The Firewalkers Read online

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  Contents

  Francis King

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Francis King

  The Firewalkers

  Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011.

  ‘One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov.’ Beryl Bainbridge

  When, in obedience to a regulation of the time, I submitted the manuscript of this jeu d’esprit to my then employers, the British Council, I was faced with an ultimatum. I could resign and publish the book under my own name; I could stay in the British Council and publish it under another name; or I could stay in the British Council and not publish it at all. It was clear that it was the last of these three alternatives that the Council favoured.

  There were two reasons for this severity. The first – and how ludicrous it seems in these libertarian days, nearly thirty years later – was that the book dealt (as one of the British Council officers responsible for acting as its censors put it to me) with ‘murky and, to many people, distasteful aspects of sexuality’. The second was that it was all too plainly a roman à clef.

  I opted to remain in the British Council – where I continued for a further decade – and to publish the book under a pseudonym. Why Frank Cauldwell? Cauldwell had been the maiden name of one of my great-grandmothers; but, more important, Frank Cauldwell had been the name of the young man, in many ways identifiable with myself, who was one of the characters in my first (and, since it contained an incident of fellatio, then considered shocking) novel, To the Dark Tower. I was vain enough to wish to leave a clue to my identity for anyone who cared enough to discover it. No one did.

  Some of my close friends were, of course, privy to the secret. I was nervous that one of these, the flamboyant prototype of my central character Colonel Grecos, might react to my representation of him either with a ferocious row, of the kind that he always relished, or with a libel action. Fortunately, he adopted neither of these courses but, instead, marched around Athens, the book tucked under a bony elbow, to announce to everyone whom he met: ‘I have been immortalised in a book.’ As subsequent events have shown, he was in no need of immortalisation. Clearly born immortal, he can still be encountered in Athens, not a day older than when I first met him at the firewalking ceremony with which my novel opens. Though no one who does not know him will believe this, my portrait of him is composed without the smallest exaggeration.

  Another character, Mrs Tullett, was an amalgamation of two English women then living in Athens, who – like many people who share basic traits – could not abide each other. When the book appeared, one of the couple, X, remarked to me: ‘I loved your book. But weren’t you just a little bit naughty about poor Y?’ I then encountered Y, who said to me: ‘I loved your book. But weren’t you a little bit naughty about poor X?’

  Cecil was based on Arthur Jefferies, a rich, cosmopolitan American, who owned a London gallery devoted to the work of primitive artists and who, in a fit of depression brought on by his expulsion from Venice, where he had lived in reginal splendour, took the wholly unnecessary step of killing himself. I now see that my fictional portrait, executed so many years before that tragic event, brings out the self-disgust and self-destruction then latent in him like the virus of a fatal illness.

  Lady Aaronson was derived from Dorothy Mayer, a writer of historical biographies, also now dead, who was the first wife of Sir Robert Mayer, founder of the Robert Mayer Concerts for Children. A charming German photographer and artist, Jo von Kalkreuth – I still treasure a small painting of two Greek sailors, arms around each other’s waists, that he presented to me when I was languishing in hospital – gave me the idea for Götz. Sophie Landerlöst was based on the wife of Sir Clifford Norton, then ‘our man in Athens’. Her nude bathing party really took place, at a time when naturism, like homosexuality, was generally regarded as at best comic and at worst immoral. Lady Norton had an admirably robust contempt for convention, which endeared her to the Greeks.

  Other real-life people make brief appearances under their own names. Among these are Moore Crossthwaite, subsequently ‘our man in Beirut’; Daphne (Lady) Bath, later Daphne Fielding, writer of sprightly biographies; and Dora Stratou, founder and directrice of a Greek folk-dance company.

  Rereading the book after so many years, I once again experienced the exhilarating sense of liberation that came to me, a prim and prudish young man all but garotted by my invisible stiff-collar of upper-middle-class English do’s and dont’s, on first setting foot in an Athens not yet ruined by tourism and the greed and rudeness that tourism engenders. When I returned to England on my first leave, Angus Wilson remarked to me at a party: You’ve become a different person.’

  ‘Different? How?’ I asked. ‘You’ve come out of your refrigerator,’ he replied.

  My experience in publishing a book under a pseudonym was the exact opposite of Doris Lessing’s in the case of her recent ‘Joan Somers’ novels – first turned down by a number of publishers and then cold-shouldered by critics previously enthusiastic about any work that bore her own name. I was not of course as famous as Doris Lessing – nor, indeed and alas, am I now. But my first three books had been praised sufficiently highly – on the basis of them Charles Snow chose me as one of his ‘six bright hopes’ for the future – for my fourth, The Dark Glasses, to be treated sniffily. Clearly, some people thought that I was getting above myself. In contrast, when The Firewalkers appeared as a first novel by someone totally unknown, all the reviewers went out of their way to be kind and generous.

