Atlantis: Three Tales

Chapter I

I ... all that we have been saying is as much a natural sport of the silence of these nether regions as the fantasy of some rhetorician of the other world who has used us as puppets! —Paul Valery, Eupalinos, or The Architect "All Greek men are barbarians!" Heidi jerked the leash. Pharaoh's claws dragged the concrete. I laughed, and Pharaoh looked around and up, eyes like little phonograph records. "Heidi," I said, "you just can't talk about an entire population that way." It was too bright to look at the sky directly—even away from the sun. The harbor was blue, not green. And if I stared into the air anyway, it was as though I were watching the water reflected in some dazzling metal, brighter than, but equally liquid as, the sea. "Haifa population," Heidi said. "I like the women. They don't have any style. But I like them." She wore her black and white poncho— which, only after I'd been living with her in her Mnisicleou Street room two weeks, I realized was because she thought she was fat. "Barbarians—hoi barbaroi—"I pronounced it the way my classics professor back at City College would have, rather than with what had been the surprising (for me) Italianate endings, despite spelling, of modern J 7S S A M U E L R. D E L A N Y Greek: "It's already a Greek word—the Greeks gave it to us—for people who aren't Greek, who spoke some other language—ba-ba-ba-ba-ba! — like you and me...Germans, Americans—" "They also wrote Greek tragedies." The green ferry sign's painted wood was bolted to the two-tiered dock rail. "From the way theybehave today, though, I don't think they still have it." HYDRA, SPETZA, and AEGINA were painted in white Roman capitals. Below, the same names were printed in smaller upper-/lowercase Greek. Heidi shrugged her broad shoulders as we strolled by. Once, when I'd commented on how strong she was, Heidi told me that, sixyears before,when she was nineteen, she'd been women's swimming champion of Bavaria. She also told me she'd recently graduated from Munich University with a degree in philosophy and a minor in contemporary Hebrew literature: she'd arranged to study for the year in Tel Aviv, with special papers and letters of introduction. But because she was German Protestant, in Israel they wouldn't let her off the boat. She'd ended up in Athens. Then, when we'd had some odd argument, tearfully she'd explained—while I showered in the pink tiled stall in the room's corner—that she suffered from a fatal blood disease, not leukemia , but like it, that left no sign on her muscular,tanned torso, arms, or legs. But that was why she'd left the American artist she'd been living with in Florence to come to Athens in the first place: likely it would kill her within three years. That last one kind of threw me. At first. And I wrote my wife about it—who wrote about it in a poem I read later. At various times I believed all of Heidi's assertions. But not all three at once. "I don't know whether to kiss David or never to speak to him again for getting me this job—baby-sitting for the children of rich Greeks is just not that wonderful." "The parents want them to learn German. And French." "And English!" she declared. "Believe me, that's the important one for them. Are you still mad at John—" who was this English electrical engineer — "for taking that job away from you at the Language Insti176 C I T R E ET T R A N S tute?" Heidi's French, Italian, and English were about perfect; her Greek was better than mine. And one evening I'd sat with her through an hour conversation in Arabic with the students we met at one in the morning in the coffee shop in Omoinoia. "I was never mad at him," I told her. "He thought it was as silly as I did. His Cockney twang is thick enough to drown in, and he can't say an 'h' to save himself. But they wanted 'a native English speaker'; as far as they were concerned, I was just another...