62

I was alone with the same three guards who had brought me. They waited a minute, two minutes. Adam offered me a cigarette. I smoked, racked between an anger and a relief, between a feeling that I should have made some excoriating denunciation of them and all their practices and a feeling that I had done the only thing that could leave me any dignity. The cigarette was almost finished when Adam looked at his watch, then at me.

‘Now

He pointed at the handcuffs that were still dangling from the supports of the armrests.

‘Look. Finished. No more of this.’ I stood up, but my arms were caught at once. I took a deep breath. Adam shrugged.

‘Bitte.’

I let myself be handcuffed to the two men. Then he came with the gag. That was too much. I began to struggle, but they simply jerked me sharply back on to the throne; once again choiceless, I submitted. He slipped the gag over my head, this time without taping it. Then I was masked, and we set off. We walked through the archway, but outside we turned right, not left; we were not going back the way we came. Twenty or thirty paces, then down five steps and apparently into yet another large room or cistern.

I was forced backwards, there was a fiddling with the handcuffs. Then my left arm was abruptly raised, there was a click, and with an icy new apprehension I realized what they had done. I had been fastened to the flogging frame. I really began to struggle then. I kicked and kneed, I wrenched at the man to whose wrist I was still attached. They could have beaten me up at will. There were three of them and I couldn’t see and it was ridiculous. But they must have been under orders to do things as gently as possible. Eventually they forced my other arm up and linked it to the second ring. The mask was taken off.

It was a very long narrow room, another cistern, but lower-vaulted; eighty feet long and about twenty wide. Halfway down was a white cinema screen, like the one that had been used at Bourani. Three-quarters way down, a pair of drawn black curtains stretched the width of the room. The obscure end-wall was just visible over their tops. It was an enlarged version of the chapel at Moutsa with the iconostasis. I was fixed to the frame, but frontways on, and it had been set against the wall. Just in front of me and slightly to my right was a small cinema projector with a reel of 16-mm. film. What light there was came from through the doorway I could see to my left.

My trio of blackshirts wasted no time. They went to the projector, switched it on, checked that the film was correctly fed and then set it going. It began with the black wheel on white, as if it was a film company emblem. One of the men adjusted the lens focus a little. Adam came back and stood in front of me – out of reach of any kick I might attempt – and spoke.

‘The final disintoxication.’

I understood that I had been forced to ‘forgive’ so that I could be moved on to this ultimate humiliation; a metaphorical, if not a literal, flogging.

I had still not reached the bottom.

I was alone with the whirring projector and whatever lay beyond the curtains. The emblem faded and words appeared.

POLYMUS FILMS

PRESENT

The screen went white for a moment. Then:

THE SHAMEFUL TRUTH

The black wheel. Then:

WITH

A blank.

WHOM YOU WILL REMEMBER AS

ISIS

ASTARTE

KALI

A long blank.

AND AS THE CAPTIVATING

‘LILY MONTGOMERY’

There was a brief shot of Lily kneeling behind a man. It had almost ended before I realized that the man was myself. Someone, Conchis, most have taken us with a telephoto lens, the day she recited from The Tempest. I remembered she had even warned me he was using exactly such a camera.

AS THE UNFORGETTABLY DESIREABLE

‘JULIE HOLMES’

Another brief shot: I was standing and kissing her in bright sunlight. The same day, beside the statue of Poseidon.

AND AS THE LEARNED AND COURAGEOUS

‘VANESSA MAXWELL’

This time it was a still. She was behind a desk, a laboratory desk covered with papers. A rack of test-tubes. A microscope. Little Madame Curie.

AND NOW IN HER GREATEST ROLE AS

The wheel reappeared for a moment.

HERSELF!

Blank film.

Then a fade-in shot of Joe in his jackal-mask running down the track towards the house at Bourani; a devil in sunlight; he ran right up into the camera lens, blacking it out.

CO-STARRING

THE MONSTER OF THE MISSISSIPPI

A blank.

JOE HARRISON

The wheel again.

AS HIMSELF

Then there were words in an over-ornamented frame.

I was going to see a blue film.

