Graham Swift - Out of This World

Happiness is like a fall of snow, it smooths and blanks out all there was before it. And, yes, everything is relative, and my complaints were nothing to what you could find in those Nuremberg depositions. But you never quite understood — with all your keen-sightedness, with all your professional interest in the world’s troubles — how your Anna, your very own Anna, was one of the world’s walking wounded.

Not that I blame you. How can I do that? I am the one to blame. I am the one to blame. But I won’t ever forget that happiness. Don’t mistake that. That snowfall of happiness. Switzerland, the white mountains, and those first four years. With Frank it wasn’t happiness. It was a tactical affair. A tactical desertion.

Such a tough little bitch was sitting somewhere inside me, while the rest of me was ready to melt. In Nuremberg, adding my own little contribution to the paperwork of grief, I understood what the war had done to me. It had made me a thick-skinned, old-young thing, with a limited capacity for outrage and for assimilating the ills of the universe. When you told me about Robert, when you said he made bombs, I let the words wash right over me. I said to myself: That has nothing to do with anything. When we drove that first time through those gates at Hyfield and up that gravel drive, I didn’t see any bombs. I saw the fairy-tales my Uncle Spiro had told me coming true. When you said — oh, with such wary pride — ‘Dad, this is Anna,’ I didn’t see a monster. I saw a perfect English gentleman.

And in any case, I think, someone has to make them. Maybe we just need them, for our safety and protection and to guard the things we love. People hurt easily, they need armour. And if they hadn’t dropped bombs on Nuremberg, we might never have all been there, to mete out justice and put the world to rights. And you and I, Harry, might never have met.

At first I thought that I would change your mind — that I had changed your mind. Then that Sophie would change your mind. Then –

And what I never told you is that he knew. I mean Robert. Even wanted it to happen. Oh, only so far. Just so you would feel a touch of persuasive jealousy. He never stopped wanting you back. ‘Into the fold’, as he put it. Never promised Frank anything. And he must have known he had an ally in me that very first time we met. He smiled so welcomingly. He took my coat so graciously and chivalrously. It was like some scene in one of those films that Uncle Spiro used to take me to see before the war, in Salonika. It surprised me that he used both arms. Then he led us in (a log fire! Oak panels!), and it was as though he were ushering me into some home that, he knew, had been waiting for me all my life.

He knew. But you never guessed. With your eyes always straying, like some person guilty of your own happiness, to the window that looked out on the world. Couldn’t see what was under your nose.

It’s funny how what I always remember are the winters, though people — English people — used to say, It must be wonderful — coming from somewhere so sunny! When you live on an island in wartime, it’s like being wrapped in a shroud — is it better or worse to be cut off from the mainland of events? And when the rain and mist moved in from Thrace it was as though the world was obliterated: now anything could happen here, and no one would know.

Once, as if a veil had been lifted, we saw two, three warships, solidifying out of the gloom, beating westwards through the drizzle. They came close enough so you could see the water pluming off their bows and the outlines of their guns. They looked so beautiful. So heroic! Uncle Spiro said they must be Italian ships. Or Italian ships commandeered by the Germans. Because by now the British would surely have trounced the Italians. They were too fast, too modern-looking to be Bulgarian. They couldn’t be Turkish. We were down on the beach gathering driftwood, and we forgot the cold and our hunger. We argued, long after they’d disappeared, knowing nothing about ships, over whether they were destroyers or frigates or corvettes or minelayers. It was strange, that rapt animation, as if to hide our disappointment.

Because the main thing was, they weren’t British ships. If they’d been British, we would have known about it beforehand. And they would have steamed right into the bay to rescue us.

Uncle Spiro used to say: ‘Greece was once the cradle of civilization, but what is Greece now?’ He would pick up a handful of stones or dust. ‘Greece is this’ — he would empty his hand. ‘And Greece is this’ — he would rub his thumb, in the gesture of crude greed, against his fingertips. And we were not even Greeks! We were Macedonians. Miserable Macedonia! Quarrelled over by Turks and Bulgars and Serbs, and chopped about by the Big Powers. ‘You know what the French mean, little Anna, when they say “Macedonia”? They mean “fruit salad”!’ My grandfathers and great-grandfathers had fought in those bitter little wars that the Great War had swallowed up. No wonder the latest generation, who could officially call themselves Greek, had the minds of brigands. Feuding with each other over piles of tobacco, waiting for the brown leaves to turn into banknotes.

He had told them as much, recklessly, as a young man with scholarly ambitions. And they had said, ‘Very well, if you must, go and become an educated man, but don’t come knocking on the door when you are starving.’ But he’d surprised them all. Found his way to far-away London, even seen the tranquil lawns of Oxford and Cambridge. Then returned to marry a rich widow — Aunt Panayiota, whom I can’t recall — who in turn had left him a rich widower, strolling the paralía in Salonika, in finely cut English suits. It was they who had had to humble themselves before him, even permitting their little jewel, their late, unexpected blessing, Anna, to spend summers with him at his villa on Thassos. Until that warehouse fire which had left Anna parentless, after which Uncle Spiro became her permanent guardian.

That fire, he told me, after a year or two had passed and he knew that my feelings for my dead parents were of a kind with his for my dead aunt, was arson, no mistaking. Though it had never been proved. An act of mercantile vandalism that had gone further than was intended. Ha! The nemesis of the Vouatsis! Burnt by their own tobacco! Greed and brigandry! But he spoke more softly and more carefully when my older brothers, Sotiri and Manoli, were killed within six months of each other, one in Albania and one on the Aliakmon.

What did I do in the war? I lived in Paradise. And never knew it. I spent the war in a summer villa. Though during the hot, blue, harsh days of summer I dreamed of cool, green England. Of fleecy English skies and English meadows and English willows draped over the cool Thames. And during the winters I dreamed of English tea-times on winter evenings, beside roaring fires and brass fenders in solid brick houses (you recognize what were once my dreams?), with toast and tea-cakes and scones and muffins (I learnt all the words) and anything else Uncle Spiro’s memory could muster or his own dreams invent, while the wind howled round the Villa Paradise and our stomachs gnawed on hunger and dread.

What did I do in the war? I learnt English. A dangerous thing to have done, given the circumstances. Whole evenings, whole days sometimes, when we would speak to each other only in English. With Uncle Spiro I read Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Doctor Johnson. And at first I really thought that this devotedness would make it all be over sooner. It was like a prayer. It would make the British hurry so much more to save us.

He said they would come. It wouldn’t be long. He said this in ’41. But they hadn’t come. They’d got out of Greece altogether. But only, so he said, so they could return in proper strength. Before the last war, when he was a boy, British policemen had come to Drama to show the Turks how things were done. And in 1916, the British had cleared the Bulgars out of Macedonia in two weeks — and they’d never have been there in the first place if it hadn’t been for that fool King Constantine.