The Two Faces of January Read online

  It was an even bet every morning whether the elevator would come or not, and every morning Rydal played a game with himself: if the elevator came, he would have breakfast in the Taverna Dionysiou in Niko’s street, and if it didn’t come, he would buy a newspaper and have breakfast in the Café Brasil. Not that it made a bit of difference one way or the other. He would buy four newspapers, anyway, in the course of the day, but in the Taverna Dionysiou he knew so many people, he was always talking too much to read anything, and in the Café Brasil, a fancier place, he never knew anyone, and so always took a newspaper with him for company. Rydal waited patiently, walking in a slow circle over the threadbare carpet in front of the elevator shaft. No annunciatory rattle from below or above showed that anyone had heard or heeded his ring. Rydal sighed, threw his shoulders back, and stared with serious attention at an extremely dark and obscure painting of a country landscape that hung on the wall of the corridor he had just walked through. Even the sky was a sooty black, as if the picture—surely no artist in the world, however bad, would paint a hillside and sky so smutty you could scarcely see where one ended and the other began—had over the years accumulated the dirt of the atmosphere, absorbed the very breaths of the Greek, French, Italian, Serbian, Yugoslavian, Russian, American and whatever people that had passed back and forth in that corridor. Two sheeps’ backsides, dingy tan, were the brightest spots in the composition.

  The elevator was certainly not coming. He might have rung again, could eventually have got service if he kept ringing, but his game was over, and he no longer cared to ride. He would go to the Café Brasil. Rydal walked slowly down the first short flight of carpeted stairs. There were two holes, each the size of a large foot, in the carpet, and Rydal wondered if anybody had ever tripped in them and fallen. They would have fallen against a cement vase, phony third-century B.C., which stood on a Victorian flower stand of cast iron. Rydal went by a mirror some ten feet long on the wall, crossed a small, meaningless foyer where there was another opaque painting and a pot of dried out ferns, and took some stairs that led down in another direction. On the next floor, a tall and somewhat angular woman in tweeds, not a bit masculine but flat and sexless as something out of a 1920 British fashion drawing, pressed the elevator button with a confident air, then returned Rydal’s gaze with calm, greenish eyes. Rydal’s eyes lingered on hers a little too long for the look to be merely one that one gives a stranger encountered in a hotel hall, but that was another game Rydal played, and the Hotel Melchior Condylis was just the place to play it. The game might be called Adventure. It depended on meeting the Right Person, male or female. Something would take place when his eyes met the eyes of the Right Person, there would be a shock of recognition, one of them would speak, they would have some kind of Adventure together—or there wouldn’t be anything in the eyes, and absolutely nothing would happen. This woman was certainly an odd and fascinating type, but nothing really happened in her eyes. The Hotel Melchior Condylis was full of odd and fascinating-looking people. It was not a place for the well-heeled, not a place the average American would be drawn to, but it had almost every other nationality staying in it, as far as Rydal could see. There was an East Indian couple now, and an elderly French couple. There was a young Russian student whom Rydal had tried chatting with in Russian, but the Russian acted as if he were suspicious of him, and their acquaintance had not progressed. Last month there had been an Eskimo travelling with an American oceanographer, and they were both natives of Alaska. There was the predictable sprinkling of Turks and Yugoslavs. It was amusing to think of little points all over the world where people who had been to the Melchior Condylis would mention its name, in one or the other of twenty-five or thirty languages, and perhaps recommend it (or could they really, except for its cheapness?) to their friends as a place to stop in Athens. The service was awful, worse than non-existent, because it was often promised when it did not come. The corridors and stairs of the place had to Rydal the anticipatory air of a stage when all the props are in place and before the first actor makes his appearance. Not one item in the rooms—Rydal had been in three of them—the corridors or the lobby was wrong for its character, and its character was that of an old, tired, Mitteleuropa stable hack.

  Rydal found the elevator operator, who also doubled as porter, reading a newspaper on the wooden bench by the door and picking his nose.

  “Good morning, Meester Keener,” said Max, a black-moustached man in an ancient grey uniform behind the desk.

  “Morning to you, Max. How are you?” Rydal laid his key down.

