Atlantis: Three Tales

Chapter VI

VI Unknown and alone, I have returned to wander through my native country, which lies about me like a vast graveyard... — Friedrich Holderlin, Hyperion In London one night beside a neon-striped eating place, I'd stood outside plate glass, a triangle of blue sliding down at my eye, listening to a record on the jukebox inside, by a group that sang, in the most astonishing antiphony, about "Monday, Monday..."—as rich with pop possibilities as new music could be. In France, for a day, I'd hitched north toward the Luxembourg airport through a stony landscape—sided with crumbling white walls, shuttered windows and planked-up doors that recalled so many of that country's warnings, from so many of its writers, about the meanness and a-sensuality of its strict, strict provinces. And, in New York, three weeks later, I was sitting at the foot of my bed, when, after some argument that had to do with neither money nor sex, my wife walked in and slapped me, about as hard as I'd ever been hit, across the face—the only time either one of us ever struck the other. A week later, with her poems and the red clay casserole, she moved into another apartment, down on Henry Street. Which left me nothing but to plunge into the ending of the novel I'd been working on last fall and spring, full of Greece —but with no Heidi or Pharaoh, no Cosima or 209 S A M U E L R. D E L A N Y DeLys, no Trevor or Costas, no Jerry or [Turkish] John. Two weeks after that I got a letter from Heidi—which surprised me: I hadn't written her at all. I sat on the bed in the back of my empty Lower East Side flat to read its more-than-dozen pages. The light through the window-gate made lozenges over the rumpled linen. The return address on Heidi's letter was Munich, which was where her family lived. Its manybeige sheets explained how she was with them now, how glad she'd been to see her mother once she'd arrived—and how the problems she'd sometimes cried to me about having with her father seemed,briefly, in abeyance.Had I gotten to the Deutsches Museum ? (I had. And it had been quite as wonderful as she'd told me. But she seemed to think I'd probably missed it.) She hoped things were going well between me and my wife. Then, in its last pages, she wrote: "Before I left Greece, I killed my poor Pharaoh—whom I loved more than anything else in the world. Even more than, for that little time, I loved you. But there was no one I could give him to. The Greeks don't keep pets. And the quarantine laws are impossible —they would have put him in kennel for six months; and that costs lots of money. Besides, he was just a puppy, and after six months more he wouldn't even have known me. But the day before I did it, I saw a dog—all broken up and bloody, with one leg and one eye entirely gone, and his innards—Oh, I don't want to describe it to you! But he was alive, though barely, in the garbage behind Kyria Kokinou's, because of what some boys had done to him. He was going to die. And I knew if I just let Pharaoh go, with the stones and the glass in the meat, and the Greek boys, he would die too. That's when I cried. "Since I was leaving Greece in two days, what I did was take my poor, beautiful Pharaoh out in the blue rowboat that David said I could use, with a rope, one end of which I'd already tied around a big rock (about eighteen kilos). I was in my bathing suit—as though we were going for a swim, back on Aegina. And while he looked up at me, with his trusting eyes —which, because you are such a careful writer, you would say was a cliche, but I could really look into those swimming, 210 C I T R E ET T R A N S swirling eyes and see he did trust me, becauseI fed him good food every day from the market and...