Landlocked. Doris Lessing
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Solly was looking at her, very close, across the table, reminding her with his eyes why he was here. And Athen was standing by his chair, face to face with Johnny Capetenakis, and the two men spoke low and fast in bitter Greek, their eyes burning hatred. Martha had never seen this Athen, and she thought that if these two men were now, this evening, standing in the same way on their mother soil, it would be to kill each other. Athen’s eyes blazed murder; Johnny’s eyes blazed back. Athen’s fist trembled as it hung by his side. Johnny Capetenakis spat out a last low volley of hate and turned and went off to his desk by the door of the restaurant.
Athen sat down. ‘He says our people should give themselves up to the amnesty, they would be safe. I told him, it’s not the first time. There’s a clause, criminals will be shot. I told him, we know who these criminals will turn out to be. He tells me I am a traitor to my country.’
He sat, sombre, looking about him with dislike, then he said: ‘I cannot stay here, I am sorry, but it is too much to sit here, in this man’s place.’
‘Well, we’re late for the pictures anyway.’
Martha led the way out, greeting Johnny at the desk, not knowing whether she should feel disloyal for doing so or not. But she noted that Athen nodded at Johnny, and that Johnny nodded briefly back.
The rain had gone, the stars were washed clean, steam rose from the tarmac that shone like dark water, reflecting rose and blue and gold. It was nearly eight. Main Street was filled with groups of civilians moving towards the cinema. No RAF, absolutely none.
‘It might just as well be peacetime,’ said Martha.
‘There is a big man coming tomorrow,’ said Athen. ‘Everyone has to polish their buttons tonight.’
‘What big man?’
‘From England. An Air Vice-Marshal.’
‘Why are you allowed out then?’
‘All the Greeks have got week-end leave, all of us. They have worked it out: the Greeks are all communists, and the communists are anti-British, therefore the communists will try to assassinate the Air Vice-Marshal.’
Athen sounded bitter, and Martha, who had been going to laugh, stopped herself.
‘What are you complaining about,’ said Solly, ‘if you’ve got the week-end?’
Martha had never seen Athen like this: the gentle controlled little man was beyond himself, he was flushed with anger, he looked humiliated and his hands shook.
‘This proves what I always said about the reactionaries. They always know facts. They always know who is a member of what. They know who has written letters to who. They know who has attended this meeting, that meeting. They know who is a man’s relatives and who can be made to talk. This they know because of their spies. But they can never interpret these facts, because they put their own bad minds into our minds.’
Athen stood bitterly on the pavement, talking – not to them. Martha and Solly stood on one side waiting.
‘I used to say to our comrades in the mountains. If it is a question of fact, they will know. Yes. Be frightened of that, and guard against it. But if it is a question of intention – if they interrogate you and say: “You mean this, you want this”, then keep your mouths shut and do not worry. They know nothing. They are too stupid. Their Air Vice-Marshal is safe from us,’ said Athen, his white teeth showing in bitterness.
‘Athen,’ said Martha gently, but he was going on. Probably, she thought (since he spoke often of that time) he was in a freezing cave above a pass as narrow as Thermopylae. Tomorrow, or next week, they – he and his soldiers – would roll boulders down bare brown hillsides patched with snow to crush one hundred and fifty of their countrymen who, in British uniforms and British-officered, were hunting them out. ‘I tell them,’ Athen said softly, ‘I tell them always: Remember who you are, comrades. Now we are like criminals hunted over the mountains, but soon that will end, and we will be men.’
‘We are going to be late,’ said Solly. He went on ahead, having decided to take the others on the offensive of his effrontery. Martha heard him say: ‘Good evening, comrades, one and all! And good evening, brother Joss!’
Athen had taken Martha’s hand. ‘Martha, I have to ask you something serious.’
From fifty yards off, Solly, then Joss, called: ‘Come on, you two, it’s late.’
‘Have you noticed a change in me?’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Thank you for saying so. It is true.’
‘Athen, have you seen Maisie?’
Athen let Martha’s hand go and frowned. ‘I know why you ask me that, Martha.’
More shouts from outside the cinema.
‘I must talk about this with you, Martha.’
They ran towards the cinema and the waiting group.
There was a girl in the group – a red-haired girl in a white dress. Whose? Not Solly’s, this evening; so that meant she must be Joss’s, or Thomas Stern’s. Probably Thomas’s – he liked thin girls. As Martha decided this, Thomas took both her hands – Martha’s, announced that she looked terrible, very pale, and much too thin, and that while he was always her slave on principle, tonight, because of her irresistible look of illness – she was irresistible. So she must be Joss’s girl? No time to find out, no time even to be introduced – Martha and the red-haired girl smiled goodwill, and then the group joined the crowd that was being sucked into the cinema, quickening as it went, like bathwater into a hole. The manager stood by the box office, his smile benign, but not enough to conceal his disappointment at the absence of his best customers. He kept darting glances at the entrance in case at the last minute the familiar blue-grey uniforms would appear, and all his seats be filled. But there were, after all, many RAF present, in ordinary clothes, like Athen, and soon the manager was smiling and urging his flock into the dark with smiles, a pressure of the hand, a pat on the shoulder. To Martha, who after all he had been welcoming for five or six years now, he said jovially: ‘And how are you these days, Mrs …?’ But he was unable to remember her current married name.
The programme had started. Across the screen that was lifted high in the big dark space over the crowded floor, moved a file of soldiers which, seen in the confusion, the jerking about of finding seats, then sitting, then finding places for handbags and jackets, looked like the columns which, in one Allied uniform or another, had marched, flown, parachuted across that screen for the last five years. But suddenly they understood the great, staring hollow-cheeked face they looked at was a German, and the uniform he wore, which was worn into rags, was a German uniform. The announcer’s voice had a note they had not heard before. It was jeering: ‘And so here he is, the Ubermensch, the Superman, the ruler of the world, here he is, and take a good look at him.’ The German on the screen was eighteen? A starved twenty-year-old? A bit of rag fluttered wildly on his shoulder, and he shivered so that it seemed as if the whole cinema shivered with him. He stared into the cinema-crowd with eyes quite empty of expression. So he had stared a few days ago into the camera which took pictures of the defeated armies – he had stared probably not knowing what the machine was doing there or what it wanted. He stared, his cheek-bones speaking of death, into the faces of a thousand full-fed people, his victorious enemies, in a little town in the centre of Africa.
The cinema was very silent. They were shocked, or in a state of mild shock, for a few moments. Then they began to realize, slowly. For the five years of the war, they had seen the faces of the enemy at a distance – and seen aircraft spinning down in flames and smoke; seen corpses like photographs in the newspaper – pictures of corpses; seen the posturing faces of enemy leaders, seen massed troops, massed tanks, armies, men in the mass, men on the move in columns, men in uniforms. Now they saw this face, close, close; and it was a shock, because the minds of the men who organized newsreels, war films, ‘propaganda’ had taken care that this face, the face of a shocked, frightened boy, should not stare, as close as a lover, into the face of a cinema audience.