Short Stories by PJ

Bradford could take off his shoes, curl himself up anywhere, and be fast asleep in three minutes. Connie envied him. Very seldom could she sleep during daylight hours. But in their travels together--they'd camped up and down the West Coast, and gone as far from home as Guaymas in Sonora and Jasper in Alberta and taken flights out of LAX for Honolulu and Amsterdam--they'd managed to separate their habits and baggage. They acknowledged where each stopped and the other started in the way that London and Los Angeles acquiesce to differences in time.

She knew that, during their present excursion, their longest--they'd be gone for three months and were scarcely two weeks underway--Bradford would send out, at the most, half a dozen post cards, all to close relatives. Whereas, while he slumbered, she would write post cards and letters to friends, relatives, colleagues, and neighbors and scribble brief journal entries as if she deserved no rest until she did.

4 Apr '81 Corfu
We waited from 7-10 am for Italian ship Appia which may still be in Brindisi (at 8 pm) Will take Egnatia in the morning. We are close to port after getting everybody in first hotel up early - Hotel bill was less than $100 (and all the afternoon tea, etc)

Took extra day to go out to Achillion built for Empress Eliz of Austria (mother of Rudolph) What a view! And all sorts of statuary including the 9 muses who probably all these years stand amazed at the big Achilles looking north toward Corfu Town. We walked back from San Rocco Sq & ate a good supper at restaurant where I'd bought big meat & cheese sandwiches this morning - Mostly sunny - but sometimes chill - I finished my roll of b & w -and found Durrell's Prospero's Cell ....

5 Apr '81
Finally on ship [for Patras] after night in hotel with toilet that could whistle. Hope to see Ithaca -

A noncommital clerk inspected their passports: Bradford Jaeger and Constance Mittag. Once in the hotel elevator the woman persisted in an interrupted reflection: "But didn't you? Didn't you climb up the diving tower and jump off when you were a kid?

The man demurred, "I can't remember."

"Oh, I remember." It had been a long time ago. She went on, "I didn't know how to dive really. I just jumped in."

He wasn't the least bit interested.

Until they found the room and settled themselves, she saw no reason to speak to him again. Independent travel, she regretted, did not appear to be her forte. Often their days brought little but acute consciousness of their (to the proprietors of budget accommodations) unreasonable obsession with good mattresses, heat, and light. Only once, in Italy, had she succumbed to American Express, which refused to make reservations for less than second class. And second class along the way to Brindisi had provided a heated tile floor in a bathroom that she'd never forget.

Tilting the train schedule at Bradford, she voiced her concerns, "We'll have to get from Patras to Olympia on our own. Next week, by the middle of April, there'll be organized day trips. There's nothing for us now."

Still unaccepting, he persisted. "We need day trips. We missed things on Corfu because we couldn't find a tour."

How well she understood his requirements: three good meals a day, a room with bath that was quiet and clean--he had a genius for charging into bathrooms, and raging that some previous occupant had urinated on the toilet seat, the bowl, the floor, apparently after the maid had thought she'd cleaned up. He wanted tea in the afternoon, preferably at four, and with less regularity at bedtime, orgasms after which his whole purified nerve center fell into profound, sonorous slumbers. Scorning her allusions to the Odyssey, he demanded that she precisely outline the happenings of their days like an orderly brochure and held her responsible for exigencies. On her part, she had held exigencies to a minimum in the Netherlands and in Switzerland, but exigencies had been the pattern of their experiences in Italy, exigencies that had been forgiven because of the bread, the pasta, the veal, the sauces. And exigencies had simply spun out the web of their first week in Greece where their food had been wantonly immersed in olive oil. Obviously, his tone was stern: he wanted no further exigencies in Greece.

She was tired of explaining and drawing out a daily schedule that verged on fantasy, or, in his darker interpretation, fraudulent misrepresentation. She, too, would enjoy transferring her responsibilities to a tour director. She ventured, "The room isn't bad."

"It's too dark."

"The toilet is clean."

Had he managed to find some smirch? But she'd have been the first to hear of it! He grunted.

"We'll take the early train to Olympia and leave our luggage here. We'll be all right to stay here a second night. Then the next day we'll get on the train for Athens." She promised him, "There'll be day trips out of Athens. You'll like that."

But he wouldn't agree. Not entirely. "We'll go to Olympia. But I've heard it's faster by bus."

"Our Eurail Pass would cover the train trip."

"The bus doesn't cost much. It's faster. The Australian I met on the train told me about it."

