John Banville - Nightspawn

I pulled up the chair, and Erik sat on the bed. He arranged his hands on his knees with care, watching them as though he were nervous of leaving them to their own devices.

‘What was going on that night?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘At the party, when you jumped through that window? Don’t you remember?’

‘No.’

‘I opened this door, and found Julian ready to beat the shit out of Andreas and your friend the Colonel with a big stick. What was the argument?’

‘I do not know. What did Andreas say?’

‘I didn’t ask him,’ I said.

‘Aristotle is threatening this man Kyd with … I don’t know, something to do with his business interests here in Greece. I don’t know.’

‘I saw him the other day.’

‘Who?’

‘Aristotle. He telephoned me, and told me to come and see him. When I went, he said nothing, but I got the impression that he was passing on a warning. He told me to get out of Greece. I don’t suppose he knows anything, does he?’

‘He knows everything, except that most important little thing.’

I gaped at him.

‘Jesus. How did he find out?’

Erik grinned.

‘I told him. Oh don’t shout at me. Do you never think? Do you never sit down and consider? Why are we still free, after the blunders we made? Someone has to … protect us.’

‘And what does he get in return for his protection?’

‘What do you think he gets in return?’

‘He said he’d kill you, that day on the island.’

‘Did he?’

He put his hands over his face, and gave a great sigh of weariness. I said,

‘Erik, Erik, what are you doing here in this awful place?’

His head jerked up, and he stared at me in genuine surprise. I waved my hands at our surroundings, lost for words. He moved his feet, and made a sucking sound through that gap in his teeth. I was curious to know what had happened to him in the last year, what awful events had brought him to this state where he was nearly broken; but yet, paradoxically, it was an effort for me to inquire.

‘I am happy here, ‘he said, that word not fitting too well in his damaged mouth. ‘When you stop drinking, you become aware of things once more. I find something, a flower, and I am like a … a young girl, pressing it to my cheek. Oh yes, you would be sickened with me now. I have projects. My file, let me show you my file.’

He went to the desk and drew from it a tattered cardboard folder bulging with papers, and laid it on my knees.

‘A file against humanity,’ he said. ‘I have so much time now, I read newspapers, all I can find. I am astonished by the things which are reported. All my life I have dealt with the big issues, and never cared to look at the trivial things. Now … Look here, look. Mother murders … couple torture … children killed by ….’

He was like a child himself, but this toy was spattered with blood and bits of bone, and reeked of the world’s carnage. He pounced upon a choice morsel, a clipping from a German newspaper, and began to translate it for me with frightening gusto. A fine spray of spit descended on my wrist. I put my hands over my ears, and cried,

‘Stop, Erik. Stop.’

He fell immediately silent, and went back to sit on the bed in that lost, piteous attitude. I laid down that bag of blood on the floor beside me, and, as gently as I could, I asked,

‘What are you hiding from, Erik?’

He did not answer. We looked through the window. The distant mountains trembled. The day was dying. We sat for a long time without speaking. Then Erik said,

‘I want …’

His voice faded off into the enormity of an inexpressible longing, and I did not discover what it was that he wanted. I was never to discover it. Strangely, that unfinished statement obsesses me yet. I probe again and again into his file against humanity, which I still have, but it gives me back only death and devilry.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Will you get me out of here, get me out for just one night?’

‘You want to drink?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d be a fool to help you to do that.’

‘Be a fool. I must have one night of freedom, Ben. Do that for me.’

‘Erik.’

‘Jesus Christ, do you want me to beg, on my knees? I will, if that will move you.’

‘All right. What do you want me to do?’

I was to walk ahead of him and make sure that the way was clear; he did not need me to enable him to escape, but I think he needed me to keep his courage intact. I should not have done it. God knows, I should not have done it.

We caught the city in a moment of magnificence, as the violet light of evening crept down from the crown of Mount Hymettus and set a soft, trembling fire among the pure white buildings, the ancient streets. The shoeshine boys were busy, preparing their clients for the night’s strolling, and young girls flitted in waves of excitement across the squares, their eyes flashing, faces flushed with the nameless possibilities surely to be met under the stars. Erik, high on freedom and the evening air, smiled on it all with a sad, gentle smile, on all that he would lose, was already losing. And Athens, like the exquisite whore that she is, laid herself before him with that look, all violet, gold and white, saying, farewell.

We went drinking. I could not keep him from it. I did not try. He was so happy, so deliriously, relievedly, carelessly happy, that I had not the courage to hold him back from all those bottles, in the amber and clear depths of which the last possibilities of his life lay. We moved from bar to bar, at first purposefully, with great big grins on our faces. I had never felt so at ease in his company. We stopped somewhere in the Plaka to consume a fearful mess of eggplant and crushed meat, which Erik said would see us right through the night’s drinking. He was pleased with that phrase. See us right, he kept repeating, chuckling, shaking his head.

From the Plaka, we crawled down to Syntagma Square, descended steps in a crevice behind a hoarding, and in the low Aladdin’s cave which we found there, we came at last to rest. It was an odd dive. The woman behind the bar turned out to be a man, or, to put it another way, the man behind the bar was turned out to be a woman. Its name was Fatima, and it stood with one stout, faintly furred arm laid upon the gleaming counter, turning its powdered head this way and that, like some great friendly awkward bird, flinging lewd remarks at the habitués, and squawking at new arrivals. As to the customers, it would take a textbook to cover the variety. I wondered how they could talk and talk and talk, exhaustively, sincerely, about nothing, for such long unbroken periods. The lights were dim, so dim that they hardly deserved their name. I remember mirrors, countless mirrors, and a million tiny crystals of glass which bent and twisted the glow from the bulbs, and laid down a ceaseless undertone of tinkling music beneath the high-pitched chatter. It was a pretty place. I liked it, god forgive me. Erik and I sat face to face across a little table, grinning at each other and chewing the rims of our glasses in that fatuous, inane attitude which marks the emergence from the far side of total drunkenness into a state where trivia impinge on the brain like explosions of supernatural grace. I must have been very far gone, for at one point, late in the evening, I found that, unnoticed by me, we had been joined by a third party: Colonel Sesosteris sat motionless between us, a billious Buddha, staring at his hands, which lay lightly folded in the centre of the table, as though he were wondering to whom they might belong.

‘Hello,’ I cried. ‘The marines have arrived.’

The old man turned his gloomy gaze toward me, but it missed, somehow, and settled on a piece of wall beside my ear.