It began: a lushly furnished, frill-laden bedroom in Edwardian style. Lily appeared in a peignoir, her hair down. The peignoir gaped absurdly over a black corset. She stopped by a chair to adjust a stocking, in a hackneyed leg-showing routine, though the close-up also allowed her to show the scarred wrist. She looked suddenly towards the door, and called something. A page entered with a letter on a tray. She took it and the page left. Shot of her opening the letter, sneering, and tossing it aside. The camera closed on the letter on the floor.

The quality of the film was bubbly and blistery, badly synchronized, like early silent film. Another flickering framed title appeared.

A new shot. Lily was lying on the bed, with the camera shooting down on her. The peignoir had gone. The corset, fishnet stockings. She had managed to give her heavily rouged and mascara’d face a suitably pouting and femme fatale look, but the visual effect was not far removed from the verbal: like so much pornography – in this case I supposed intentionally – it was dangerously near the ridiculous.

It was all to end in a joke; a joke in bad taste, but a joke.

Back to the same shot. Suddenly she sat up with a leer on the French brothel brass bed. Someone else had come in.

A shot of the open door. It was Joe, dressed in absurdly tight trousers and a sort of loose-sleeved white blouse. More like a black bullfighter than a black bull. He closed the door; a smouldering look.

The film veered into nastiness. There was a shot of her running to meet him. He stepped forward and gripped her by the arms and then they were kissing wildly. He forced her back to the bed and they fell across it. Then she rolled on top of him, covering his face, his neck in kisses.

She was standing in the black underwear, against the wall, her arms out. Joe was kneeling in front of her, bare above the waist, feeling with open hands up over her corset to her breasts. She caught his head and pressed it against her.

Next there came a five-second fetishist interlude. He was lying on the floor. There was a close shot of a naked leg ending in a foot in a high-heeled black shoe resting on his stomach. He caressed it with his hands. I began to suspect. It could easily have been any white woman’s leg; and any black man’s stomach and hands.

A shot across the room of her pressing him back against the wall, kissing him. His hand slipped round her back and began to unhook the corset. A long bare back bound in black arms. The camera closed, then tracked down clumsily. A black hand moved suggestively into shot. Joe was now apparently naked, though hidden by her white body. I could see his face, but the quality of the film was so bad that I could not be sure it was Joe. And her face was invisible throughout.

I began to be more suspicious than shocked. A series of very short shots. Bare white breasts, bare black thighs; two naked figures on the bed. But the camera was too far back to make identification possible. The woman’s blonde hair began to seem too blonde, too shiny: wiglike.

A street shot in a city I did not recognize, though it looked American. Crowded pavements, a rush-hour. It was of better quality than the other sequences and had obviously been cut in from some other film; and it made the ‘blue’ sequences seem even more antiquated and claustrophobic.

An anonymous white hand stroked an anonymous phallus in one of the most unexceptionable caresses of love. Its obscenity lay in the fact that two people could lie and be photographed doing it. But it was the wrist of the right, the unscarred hand that was in the frame; and although it made a playful flute-fingering gesture, I would now have bet that it was not Lily’s.

There was the most brutally pornographic shot yet, down-angled, of the naked girl lying on the bed. Once again it did not reveal her face, which was twisted back almost out of sight. It showed her waiting to receive the Negro, whose blurred dark back was close to the camera.

Suddenly the quality of the film changed. It was shot, very jerkily, by a different camera in different circumstances. Two people in a crowded restaurant. With an acute shock, a flush of bitter anger, I saw who it was: Alison and myself, that first evening, in the Piraeus. There was a flash of blank film, then another shot of us, which for a moment I could not place. Alison walking down a steep village street, myself a yard or two behind her. We both looked exhausted; and though it was too far to see the facial expressions, one could tell from that gap between us, the way we walked, that we were miserable. I recognized it: our return to Arachova. The cameraman must have been hidden in a cottage, shooting from behind a shutter perhaps, because a transverse black bar obscured the end of the shot. I remembered the wartime sequence of Wimmel. I also recognized the implications; that we had been followed, watched and filmed throughout. It would not have been possible on the bare upper slopes of Parnassus, but in the trees … I remembered the pool, the sun on my naked back and Alison beneath me. It was too horrible, too blasphemous, that that, of all moments, could have been public.

Stripped, flayed by the knowledge; and their always knowing.

Blank film again. Then another title.