He changed the subject. "Wouldn't you like a nap?"

"Now?"

He pressed her hands with an urgency that she recognized, and she repeated, "Now?"

"You'll be too tired later on."

"Sometimes I can't believe you."

With a glow of pride he imparted his information, "My urologist explained that sex is good for my prostate. You have to remember...."

"Please...."

The Australian hadn't mentioned that there would be a transfer in Pirgos. They found out about the transfer at the bus station but climbed aboard anyway. The early train was gone. After they got away from Patras, they contemplated a radiant day, the bluest sky wrapped around the Peloponnesus like a security blanket. When Bradford leaned back in his seat, his unreliable tour guide relaxed her grip on her Minolta.

The bus driver commanded their attention. Whatever he said in Greek got interpreted by his simultaneous gestures, carried on as if he possessed more than two arms. Pointed to the side, his fingers advised all passing cars and trucks to look out for him. Only Greek bravado permitted passing his bus; he drove desperately fast. Passersby stood back with respect. A priest raised his arm as the travelers rushed by. To some of the townspeople along the way, the driver threw kisses, wildly.

Sitting next to the window, Bradford needn't look far for something to worry about. "We should have taken the train."

She shrugged, wanting to say, "I told you so."

"I'd certainly not want to visit Greece and have the Goddess Athena angry with me. Or Venus. Terrible things could happen."

He snorted. "You've given me children's stories to read. You want me to read little stories written for children."

"You liked the story with the sea monster."

"Poseidon sent the thing. I've heard of him."

"We've left the coast for today."

He hadn't bothered to look at the map.

"What was your favorite story when you were a boy?"

"I didn't read stories much. Pinnochio. I liked Pinnochio. My mother read to me about him." Bradford smiled at whatever old images returned to him. Maybe that small Italian woman with the dramatic liquid eyes looked large and protective then.

Constance wore a dark denim outfit, jacket and skirt that didn't look out of place beside the clothes of the women on the bus, so many of whom wore black skirts and black shawls. By a certain age, all women in Greece have been bereaved, and ever after they wear black, she'd been told.

One older woman, white haired, a little stooped, crossed herself whenever the bus passed a church. She carried two big sacks stuffed with her belongings and food items. She bowed her head as if she might never raise her eyes. The bags sagged open. A loaf of bread poked out.

The sun was shining on the passengers on the other side of the bus. They didn't remove their outer garments. A wisp of smoke suddenly enveloped all of them, bursting and blooming toward their driver.

Once the driver smelled the smoke, he reacted instantaneously, stopping the bus and opening the doors. He pointed to the sign above his head: even Constance and Bradford understood the significance of the red and white cigarette with black superimposed X.

Turning to his audience, the insulted driver rattled off paragraphs and pages. The smoke disappeared. After a pause the trip was resumed though imprecations still rumbled from the driver's seat.

By Pirgos windows were open to dispel the gathering warmth. Many of the passengers climbed down with Constance and Bradford. She mused that for the moment she and her companion seemed to know as much about what they were doing as anybody. Whatever criticism might have been directed their way would have been unintelligible anyway. She took a deep breath, wanting to remove her jacket, not wanting to carry it.

When she saw the bus marked Olympia, she thought they'd have no trouble, but she was wrong. Although they knocked on the door, they were not admitted. They never were to understand why the Olympia bus driver would not let them board. It was the right time, the right bus. Not one passenger was aboard. The driver who waved them aside took off in a way menacing to all who might try to ride the roads to Olympia with him. The Greeks appeared to have no more idea about why they were not allowed aboard than did Bradford and Constance, suddenly left in Pirgos, ostensibly a large town with not a soul who spoke English to assist them.

"We'll eat and find the train station. We passed it when we entered the town. It's back the way we came in."

What might the pair look like to the residents of Pirgos? They both carried cameras. His hair was mostly white and hers a graying blonde. They spoke no Greek, but she had learned to find signs that advised restaurant, laundry, pharmacy, bus. They were both something below average height in California where they came from and were a good weight for their measure They were limber people, walkers wearing low, comfortable shoes. Perhaps they were not so remarkable in Pirgos on the Peloponnesus as in Los Angeles where they bundled up comically in the mild winter and often strode along with ruddy faces while others drove.

The detail of their travel together that might most have stimulated the Greek imagination was seldom surmised except by hotel keepers who paid some attention to their passports: they were not married to each other. And they got along rather badly, sometimes shouting at each other and arguing in such a way that it was not necessary to know English to know a bitter confrontation was occurring between the two. Practically every day of their travel had been marred by jibes and threats to part with each other. As others might have figured out, they stayed together in the way survivors of ship wrecks inhabit desert islands with each other.

