Free Enemy and Brother by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

one face to the other and then to me as if to plead the welcome. I could see in her the girl she would have been when Stephanou had left her—for war and revolution. But, oh, dear God, what would she see in him who was coming home—the dead man looking for a grave?
    Vasso brought us coffee which the old boys sipped noisily as though to dissipate Modenis’ brooding silence.
    The butcher drove up in his Chevrolet. Modenis put on his hat and raised himself from the chair. No one dared to help him, but each man grunted sympathetically. I stood up and moved the chair out of his way.
    He extended his hand to me. “I am sorry I was lacking in hospitality.”
    “Godspeed,” I said, although the word was bitter in my mouth.
    I walked far that day, crossing through the olive groves and climbing to the rocky cliffs above the Bay of Corinth. I was trying to walk off a sudden anger, or at least to understand it. I supposed it lay in the resuscitation of that dread feeling of being used, and of having got myself into a position where I could not avoid it: I was to be part of the welcome—I’d seen it in Vasso’s face—as though she had said, “I am glad you are here, someone of his caliber. You will be useful in his rehabilitation.”
    Or was it jealousy that ailed me? Of all the god-damned nonsense! I was jealous of his coming home to Vasso even as I had once been jealous of the relationship between him and Webb as we had gone north together. I thought then of the son who bore Vasso’s maiden name, Panyotis, and felt a satisfaction in the breach I presumed it manifested in her fidelity. Then how I castigated myself for that bit of nastiness! I was incapable of measuring honest sentiment to the depth of a handshake, I thought. I had never loved a woman I had touched or touched a woman whom I had loved. Pitiable if not funny. I had pitied myself too much and had rarely if ever been able to laugh at my own expense. For a flickering instant as I looked down on the dark, night-blue water, I asked myself at what Paul Stephanou was laughing that night when we had looked for Webb, both of us frantic—or so I had thought him as well as myself—for the safety of the man, only to discover him tossing on a sea of bliss.
    Christ in heaven! Was that not funny? I could no more laugh now, explaining the joke on myself to myself, than I was able at the time to see it that way. But the loathing I had felt at that instant for Webb and for the laughing Greek had, over the years, shifted its focus… I had come to loathe myself for the victim that moment had made of me.
    “The wretch, concentred all in self….” I said the words aloud even as they surfaced unbidden in my mind.
    I moved away from the precipice and turned my back on the sea, my mind clinging, much after its usual fashion, to the contemplation of some poet whose words I had plucked with apt timeliness from my subconscious as from a jewel box. Thus did I substitute ornament for truth. There was something in the exchange of correspondence between Scott and Byron I ought to explore, I told myself, a key perhaps to the puritanism behind the sham of the libertine.
    It was late afternoon when I returned to a much-changed village. Word had spread of Modenis’ mission, and by now the name of Paul Stephanou was on everybody’s lips. Women were home early from the fields, picking flowers from their gardens, or braiding their hair as they gossiped at the windows. Girls, most of them too young to remember him, were out in fresh frocks. When one of them said something, they would rush together to join in paroxysms of glee. They reminded me of nothing so much as undergraduates on a football Saturday. One had to suppose from this activity that there was a legend to the man returning home.
    Children were dispatched to the shrine where the road turned down to Kaléa. Outside the church a close-shaven young man was rehearsing a boys’ chorus in folk songs. I wandered among the men gathered at