed, to her throat. She has this way of seeming to draw in, chastely, the collar of her blouse, even when she is not wearing a blouse or her neck is bare. It started when we lost our baby. It is a way of signalling that she has certain inviolable zones that mustn’t be trespassed on. She gets up and walks around the room. She seems overwhelmed and avoids looking out of the window.

“He is probably still out there, lurking in the corridor,” she says as if under siege.

She looks at me expectantly, but cautiously. She is not interested in facts but reactions. I should be angry at the Turk, or she should be angry at me for not being angry at the Turk. The truth is we are trying to make each other angry with each other. We are using the incident to show that we have lost patience with each other.

“Then we must get the manager,” I repeat.

Her expression becomes scornful, as if I am evading the issue.

“You know what will happen if we tell the manager,” she says. “He will smile and shrug his shoulders.”

I somehow find this quite credible and for this reason want to scoff at it harshly. The manager is a bulky, balding man, with stylish cuff-links and a long, aquiline nose with sensitive nostrils. Every time trips have been arranged for us which have gone wrong or information been given which has proved faulty he has smiled at our complaints and shrugged. He introduces himself to foreign guests as Mehmet, but this is not significant since every second Turk is a Mehmet or Ahmet. I have a picture of him listening to this fresh grievance and raising his hands, palms exposed, as if to show he has no dagger.

My wife stares at me. I feel I am in her power. I know she is right; that this is not a matter for the authorities. I look out of the window. The sun is glinting on the Bosphorus from behind dark soot-falls of approaching rain. I think of what you read in the guide-books, the Arabian Nights. I should go out and murder this Turk who is hiding in the linen cupboard.

“It’s the manager’s responsibility,” I say.

She jerks her head aside at this.

“There’d be no point in seeing the manager,” she says.

I turn from the window.

“So actually nothing happened?”

She looks at me as if I have assaulted her.

We both pace about the room. She clasps her arms as if she is cold. Outside the sky is dark. We seem to be entering a labyrinth.

“I want to get away,” she says, crossing her arms so her hands are on her shoulders. “This place”—she gestures towards the window. “I want to go home.”

Her skin seems thin and luminous in the fading light.

I am trying to gauge my wife. I am somehow afraid she is in real danger. All right, if you feel that bad, I think. But I say, with almost deliberate casualness: “That would spoil the holiday, wouldn’t it?” What I really think is that my wife should go and I should remain, in this unreal world where, if I had the right sort of dagger, I would use it on myself.

“But we’ll go if you feel that bad,” I say.

Outside a heavy shower has begun to fall.

“I’m glad I got those photos then,” I say. I go to the window where I have put the guide-books on the sill. A curtain of rain veils Asia from Europe. I feel I am to blame for the weather. I explain from the guide-book the places we have not yet visited. Exotic names. I feel the radiator under the window ledge. It is distinctly warmer.

My wife sits down on the bed. She leans forward so that her hair covers her face. She is holding her stomach like someone who has been wounded.

The best way to leave Istanbul must be by ship. So you can lean at the stern and watch that fabulous skyline slowly recede, become merely two-dimensional; that Arabian Nights mirage which when you get close to it turns into a labyrinth. Glinting under the sun of Asia, silhouetted by the sun of Europe. The view from the air in a Turkish Airlines Boeing, when you have had to cancel your flight and book another at short notice, is less fantastic but still memorable. I look out of the porthole. I am somehow in love with this beautiful city in which you do not feel safe. My wife does not look; she opens a magazine. She is wearing a pale-coloured suit. Other people in the plane glance at her.

All stories are told, like this one, looking back at painful places which have become silhouettes, or looking forward, before you arrive, at scintillating façades which have yet to reveal their dagger thrusts, their hands in hotel bedrooms. They buy the reprieve, or the stay of execution, of distance. London looked inviting from the air, spread out under clear spring sunshine; and one understood the pleasures of tourists staying in hotels in Mayfair, walking in the morning with their cameras and guide-books, past monuments and statues, under plane trees, to see the soldiers at the Palace. One wants the moment of the story to go on for ever, the poise of parting or arriving to be everlasting. So one doesn’t have to cross to the other continent, doesn’t have to know what really happened, doesn’t have to meet the waiting blade.

IT’S TRUE: EVERYTHING CHANGES. WHAT you think you know, you don’t know. What’s good or bad at one time isn’t good or bad at another. Once I cut off the fingers of my own mother. You don’t believe me? It was during the war in Athens. She was dead. She was dead because there was nothing to eat. And we younger ones were too conscious of our own empty bellies to waste time grieving. There were three fat rings on Mama’s fingers — rings to barter for food. But Mama’s knuckles were swollen and you couldn’t get the rings off by pulling. So, because I was the oldest and expected to make decisions, I got hold of the bread knife …

Thirty-five years ago I chopped off the fingers of my own mother. And now I chop onions in a restaurant. I don’t like the way the world’s going. Thirty-five years ago the Germans killed Greeks for no reason at all, cut off their hands and put out their eyes. And now, every summer, they flock to Greece in the thousands, take snap-shots of the white houses and the smiling men on donkeys and suffer from sun-burn.