  “You want lottery ticket?” Max asked with a hopeful grin, holding up a sheet of tickets.

  “Um-m. Am I feeling lucky today? Not particularly. Not today,” Rydal said, and went out.

  He turned left and walked towards Constitution Square and the American Express. There might be a letter for him at the American Express, there most likely was a letter, because this was Wednesday and he’d had no mail Monday or Tuesday, and he averaged two letters a week. But he decided to wait until afternoon before going in to ask. He bought yesterday’s London Daily Express and an Athens newspaper of this morning, gave a wave to Niko, who was shuffling about in his gym shoes a few yards away on the pavement in front of the American Express Travel Agency, his figure beige and more or less round under the sponges that hung on strings all over him.

  “Lottery?” Niko yelled, swinging up a ticket sheet.

  Rydal shook his head. “Not today!” he yelled back in Greek. It was evidently a great day for lottery tickets.

  Rydal went into the Café Brasil, climbed the stairs to the second-floor bar where one could also get breakfast, and ordered a cappuccino with a jelly doughnut. The news in the paper was dull today. A small train wreck in Italy. A divorce case against an M.P. Rydal rather enjoyed murder stories, and he liked the English best. He smoked three Papistratos after his coffee, and it was getting on to 11 when he went out. He thought he would drop by the National Archaeological Museum for a little while, then buy a present for Pan—Pan’s birthday was Saturday, and he was giving a party—in some haberdashery or leather shop in Stadiou Street, have lunch in the hotel restaurant, then work on his poems in what was left of the afternoon. Pan had said something about going to a movie tonight, but the date might not come off, and Rydal didn’t care if it didn’t. It was obviously going to rain, and the Athens paper predicted it also. Rydal enjoyed loafing in his room and working on his poems when it rained. Out on the pavement, he was inspired to call at the American Express now instead of this afternoon, so he walked through the arcade that brought him out on another street more or less parallel to Constitution Square, where the American Express mail office was located.

  There was a letter from his sister Martha in Washington, D.C. Another slight reproach, Rydal supposed. But it wasn’t. It was actually almost an apology to him for having “spoken a little sharply in December”. She had written, not spoken. Rydal’s father had died in early December, Rydal had been notified by a cable from his brother Kennie two days before the funeral, he could have flown home, but he hadn’t. His father had suffered a heart attack, and died within four hours. Rydal had delayed, undecided, for twenty-four hours, and had finally wired Kennie in Cambridge that he was sorry to hear the news, and that he sent him and the rest of the family his love and sympathy. He did not say he was not coming, but that was evident, since any mention of his coming was left out. Kennie had not written him since, but Martha had, and she had said, “Considering the family is so small, just you and I and Kennie and his wife and children, I think you might have made an effort to get here. After all, he was your father. I can’t believe that your conscience doesn’t bother you. Are you going to nurse a grievance even after the object is dead? You would be happier, Rydal, if you could be bigger about it—and if you’d come and stood by with the rest of us.” Rydal remembered the letter almost verbatim, though he had thrown it away as soon as he had read it. Now his sister
wrote that she understood that he had his grievances

  “. . . which, as you know, I’ve always considered rather warrantable. But don’t be bitter, if you can help it. You once told me you understood the uselessness of hatred and resentment. I hope it’s true now more than ever, and that you’re finding some kind of peace over there. Somehow I like the idea of your being in Athens rather than Rome. . . . When do you think you’ll be coming home?”

