Dimitris Nollas: The Old Enemy

Always in my sleep I’m hounded by the third window a merciless eye
Nikos-Alexis Aslanoglou

It was during a long walk that I wondered if perhaps I were in a genre tale and not in one of Piraeus’ older neighborhoods, through the back streets of which I’d been aimlessly roaming for some time now. My suspicion became a certainty when I realized that I’d spent the greater part of my time following in the footsteps of a hawker who for some time now held me captivated so that I was walking around an invisible center, which was becoming ever more distant, ever more indistinct, as I followed him in a daze.

It was obvious that something was drawing me to this man. I must have made his acquaintance, have met him in the past for me to be stuck to his heels and to be following him like a hound its prey. I couldn’t remember who he was, but I was sure about one thing: I must have met him in the distant past when nothing had boded his present sorry state.

Without being really aware of it, I had gone with him into two cafés and a bakery, where I’d bought a kilo of rolls in order to justify my presence, and now I was in a grimy tavern, full of barrels that were hanging ominously over the heads of the few customers and that I suspected were part of an illusory setting, as the tavern-keeper filled the cup of wine ordered by the man from a demijohn behind the counter and not from one of the barrels decorating his dingy establishment. He did the same for me just afterwards when I collapsed into a chair, resolved at last to put an end to my tortuous wanderings.

As far as I could tell after having lost a whole morning with him, this man was trying, with little success, to sell Bulgarian perfumes. The way he walked, his battered shoes, which at every step looked ready to leave their heels on the asphalt, the dragging of his left leg, and in particular the way he pronounced a double “l”, as though he wanted to drown it in saliva every time he shouted “Colognes, Bulgarian colognes”, was what made me glue myself to him. It was all this that had made me wonder if perhaps I was skipping through the first lines of a genre tale.

He sat down at the facing table, and if his gaze hadn’t been so tired, his eyes would no doubt have passed through me, given the way he had them fixed on me.

“Only four hundred,” he said. Without moving from his seat, he showed me the sample bottle that he displayed to everyone and drew his chair over to me without my inviting him. “We must have met somewhere before,” he added with a tone of familiarity totally befitting the place, and mentioned the name of some miserable suburb in a scorched Attica, the bowling center of which we had supposedly frequented in the past.

I was quick to deny it, as if not wanting to allow him to be the one to recognize me. Hell, I thought to myself, no, not when I’m the one who’s been following him for so long.

I poured him some of my wine and began going through the past, quickly passing from the white to the black squares of memory, and I wondered whether we’d perhaps gone to the same schools, if we’d been together in the army, or perhaps we had worked together in Perama, where for a few years I’d been employed in the accounts department of a company that dismantled old ships. This seemed to me to be the most likely.

Full of apprehension, I waited for him to answer, because, I could see it now, I could swear that I knew that gaze. Perhaps it wasn’t the warmest look I’d encountered in my life, but I recognized it, I certainly recognized his look. And I was waiting for confirmation.

He began with a rather interesting introduction, but excessively long and quite irrelevant to the matter, as it seemed to me at first.

“I am,” he said, and faltered as if thinking better of it. “I have the opportunity, every day, because of my work, to come into contact with everything anew. I go everywhere and so I can walk in streets I’ve often walked and see again old acquaintances who thought I’d forgotten them. I encounter everyone and everything from the beginning and in new ways. Last time, however, I saw someone I felt I’d been looking for all my life but he escaped me at the last moment. I recognized a man, an old friend of mine, who had hurt me a long time back. He’d wronged me and I hadn’t been able to forget it. Though a great deal had happened in the intervening years that should have softened the pain of the hurt, I still remembered it, though not of course as vividly as at first. So I followed him and kept asking myself why I couldn’t forget him. The harm he’d done me hadn’t been so great, the proof being that I only vaguely remembered it, but what started to scare me more was the thought that perhaps all my encounters with random people from the past were not accidental, but were in fact the agonizing hunt for one man alone: the one who was now walking in front of me. And if anyone were to look at us, given the way I’d coordinated my stride with his, they’d see that not only our step but also the swinging of our arms was identical, so much so that we must have both looked like a projection of each other. And I kept wondering what it was that was gnawing inside me and not letting me break free of its memory, which had turned into a nightmare.”

