The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

Helena and Julian were standing on the steps of the restaurant with little Ferdinand as I emerged from the taxi. Julian smiled broadly while Helena embraced me as though she would never let go. We had exchanged emails regularly, by which I mean she told me how things were going, and I read her messages. Read the way I listened, and replied briefly, mostly follow-up questions, as was my habit when in conversation.

It hadn’t been easy in the beginning, she wrote. Julian was more affected by what had happened than was initially apparent. After the euphoria of being rescued and being back with her had passed he became dark, closed-off and difficult, a different man from the one she had fallen in love with, it seemed to her. And he spoke so much of his brother. He excused Franz. It seemed important to Julian that she, and her parents too, should understand that Franz wasn’t evil, he had simply been very, very much in love.

In fact it got so bad she was thinking about leaving him, until something happened that changed everything: she had become pregnant.

And from that day on it was as though Julian had woken up and become again the Julian she could scarcely remember now from the single night they had spent together before he went missing. Happy, good, kind, warm, loving. Maybe he never became quite as full of life and crazy as she remembered from that night, but what of it? Don’t all women think their husbands were a little more exciting in the early days? And what more can one ask of a man than that he is faithful, loving, and works hard for the family? Even Helena’s father had to admit that she had got a husband who was a hard worker and reliable, someone he could safely hand the restaurant on to when that time came.

According to Helena, Julian had cried like a child himself on Ferdinand’s arrival. Like his father the boy radiated love. ‘Like some kind of heater,’ she wrote. ‘And when the winter storms batter Kalymnos you couldn’t wish for anything better.’

‘So you think you’re ready for Where Eagles Dare,’ said a smiling Julian once I was installed in my room and we were seated at lunch in the restaurant. Grilled octopus. It was their speciality, and it really did taste fabulous. I noticed that Julian didn’t eat it and wondered if it might have something to do with the myth that octopuses feeds on corpses. Not a myth, of course. Every creature in the sea feeds on the drowned when the chance comes along.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But at least I’ve done a little climbing on the crags around Athens.’

‘Then we’ll start out early tomorrow,’ he said.

‘It’s an extremely long route,’ I said. ‘Forty metres.’