  Rydal refolded the letter and pushed it into his overcoat pocket. Then he walked out of the American Express office and turned in the direction of the arcade again. He was not going to be in Athens much longer. The Right Day would come, and he would take the plane for Crete, have a look at the Palace of Knossos and the Iraklion Museum of Cretan antiquities, and then fly home. Then he would see about getting a job in a law firm, he supposed in New York. He had about eight hundred dollars left in traveler’s checks and a little cash. His money had held out quite nicely over the two years he had been away. His dear grandmother’s ten thousand. His grandmother had been the only one in his family who had believed in him at the time of the crisis with his father. She had made her will then, and had died when Rydal was twenty-three, midway in his year of army service. He had made up his mind then what he was going to do with it: go to Europe and stay as long as it lasted. His father had wanted him to get started right away in a law firm, and even had a position in a junior capacity arranged for him with Wheeler, Hooton and Clive on Madison Avenue (his father had known Wheeler), but Rydal hadn’t and didn’t want to start work with any firm that had any connection with his father. You’re late enough, said his father, mostly in regard to his not getting out of Yale Law School until he was twenty-two, so unlike the precocious and scholarly Keeners, but his father’s sending him to reform school for two years hadn’t helped, and he had not entered Yale until he was nineteen. His father had graduated from Harvard at nineteen, Kennie at twenty, Martha from Radcliff at twenty also. All Phi Beta Kappa. Rydal was no Phi Beta Kappa.

  Rydal found himself standing in front of the Café Brasil’s glass doors in the arcade, awoke to the present and remembered he’d just been there, then went on through the arcade in search of Niko. Yes, he’d buy a couple of lottery tickets today, after all. There was Niko, still shuffling and stomping in the cold in his gym shoes. Niko had bunions, and sneakers were the only kind of shoes he felt comfortable in. Rydal smiled as he watched Niko approach a well-dressed gentleman just emerging from the American Express. Lottery tickets or sponges, which would you like, sir?

  Then Rydal came to a stop. The man talking to Niko looked remarkably like his father. The blue eyes were the same, the jutting nose, the color of the moustache. This man was about forty, heavier and ruddier, but the resemblance was so astounding Rydal had an impulse to ask the man if they were related, if his name were possibly Keener. The Keeners had some English cousins, and this man could be English—but his clothes looked American. The man put his head back and laughed, a hearty laugh that carried to Rydal and made him smile, too. Niko’s hand jerked back under the sponges, but Rydal had seen a white flash that might have been pearls on his palm. The ruddy-faced man in the dark overcoat had declined whatever Niko had offered, but was buying a sponge. Rydal folded his arms and waited quietly near the newspaper kiosk on the corner. He saw the man push a second bill into Niko’s not unwilling hand, saw him wave and heard him call, “So long!” as he walked away.

  He was walking towards Rydal. Rydal kept looking at him, seeing even in his walk his father’s confident stride. The sponge bulged his overcoat pocket. In his left hand he carried a new-looking Guide Bleu. He glanced at Rydal, looked away, then looked again, walking past him now, but turning his head so as to keep him in view. Rydal stared back, and it was no game now, he was not waiting for a sign, he was simply fascinated, spellbound, by the man’s resemblance to his father. The man at last looked away from Rydal, and Rydal followed him, walking at a slower pace. The man glanced over his shoulder at Rydal, hurried his steps, ran off the curb at Venizelos Street, then slowed at the wrong place—in front of an oncoming car—as if trying to give the impression he was not hurrying. Now he had passed the Grande Bretagne, and Rydal had expected him to turn in there. Rydal kept him in view, but already his interest was flagging. What if he were an English cousin? Who cared? The man went into the King’s Palace Hotel, whose front door was set at an angle on the corner, and he looked back—Rydal couldn’t tell if he saw him or not—before he went in.

  It was that last looking back that roused Rydal’s suspicion. What was the man afraid of? What was he running from?

  Rydal walked slowly back to Niko and bought two lottery tickets. “Who was your friend?” Rydal asked.

  “Who?” asked Niko, smiling and showing his lead-framed front tooth, next to it a gap.

  “The American who just bought a sponge,” Rydal said.

  “Ah. I don’t know. Never saw him before this morning. Nice guy. Gave me extra twenty drachs.” Niko shifted and the sponges swayed. The broad, dirty-white gym shoes, all that was visible of him below the panoply of sponges, did slow ups and downs like the feet of a restless elephant. “Why you ask?”

  “Oh, I dunno,” said Rydal.

  “Plenty lettuce,” said Niko.

  Rydal smiled. He had taught Niko the word lettuce, and a lot of other slang words for money, a subject Niko was very interested in. “But you couldn’t get rid of the hot stuff to him?”

  “Reed?” asked Niko, puzzled.

  Niko knew “hot stuff,” but not “rid.” “Couldn’t sell him any jewelry?”