  Many years after the publication of The Firewalkers – which appeared, incidentally, under the courageous imprint of John Murray and not of my normal publishers, Longmans, who were as nervous of it as the British Council – I went to a cocktail party given by Harry Morris, an old friend, now dead. Harry brought over to me a young-old man in a dark-grey suit, with sleek, carefully parted hair. The young-old man was, Harry told me, a Foreign Office colleague of his, who had recently been en poste in Athens. ‘Are you the Francis King who wrote The Man on the Rock?’, he asked. The aggressive tone should have warned me. I confessed that I was. ‘I read it the other day and I’m afraid I must tell you that I don’t think you’ve understood Greece and the Greeks at all.’ I tried to appear neither rattled nor nettled, but my face must have looked like t
hat of a mother who has just been told that her child is a monster. Then he went on: ‘Now there’s one novel about Greece and the Greeks that really gets them. You won’t have heard of it. I found it quite by chance in a church jumble-sale in our village. It’s called The Firewalkers. Do look out for it.’ ‘I wrote it,’ I said. But of course he did not believe me, and I had to call Harry over for confirmation.

  That my little book ‘really gets’ Greece and the Greeks in all their extraordinary diversity is something that I myself should never claim for it. Rather, I see it as an album of snapshots, taken in the brilliant sunshine of Athens before its Smog Age set in and of my new-found liberation at the moment when my personal Smog Age had dissipated. The snapshots will, I hope, convey something both of a vanished paradise and of a vanished self.

  Francis King

  Chapter One

  THIS is a story, not about myself, but about an old Greek and an ugly German who seemed to have nothing in common but their poverty and an unsatisfied craving to be loved. It is also a story about exile: that exile from country or class which people choose in order not to have to pay the debt of conformity which country or class exacts from them. Of such people Theodore Grecos and Götz Joachim—and indeed myself—seem to be typical representatives.

  The three of us first came together one Ascension Day at a village called Langada in Macedonia, where we had each gone separately to see a religious sect, the Anastanarides, walking on fire. I had borrowed a bicycle to cover the twelve miles out from Salonica and since these were Greek roads I inevitably arrived late. However, since these were also Greek firewalkers, my lateness did not matter. As I stepped off my bicycle—or, rather, was flung off it—in a square where the mud had been worn by farm-carts into ridges and then baked hard by the sun, a ‘Hey, Johnny’ approached.

  ‘Hello, boy,’ he shouted.

  Perhaps when I am ten years older I shall not mind being called boy; now I dislike it.

  ‘Hello,’ I answered coldly.

  He was like any old Macedonian peasant, but for the expansiveness of his manner, his obviously transatlantic tie and the wide-brimmed brown felt hat which he wore on the back of his head. He had on, a black suit, a gold chain looping from one pocket of the waistcoat to another across his paunch, and a pair of heavy brown boots. The ring on his wedding finger had a diamond in it.

  ‘You come for the firewalking?’

  ‘Yes. Has it begun yet?’

  ‘Begun? Say, are you joking, boy?’

  ‘They told me it would begin at eleven.’

  ‘You come with me. I bring you to the house of the Anastanarides.’

  He approached the bicycle and I thought he was going to take it from me; but, instead, he began to ease himself cautiously on to the cross-bar until, satisfied, he exclaimed: ‘O.K., boy! Let’s go.’ I was already sweating and breathless from the twelve miles I had covered, but I pushed off and somehow managed to keep the bicycle moving in the direction I was told. We must have looked curious, the old man sitting dignified and benign, while I panted and swore behind him, occasionally putting a leg to the ground as the bicycle jolted over.

  Eventually we reached a courtyard, full of cars, people, policemen and dogs: ‘All right, mister! Stop! Stop!’ But the brakes on the bicycle had never functioned properly and we ended up on top of two large Salonica women in black who were seated glumly on a couple of straight-backed wooden chairs, waiting for something to happen. Outraged, they continued to smooth their skirts with podgy heavily be-ringed hands for at least five minutes after the accident. I looked about me. The American Consul had climbed into a tree from which he was taking snapshots and a number of bedraggled children were peering into the windows of the car in which the French Consul and his family were eating either a late breakfast or an early lunch. ‘Plenty people,’ my old man said; and a priest who came to my literature classes hurried over to explain: ‘Everyone is here because the Bishop said that the Anastanarides are heretics and no one should come.’

  ‘Ought you to be here?’

  ‘I am here as an observer,’ he replied in dignified reproof.

  I remembered the story of the last time a priest had been present as an observer at the ceremony. He was from the village itself, and he had taken his wife with him to support him as he delivered a solemn address to the assembled villagers on the sin of such idolatrous practices. But suddenly, as the Anastanarides danced over the fire to the sound of pipes and drums, the devil entered into his wife and she was away too, capering over the red-hot cinders, her shoes and stockings off and her skirt above her knees. That night the priest chased her with an axe, and the next morning the villagers chased them both from the village because of the scandal.

