Storymania - Trapdoors by Kevin Hadley

Trapdoors
Kevin Hadley

Somewhere the one-armed man is patiently waiting. Somewhere in my memory, he stands in the shade of a roadside eucalyptus tree, poised, ready to set off down that deserted road, one arm swinging in time with his sorrowful step, the moment I summon him up. What strikes me now about my single, fleeting encounter with him more than twenty years ago is that he wasn’t actually one-armed at all. He had two arms, it’s just that there was something badly wrong with the other arm that reduced it to an insignificance. As I think of him, and it happens whenever I hear this sad song, he’s coming back to me; he’s coming back in two versions - then and now. It’s always then and now, that’s the curse of memory, growing old and quietly dying, just as we do.
How did this all come about? At that time, I had been reading about a one-armed boxed called Jack Walkworth; a champion pugilist, fighting in Sussex fairground prize fights at the end of the 19th Century, who had beaten all-comers with what had been recorded as a ‘Quixotic windmill style’. In the face of such turbulence, each staggering holiday drunkard, egged on by his harsh-tongued seductive damsel, had soon come a cropper. Even the more sober, fleet-footed, flintlock-fisted opponents had had no answer. Having just finished a paperback on the Bermuda Triangle, I’d come across the Sussex tale in an encyclopaedia borrowed from the library of the Kalloni School of English – the library being a single dusty shelf of random treasures discarded by tourists and ex-teachers. On those autumnal aquatint Aegean nights, I’d pour myself an ouzo and, soaking in the quiet happiness of life, sit at the table, prop up the hardback tome and open it at a random page to read, illuminated by the 60-watt yellow bulb that shone down like a fading sun on my reveries.
One such evening, I’ll have turned on the CD player and been listening to the sad song. Yes…it’s coming back to me…that’s how it was… The One-Armed Boxer song. Again, that same refrain, ‘I thought I did the right thing by slipping away…the ache that’s making me ache has gone for the day’, crooned by Karl Denver in his soft yodelling voice.
Then, one day not long after, into that coincidental corner of a coincidental universe shuffled the one-armed man who perpetually waits in my memory to be summoned up to begin his walk. He was made real. Sometimes you get the feeling that the world is being conducted from afar.
One Sunday afternoon, I’d been for a walk in the wild herb maquis hills that rise above the road that turns past the Orthodox Monastery and leads out towards the villages of the rocky north coast where they play the saddest bouzouki of anywhere in Greece. On my return journey I’d passed a man coming the other way. As was the norm in the area, we’d exchanged a friendly ‘Ya’ as our paths had crossed. Something had caught my eye as he’d approached, but politeness had dictated that it wasn’t until he’d passed that I’d turned and taken a longer look. One arm was hanging limp by his side; the other swinging, it seemed, unnaturally, perhaps in a compensatory manner. A moment later, the man turned to glance at me and in so doing curtailed my stares. Had he felt my eyes on his back? Or was he merely doing the same as me – turning to catch a quick glimpse of something exotic?
One minute in the ocean of time that is forever and I never saw the man again. And yet, he has never left me – never escaped the cool, shaded vaults of Hellenic memories that lie in a subterranean corner of my universe of memories – the one scattered with crystal-walled palaces through which voices will never be heard…Arcadian landscapes of carefree teenage languor…wooden-housed hamlets on the eastern fringes of the civilized world…a universe perfumed by the forgotten childhood smells that are irrecoverable, but which surround the frozen heart with a precarious warmth.
“Ah…malaka…that was Panagiotis…” Kostas informed me when I told him about the fleeting encounter on the road back into town. “Panagiotis…” I repeated, trying to copy the enunciation. “He’s famous locally,” my young friend said, lighting one of his charcoal-filtered cigarettes as he tip-toed into the story. “His great uncle, that’s who he’s named after. Panagiotis Toundas…” He paused, just to confirm that, although I hadn’t the foggiest idea to whom he was referring, he hadn’t lost me. “He was a great man, I think you would say a legend…from the Smyrna School…” Kostas took a drag of his cigarette, waited a moment, then breathed five perfectly formed smoke rings into the afternoon air. “So, he was a famous school teacher then…from Smyrna?” With the last word, I felt I was showing some knowledge – I knew what Smyrna was, more than a city, more than a lost world; a city I had come to understand was on a par with Alexandria, Odessa or Timbuktu. Kostas, was in no mood to celebrate my knowledge however; instead he gave a hearty laugh.
