Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

But it’s Adoni who tells me about the Germans and their cameras. How should I know about Greece? I haven’t been there for thirty years.

What do you do when your country is in ruins, when a war’s robbed you of a father, then a mother, and of a nice future all lined up for you in the family business? You do what any Greek does. You find a wife who’ll go halves with you; you get on a boat to New York or England, where you’re going to open a restaurant. In five or ten years, you say, when you’ve made your pile, you’ll go back to Greece. Twenty years later, when you’ve only just saved enough money to open that restaurant, and you know there’s no money in restaurants anyway, you wake up to the fact that you’re never going to go back. Even if you were offered the chance you wouldn’t take it.

Yes, I want sunshine. I’m a Greek. What am I doing in the Caledonian Road? I should be sitting in one of the big, noisy cafés on Stadiou or Ermou, clicking my beads and reading To Vima. But that’s how it is: You’re made for one soil, but you put down roots in another and then you can’t budge.

And why do I say “Greek”? There are Greeks and Greeks. I was born in Smyrna in Asia Minor. When I was a tiny baby, only a few months old, I was bundled with my parents onto a French ship, because another bunch of butchers, not the Germans this time but the Turks, were burning Greek houses and lopping off the heads of any Greeks they could catch.

Yes, that’s the way it is: We’re born in confusion and that’s how we live.

I can hear Anna clattering in the kitchen below. She’s talking to Adoni just as if nothing has happened, everything’s the same. It’s funny how women can make changes; it’s men who are obstinate. “Go and lie down, Kostaki mou ,” she says. “You’re tired. Leave the clearing up to Adoni and me.” And so I climb the stairs, take off my shoes, my trousers and shirt and lie down in the cramped bedroom from which we can never quite get rid of the smell of food — just as I do every day for a half hour or so between when we shut after lunch and when we open again in the evening. But, today, a little longer.

Tired. Why shouldn’t I be tired? Yesterday — what a day! — I had to get up early to meet Adoni at the airport. Then we didn’t get to bed till nearly three in the morning. And then, these last two weeks, I’ve had to work extra hard because Adoni suddenly takes it into head to have a holiday. In Greece. After thirty-five years, he wants to have a holiday.

Adoni, Adoni. Who could have given him that name that sounds so preposterous in English? Adonis. It wasn’t us who gave it him. Though Adoni was none the wiser. Adonis Alexopoulos, son of Kosta and Anna; born, Athens, 1944; and carried away by his parents — just as I was carried away from Smyrna — to a new land. How was he to know that his real father was in some mass grave in Poland and his mother had died bringing him into the world? He was taken in by Anna’s family, who lived only a block away from us in Kasseveti Street and just a stone’s throw from where Adoni’s real parents — whose name was Melianos — had lived. Anna said when we got married we’d adopt Adoni as our own son. I wasn’t sure if what she meant was: If you want me, then you’ll have to take Adoni too. But I agreed. I thought: All right, Anna can have Adoni and sooner or later I’ll get a real son of my own. But what Anna never told me was that she couldn’t have babies. She was an only daughter and all four of her would-be brothers had been still-born monsters.

What a shameful thing for a man to live thirty-five years not knowing that his parents are not his parents at all. But what a worse shame for a man to have to be told. We always said: When he is old enough we will tell him. But “old enough” always seemed to be just a little bit older. What you put off starts to become impossible. We even began to kid ourselves: He really is ours; he isn’t anybody else’s.

Perhaps there’s a curse on adopted children. Perhaps the fact that they don’t have any real parents comes out, not consciously, but in the sort of stunted way they grow up. What did he become, this Adonis of ours? Slow at school, bashful with the other kids; silent; secretive. Every year we waited for him to bloom like a little flower. We said to ourselves: One day he will start chasing the girls; one day he will stay out at night and not come home till late; one day he will stand up and row with his father and say, I want nothing to do with this crazy idea of opening a restaurant, and slam the door on us. I actually wanted these things to happen, because that’s how real sons behave with their fathers.

But none of it happened. At eighteen, when we buy the restaurant, and when he’s still as chaste and sober as a monk, he puts on a waiter’s jacket without so much as a murmur. He learns to cook dolmades and soudsoukakia. He gets up early every morning to clean up from the night before and to go and order meat and vegetables, and when he does this he doesn’t swop jokes with the traders, he simply sticks out a big, podgy finger at what he wants. In the evenings, he doesn’t prance and scurry like a waiter should; he lumbers between the tables like a great bear. For even in appearance this Adonis is a rebel to his name. His flesh is pale and pasty; at thirty-five he has the thick build of a man twenty years older. When I make introductions to some of my more enthusiastic customers, when I say, like a proud Greek restaurant owner should, “This is my wife Anna, and this is my son Adonis” (for I’ve told that lie to half of Camden), I see a snigger cross their faces because the name is so absurd.

“Adonaki,” I tell him, “try to use a little charm — you know, charm.” But it’s no use trying to make that pudding face sparkle. I shouldn’t complain: he works hard; he doesn’t spill food or make mistakes over the bills; he pulls corks out of bottles as if he’s plucking feathers. And I’m the one who, over the years, has learnt to provide charm. In the evening I’m all smiles. I joke with my customers; I put a sprig of herbs behind my ear — so I can imagine them saying about me: That Kosta in the restaurant, he’s a character. And even though I lie in bed in the afternoon, in my yellowed vest, like a great lump of dough, yet, come opening time, I never fail to play my part and give a twinkle to my eyes. We Greeks are like that: We come alive, we perform, like drooping flowers splashed with water.

Anna is coming up the stairs. The stair-case creaks. She is heavier even than me. She’ll take her lie-down. But Adoni won’t lie down. He’ll sit in the restaurant with his feet up on one of the chairs, smoke a cigarette and read the newspaper or one of his books from the library— Mysteries of the Past, The Secret of Mind-Power —slowly and methodically. Though he’s slow, he likes asking questions, that boy. And he finds out the answers. Oh yes. Give him time, he’ll find out about everything.

Anna waddles into the bedroom. I pretend that I’m asleep, though I watch her with one half-closed eye. She kicks off her shoes, then her fat arms grope to undo her dress. It falls off her without her having to help it, like a monument being unveiled. In her slip she is like a huge pale blancmange inside a white, diaphanous wrapping. She shuffles around to her side of the bed, winds and sets the alarm-clock. She always does this in case we oversleep. But I’ve never known a time when she wasn’t awake and heaving herself onto her feet without the alarm having to remind her. She’s like that: She does what has to be done. That vast body of hers is built for sweating in the kitchen and scrubbing pans. We men, we like our fancies, our bit of hot spice in a skirt, but where would we be without these great work-horses to pull us through?