384
PARTISAN REVIEW
Just the same, Athos missed her.
It
was 1924 and in the next
eight years, he drifted through the Greek sections of New Or–
leans, Charleston, Detroit and Elkhart, Indiana, finally winding
up in Chicago because its Greek Town was the largest. He went
to coffeehouses' and the Greek restaurants and political clubs,
though never to church. Perhaps Archie Anderson 's Calvinist
strain had surfaced in that rejection. When Athos met Pano in
1932, Athos was living on five dollars a week and one meal a day
fed him at the back of The Greek Garden by Moscow, whom he
had met in the course of a violent political discussion in a
kaf–
fen ion.
It
was close to election time, there were at least two
hundred Greek clubs in the city, and two factions were arguing
over how many Greek voters would turn out on voting day.
"Twenty-five thousand, " proclaimed a shopkeeper suspected
of harboring Republican sympathies.
"Fifty thousand strong!" hissed a furious little man with a
couple of teeth missing and a copy of the
Worker
sticking out of
his pocket.
"I come from Pylos where I was raised in the tradition of
the great Homer and the wise councillor, Nestor, and you would
do well to listen to me. Twenty-five thousand," said the
shopkeeper.
" I come from Salonika where we learned to distrust the im–
perialist, warmongering assertions of the Mycenean ruling-class
and its corrupt descendants. Fifty thousand Hellenic helots will
rise and march to the polls in November to elect Franklin
Delano Roosevelt president of the United States of America!"
Athos, who was going to vote for Herbert Hoover (Archie
Anderson again) but who was scrupulously honest and about as
politically emotional as a lamb chop, said that while he had read
both figures in the daily papers, the latter seemed to be based on
a non-partisan examination of voter registration records, so he
would assume that it was more nearly correct.
"A Solon is in our midst," declared the little man whose
English was so poor that he read the
Worker
only with the great–
est difficulty but who
was
a worker-a waiter, to be exact-and
thought it not unreasonable to display the badge of his trade as
well as his political affiliation , and he beamed at Athos. Deli–
cately divining that Solon needed a meal , Moscow dragged
Athos down the street to The Greek Garden, seated him at a table