  ‘Come, mister! You want to see inside the house?’

  I had noticed that around the courtyards there were a number of shacks, rooted with either corrugated iron or bamboos, and into one of these I was now taken, after my ‘Hey, Johnny’ had explained in Greek to the two policemen at the door that I was an important member of the British Embassy staff. I only hoped that the two policemen had not witnessed our arrival on the ramshackle bicycle. There was only one room in the hut, and it was full of the smoke of incense so that, at first, I had nothing but an impression of vague, cow-like forms slumped around the walls while before an ikon there was kneeling a figure of an almost superhuman stature. Apart from the smell of the incense, there were the smells of human bodies, of smoke and wet clothes (it had been raining in the early morning). Everyone was murmuring but it was impossible to tell whether in conversation or prayer. My ‘Hey, Johnny’ said in a loud voice: ‘These people, no education—no education at all! Dirty! Pah!’

  The figure kneeling before the ikon turned and hissed: ‘Sh!’; and I at once realised that this was not a Greek but a Northerner.

  The most important fact about Götz Joachim then, as now, seemed to me to be his quite extraordinary ugliness. I have met other men who were grubby or had harelips or bit their fingernails till they bled, and yet were not repulsive; so that perhaps it was merely the combination of all these physical defects that made it so difficult for one to look at him for long. Women, who are often attracted by ugliness, recoiled from him in horror; and I noticed that male Greeks, who are always patting one another in a comradely fashion, never patted Götz. As he turned round to hiss at us, it was of course his harelip that first caught my notice; then his extraordinary, wayward nose, which seemed to have been broken twice in such a way that one nostril was now double the size of the other; and finally his colouring, of that albino whiteness that seems almost pink—pink hair, pink eyebrows, pink eyelashes. He was wearing a tartan wind-jacket, under which one could see a roll-top sailor’s jersey, blue jeans so tight that it looked as if his enormous buttocks would at any moment burst the seams, and a pair of brown canvas gym-shoes through one of which a toe could be seen protruding. He now returned to his devotions with what was an obviously genuine piety: kissing the ikon, crossing himself and lighting a candle for which he dropped a thousand drachmae note into the chipped kitchen pie-dish that had been placed there for this purpose. At last he hoisted himself upright, hitting his head on the ceiling so that the corrugated iron sheet rumbled like thunder, again crossed himself and joined the entranced forms slumped around the smoke-blackened walls.

  ‘Hey, Marika,’ my friend shouted at an. old woman in Greek. ‘When are you going to dance?’

  The old woman patted the mud floor, on which she was squatting, with a shrivelled claw: ‘When the Lord bids us.’

  ‘She says they dance when God tells them to dance,’ the ‘Hey, Johnny’ explained. ‘These very ignorant people.’

  ‘Sh!’ The German was glancing up at us through the cloud of incense with such an intensity that I at once hurried out of the hut, into the rain, that had again begun to spin across the courtyard.

  ‘You want to hear lecture?’ The ‘Hey, Johnny’ pursued me indefatigably. ‘No good here. You get wet.’

 
‘What lecture?’

  ‘Colonel Grecos—he come from Athens. He talk about Anastanarides. In the village school. He very clever guy. But you no understand.’

  ‘I’ve been in Greece for two years.’

  ‘Never mind! I translate for you. Where’s that son-of-a-bitch of a bicycle?’

  This was my chance. I had spotted the bicycle in the hands of some children who were taking it in turns to wheel each other round on it, and calling out ‘ Goodbye! Thank you!’ I raced towards it, grabbed it and pedalled off before I could be followed. The last I heard from my friend was a despairing shout of ‘Hey, Johnny! Hey!’

  In the schoolroom there were the same odours of human bodies, smoke and wet clothes; but instead of incense there was the smell of the overflowing drain across which I had had to leap in order to get in. I perched myself on top of a desk beside an old man huddled deep into a vast sheep-skin jacket, and then looked at the platform, only to grow uncomfortably conscious that the lecturer was in turn looking at me, having stopped speaking to do so. My first impression was of a personal dignity so great as really to be formidable. He was not a handsome man—his nose was too long, and the girlishly pointed chin was inappropriate under the massive cast of the rest of his features—but he was a man at whom one could look with admiration, wherever one met him. His complexion was bad, being of the colour and texture of gruyère cheese, with warts instead of holes in it; his close-clipped hair was white and stiff, and his white eye-brows bristled as thick as his moustache. He was wearing a threadbare but well-cut suit of grey flannel, which had sea-shells sewn on it in place of buttons; instead of a tie, a scarf, navy blue with the figures of sailors on it, was knotted jauntily about his long, scrawny neck. He made extravagant gestures as he talked, waving both of his hands. Altogether the effect he made was at once absurd, impressive and touching in a way one could not explain.