She was originally from the Mid-West, wife to an engineer hired by the California rocket industry, never having seen the Far West before. Her companion had been born in San Francisco, schooled in Los Angeles, trained by the CCC above Redding before being drafted to serve as an infantryman in South Pacific jungles during World War II. Both divorced, they had grown children who were on their own. They'd worked long enough to have the money and time to see a world that had eluded them. They'd one by one left behind demanding spouses, competent sons and daughters, overtime employment. Putting even the Los Angeles freeways and their mortgage payments at a distance, here they were together in Pirgos.

The restauranteur greeted her in German. So to the Greeks they appeared to be a German couple. And the Greeks let them mind their own business.... Having recalled the amenities in German, Constance answered him back and the man, as was the custom in the smaller Greek restaurants they'd visited, took her to his kitchen where she and Bradford looked into the pots while their host, after his brief salutations, got to the business of explaining what they might choose for lunch. The first item eluded her. "Ziege?" The restaurant keeper put hands with pointed fingers to his head.

Her companion lost all patience. "Find out what it is."

The restauranteur beamed at them. "You speak English?"

Of course. It was goat in the pot. They didn't want to eat goat. But other pots were more promising. They trusted chicken. Both of them were still fond of the Greek country salad--wedges of buttery feta cheese, Greek olives, cucumbers and raw onions, peeled and served in chunks. He had learned to order spaghetti that was served with a minimum of oil. The bread was dependably fresh and firm textured. They were very hungry when they reached for the bread in the basket on the small chrome-legged table. Not many others were in the restaurant. It wasn't quite noon. They'd get to the train station as soon as possible.

"At least they know how to cook spaghetti. We had an old Greek living near us in Los Angeles at that place my stepfather rented on 103rd. I watched him fix his car on Sunday. He was always having trouble with his carburetor. Too cheap to get a rebuilt one. Now when I had my Lincoln...."

"You know I don't know a thing about automobiles."

In front of the restaurant the street was crowded. Only with difficulty did they manage to stay together. A few doors from the restaurant they stopped suddenly. In front of them was a butcher shop open to the street. From hooks hung the carcasses of various small animals with transparent pink flesh. "I know what it was I ate on Corfu. Do you remember? At the restaurant at Paleokastritsa? I had that meat on a skewer."

"It was tough."

"It was goat."

"I've told you to find out what you're eating."

She wailed, "I've never wanted to eat a little goat."

"Now you'll know better."

After they turned onto the street that ran at right angles to the main street, the crowds diminished. It was only a few blocks to the train station, and the train was due in less than half an hour. She remained disappointed. "I knew we should have taken the early train. We'll have so little time for Olympia."

"What is there to see there?"

"You know Olympia is where the first Olympic games were held."

"Why should I care?" He had worked as a millman during most of his thirty-four years in a tire plant. Before that he'd fought the Japanese in a New Guinea jungle. K-Rations, union dues, time and a half.... Put aside something in case there's a strike. He was a practical man by many estimates. But he had more curiosity than most college graduates. He believed in spending some time and money on travel. Foreign competition had precipitated his retirement; financial incentives ensued. Feeling still the damaged tendons and the bodily ills he owed to his long employment, he was willing to read the stories he suspected were written only for children. He suspected that in a few years his calloused hands would be like a child's again. She recalled windowed mahogany bookcases, a home that valued education and professional achievement. She could not remember when she did not know some of the Greek legends although to see and taste Greece was something she'd never permitted herself to imagine. Why were the white pear trees any different? The purple flowering trees were for ornamentation: Kokikia. Flowering Judas.

English poets visited Greece in the spring, not someone who had grown to womanhood in the 1940's. Someone who has first experienced menstruation in the Mid-West, remembering only words, not images, of the Ionian and Aegean Seas, can scarcely set her sights on Greece. She will be fortunate if she gets a glimpse of the Gulf of Mexico some August, Florida perhaps as aging sets in. Greece? Greece is words translated into English readers, Latin grammars. "Tomorrow translate the passage about Polyphemus." There was no illustration in the Latin book that caught the colors of the Ionian with Ithaca a speck on the horizon.