  “Ah!” Niko waved a barely visible hand among the sponges, laughing with a sudden and uncharacteristic embarrassment. “He think it over, he say.”

  “What was it?”

  “Pearls.” After a glance to either side of him, Niko pulled a hand out and displayed a circle of pearls, a two-row bracelet on his wide, soiled palm.

  Rydal nodded, and the pearls disappeared again. “How much?”

  “To you—four hundred dollars.”

  “Ugh,” Rydal said automatically, though they were worth it. “Well, good luck with the rich American.”

  “He be back,” said Niko.

  And Niko was probably right, Rydal thought. Niko had been a fence or a messenger for fences since childhood, and he could size people up. Then Rydal realized that there had been something vaguely dishonest looking about the ruddy American, even in the few seconds Rydal had seen him talking to Niko. Rydal could not quite say what it was. At first glance, he looked a jolly, talkative type, open as a child. But he’d certainly had a furtive manner as he walked towards his hotel. The man probably would come back and buy the bracelet from Niko, and what honest or even reasonably cautious person would buy real pearls from a street peddler of sponges? Perhaps the man was a gambler, Rydal thought. It was a funny incongruity, to look so much like his father, Professor Lawrence Aldington Keener of the Department of Archaeology at Harvard, who had never dreamt of doing anything faintly illegal, a veritable pillar of respectability, and to be possibly a gambler, a crook of some sort.

  It was three days before Rydal saw the ruddy American again. Rydal had forgotten about him, or if he had thought of him once in that time, had supposed he had moved on somewhere; and then, one noon, Rydal ran into him at the Benaki Museum among the costume exhibits. He was with a woman, a young and quite chic American woman, almost but not quite too young to look like the man’s wife. From the way the man solicitously and affectionately touched her elbow now and then, the good-natured way he strolled about and chatted with her as she looked, with obvious pleasure, at the embroidered skirts and blouses on the glass-enclosed dummies, Rydal thought that they were either married pretty recently or were lovers. The man carried his hat in his hand, and Rydal could see the shape of his head now, high at the back like his father’s head, the hair above his temples receding as his father’s
hair had receded, like an ebbing tide following the contour of a shore. His voice was deep and resonant, a bit more taut than his father’s. He chuckled easily. Then, after perhaps five minutes, the woman looked directly at Rydal, and Rydal’s heart stopped for an instant, then beat faster. Rydal blinked and looked away from her, but looked at the man, who, seeing him, frowned slightly, his lips parted in surprise. Rydal turned, slowly walked to a case full of jeweled scimitars and daggers, and bent over it.

  Less than a minute later, the man and woman were gone. The man certainly thought he was trailing him, watching him, Rydal thought; he’d made the man uneasy, and Rydal had an impulse to go to the King’s Palace Hotel, wait for him, just to assure him he meant him no harm and that he wasn’t and hadn’t been shadowing him. Then that struck him as, after all, uncalled for and a bit silly, and Rydal decided to do nothing about it. Rydal walked slowly out of the museum, feeling suddenly lonely, sad, and vaguely discouraged. He knew now what had struck him about the young woman, but it was irritating and disturbing that his heart had known before his brain, or his memory. She had the same sexy comehitherness, the same soft, plumpish charm that his cousin Agnes had had at fifteen.

  “Son of a bitch,” Rydal whispered as he walked down a broad avenue. “Son of a bitch,” to no one, and with no one in particular in mind.

  The woman had blue eyes, anyway, and Agnes’s were brown. Agnes’s hair was dark brown, and this woman’s was reddish. But there was something. What was it? The mouth? Yes, a little bit. But most of all just the expression in the eyes, he thought. He hadn’t fallen for it since, Rydal assured himself. But had he seen it since? No, he hadn’t. Well, it was a funny thing, a man who looked like his father’s twin brother, in the company of a woman who had called up Agnes to him, straight and fast as a light turned on in his face, or a knife that laid his heart wide open. It had been ten whole years ago. He had been fifteen. So much had happened in the ten years since. Now he was supposed to be a mature man. He remembered Proust’s remark, that people do not grow emotionally. It was a rather frightening thought.