Chapter 40
Leandros removed the stone holding the letter down and laid his large hand on the paper.
"Nekyomanteion has made us an offer on the occasion of Father's eightieth birthday. I've no idea how they found out that he would be eighty."
Alexandros put a jug of wine on the table. Leandros filled the gla.s.ses, which immediately misted over, diffusing the golden yellow sparkle of the wine.
"When Nekyomanteion Inc. was founded and the company bought up all the land around Acheron, they also acquired sixteen hectares of pastureland in the mountains from your father."
"Pastureland!" Dimitrios screeched contemptuously. "You couldn't have kept a dozen goats on it. Nothing but stones. That was the best deal he ever made!"
Leandros put on his gla.s.ses and, in a pedantic manner, read the letter out loud: " 'Kristos Katsuranis belongs to the group of privileged persons to whom we have made the unique and extraordinary offer: a free recording...' "-Leandros hesitated-" 'of his person at any prearranged time. This recording will be stored free of charge for a period of five years. After that period, the usual fee for such storage s.p.a.ce will be charged. A 33 1/3 percent discount will be given for the realization of every copy- including medical care of the same until its decease, the standard procedure, cremation etc...' " He moistened his lips and followed the text in the letter with his finger. " This is the most valuable present you can give a person-the gift of life." "
A pensive stillness followed.
"It's a bargain!" Leandros pointed out. Helena's words. I could almost hear her voice. "Up to now only the very rich have been able to afford it: the young Ona.s.sis, the fifth Rockefeller, King Charles and Lady Di, a few oil sheikhs, some politicians, a couple of actors... It's a bargain, believe me."
"What does Father have to say about all this?" Dimitrios asked. "Where is he, anyway?"
"He has gone to the cafe. He had a fight with Helena. Every day the same goings-on. Always the same. We had to fire another young girl yesterday. A good girl. She came from Papigon, up there in the hills, hardworking and capable. He was always after her, trying to grab at her under her skirts. Always the same. Now Helena has to do all the work alone again. Ah..." He became silent with a sigh.
"What does Father have to say about the offer?" Nikos asked.
"I haven't told him yet. We wanted to talk it over with you first."
"Such bargains are often the beginning of the end," Dimitrios inserted.
"Nonsense," Nikos said. "They probably have some leftover storage s.p.a.ce."
"I think the new Nekyomanteion will be as successful as the old one," I said. "When they've got their first few thousand persons stored, they'll earn a fortune in storage fees. Once such a recording exists, who would ever have it erased? Who would want to be the willful executioner of a favorite relative? Who would want to destroy hope of eternal resurrection of the flesh? Even if mathematicians say that it is, in principle, just not possible-when has faith ever been conquered by mathematics? Faith, love, hope-the three emotional pillars of mankind-shaken by a couple of dry formulas? Never! The relatives will pay the bill of Nekyomanteion Inc. like good citizens. Only when the person concerned can no longer be remembered in the hearts of those living will it perhaps be possible to delete his recording. Then and only then will he be able to rest in peace. But that has always been the case."
"Are you against this, then?" Nikos asked.
"No, I'm not."
"I don't know what the whole thing is about," Dimitrios said.
"It just means," I said, "that you can get together with someone for a few hours-with someone long since dead. You can talk to him, celebrate with him, be happy with him." Forgive me-I didn't know any better at the time.
Nikos shoved a piece of cheese into his mouth. "One of the greatest scientific achievements of all time. I'm all for it."
Dimitrios nodded.
"Me, too," he said.
Leandros shrugged his shoulders. "It's a bargain," he said.
"Have you the right to speak for Helena?" Nikos asked him mischievously.
Leandros looked at him helplessly.
"Please stop it, Nikos!" I said.
He raised his hands defensively. "I didn't really mean it like that."
Eurydice, bored by the grown-ups' talk, kicked the concrete wall surrounding the terrace with the tip of her plastic sandal. Suddenly, a large piece came loose and fell noisily down to the street below. Everyone stared, shocked at the hole in the wall. In the silence that followed, you could hear the shouting of the young boys playing ball at the other end of the quay.
Dimitrios suddenly burst into cackling laughter. "Don't worry," he said. "Father was only saving cement."
"Have you come to an agreement?" Helena asked. She had appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on her skirt. "It's a bargain."
And that in the end was our father's real reason, too, even if he did grumble that he would never let himself be "poked about" by a machine and suspected his daughter of having sold him to the "American capitalists" behind this "corpse-stripping company," as he called it. Just as a steady drop of water hollows out stone, the fact that it was a bargain succeeded in penetrating to the very depths of his consciousness, dispersing any doubts and reservations. Sometime during the following year, he agreed to the recording with one stipulation: I must accompany him to Acheron.