She had lived on words while a mother cautioned that her reading gave her a bad squint, ruined her face, left her staring into space. Words. And being in Greece she spelled out words like a child again. It was all images for her, suddenly, in a way it had never been growing up with that mother who did not believe her little girl should wear glasses. Now Constance Mittag, a fiftyish purveyor of rhetoric and literature to primarily adult students in an urban college of stolid post and beam construction set beside a freeway, pursued a travel sabbatical, would see Olympia, the acropolis at Athens, later. The colors and the old women leading donkeys on which the old men rode had already broken her heart on Corfu. She would look for Byron's carved name on the temple at Sounion.

The train wobbled against the tracks and carried only a few passengers. Outside the train windows the ploughed fields absorbed the even sunshine the tranquil day provided. For miles the reddish-brown soil appeared. She thought how many years these lands had been tilled. But the soil looked richer than any she had seen in the Mid-West and in California. When they stopped, it was at small villages. Children got on and rode to the next village and got off; they carried school books. Sometimes a woman wearing a head scarf would take the hand of a sturdy boy and lead him away.

"Used to be one of the men on my shift would race with trains. He got in the habit. Always late for work. Never gave himself enough time in the morning. And there was a place on the way to the plant where the train crossed the road. Almost every morning there'd be a train. And he'd race it to the crossing. He made it and would laugh about it when he got to work. He'd tell us about racing for that damned train. But one morning...."

"Oh, you've told me that story a hundred times."

Then at one station the man and woman and young girl got on the train. They sat up toward the front of the car, the girl and the woman on one seat and the man in the seat behind them. Their clothing looked as worn and threadbare as the train seat, and the woman and the girl just seemed to fold their hands and stare straight ahead as if lacking all curiosity about where they went or how along the way the soil that looked bloodied by human sacrifice was turned over. But the man began to twist his head and look around and finally he got up and walked forward in the car and out and was gone. There was a small bar ahead. Did he go there? It wasn't long before he returned and smiled at his companions. The woman was like a wrapped up pudding. When she boarded the train, her face had had comic strip, expressionless eyes. She wore colorless garments, grey, thick stockings, heavy shoes. Now she was sitting slightly bent with those thick shoes parallel to the floor.

The little girl was nine or ten, very slim, wearing dark garments that accentuated the drawn, small adult-like face. Her thin chin pointed toward her narrow chest and now she sat in about the same posture her mother maintained, her eyes straight ahead as if on some fixed point. She wore a little coat that was tight across her narrow back; it was as if she'd picked the wrong coat from the school cloakroom. She was nothing like the plump children with book bags who darted on and off the train. She seemed to have farther to go.

And the man approached them. Bradford sat on the aisle. When the man got close, smelling a bit of retsina, the cheap wine of Greece that reminded Constance of turpentine and cleaning paint brushes, he stuck out his hand to Bradford. He wore black pants, worn to an almost violet shade, the threads visible at the pockets and a dark stain where his hand--or some previous wearer's--had slid back and forth innumerable times. The pants were some sort of worsted originally, smoothed by usage. His belt too had lost its blackness at the button holes. His shirt was white and clean, open at the collar. The hand he put forth was thin. He could not speak English. They understood, "For the girl." And he pointed to the woman and the little girl forward in the car, staring straight ahead as if they couldn't bear to look back. He had a thin face, long, with unkempt, drooping moustache that with the heavy brows, gaunt cheeks exaggerated the severity and sadness of his mission. Large, hard eyes like big buttons reflected his concern, and facial wrinkles like a Greek tragic mask but thinner and longer. The wrinkles reiterated, "The little girl."

Bradford reached in his pocket and gave the man a large coin, and the man touched his hand and slid the coin into his worn pocket. He went back up and sat down behind the woman and child and in time he took the window seat and leaned his head against the window despite the motion of the train.

"He'll just spend the coin you gave him at the bar."

Bradford shrugged off her criticism.

"I wonder why they're on the train. They don't have any baggage. They must be on some day trip the way we are."

"Maybe they don't own much. Or are going to visit relatives."

"All right. It was nice of you, I suppose, to support whatever hope that man has. The only time I was ever hard up it was by choice. I resigned my teaching job--I'd taught in a little town in Kansas for a year--and went back to graduate school. I had only a few hundred dollars. My father screamed at me. All my friends were married and having their first children, making car payments, that sort of thing. And I worked so hard and had no car and no place of my own. If I had to share a stopped up shower again...."

"Well, I couldn't do it. I never used the G. I. Bill. The plant paid well. It was hard work. The overtime was killing. But I couldn't make that kind of money for sure, even with a college degree. I dropped out of high school because I didn't have nice clothes. It took me a long time to go back and finish after the war."

