Stopover

a man can't do everything, but how much time had he wasted in transit lounges?

I am Sitting Alone in the airport at Athens, jangled with gin and mental fatigue, having a conversation with my grandfather. The subject is travel. Grandfather, who died in 1937, finds it praiseworthy that I have stirred my stumps to the extent of journeying all the way to Athens. Very enterprising, he thinks; it shows admirable breadth of spirit. He himself made several crossings of the Atlantic in the 1870s and 1880s, when crossing the Atlantic was no joke, but he never aspired to anything as adventurous as my voyage from the New World to the cradle of classical civilization.

Well, now, he says briskly, do I propose to visit the Acropolis first thing, and thus experience without delay the still awesome remnant of what remains even now the noblest flowering of our Western (concluded on page 198) Stopover (continued from page 137) culture? No? Well, that's probably the sensible course. Work up to it, find a simple hotel, walk about the streets of the city, sit in a café and read a little poetry, let the harsh yellow light flood through the mind's chambers.

I tell my grandfather that it's just a stopover.

He accepts this with a smile and a wave of his hand. It's too bad, of course, he says, but Mann kann nicht alles tun, and if I have a schedule to keep on this journey, nicht zu machen, a few days in Athens are better than nothing. (My grandfather was Danish-American, not German, and, in fact, fled to the U. S. when he was 17 to escape conscription in the German army, after Germany had inhaled his region of Denmark. But I can't manage a Danish accent, even in the privacy of my imagination, and since I must invent both ends of this profitless dialog. I indicate my ancestor's loreignness by giving him a few lines in the only foreign language I know.)

I'm sorry. Grandfather. I tell him. The stopover is for an hour and ten minutes. There's not time for the Acropolis, but I think I saw it from the air as we were landing.

My grandfather looks at me sharply, seems about to say something, then appears to reconsider. When he does speak, it is in the tone a patient man might use when replying to a neighbor's child who has just described the plot of a school play. "Yes, And your destination is, was hast du gesagt, Karachi? I'm sure that you will find much there to interest you."

"Well, the thing is," I explain, "we get to Karachi at ten minutes after midnight and we leave again at 2:45 A.M. So there won't be much time to look around." There is no response from my ancestor and to myself I tick off some of the places I have visited only in the sense that I have killed an hour or so in their airports; Cairo; San Juan; Seattle; Entebbe; Frankfurt; Lincoln, Nebraska; Keflavik; Dayton; Buffalo; Winnipeg; someplace in Texas; Barcelona, And Karachi late tonight, Peshawar tomorrow.

I decide to recite this strange list to my grandfather. Old people, I have noticed, generally respond well to the what-is-the-world-coming-to? theme. I arrange my face in an ironic grin.

Grandfather, however, does not receive my signal. He is looking at his watch. It is a big vest-pocket model on a chain, with a gold flip-up lid covering the glass. He replaces the watch in his vest, slaps his hands on his knees and stands up: a short, square, durable man with a sandy mustache. He says that he has enjoyed very much having had this opportunity to chat with me.

"Aren't you flying to Karachi with me? You've never been on a jet."

Grandfather says no. Now that I have imagined him here in Athens--and he is most grateful for the favor--he plans to have a look around. He shakes hands gravely, says auf Wiedersehen and walks away toward Passport Control, through which he passes unnoticed.

I wander about the large and handsome arrivals-and-departures building, which is built of a material that resembles marble. I check to see whether the Herald Tribune has arrived yet, then spend some time looking at a display of watches. People from Des Moines and Stuttgart stand beside me. Each of us wears a fine watch, but we inspect the watches in this glass case as if we had never seen one before.

When my flight is called, I show my boarding card to the smiling attendant and walk out into the yellow light. On board the plane there is music. A string orchestra is playing Begin the Beguine.