Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

She settles down next to me and she sees that I’m not really asleep. I open my eyes. “It doesn’t matter, Kostaki,” she says. “It doesn’t matter. Who are we anyway?”

Her body smells of warm grease and scouring powder. How can it be that that womb of hers — which can now produce nothing — would have once produced not men but deformities? How can it be that she has grown into this vast flesh-mountain? And yet once — it doesn’t seem possible — in the scrubby bushes on Hymettos, when I was a dolt of eighteen, she said, “ Ela pethí mou ,” and pulled my hand between her legs.

Sometimes I wonder what Adoni thinks of women. I swear, at twenty-five he’d never touched one. I used to say to him, every other night, “You take the evening off, Adoni, Anna and I can manage,” so as to give him the opportunity; but he’d shrug, shake his head and carry on skewering kebabs. Then we started to hire waitresses. It’s a good idea, if you can afford it, to hire pretty waitresses. It attracts customers, apart from easing the load. But my real reason for hiring waitresses was to encourage Adoni. I’m an immoral old man. First there was Carol, then Diane, then Christine, but Christine was the best. After we closed at night I used to get Anna to go to bed early. I’d go with her, and leave Adoni and the waitress to clear up. I’d lie in bed with one ear cocked, thinking: “It’s all right, Adoni, don’t have any qualms. Take your chance. Live up to your name. Don’t you want that little Christine? Doesn’t she make your blood hot? Take her up to your room and screw her for your Mama’s and Father’s sake — we won’t mind.” But nothing ever happened. And to make matters worse, I couldn’t resist, after a time, clapping my hand, more than once, on that Christine’s bottom, and poking my finger down the front of her blouse. And though no one else ever knew about it, she gave her notice, and the next waitress we got — perhaps it was just as well — was a mousy thing with a perpetual sniff.

Adoni approached his thirtieth birthday. I began to be ashamed of him. This son of mine — he wasn’t a man, he wasn’t a Greek; he wasn’t anything. But there I go again: “this son of mine.” What right did I have to that sort of shame? What right did I have to the fatherly luxury of wanting my own son to have a little more pleasure in his youth than I’d had in those miserable, famished years in Athens? The truth is I wanted a real son, the son I’d been tricked out of, not this wooden substitute. But Anna was menopausal. I was menopausal too. Sometimes I wept.

And then I began to think: It’s a punishment. It’s because we never told Adoni in the first place. If we’d told him, perhaps he’d have developed in a normal way, because at least he’d have known who he was. But there’s no hiding a fraud when it’s a matter of blood. I started to think: Perhaps he knows, perhaps he’s worked it out by some sort of sixth sense and it’s he who’s punishing us. Because we’re not a true mother and father to him, he’s behaving as if he’s nothing to us. I said to myself: Any moment he’s going to come out with it: “Anna, Kosta, I can’t call you Mother and Father any more.” And how could I have forestalled him? By saying to him, “Adoni, you’re thirty-three now — it’s time you were told something”? I began to look for signs of suspicion, of rebellion in him. He only had to show the slightest coolness to Anna — if he was slow to answer her when she spoke, for example — and I’d fly into a towering rage.

Ach! Did I say I was menopausal? Did I say I was paranoid?

And then — what happens? Adoni asks for time off. He starts to go out at night, and in the afternoons too. “Of course,” I say. “Take a whole day off — have a good time.” And I start to breathe more easily. I don’t say anything more, but I look for signs. Is he using a lot of after-shave? Is he slicking his hair? Is he trying to lose some of that premature fat and learn some modern dance steps? And I think: When the moment is ripe I’ll say to him, Here, come and sit down with me, have a brandy. Now tell me, who is this nightingale? But I don’t smell any after-shave; and though Adoni goes out at night he doesn’t come home late; there are no stars in his eyes; and I see him, sometimes, reading these big books, the kind you blow the dust off.

“Adonaki,” I say, “what do you do when you go out?”

“I go to the library.”

“What the hell do you go to the library for?”

“To read books, Baba.”

“But you come in at ten and eleven. The libraries don’t stay open till then.”

He lowers his eyes, and I smile. “Come on, Adoni mou , you can tell me.”

And I’m surprised by what he says.

“I go to the Neo Elleniko , Baba.”

I’ve heard of the Neo Elleniko. It is a club in Camden for so-called expatriate Greeks. It is full of old men who tell tall, repetitious stories and like to believe they are melancholy, worldly-wise exiles. They are all trellí. What is more, two thirds of them aren’t Greeks at all. They are crazy Cypriots. I’ve no time for the Neo Elleniko.

“What do you want with all those old madmen?”

“I talk to them, Baba. I ask them questions.”

Now it’s my turn to drop my eyes. So Adoni really is playing the detective. He wants to have answers. Is there a gleam in his eye? Maybe some of those old fogies at the Neo Elleniko were around in our neighbourhood in Nea Ionia during the war, or maybe they know people who were. He’s trying to get at the truth.

“They won’t tell you anything but vlakíes. ” Spittle comes to my lips.

“Why are you angry, Baba?”

“I’m not angry. Don’t call me ‘Baba.’ You’re not a kid.”

He shrugs. And suddenly his round, waxy, somehow far-off face seems the face of just another man, a man who could be my age — someone you meet over some minor transaction, shake hands with, then forget.

“All right. If you like the company of old men — if there aren’t any better things to do — you go to the Neo Elleniko. Don’t ask me to come too.”

This was in the spring. I tell myself: It’s only a matter of time. I feel like a guilty criminal. What are we going to tell all those people we’ve told Adoni is our son? Anna says, “Don’t worry, glikó mou. Nothing will happen. It’s all in the past. It’s too late for anything to change.”

And then, some time in July, he says: “Father, I want to take a holiday this summer. You don’t mind? All these years I haven’t taken a holiday.”

I look in his eyes for any extra meaning.

“Okay — if you want to take a holiday, take a holiday. Where are you going?” But I know the answer to this one.

“I want to go to Greece, Baba.”

And so he buys his air tickets and a suitcase and lightweight clothes. He can afford all this, with all the money he hasn’t spent on women. And what can I do to stop him? I even envy him — stepping off the plane at Glyfada into that syrupy heat.

His holiday is fixed for a fortnight in September. I become resigned. Let him go. He’s thirty-five. It’s fated. Like King Oedipus he’s got to ask these fool questions. He’s got to find out where he came from.

And Anna says: “Why do you look so miserable, Kostaki? Our little Adoni — so serious, so sovaró —he’s going to take a holiday. He wants a little sunshine.”

The alarm goes. Anna is already up, buttoning her dress. I haven’t slept a wink. I raise myself and scratch my belly. Soon, we shall have to go through it all again, the old nightly ritual. Anna’s fat hands will garnish salads. Adoni will lollop round the tables. And I will have to pretend once again I’m Zorba the Greek.