"I remember a friend getting her milk bottle off the window sill one morning during the Christmas holiday--we didn't have the money for vacations with our families. She was chipping off a little block of iced milk for her breakfast. She had quite a sense of humor. Up went her arms and she cried, 'How little can we accept? How little can we become accustomed to?'"

"I don't understand. I wanted to be making money. I don't understand you. To choose to be poor...."

The conductor banged open the heavy door at the front of the car, instantly amplifying the clacking of the train against the tracks. Then the enveloping noise subsided as the door closed behind him. At first, the script was obvious enough, even performed in Greek. The conductor wished to inspect the tickets of the little party of three. The man's ticket was handed back and apparently satisfactory. But there was a problem with the two tickets the woman had shown him, her own and the child's. Now the woman was looking up, her pudding figure animated. She was speaking rapidly. The man behind her burst in with a further volley to which the conductor responded. Their voices grew louder. The conductor's face flushed. He pointed at the little girl. Only the little girl appeared disinterested, looking straight ahead.

Another village showed its boundaries. It was larger than those they'd passed through. The station came into view. "Bradford, here's Olympia."

They found a taxi driver who drove them immediately to the ruins and pointed out where they were to enter. Though they hurried down the path, they arrived at closed gates. The ruins closed earlier than during the tourist season. All Bradford and Constance could do was lean against the gate and look down the trail to the ancient stadium where the trees were in some frenzy of springtime splendor. The flowering Judas was everywhere. Her companion didn't take his Nikon out of its case, but Constance did snap a picture of the pathway. "It's such a beautiful time to be here. I've talked to friends who have visited during the summer and had such a time with the heat. It's improbable," she admitted, "that I'll ever get here again in April, not on a day like this. Why can't we plan our lives more sensibly on the first time around?"

He wanted to know, "You think there'll be another chance?"

"You're the believer. Anyway, we can visit the museum. We have an hour or so before it closes. Then we'll have time for a leisurely walk back to the village. I like it here."

Her youngest was a runner. He had the build and carriage of the statuary that depicted Greek and, to her surprise, mostly Roman athletes. Ecclesiastes grumbled that the race is not to the swift. But young people have no business committing such commentary to heart; that book is for the runners past their prime, strollers that are content to snap pictures here and there and read all the inscriptions on museum mock-ups. The aging accept the fragments of a civilization in the way they have to put up with losing their hearing and suffering from bursitis.

Back on the train they'd ride all the way to Patras with no transfer to worry about. It was late afternoon, and they were glad they had eaten in Olympia.

"What do you think became of our little family?"

"Do we know that they're a family?"

"You think that man and woman might just have been traveling around together the way we do?"

He took her hand. "You never know. But I think the woman was the little girl's mother." After a pause, he continued, "You see, all that clatter was because the child's ticket wasn't right. That woman was trying to get her on for less money than the conductor thought she should have paid."

"How do you know all that?"

He looked out the window. "My mother used to do that to me. I was small for my age. When we lived in Los Angeles, my stepfather never used to give her enough money for the housekeeping. She saved every way she could. So she never paid full fare for me when we got on the street car, and sometimes the conductor would bawl her out."

"And you'd get embarrassed."

Ruefully, he nodded.

She looked back in time and saw him with the small Italian woman. He was a skinny blond with a German name, couldn't remember his own father, resented the step-father, baby brother, lack of money. He hadn't wanted to leave San Francisco where there was an adoring grandmother and his mother had brothers who bought him things and took him places.

She thought how hard it was to hold on to a perfect time. It was a day here and maybe just a few minutes there, coming back all chipped away by what had happened afterwards.

"I'm glad," she said, "that for this time here today, early April between Olympia and Patras, you are with me, Bradford."

7 Apr. 81 Patras - Athens
Up for b'fast & walk - to top of great stairway that dominates Patras for Harbor View. Atmosphere prevented good pics - We met the Australians there. They had carried up their gear on their backs. He wouldn't let her leave Australia with more than 10 pds. Then to square where we'd seen 2 fountains. Only one in good sunlight - Then to beautiful church I'd spotted from train - Paid hotel & bought food. Now on 11 am out of Patras for Athens. With young Australian couple --they'd had more trouble than we on trip to Olympia and got there too late even to get inside the museum.

8 Apr. 81 Athens
Arranged three day trips after being without & having such a time with buses in Pirgos - We'll be picked up at hotel for city tour this morning - Did have really good lemon-chicken-rice soup last night. The lamb was nothing special....

Short Stories by PJ