I looked at him questioningly. “The Smyrna School,” he said, softening his tone, “it’s where rebetiko started…one of the places…but really the place. Toundas was a mandolin player and then when there was the great fire and everyone had to flee, he ended up in Athens like everyone else. And there you have it you see, he took his childhood with him…the place, the port with the Armenian and Jewish merchants…the bed in the little room in the house and outside the chestnut trees that brought the ghosts to life on dark winter nights You have to create your own imagination of it…magical imagination…because every childhood place is magical. It was all in his music you see…so they say. His brother was with him on that journey to Athens, but he threw his mandolin into the sea and said he would never play again. But they say he couldn’t play much anyway… His brother just wanted to go home, and he almost did…got as far as he could…and ended up back here, as close as you can get to home…one that’s gone forever…”
Kostas, once he got carried away by one of his stories, would forget about his beloved charcoal filters – that is, until the column of ash had almost burned down to his fingers. Then he would suddenly notice what he called the smouldering of time, flick the ash onto the floor, and take a final puff. This ritual he dutifully observed, completing it by blowing another five regulation smoke rings into the still air.
“Now, Panagiotis, our Panagiotis, he was a good bouzouki player himself. The family, you know…well they all played…grew up playing…everyone adding their own layer of history to the handed down tradition. But obviously with Panagiotis, it’s all come to an end. A withered branch on the tree of history…” Kostas said, slowly, sadly, shaking his head. “Malaka…”
Had I been relating the tale, there might have been pathos creeping in at this point, but Kostas always charted the waters of sentimentality skilfully. Before the ‘withered branch’ could become mawkish, he ventured on.
“He had a sister you see, Panagiotis…younger than him…they all loved her…and they used to go and visit their widowed aunt up in the hills often. After their visits, they’d wander back into town carrying bread or olives or bags of tomatoes to last them until their next visit. One afternoon they were coming back and it was just getting dark…. that time when the light starts to fade and your eyes…well, you can’t trust what you see in front of you… They weren’t that far from town and he was walking along with his sister hand in hand and a car hit her. One of the farm workers…just an accident…thought they were shadows of trees…that’s what he said. She was killed. And Panagiotis has held onto her hand all the time. The force had been so much it had ripped his shoulder out and destroyed the nerves. But he’d never let go…that’s all that matters. They said they could do his shoulder for him…wanted to send him to Athens to some specialist and had all the money to pay for it…but he wouldn’t do it. Never played the bouzouki again of course…”
Kostas paused to take out another cigarette, tapping it on the packet as he did so.
“Never played the bouzouki again…but I suppose he doesn’t actually need to play it…it’s always playing somewhere….”
As Kostas lit up, I thought about my brief encounter - the man I’d walked past that afternoon a couple of weeks before. I imagined our passing, trying to picture it again exactly as it had been.
“Did you notice,” Kostas asked, “that he swings his arm?” “I did…” “And did you wonder why?” “Compensation for the arm that doesn’t…” “You know what I think…and it’s just my thought…I think he’s walking hand in hand with Myrto still…if you look, you can almost see her beside him…”
I thought back to that Sunday afternoon. Yes, perhaps Kostas was right, although I was aware of the disturbing tendency we all have to add meaning where none exists when seduced by tempting ideas. But, perhaps there was a rhythm to the good arm…
“You saw her, maybe… I can see it in your face. But you Englishmen, you don’t like to see ghosts where they don’t exist…it’s your fear isn’t it…your great fear…that people will think you’re mad… It’s different here…it’s a deep shame to deny the ghosts that exist…to deny the melodies that are playing in people’s heads…the bouzouki music…”
He lifted the cigarette to his lips and with it the story came to an end– hazed out in the smoke of a smouldering pyramid of memories – you traverse one level by flickering torchlight and stumble upon a trapdoor to a new level – on that level there are two trapdoors leading to new levels – and so on, until you don’t know where you are and you have nothing left to say…and there is no way out. Me remembering the one-armed man; him, perhaps remembering me. Me remembering Kostas remembering a man who was the great nephew of a man he’d never met, remembering the great fire of Smyrna. There is no end. There is no escape.
And yet, always, somewhere in the darkness of my memory, the one-armed man is patiently waiting…his good arm swinging in rhythm to the bouzouki, holding soft fingers that never age.