It was a clear morning in late spring. Sage and thyme were in bloom. Yellow broom had covered the slopes with gold and, here and there, the tranquil green of the countryside was broken by the blaze of pomegranate blossoms. We drove along the coastal road, along the mountain slopes, toward the north. The ocean glistened in the sun and embraced the coast with arms the color of emeralds. You can't see the rubbish from up here, I thought, the wasteful blessings of the age of plastic.
Father insisted on stopping a couple of times to rest and drink ouzo. I drank mine out of a gla.s.s with water. The water took on the milky color of the ouzo. Father, used to a life of prohibition, drank his out of a cup.
Just ever so slightly tipsy, we entered a small, unadorned church, lit two thin candles and pressed them into the sand holder near the altar. Stern-looking saints in gla.s.s-covered pictures gazed serenely down on us from across the centuries.
Shortly thereafter, we reached our destination.
Nekyomanteion Inc. was a subsidiary of a multinational corporation comprising above all a chain of homes for the aged, a senior citizens' travel agency, geriatric hospitals and funeral homes. In order to exploit the genius loci, it had bought up a huge piece of land east and southeast of the village of Parga and transformed it into a park. The land between Igoumenitsa and Preveza, which had represented the end of the world of the living eons ago, had always been a barren, mountainous region. Even on sunny days, it seemed dark and gloomy. Innumerable caves led deep into the earth. The small river that flows down from the mountains and joins the ocean southeast of Parga is called Acheron. It was the river boundary between this life and the next. Two and a half millennia ago, the ancient Nekyomanteion had been situated on the hill overlooking the sh.o.r.e of the hereafter.
The modern Nekyomanteion had very little in common with the ancient one-except that they both induced the rich to part with their money. It was a combination of a home for the aged and a hospital, a gigantic hi-tech plant and a nuclear research center. The buildings blended with their surroundings and were built partly underground. Cypress groves, fast-growing eucalyptus trees, well-kept lawns, paths and park benches predominated. The company had had a nuclear power plant built in the Bay of Preveza to extract the salt from the sea water and to supply the power for the equipment that produced the recordings and the copies. Rematerialization in the turbulence chamber used up enormous amounts of energy.
The whole landscape had been transformed. When there was enough water, a generous forestation program was started. The result looked more like Hollywood than Hades-at least at first glance.
The formalities were quickly settled. In spite of this, we had to wait. We paced impatiently up and down
Kristos groped for my arm with his small strong hand and looked up at me imploringly.
"Will I have to take all my clothes off?"
Bewildered by the simple, but unexpected question, I didn't know what to say and just stared at my father's face. How old you've grown, Father, I thought, with a touch of dismay at the pitiless frailty of human flesh. At the same time, I became aware that I had not really looked at his face for years, thoughtlessly taking for granted its familiarity. With great effort, I pulled myself together to answer his question.
"I don't know, Father. We'll ask the doctor-if you think it's important."
The anxiety faded from his blue-gray eyes, surrounded by innumerable wrinkles; the corners of his mouth twitched; his hand slid from my arm and fell to his side.
"But you'll wait for me, Son, no matter what they do to me. Promise!"
"Of course I'll wait for you, Father. It won't take long anyway."
A friendly middle-aged doctor, who introduced himself as Dr. Kaminas, accompanied him. The examination lasted more than four hours! I wandered aimlessly through the grounds of Nekyomanteion. I had never seen so many decrepit people in my life. Most of the park benches were occupied by patients, who were surrounded by visitors looking very ill at ease. An electric wheelchair drove past me with its whining motor. An old man was sitting upright in it, dressed in a painfully correct, but terribly old-fas.h.i.+oned, cream-colored suit. He seemed in some way or other very familiar to me. I was convinced I had seen him many times on television a long time ago. However, I could not remember his name. The patient lifted his straw hat and greeted me with a nod of his head, but he didn't look at me. He gazed straight ahead at the path in front of him. His cramped left hand clutched the controls. His face was distorted by the strain of being courteous, and saliva ran out of one corner of his mouth, over his chin and the starched collar of his apricot-colored s.h.i.+rt.
A portly old man, his head shaved bald and with an enormous mustache, sat on another bench. I was certain I had seen his face quite often in the newspapers, but that would have been ten or fifteen years ago. A well-known lawyer? A politician, perhaps? I couldn't remember his name. He sat slumped against the back of the bench, his heavy head bent backwards, his mouth wide open. His breath rattled, and a transparent plastic tube was suspended from one of his nostrils. Foamy red mucus bubbled through the tube. He was deathly pale, and his eyes stared unseeingly into the sky. One of his large, waxlike hands lay in the lap of an older, very elegantly dressed, woman. She was holding his hand tightly, and her eyes were red from crying. She furtively dabbed them with her handkerchief. A young, good-looking nurse in a tight-fitting uniform with a red collar stood behind the elderly couple. She smiled encouragingly at me. Irritated by the contrast, I turned quickly away and fled back to the reception hall, accompanied by the ever-present sound of the lawn sprinkler... pft, pft, pft.