At this point, he took a deep breath and I got the impression he wanted to check the effect his words had had on me. I tried to hide my annoyance and reluctantly ordered another half-kilo of wine. I was once again on the dark border of a state into which I’d begun to slip and from which I’d find it difficult to emerge, unless I too, in my turn, decided what it was precisely that I was looking for.

He got up as if about to leave and, before I was able to understand how difficult these things are, he began humming, accompanying the song coming from an invisible cassette recorder. The nasal subterranean melody accompanied the words of that strange song, the murmur of which sounded like a hymn of repentance:

I’m not playing dice again
or rummy or any cards
if only they’d promise me
the sky with all its stars.

At that same moment, as if he’d lost something valuable, which he may have dropped, he turned slowly round himself looking carefully at the floor beneath his feet. This entire ritual acted as a smoke screen for the song, for it was obvious that his feet were saying one thing and his heart another. His voice had such heartache that he undermined the whole message of the song at the same moment that he was singing it. It sounded as if he were again ready to do the same things about which the song complained. As if he longed for them – even worse, as if he were planning to do everything brought by the night as it approached with its own counsels, and was already dreaming of how it would turn out.

No one had noticed his dance step and he immediately came and sat down again next to me. He went on as though the dance-music interlude hadn’t happened, while I still couldn’t get the words of the song out of my head.

“And then the strangest thing of all happened,” he said. “The more I followed on his tail, certain that there was no way I would lose him, but without going up to him to make his acquaintance, pretending to be a stranger, the more clearly I recalled another event that had happened in the time since his disappearance and to which I’d been a witness. It was a calm discussion between friends that came to an unhappy end, and perhaps it was the memory of this other interpolated story, during the time of his absence, that was the reason why I delayed going up to him, the reason why I avoided going up to him. And, in any case, to do what to him? God only knew. Anyway, this little episode happened as follows: Sitting and chatting at a nearby table were two acquaintances of mine, one of whom had actually worked with me as a shipmate for some time. They were close buddies and I’d never seen them in anyone else’s company. In fact, they were annoyingly close. And suddenly, while they were discussing something quite insignificant, one of them, I don’t recall which one, got up and, after letting out a scream of pain, took out a knife and plunged it into the other’s chest. Murdered him just like that. It took me days to recover, and the reason that I delayed going up to my old enemy and remained constantly behind him at a steady distance must have had something to do with that shock.”

He had no intention of letting me get a word in or make any comment on his tale. Meanwhile, we were getting down the half-kilo of wine at a pretty fast rate. In his case because his throat must have been dry from endless narration, and in my case to ease the boredom caused by his two unlikely tales.

“Because we, too, my good man,” he said with renewed familiarity, “sitting as we are like this, have every opportunity, with every word that slips out from between our teeth, to lead the conversation to a bad end. Our every word might give rise to something bad. And that’s why we’re careful, just like everyone who approaches another person for the first time. But those two had already said everything there was to say in life, everything that might have divided them. And yet one word, a word that perhaps still hadn’t been said, woke the other self that they’d had hidden inside them for so many years and whom they’d struggled to satiate with other conversations.”

He suddenly stood up and, without another word, went out and stood in the tavern doorway, undecided as to which direction he should take. A chill had penetrated the afternoon languor and I felt the oxygen that I was breathing piercing my nostrils. I didn’t even think of suggesting he pay his share of the bill, or of asking his name, since I’d begun to suspect, as a result of his narration, just what dangerous surprises might be concealed in the words of the poet, take my word, give me your hand.

He stood in the doorway and discreetly managed to restrain himself from swaying. He started anxiously searching in his pockets and, with a ponderous air, sometimes feeling them and sometimes thrusting his hands into them, he very carefully pulled out various bits and pieces of paper, notes with faded addresses and telephone numbers, receipts and bills and orders for fines, which he perused with excessive attention. He was absorbed in this pile of crumpled papers and profoundly studied them one by one in the mauve light as if he were about to make some major decision or settle one of the bills at that very moment. He made himself appear extremely busy, pretending to be the sober type with endless jobs to do, perhaps because he believed that there was always someone watching us, who is following on our heels, and who we have mislead.

Translated from the Greek by David Connolly