Atlantis: Three Tales (31 page)

The return address on Heidi's letter was Munich, which was where her family lived. Its many beige sheets explained how she was with them now, how glad she'd been to see her mother once she'd arrived—and how the problems she'd sometimes cried to me about having with her father seemed, briefly, in abeyance. Had I gotten to the Deutsches Museum? (I had. And it had been quite as wonderful as she'd told me. But she seemed to think I'd probably missed it.) She hoped things were going well between me and my wife.

Then, in its last pages, she wrote:

“Before I left Greece, I killed my poor Pharaoh—whom I loved more than anything else in the world. Even more than, for that little time, I loved you. But there was no one I could give him to. The Greeks don't keep pets. And the quarantine laws are impossible—they would have put him in kennel for six months; and that costs lots of money. Besides, he was just a puppy, and after six months more he wouldn't even have known me. But the day before I did it, I saw a dog—all broken up and bloody, with one leg and one eye entirely gone, and his innards—Oh, I don't want to describe it to you! But he was alive, though barely, in the garbage behind Kyria Kokinou's, because of what some boys had done to him. He was going to die. And I knew if I just let Pharaoh go, with the stones and the glass in the meat, and the Greek boys, he would die too. That's when I cried.

“Since I was leaving Greece in two days, what I did was take my poor, beautiful Pharaoh out in the blue rowboat that David said I could use, with a rope, one end of which I'd already tied around a big rock (about eighteen kilos). I was in my bathing suit—as though we were going for a swim, back on Aegina. And while he looked up at me, with his trusting eyes—which, because you are such a careful writer, you would say was a cliché, but I could really look into those swimming,
swirling eyes and see he
did
trust me, because I fed him good food every day from the market and took him for his walks in the morning and at night so he could make his shits and his pee-pees, and I had protected him all winter and spring from those horrid Greeks. I tied the rope around his neck, the knot very tight, so it wouldn't come loose. Then we wrestled together in the boat and I hugged him and he licked me, and I threw him over the side. He swam around the boat, as he used to when I'd take him out in the skiff on Aegina, with most of the rope floating in curves, back and forth, snaking to the gunwale, and back over. Once he climbed in again—and got me all wet, shaking. Then he jumped out, to swim some more.

“He just loved to swim. And while he was swimming, sometimes he glanced at me. Or off at a sea bird.

“When he looked away, I threw the rock over.

“The splash wet me to my waist. Over the time of a breath, in and out, while the boat rocked up and down, all the curves in the rope disappeared.

“And still paddling, Pharaoh jerked to the side—and went under.

“There were ripples, moving in to and out from the boat.

“There were the obligatory gulls—one swooped close enough to startle me, making me sit back on the seat. Then it flew away.

“The paper mill squatted in its smelly haze across the harbor.

“But it was over.

“Like that.

“I waited ten minutes.

“I'd thought to sit there perhaps an hour or so, being alone with myself, with the water, with what I'd done—just thinking. But after ten minutes—because of the gull, I think—I realized I'd done it, and I rowed back to the Pasilimani dock.

“Although I cried when I saw the poor dog out behind the house, I didn't cry with Pharaoh. I'm really surprised about that—about how little I felt. I suppose I didn't feel worse than any other murderer who has to do things like that daily for a living—a highway bandit; a state executioner. I wonder why that is?

“Cosima thought I was just a terrible person, and kept saying that there must have been something else I could have done.

“But there wasn't. And I hope she comes to realize that. I hope you realize it too.

“I used to say the Greeks were barbarians, and you would laugh at me and tell me that people's believing they could deal with the world in such general terms was what made it so awful. And I would laugh at you back. But now I know that I am the barbarian. Not the Greeks who are too hungry to understand why anyone would keep a dog. Not the Germans who managed to kill so many, many Jews with their beautiful languages, Yiddish and Hebrew, and who, still, someday, I hope will let me into their country to study. Not the southern whites like Jerry and DeLys who lynch and burn Negroes like you. Not the Negroes like you who are ignorant and lazy and oversexed and dangerous to white women like me.

“Me—and not the others, at all; not you, not them.

“Me.

“I loved my Pharaoh so much. He's gone. My memories of him are beautiful, though.

“I hope someday you will write something about him. And about me—even though you have to say terrible things of me for what I did. And because of how little I felt when I did it. But, then, you haven't written me at all. Maybe you'll just forget us both.”

That was her only letter.

—
Amherst
September 1990