John Fowles - The Magus

I was marooned; wingless and leaden, as if I had been momentarily surrounded, then abandoned, by a flock of strange winged creatures; emancipated, mysterious, departing, as singing birds pass on overhead; leaving a silence spent with voices.

Only too ordinary voices, screams, came faintly up from the bay. More horseplay. The present eroded the past. The sun slanted through the pines, and I walked one last time to the statue.

Poseidon, perfect majesty because perfect control, perfect health, perfect adjustment, stood flexed to his divine sea; Greece the eternal, the never-fathomed, the bravest because the clearest, the mystery-atnoon land. Perhaps this statue was the center of Bourani, its omphalos—not the house or the Earth or Conchis or Lily, but this still figure, benign, all-powerful, yet unable to intervene or speak; able simply to be and to constitute.

The first thing I did when I arrived at the Grande Bretagne in Athens was to telephone the airport. I was put through to the right desk. A man answered.

He didn’t seem to know the name. I spelt it.

He said, “Please wait a minute.”

Then a girl’s voice; the same Greek-American who had been on duty that evening.

“Who is that speaking please?”

“A friend of a friend.”

A moment’s silence. I knew then. For hours I had nursed the feverish tiny hope. I stared down at the tired green carpet.

“Didn’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“She’s dead.”

“Dead?”

My voice must have sounded strangely unsurprised.

“A month ago. In London. I thought everyone knew. She took an overd—”

I put the receiver down. I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. It was a long time before I found the will to go down and start drinking.

The next morning I went to the British Council. I told the man who looked after me that I had resigned for “personal reasons,” but I managed to suggest, without breaking my half-promise to Mavromichalis, that the Council had no business sending people to such isolated posts. He jumped quickly towards the wrong conclusions.

I said, “I didn’t chase the boys. That’s not it.”

“My dear fellow, heaven forbid, I didn’t meant that.” He offered me a cigarette in dismay.

We talked vaguely about isolation, and the Aegean, and the absolute hell of having to teach the Embassy that the Council was not just another chancellery annex. I asked him casually at the end if he had heard of someone called Conchis. He hadn’t.

“Who is he?”

“Oh just a man I met on the island. Seemed to have it in for the English.”

“It’s becoming the new national hobby. Playing us off against the Yanks.” He closed the file smartly. “Well thanks awfully, Urfe. Most useful chat. Only sorry it’s turned out like this. But don’t worry. We’ll bear everything you’ve said very much in mind.”

On the way to the door he must have felt even sorrier for me, because he invited me to dinner that evening.

But I was no sooner crossing the Kolonaki square outside the Council than I wondered why I had bothered. The stiflingly English atmosphere of the place had never seemed more alien; and yet to my horror I had detected myself trying to fit in acceptably, to conform, to get their approval. What had they said in the trial? He seeks situations in which he knows he will be forced to rebel . I refused to be the victim of a repetition compulsion; but if I refused that, I had to find courage to refuse all my social past, all my background. I had not only to be ready to empty dustbins rather than teach, but to empty them rather than ever have to live and work with the middle-class English again.

The people in the Council were the total foreigners; and the anonymous Greeks around me in the streets the familiar compatriots.

I had, when I checked in at the Grande Bretagne, asked whether there had been two English twins, fair-haired, early twenties… recently staying at the hotel. But the reception clerk was sure there had not; I hadn’t expected there to be, and I didn’t insist.

When I left the British Council, I went to the Ministry of the Interior. On the pretext that I was writing a travel book, I got to the department where the war crimes records were filed; and within fifteen minutes I had in my hands a copy of the report the real Anton had written. I sat down and read it; it was all, in every detail, as Conchis had said.

I asked the official who had helped me if Conchis was still alive. He flicked through the file from which he had taken the report. There was nothing there except the address on Phraxos. He did not know. He had never heard of Conchis, he was new in this department.

I went back in the sweltering midday heat to the hotel. The reception clerk turned to give me my key; and with it came a letter. It had my name only, and was marked Urgent. I tore open the envelope. Inside was a sheet of paper with a number and a name. 184 Syngrou .

“Who brought this?”

“A boy. A messenger.”

“Where from?”

He opened his hands. He did not know.

I knew where Syngrou was: a wide boulevard that ran from Athens down to the Piraeus. I went straight out and jumped into a taxi. We swung past the three columns of the temple of Olympic Zeus and down towards the Piraeus, and in a minute the taxi drew up outside a house standing back in a fair-sized garden. A chipped enamel number announced that it was No. 184.

The garden was thoroughly disreputable, the windows boarded up. A lottery-ticket seller sitting on a chair under a pepper tree nearby asked what I wanted, but I took no notice of him. I walked to the front door, then round the back. The house was a shell. There had been a fire, evidently some years before, and the flat roof had fallen in. I looked into a garden at the rear. It was as dry and unkempt and deserted as the front. The back door gaped open. There were signs, among the fallen rafters and charred walls, that tramps or Vlach gypsies had lived there; the trace of a more recent fire on an old hearth. I waited for a minute, but I somehow sensed that there was nothing to find. It was a false trail.

I returned to the waiting yellow taxi. The dust from the dry earth rose in little swirls in the day breeze and powdered the already drab leaves of the thin oleanders. Traffic ran up and down Syngrou, the leaves of a palm tree by the gate rustled. The ticket seller was talking to my taxi driver. He turned as I came out.

“ Zitas kanenan? ” Looking for someone?

“Whose house is that?”

He was an unshaven man in a worn gray suit, a dirty white shirt without a tie; his rosary of amber patience beads in his hand. He raised them, disclaiming knowledge.

“Now. I do not know. Nobody’s.”

I looked at him from behind my dark glasses. Then said one word.

“Conchis?”

Immediately his face cleared, as if he understood all. “Ah. I understand. You are looking for o kyrios Conchis?”

“Yeah.”

He flung open his hands. “He is dead.”

“When?”

“Four, five years.” He held up four fingers; then cut his throat and said “ Kaput .” I looked past him to where his long stick of tickets, propped up against the chair, flapped in the wind.

I smiled acidly at him, speaking in English. “Where do you come from? The National Theatre?” But he shook his head, as if he didn’t understand.

“A very rich man.” He looked down at the driver, as if he would understand, even if I didn’t. “He is buried in St. George’s. A fine cemetery.” And there was something so perfect in his typical Greek idler’s smile, in the way he extended such unnecessary information, that I began almost to believe that he was what he seemed.