"It really didn't cost anything," Father cried loudly as he came out of the entrance to the reception hall, flanked by Dr. Kaminas and a nurse. He seemed extremely satisfied and a little drunk. His eyes were slightly glazed. Probably the anesthetic, I thought, as he had really not drunk that much ouzo.
"Did you have to take all your clothes off?" I asked him as we walked to the car.
"Eh?" He cupped his hand to his ear and pinched one eye closed as if in some mysterious way this would help his diminis.h.i.+ng power of hearing.
"Did you have to take all your clothes off?" I repeated.
"No, they only p.r.i.c.ked my finger." He raised his hand to show me his left index finger and rubbed the tiny spot with his thumb. "Then, I must have dozed off. When I awoke, everything was finished. I have no idea just how they did it, but Dr. Kaminas said they had taken care of everything."
He fell asleep in the car on the journey home. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. His hair, almost white, was still as thick and unmanageable as the mane of a wild donkey. His dark brown weather-worn skin, which stretched over his temples and cheekbones, made his features look like those of a mummy. His toothless mouth was slightly open, and the ridiculous Charlie Chaplin mustache, the size of an enormous housefly and with not a trace of gray in it, looked just like that of Dimitrios. His scrawny neck seemed lost in the collar of his s.h.i.+rt, which had become too large for him. My father-I said to myself and was overcome for a moment with a tenderness that I had never felt for him before, which, in this fleeting moment, moved me almost to tears.
The Nekyomanteion Inc. offer had included, among other things, the admission of the old man to the company's home for the aged. Leandros had not dared discuss the matter on that Sat.u.r.day afternoon, because he knew that aside from his wife, no one could be persuaded to accept the idea.
"It's all right for you, you don't have all the trouble and worry with him," Helena complained, when the subject was finally brought up. "You don't have him around all the time!"
"You've got a hotel with sixteen beds," Dimitrios replied sternly, "and no room for Father?"
"He's your father, too! You visit him three, at the most four times a year. Nikos and Apostoles, too. But I have to put up with him day after day. He drives me mad the way he runs after the maids and talks absolute nonsense to the guests when he's drunk."
It was true, he was stubborn and cantankerous. He always had been. It was our mother's fault. Aretti was her name. She had put up with him all those years and had cared for him lovingly, but in silent reproach and bitterness. She had died eight years ago. There would be no reunion with her-at least no electronically induced reunion. Helena had long since taken over her role-but forever scolding, always impatient and severe. He resisted her rod of iron and had bitter fights with her, which he readily brought to a head in front of the guests. He enjoyed the open battle that his wife had never allowed-at least not in front of others. And since his hearing was no longer what it once was, which he, naturally, like most people who are a little deaf, was not prepared to admit, it was sometimes very embarra.s.sing-especially, when he loudly told Greek guests just what he thought of Orientals, when guests from the Orient were sitting only three tables away. It was even more embarra.s.sing when he shouted from the toilet that there was no paper left, in a voice so loud the pigeons on the quay were startled into flight.
"No," we all agreed. "You and Leandros inherited the hotel Father built with his own hands, and this is his home. Who knows how much longer he has to live."
"Your father has more life in him than all three of you put together! He'll live to be a hundred," she screamed.
He didn't live to be a hundred. The same year, shortly after his eighty-first birthday, he left us silently and without much ado. It had never been his way of doing things during his lifetime. It was a sunny afternoon, the sea air was cool, but the final lingering rays of suns.h.i.+ne from an Indian summer still warmed the white wall of the cafe, where four old men were sitting together. Kristos had his chair tipped back with his head resting against the cafe wall, his hat pulled down over his forehead and his mouth slightly open. The reflection of the sun on the water of the harbor painted billowing circles of light on the underside of the awning and on the stubbly beards of the men. The autumn wind swept the first dried leaves of the old mulberry tree over the pavement of the jetty. The plastic worry beads clicked lazily in the sun.
Later it became cooler, and they got the game-Tavli, with its dice and well-worn stones-out of the cupboard in order to play a few rounds as they did every day.
Kristos was never to play that game with them again.
Time pa.s.sed. A good many modern ugly concrete buildings had to be blown up or torn down with great difficulty. To the delight of the environmentalists, long stretches of highway slicing through the landscape crumbled. Everything had been tried, poison and paint, but the spores of the tiny plants were everywhere. They were hardy little organisms that had ventured into a totally new environment taking root in every crack, in every opening, camouflaging the ugly concrete with a delicate veil of red and ocher.
