Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

Outside it’s raining. Anna hoists up her sleeves like a workman. In England now it’s already autumn. But in Athens the nights are still like ovens and the pavements smell like hot biscuits.

So I get up at four to meet him at the airport, my heart beating, like a man in a cell awaiting his trial. I see him come out of Customs, and I can tell at once — there’s something about the way he walks — that he knows. I can’t kid myself any more he’s a son of mine. But I hug him and clap him on the shoulder just like a father should, and I think of all those scenes in which fathers meet sons who have been away a long time, in far-off lands, at sea, at war, and I don’t look straight at Adoni in case he sees the wet glint in my eyes.

“Eh, Adonaki — you look well. Did you have a good time? Tell me what’s it like. Did you go to Vouliagmeni? Sounio? Did you get the boat to Idra? Eh, tell me, Adoni mou , the Athenian girls, are they still—” I raise my hand, fingers and thumb together “— phrouta? ”

“My suitcase, Baba—” he blinks as if he never meant to say that word, and he slips free of me to go to the luggage escalator.

In the car I’m waiting for him to spit it out. I can see it’s there nudging at his lips. Okay, so you’ve been nosing around in Nea Ionia, you’ve been asking questions. You haven’t been on holiday at all. Say it. Get it over with, for God’s sake. But he doesn’t say it. Maybe he’s scared, too, to speak. Instead, he tells me about Athens. There are these tourists everywhere, and nowhere to get a decent meal in the centre of town. Vouliagmeni? Yes. It crawls with close-packed bodies and you have to pay to get on a clean piece of beach. Idra? It’s full of Germans, clicking their cameras.

And I realise the delapidated but companionable Greece I knew — and which Adoni knew, via my memory — isn’t there any more.

“And the girls, Adonaki?”

Later that same day he gets back into his waiter’s outfit, starts slicing the bread and pulling the corks, just as if he’d never been away. I’m still waiting for him to pluck up the courage. We keep eyeing each other as we pass each other with plates, and Anna looks at me anxiously in the kitchen.

But it’s not until we’ve closed for the night that the moment comes. For I wasn’t mistaken: I knew it had to come. We’re sitting in the empty restaurant, sipping coffee, asking Adoni about Athens. And suddenly something Adoni says sets Anna going. Her eyes glaze. She starts remembering Nea Ionia before the war: the old balconied houses, the families along her street, the Vassilious, the Kostopoulous, the one-eyed fig-seller, Trianda-philos. I look at her ferociously. She must know this is like a cue. But perhaps she means it as a cue.

“ As to! Koutamares! Go and make some more coffee!”

Anna shuffles off, and I know the time has come — and I know Anna will be waiting, ears pricked as she stands by the stove, until it’s passed.

He lights a cigarette.

“Do you know? — I went to see if I could find Kassaveti Street. It’s still there, though all the building’s new. And — do you know? — I even found one of the Vassilious — Kitsos Vassiliou, he’d be a little older than me. And he told me where I could find old Elias Tsobanidis. Do you remember him?”

Yes, I remember. He seemed about seventy when I was only a boy. I’m staggered he’s still alive.

He toys with his coffee cup. There’s a silence like a huge weight tilting.

“You know what I am going to say, don’t you?” Suddenly his face seems no longer puddingy and soft but made of something like stone.

“Yes, yes. Say it. Say it! Say it!”

“Elias Tsobanidis told me — or he said things so that I could work it out — that my real name isn’t Alexopoulos — it’s Melianos. My mother died when I was born and my father died in the war.”

“It’s true, it’s true. It’s the truth!” I wish I could blubber like a sinful old man.

“Forgive me, Adonaki.”

But he looks at me with that hard, determined face — where has he acquired that from? He draws on his cigarette. His big fingers are leathery and blunt. And suddenly it seems not just that he’s a grown man but that he’s old, he’s lost the youth he never had.

He puts down his cigarette, leans forward across the table, and then he says, cool as ice:

“Elias told me something else too. You know that what Elias says must be the truth, don’t you? He said your name is not Alexopoulos either. The Alexopouloses were neighbours of your parents in Smyrna — they were in the tobacco business — and they were the ones who got you onto the refugee ship. Your mother and father were killed when the Turks burnt the city.”

I look at him as if he is a ghost. I notice that Anna is standing in the doorway. She too looks like a ghost and she is looking at me as if I am a ghost.

We’re all ghosts. But at the same time I know, I see it as plain as anything — we’re all going to carry on just as before, performing our rituals in the restaurant as if nothing has changed, pretending we’re people we’re not.

“Elias Tsobanidis is an old liar!” I start to yell, to this “son” I’ve lied to all my life. “An old liar! An old liar!”

Tell me, who are we? What’s important, what isn’t? Is it better to live in ignorance? All my life I’ve felt guilty because I chopped off my mother’s fingers, and now I learn it wasn’t my mother at all. Ach! And two of those heads the Turks lopped off in Smyrna, two of them belonged to my father and mother.

Aiee! I don’t like the way the world’s going.

THE POND IN OUR PARK was circular, exposed, perhaps fifty yards across. When the wind blew, little waves travelled across it and slapped the paved edges, like a miniature sea. We would go there, Mother, Grandfather and I, to sail the motor-launch Grandfather and I made out of plywood, balsawood and varnished paper. We would go even in the winter — especially in the winter, because then we would have the pond to ourselves — when the leaves on the two willows turned yellow and dropped and the water froze your hands. Mother would sit on a wooden bench set back from the perimeter; I would prepare the boat for launching. Grandfather, in his black coat and gray scarf, would walk to the far side to receive it. For some reason it was always Grandfather, never I, who went to the far side. When he reached his station I would hear his “Ready!” across the water. A puff of vapor would rise from his lips like the smoke from a muffled pistol. And I would release the launch. It worked by a battery. Its progress was laboured but its course steady. I would watch it head out to the middle while Mother watched behind me. As it moved it seemed that it followed an actual existing line between Grandfather, myself and Mother, as if Grandfather were pulling us towards him on some invisible cord, and that he had to do this to prove we were not beyond his reach. When the boat drew near him he would crouch on his haunches. His hands — which I knew were knotted, veiny and mottled from an accident in one of his chemical experiments — would reach out, grasp it and set it on its return.

The voyages were trouble-free. Grandfather improvised a wire grapnel on the end of a length of fishing line in case of shipwrecks or engine failure, but it was never used. Then one day — it must have been soon after Mother met Ralph — we watched the boat, on its first trip across the pond to Grandfather, suddenly become deeper, and deeper in the water. The motor cut. The launch wallowed, sank. Grandfather made several throws with his grapnel and pulled out clumps of green slime. I remember what he said to me, on this, the first loss in my life that I had witnessed. He said, very gravely: “You must accept it — you can’t get it back — it’s the only way,” as if he were repeating something to himself. And I remember Mother’s face as she got up from the bench to leave. It was very still and very white, as if she had seen something appalling.