Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

She was his wet-nurse — a peasant. That perhaps was why he could accept himself as a peasant-woman in a reed hat, and because there is less distance between peasant and emperor than between the Imperial Highness and those who compose the hierarchy.

His memory still showed him Stavroula (the Little Cross) a small woman of blanched cheeks, and enormous globes designed for devouring by the hungry offspring of the rich. (He had loved his milk-brother, however, and had rewarded him later, one Easter while sharing the same bed, by uniting with him in a sea of sperm.)

Stavroula had recurred throughout his youth, offering, always offering: purple figs on a bed of leaves, glasses of cold well-water, food, food, endless food, her face growing smaller, yeast-coloured, welted, in the black kerchief surrounding it, beside the Gulf, and down the coast at Mikhali, its green valleys descending out of Asia powdered with a reddish dust.

He could remember her kissing his hand. Himself always the acceptor, in a peasant hat worthy of an emperor.

Tears gushed out as he crossed the kitchen of the villa they were renting from Madame Llewellyn-Boieldieu, and half an eggshell jumped off the table, the surface of which was grooved by use as Stavroula’s face had been welted by age and hardship. The shell bounced on the floor which E. had not swept since Joséphine Réboa disturbed them by defecting.

Had E. defected?

Stavroula never would have. That is why he wept for the dead and the past.

He wept for the saints, even the pseudo-ones, the hateful Bogomil — a Bulgar .

And reached the back terrace, and shouted, ‘Eudoxia! Where to God have you got to?’ He hesitated before shrieking, ‘ Gamo ton olakeron kosmo! Fuck!’ His voice, dying, mumbled, blubbered in a whisper, ‘Doxy — for Christ’s sake …’

In the absence of the one who had abandoned him he ground his head against the terrace table, its marble permanently stained by the early coffee they were in the habit of taking there. He dragged his forehead back and forth, the disenchanted Emperor of Byzantium, Nicaea, Mistra, and all those lands threatened by the Slav, the Turk, the western hordes of schismatic, so-called Christendom — the Barbarians of past and present.

E. did not come. The spirit of Stavroula was not moved to appear. Mamma was at cards in another part of the town, Anna the Soul was no doubt copying aphorisms into a leather-bound notebook, or kissing an archimandrite’s clammy white hand. She maintained that the hands of high-ranking monks and priests smelled delicious — of rose-water. It was the only streak of sensuality in Anna. He could not believe in the rose-water; he was sure an archimandrite smelled like any other monk or priest: of flannel vests and frustration, or the throbbing overflow of a dammed-up concupiscence.

Where was E.?

Only today he realised the connection between Anna and E., two scribblers: Anna the copyist; with E., he suspected, it was self-expression or-vindication. No, he did not want to investigate the fruits (too frightening) he was only curious about them. Anna had been religious; he suspected E. was too, but differently. Anna was as Orthodox as a burning candle, E. some kind of life-mystic, poor devil — a potential suicide in other words.

Who was not? unless the vegetables.

He lifted his head from the terrace table. He had promised himself a serene close to the day, one of those perfect evenings on the Coast, with music, conversation, perhaps an omelette aux fines herbes , a glass or two of Armagnac, then bed. Instead, blood could be threatening.

‘Doxy, where are you? Damn all saints, mystics, literary pretenders …’

The only true saint and woman was Stavroula, and for that reason he had kept it more or less secret, from Mamma, Anna, E. Mamma would have laughed at the idea, Anna would not have believed, E. might have, and for that reason, would have been more jealous than any.

His crypto-saint on her knees in her cell-cottage at Mikhali. She tended it, but it wasn’t her own, any more than Yanni her giant husband (another slave) his strength dwindling till he ended, a paralysed flitch of bones wrapped in spotless rags, or Babbis the rosy boy who became a congested, resentful clerk.

You kissed Stavroula once on one of the white welts of her old puddingy cheeks and it smelled of the cleanliness which you recognised as earthly evidence of sanctity. (All nonsense of course if all is nothing as it has been decided.)

Again you recognised the smell of sanctity in the purple soil they opened in the graveyard above Mikhali to lower her into. Babbis glaring blubbering the other side of the grave. Resentful of the love you bore his mother? the milk you had deprived him of? more likely the sea of sperm to which you had both contributed while sharing a bed that Easter night. Anyway, he glared and blubbered, this grown boy and portly clerk, while you could not raise a tear for the Dormition of Stavroula and the great abstraction of death. (‘Angelos is cold.’)

Angelos now crying, his head on a stained table, perhaps crying for himself because close to death. (In those days graveyards, cypresses always on the alert against marauding Turks, belonged by tradition to those who were lowered into their redemptive soil; today all dust, the bones scattered; relatives squabbled over whether they should buy an additional plot — or two — or six — of Attic or even foreign soil in which to lay their mortal remains and those of their descendants.)

Somebody knocking, was it? The bell had eroded long ago. Neighbours came round to the back with their offerings of eggs, fruit, a strangled cockerel. Peasants don’t knock.

‘E.? E.?’ He barked his shins against the iron cradle of this hateful marble table.

Above him the French sky held firm, when that above Mikhali, Smyrna, or any of the Imperial staging posts would have split open at his command.

Not far below the terrace where the Imperial Highness was creating such a rumpus, ‘Eudoxia Vatatzes’ was seated on a rock, bare feet enjoying the texture of stone (and childhood) long arms emerging from these faded, but still lovely, carnation sleeves, to embrace bony knees.

E. had not written up the diary, but here it was, all in the head, in the waning light above the pine-crests, between sea and sky: ‘E. Vatatzes’ stroking it out of terracotta arms.

‘… now that I’ve done the deed, now that I’ve invited them , shall I be brave enough to tell? To commit myself to the Golsons even in a moment of crisis: to Curly’s alcoholic breath, cracking seams, Joanie’s steamy bosom, her gasps and blunders, the smell of caoutchouc — to dismiss all the mistakes of the past culminating in Marian s driving the tennis ball against the ivy screen in which sparrows are nesting.

Whatever is in store, I must go up. My Angelos is screaming as only a Byzantine emperor can scream.

No, I can never leave him. He is too dependent. Only I am more so. We are welded together, until war, or death, tears us apart.’

He opened the door. ‘ Qui est là? ’

‘Nous sommes les Golsons.’

‘Who?’

‘Joan and — Curly — Golson.’

He stood looking at them from under that incredible woman’s hat, his lower lip protruding and trembling.

Joan Golson, too, was trembling. ‘You met my husband. You are Monsieur Vatatzes, aren’t you?’

‘He is not at home.’

She could hear Curly murmuring behind her, dragging the soles of his stationary boots on the stone paving. In a moment she would be accused.

‘But how tiresome of us! Have we come on the wrong day? I’m sure your wife said Thursday.’

‘Anna died.’

Joan Golson thought she might burst into tears, when Madame Vatatzes appeared at the end of what must have been a poky hall, but which in the circumstances had taken on the endlessness, the proportions, of a dream perspective, down which this vision was advancing, burnt arms outstretched towards them from long, floating, carnation sleeves.