THE ANATOLIAN by Elia Kazan

Author:Elia Kazan [Kazan, Elia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80730-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

The following Sunday morning, Stavros went to call on her.

“You might have telephoned first,” she said. “I haven’t even brushed my hair.”

“You look all right,” he said.

She thought him surprisingly calm, and they talked together quietly.

“What I can’t understand,” he said, “is the following: How, when you’re with me, you can be friends with a man you’ve been with before? Take a ride in his car, take him to your parents, so forth?”

“They invited him.” She wondered why her tone was so apologetic.

“But you belong to me,” he said, using the present tense of the verb, which signaled to her that in his opinion, their quarrel was over.

Surprised, she smiled, and that made him uncomfortable.

“What you smiling?” he asked.

She shrugged, and pulled the front of her bathrobe together.

“I have to tell you something,” he said. “I believe a certain way on these things, I can’t help it.”

“That I know.” She smiled again.

“So from now on, you must treat him like stranger”—he hesitated, then said it—“if you want to stay with me. When he says something to you he thinks is funny, you must not laugh. When he comes into a room, look the other way, or maybe better, leave the room. Then he knows you finished with him. Not like now. Imagine what he’s thinking now. You understand what I’m talking? I can’t help it, that’s the way I am. Why you laughing again?”

“I was thinking: How about the way I am?”

That made him pause. They stared at each other. Then she got up and moved to the kitchen. When she came out, she had a glass of ouzo, which she’d fogged with water. “Too early for this?” she asked. “I understand what you’ve been saying to me.”

“Then all right, what the hell, I take it.” He looked at her, took the glass, shrugged, and smiled. “What the hell,” he said.

He drank the ouzo. She went back into the kitchen and he heard a familiar sound. When she came out she had a full bowl of pistachio nuts. “I thought you might come back to the scene of the battle,” she said.

A half hour later they were in bed. And so they went along, as people do, having nothing better at hand. But although what they’d said to each other that Christmas night may have been forgiven, it wasn’t forgotten.

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