Exactly six years after the recording had been made, the first annual bill arrived for, as it stated, the "storing of data for the creation of a copy of Mr. Kristos Katsuranis." It was three times as high as the electricity bill for the hotel.
Helena talked to Dimitrios, Nikos and me, in that order, for more than an hour on the phone. I could imagine the side of her hand chopping down again and again like an executioner's axe-a Greek expression of unyielding determination used to hack the opponent's argument to pieces and destroy it.
"Listen, Helena," I said, "there's really no point in shouting at me. We all agreed to accept the offer. If I remember correctly, you were the first one to mention that it was a bargain."
"You can't just simply have Father deleted," Dimitrios said. "As far as I can remember, we're obliged to have at least one copy made. Have you asked what that would cost yet?"
We were informed that it would cost a fortune in spite of the generous discount.
The family held council.
"I knew this would happen," I said. But that was not true. It's easy to say such things afterwards. I could never have predicted the horror to come. Certainly not what really happened in the end.
We agreed to pay the storage costs between us and save up the necessary amount in order to have Father brought back to life on his one hundredth birthday.
It was a bright, windy day. During the night, there had been a violent thunderstorm, and the hot, oppressive haze that had been hanging over the coastline for days had disappeared. The ocean waves trembled at the touch of the cool, northwest wind, which also rumpled the silver manes of the olive trees. And on both sides of the road, the oleander trees nodded at us encouragingly.
The women had been cooking, roasting and baking for days, the men had brought wine and spirits and set them to cool. Picnic coolers were filled to the brim with fruit, tomatoes and cuc.u.mbers. There were gla.s.ses and jars full of salt and pepper, onions and garlic, sage and rosemary, oregano and basil. There was goat's cheese steeped in a salt dip, the finest olive oil and fresh bread. After much discussion as to just where everything had to be stowed, the trunks of the cars resembled sumptuous treasure chests and there was a pleasant fragrance of herbs everywhere. Then the six-car convoy set off on its journey, with Nikos in the lead, Dimitrios in the middle and me bringing up the rear. Three generations of Katsuranises with great expectations. I was slightly afraid of what was to come.
Nevertheless, Nekyomanteion Inc. had the situation completely under control-biochemically speaking, that is. After being welcomed with a c.o.c.ktail of our choice, I found myself chuckling stupidly and thinking fondly of the "good old days" that I had, in fact, found unbearable at the time.
We were led to Elysium No. 14, a pavilion about six by four meters in size. It consisted of a roofed terrace open on three sides, set with tables and chairs and surrounded by thick hedges; a s.p.a.cious bathroom; toilets; a medical room with a direct underground link to the central office of the hospital. There was also a kitchen, elaborately equipped with dishes and cutlery, a refrigerator, a microwave oven, a sideboard and a dishwasher. The women immediately started to set the table for the feast, while the men poured themselves one ouzo after another at the small bar. Soft music emerged from hidden loudspeakers. Somewhere, the sweet notes of a nightingale sounded the hour-it was, I a.s.sume, a digital recording. The reunion with the loved one was scheduled to take place at noon. However, because of the violent storm during the night, the technicians had not been able to start the copy until morning for fear of atmospheric electricity. It would take a while, they declared. I walked over to the technical center with Bastos and Pindar, the grandsons of Dimitrios. We met old people everywhere, mostly in wheelchairs and accompanied by nurses. Some of them looked terribly frail and decrepit.
"Probably copies," Pindar whispered, completely awestruck.
"They've been brought back to life," Bastos corrected him in a reprimanding tone.
The central foyer radiated an atmosphere of luxury and wealth and was as cool as a catacomb. The man at the reception desk raised his eyebrows in question.
"Kristos Katsuranis," I said.
He took one of the microphones and spoke with exaggerated exactness -"Kat-sur-an-is, Kris-tos." The following words appeared on the screen beside his terminal: KATSURANIS, KRISTOS.
August 18, 1953-October 23, 2034 RECORDED.
June 2, 2034 Simultaneously, in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, a green field flashed with the words: COPY ALIVE.
I took a deep breath. "It's time," I said. "We must go back."
Bells chimed softly, and a cylindrical capsule appeared in a round opening. The attendant pulled it out and handed it to me over the counter. It felt hard and cold, and I quickly handed it to Bastos, who weighed it professionally in his hand and said, "It's like a grenade." He had just finished his military service.
"Is that Grandfather?" Pindar asked.
I examined the engraving on the edge and nodded.
Suddenly, we all had to laugh. The attendant gave us an exasperated look and shook his head reproachfully, as he pushed the cartridge back into the opening and entered a code into his terminal.
We needn't have hurried at all. It was another half hour before anything happened. Then-as always-we heard him before we saw him.